page 2.
Monday, November 23, 1982
Queens, off your thrones
. . . and to your gavels
Another Homecoming has come and gone, and with it goes a cast of
thousands, the beauty queens.
One can see the need for Miss NCCU, queens of fraternities, and queens of
organizations and clubs. But at NCCU a kind of queen mania has set in. Is
there really a need for Miss Central Heating, Miss Plumbing or Miss Elec
tricity? At NCCU, queens are like “the lilies of the field,” beautiful but just
as common as weeds.
Queens are a tradition at NCCU, and these women are highly regarded by
the organizations they serve, but face it, being a queen at Central is just too
easy. Sometimes it is merely an excuse for an ego trip.
Just because something is a tradition does not always justify its existence.
The energy that is expended on the queen’s elections could be channeled in
to something more important. Women outnumber men 3-to-l on this cam
pus, so why aren’t more women elected class officers and SGA executives?
If women had their act together politically on campus matters, male can
didates would not stand a chance unless they made some concessions
amenable to women voters. Conversely, a well-qualified and competent
woman candidate could easily trounce her male rival—if women voted in
force and in bloc.
Sadly, students, many of them women, refuse to take tlie candidaev of a
woman seriously; thus Central students are squandering a very \aluable
resource.
Fortunately, women are progressing beyond vanity titles at NC C U. Tliis
year, the senior class is being led by Sheila Smith, who is proving to even the
most steadfast male chauvinists that a woman can be an assertive student
leader.
It was encouraging to see women running for president of the freshman
class. I just hope their defeat did not discourage them from running for of
fices in the future.
Of course, the women serving in the Student Congress should not be
overlooked, since they are the pool from which leaders can be picked.
This is not an attack on male candidates, but rather an open invitation to
the womeq of NCCU to consider taking a more organized, active role in the
electoral process here at Central.
Women should look beyond the vanity titles, for they are a reminder that
at one time these titles were the only thing that women could run for. The im
age that these titles suggest, that a woman’s only responsibilities was to look
attractive and smile, should be reptilian to most women seeking a college
degree.
Marion McKinney
The champs need no help
sxTcrj rnjfi JuodB r
The Nov. 6 football game against Johnson C. Smith was significant not
only because it was Homecoming, but because the CIAA Southern Division
championship was on the line.
NCCU won the game and will play Virginia Union Nov. 20 for the league
championship. But, there seems to be some doubt cast by an article in The
Charlotte Observer which alleges that NCCU owes its victory to a controver
sial call by an official.
The article, headlined “With A Little Help, Central Edges Smith,” by
David Scott, said “Central’s domination of the game was too decided, too
complete. The Eagles, if nothing else, should have proved that they deserved
to be the conference’s Southern Division champion ... by clean, hard
statistics.”
Our record, at game time, of 6-1 in the CIAA and 7-2 overall, our hard
hitting defense, the rifle arm of Gerald Fraylon and the sure hands of Victor
Hunter should have been proof to J.C. Smith, The Charlotte Observer and
its readers that we deserved to win.
For the reporter to imply that J.C. Smith lost the game “because a
referee’s judgement went Central’s way” is absurd. Smith lost the game
because NCCU beat them soundly and by “clean, hard statistics.”
Journalists are taught to be objective in their reporting but apparently this
reporter was suffering from amnesia. By the time of the championship game,
in Charlotte, we hope he will have received treatment.
LaTanya A. Isley
Vi, 's *
R i
i,
i
• ■ -»i
Onlookers read
the names of
American dead
on Vietnam
Veterans
Memorial.
Photo by R.
Norman
Matheny, staff
photographer
for The
Christian
Science
Monitor.
Vietnam Flashback
War memorial reawakens troubling memories
By Tom Evans
Well it’s one, two, three, what are we fightin’ for?
Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam.
Country Joe McDonald
“Fed Like I’m Fixin’to Die Rag’’.
Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
Protestors’ Chant
“We could win this damn war
if we had the American people united behind us. ’’
Pentagon General, 1970
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated last week in
Washington, D.C.
While television, with its repetition of triviality and nonsense,
has often demonstrated its capacity to numb, the network
coverage of the debate over the monument gave me repeated
shocks that I have not felt since I watched the last helicopters lift
off from the roofs of Saigon in 1973.
War in oqr living rooms
Vietnam was the first televised war. Most Americans, in fact,
know the war only thfough television. Television brought the
blood and confusion into our living rooms. It did not often
make sense of the experience but it made us all participants. It
provided most of us, who had the profound good fortune not to
be there, a window-seat and fun-house-mirror view of history.
We exRgricrt.ced the,war—those of us not torn with anxiety for
a husband, son, father or brother—in the crazy-quilt patches
dictated by the format of the nightly news, experienced it with
our evening meal, or just before bedtime, so that it was sure to
be the stuff of our dreams.
Mental scar tissue
The war went on for 10 years, the violence far longer. So
unless it was our brother, son, husband, or father who got off
the plane in a wheelchair or body bag or who just never found
his way back to the normative values Vietnam vets called “the
world,’’ unless it happened to us, we developed defenses against
that nightly barrage of imagery.
We developed mental scar tissue.
We told ourselves it wasn’t real. We told ourselves the war
was just television. We put it all off in the same corner of our
minds with the surreal melange of game shows and commercials
for underarm deodorants.
When, at last, we couldn’t just dismiss it any longer, some of
us stood in peace vigils with the Quakers on Wednesday after
noons and signed petitions. Some of us marched on the Pen
tagon, took over armories, staged sit-ins on the lawns of college
campuses and occupied college administration buildings. Some
of us had our heads broken by police and went to jail. So we said
we had done our bit, and deep in our souls we felt that because
we had done our bit, we could forget the nightly horror show.
Some of us turned inward, turned on, tuned out, moved to
communes in the country, fled to Canada, followed the
Maharishi to transcendental consciousness, followed the yellow
brick road to Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury. If the music
were loud enough, the psychedelic haze thick enough, then
maybe we didn’t have to watch.
Not everyone took mind trips to never-never land, though.
Some of us tried to believe it all made sense, that there was a
cause to fight for and that the cause was just. The ideals of duty,
honor and country had never had it so tough, but they endured.
Just listen to the conservative political philosophies espoused by
returned POWs running for office. When there is nothing else to
shield you from the horror—duty, honor and country will serve.
When it was finally over, those of us who had not gone to war
felt less guilty about forgetting. For those who had gone, of
course, this quick turn away from their recent trauma was the
most damning of betrayals.
That betrayal has, been thorough indeed. In the years im
mediately following the war, there were few public honors for
Vietnam vets. In fact, the public has regarded the vet with some
distrust and fear—as if he were threatening us physically, or
worse, threatening to reawaken the memories of the war which
we have pushed to the bottoms of our minds.
In our popular mythology we have made him a permanent
stranger in our midst.
Time bombs waiting to go off
Following the two world wars and even the war in Korea, even
if the veteran was not always seen as a hero, he was at least seen
as a man who had been through horrible experiences but was in
the process of readjusting to society and putting his life back
together. Battle fatigue or shell shock, as it was once Called, was
thought to be a curable condition—given time, rest and love.
Now, however, battle fatigue is called Delayed Stress Syn
drome and is characterized by incurable flashbacks that make
the vet a public menace, a time bomb waiting to go off, liable at
any moment to bring the chaos of war literally back into our
lives.
Witness the rampage of Sylvester Stallone in his latest film,
“First Blood.” Although the film presents the establishment's
insensitive and corrupt, it is clear that Stallone’s anti-heroic
character can never be a normal citizen integrated into the fabric
of society.
A similar message came through in last week’s episdoe of
“Hillstreet Blues.” One plot-line featured a crazed veteran with
uncontrollable screaming in his head who forces a sympathetic
policeman to shoot him. In the last scene, even the policeman,
himself a veteran, reveals that he has not yet come to grips with
his own war experiences.
The implication of these stories—both of which claim to be
sympathetic portrayals of the veteran’s plight—is that the
veteran, unable to put his life back together,-is angry and self
destructive, a threat not only to his own life and limb but to the
whole social order as well.
The fear of fear itself
So we are afraid of the vet. What we fear, of course, is not so
much the veteran himself—though the media may have brain
washed us in that direction—but our own Delayed Stress Syn
drome. By his very presence, the veteran threatens a return of all
that brutal imagery that we as a nation have so successfully
buried in our subconscious minds.
Repressed fear also energizes the debate over the design of the
Washington war memorial. The memorial disturbs us because it
has the power to flash us back to the terrible imagery of Viet
nam.
Someone has said that from a distance the memorial looks like
a tombstone. So it brings back the death.
It is partially buried in the ground, like a blackened shard
chipped off the Pentagon. It points into the earth, like an in
verted Washington Monument. Because it does not celebrate the
war it memorializes, it recalls the counter-culture of protest the
war engendered.
The memorial fools the eye. As you approach it, it is scarcely
visible. You stumble into it, fall into it—as we fell into the war
itself.
Again like the war itself, it is at once immensely personal and
impersonal. A black granite wall which lists the 57,000 names of
the war dead, it reminds us all too concretely of the individual
Americans who died in Southeast Asia.
Yet the memorial itself contains no human figure with which
to empathize. That is why a group of veterans supported a suc
cessful effort to have a more traditional and less disturbing
statue of a soldier erected within sight of the memorial. They felt
the unadorned memorial sucked the life from their sacrifice.
Even here the memorial seems true to its occasion, for the un
justness of the war itself and the public reaction against it also
sucked the life from their sacrifice.
The memorial, therefore, raises a vexing philosophical ques
tion: how should we pay tribute to the bravery and sacrifice of
honorable men caught up in the service of an ignoble enterprise?
Insofar as it raises that question, it has done more than most
public monuments ever do.
Insofar as it has the power to raise that question, it is a mov
ing work of art.
The country ought to be grateful for it.
Tom Evans is a 38-year-old assistant professor of English and
a faculty adviser to The Echo. He Is not a veteran.
Editor-In-Chief
Marion McKinney
'the
Campus
‘Ecfio
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LaTanya Isley
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Tom Scheft
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Jim Jarvis
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Valerie Cornwell
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