When the
Silent Sam left last April, and then,
a month later, so did many of us.
The graduates left to find some age,
and he to remove some. For nearly
73 years he was this town's stoic
sentinel, and then when he turned
green, The Powers took him down.
They said they'd bring him back
healthy a bronzed, rejuvenated
Sam but 1 knew they'd kill him.
An exterior is all a statue's got.
People now don't understand the
natural hue of a respectable statue.
They don't know that statues don't
tan.
They're making Silent Sam the
Phyllis Diller of heavy metal, and it
ought to cause a little flurry, incense
a couple of closet radicals, I seem
to be the only one mourning the loss
of age, though, and so 111 have to
speak because Sam never did.
This is the time of the new things,
the age that threatens all age. Eve
ryone wants new things, new images
and new ideas. The general idea
seems to be that old things don't
work. All this from the generation
that grew up on plastic toys.
Billy's G
Tin Main gets nasty in mf plastic society
Randall Patterson
Staff Writer
Plastic lasts forever. Whole bits of
it often break in half, but it doesn't
break down much further than that.
In the next civilization, anthropol
ogists will have in memory of us
depthless piles of garbage bags that
hold our sandwich bags, our milk
cartons, our Barbies, Kens and G.I.
Joes. They'll have our car interiors
and kitchen counters, our plastic
bullets and our drums of nuclear
wastes.
Plastic is eternal, but maybe one
of the reasons our toys are in the
trash is that plastic has no soul. You
just can't cherish plastic. Barbie was
a friend until you realized that real
people wouldn't want to look like
that and her date was a little groovy.
You dropped the water pistol on the
driveway, and in that battle you
artoons" for
became a casualty. So the plastic doll
and the plastic gun are discarded in
the plastic drum.
Mom's doll was china, though, and
Dad's gun was a replica of; the
muskets circa the Revolutionary
War.r Mom still has that doll, still .
has her grandmother's doll made of
cornhusks. They're enshrined now,
demigods in the living room case.
Dad gave his gun to me in one
of those father-son rituals I was too
young to understand. The gun had
its end at my Alamo, when after
running out of cork bullets, I began
swinging at those rushing hordes of
Mexicans. The Mexicans were Mag
nolia leaves, and in a frenzy, I gave
the whole troop of them a shiver,
smacking at the tree's trunk.
We're moving toward a plastic
standard where plastic is the rule and
not the exception. I wasn't used to
the wooden exception. My toys had
always been disposable, and I'd never
cried at their departure until that
rifle, when Dad made me.
We young folks don't have histo
ries, then, or at least mementoes to
Goons
what tx?
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by Billy Warden
The
mark them. All that was collected
with the morning garbage, and our
historian, the county dump, is as
speechless as we should be. So we're
timeless, and we could care less about
time. It's our philosophy of plastic,
our superficial, consume-and-dispose
lifestyle.
We do the easy thing, perhaps
more so now than ever. We hold the
easy ideals-and go for the easy life.
To think is gauche, and the only issue
that concerns us is the new drinking
law. The number of people going for
business degrees is up 1,200 percent
since the early 1960s. Why? A good
job at IBM, a good car, and later,
a good wife. And somewhere in there
Southern gentlemen
'Gone With the Wind'
A vital part of the South is dying
a slow, steady death. In bygone years,
men of the South were called "South
ern Gentlemen'' and ladies quivered
to capture the affections of one of
these. This is not so today. The
"Southern Gentleman" is a dying
breed as is the "lady," and it is a
shame to see.
A certain degree of etiquette used
to be expected of young men. A
young man who did not display his
gentlemanly qualities by such simple
rituals as door-opening, chair
handling, and proper table manners
was simply shunned by the young
lady and her mother. The young lady
expected to have her car door opened
for her, her chair pulled out for her,
and to be served first and addressed
honorably in all situations.
Today, it is a rare young man who
could be called a gentleman and, if
expecting gentlemanly behavior is
one requirement for the term "lady,"
there are few young womea who
could boast this term. Young men
don't even think of things like
opening the car door and extending
a courteous hand to a date. Table
manners are all but forgotten in all
but the most well brought up. And
simple things like handling the
reservations at a nice restaurant are
irksome tasks for the average young
man. It is not surprising that this is
so. Young women donV expect this
stuff anymore, and it takes a great
deal of the fun out of dates and just
life in general.
This may all sound trite and
insignificant, but it is not. The decay
of these small Southern chivalric
values is evidence of decay on a large
scale of the whole way that men look
Lexers . needed
The Summer Tar Heel always welcomes letters,
provided they are typed double-spaced and
include the author's name, major and year in
school. Somebody out there must have an opinion
on something take advantage of the editorial
freedom afforded by your student newspaper.
When you're sporting bifocals and a visibly
receding hairline, you'll have a tattered newspaper
clipping to remind you of your college career.
Tar Heel Thursday, July 24, 19869
is the dog and the relaxing weekends,
perhaps the only parts of our lives
that we wouldn t throw away for a
better model.
No, Sam wasn't green with envy
of this new world. They took Sam
down because he was old, about to
exceed the American life expectancy.
Maybe they'll bring us Sam back in
plastic, with a simulated-bronze
veneer. And maybe we wont even
mind.
Randall Patterson is a senior
journalism major from Chapel Hill
waiting to be told poolside, "Plastics,
Randall, plastics. That's where it's
at."
Bill Logan
The Right Stuff
at women. The purpose of all of these
little rituals was to bestow honor on
the lady, honor not for the purpose
of deception in order to get some
thing, but honor for the simple
reason that the lady deserved honor.
But between the women's liberation
movement and all of the press about
thwarting descrimination against
women in the workplace, this impor
tant factor, honor, has slowly given
Way to apathy and, in some cases,
competition between the sexes. In
short, because of some who thought
that these chivalric contrivances were
degrading (a sadly mistaken conclu
sion), women with the cooperation
of weak-hearted men have, in -small
ways, cheapened themselves in the
eyes of men.
Gone are the days of upholding
a young lady's honor, and gone are
the days of being able to tell a quality
young man by his mannerisms.
Young ladies, by not expecting such
behavior of young men, you are
depriving yourself of the honor that
you deserve. Young men, by not
giving young ladies such treatment
voluntarily, you are depriving your
self of much of the old fun and
challenge of courtship. As a whole,
our society becomes just a little more
generic, loosing a really grand part
of its character.
Bill Logan is a junior biology
major from Chapel Hill.