Chapter 39: Recriminations

Monday, December 3, 1984

As one would expect, the mood around campus was pretty much pure jubilation. Nearly everyone was wearing either A&M-logo clothing or something celebrating the game.

Classes themselves were less jubilant, since we were preparing for finals. Even the professors mostly seemed to be in an upbeat mood, though.

The impact of one game on a community can be enormous, and sometimes long-lasting. Months after this game — years after this game, most likely — many of us would be saying ‘Do you remember when?’ and ‘Yes, I was there!’ when it came up in conversation.

Which it inevitably would.

The Batt was back to gay-related content on the opinion page. Fortunately, it was all good from our perspective. One letter-writer called out the opposition to GSS for what it was: bigotry, pure and simple. It wasn’t the best letter ever, but it was good.

One of the opinion columns was perhaps better. The author had been in the military and related his experience of having a gay roommate, and the roommate’s (‘Charles,’ a pseudonym) struggles with the whole thing. Charles, of course, could not ‘come out of the closet’ in general. That would get him kicked out. But he did ‘come out of the closet’ to his roommate.

Charles had tried to commit suicide several times as a teenager, failed, then went into the military, hiding his homosexuality behind vehemently anti-gay statements. Ironically, those statements were so overdone that the writer had guessed Charles was hiding something long before Charles confessed to being gay.

Without making the connection, that was much of the actual mission of GSS: to offer a community to people struggling with their sexuality, whether it was figuring things out or finding people who understood and were sympathetic.

Every little bit helps. Over the course of the semester, I felt like we’d seen small but significant shifts in how the average Aggie saw GSS. Hopefully, that would matter when GSS was recognized, as I thought it inevitably would be.

That is, unless this universe was inferior in that regard.

I had an unexpected message from Marco Roberts waiting on the answering machine when I got home. One of the Batt’s writers had approached him about doing a profile on non-gay members of GSS. There were very few of us willing to be publicly identified, but he guessed (correctly!) that I would have no problem with that.

He gave me the contact information for the author (Marc Viguet) and asked me to give Marc a call if I was interested. I did, and wound up leaving him a message.

While hanging out at home, MTV played a song that almost literally had me rolling on the floor laughing.

Paige gave me a look and said, “What? Do we need to whap you? Any ideas, Ang?”

Angie shrugged and said, “I don’t know. What’s up with this song, big brother? I mean, I know it from way back, but...”

Cammie growled a bit at that, and Paige (who was sitting next to her, of course) gave her a relatively polite elbowing, which Angie giggled at.

“It’s ... it’s not that ... exactly,” I said, recovering.

“What is it, then?” Jas said.

“So...” I said. “It’s ... this song ... it’s not bad, per se, but it’s not good.”

Everyone nodded at that.

“It became a running joke somewhere in the 2010s. This song turns up — well, will turn up — on every radio station that plays Christmas music all month in December. It doesn’t show up a lot, though. It’s just enough to be interesting. Once, twice, maybe a few times throughout December. People mostly don’t like it, but they also don’t loathe it, by and large.”

“So?” Paige said.

Cammie said, “Do we want to know? How weird will this be for us?”

I shrugged.

“I think it’s okay. There’s a game — it has a name, but I won’t name it so no one inadvertently says it — that people will make up. It’s a really simple game. If you hear ‘Last Christmas’ during December, you lose. Make it all the way to December 25th without hearing it, but while allowing yourself to hear ‘Christmas music,’ and you win. I mean, it’s all in fun. There are no prizes, but people made big dramatic ‘Oh my God, I just lost!’ statements if they heard it.”

“For this song?” Paige said. After a second, she nodded to herself. “Never mind! I get it. It works.”

“So,” Mel said. “That means we’ve all lost.”

“Yup,” I said. “Day one, and we’re out. Done.”

Everyone laughed at that.

History would never know it, but the very first game of ‘Whamageddon’ had just been played. And lost.

Even if there was no such thing as ‘social media’ on which to post our ignominious fate.

Tuesday, December 4, 1984

The Batt came with a headline I’d been dreading for years. Now, it was here. The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India had (again?) released toxic fumes, killing hundreds of people and injuring far more. It was one of those things I knew would happen, but not when, not until it did happen.

There was nothing I could have done, even had I known the date. Later evidence suggested the incident had quite possibly been sabotage by a disgruntled worker, not some disregard for safety (though the plant’s safety record was far from stellar). What was I to do: call Union Carbide and tell them someone was likely to sabotage the Bhopal plant? Why would they ever believe me?

It bothered me, and I could tell it bothered Angie even more. Jas, too, since she’d talked through it with us. The others quickly picked up on our having known this was coming and tried to help, sometimes with hugs, sometimes with a bit of ‘tough love.’

We weren’t ‘responsible.’ We knew that. Still, we’d known something important and it hadn’t made a whit of difference. Those people who died still died. Those who were injured — many permanently, in life-altering ways — were still injured.

It was hardly the last time. These things were going to happen. That I could remember Bhopal said maybe it was worse than some of the others, but who knew? Perhaps the next industrial accident would be one I couldn’t quite remember until it happened but would kill yet more people. Maybe Angie or Laura would remember that one.

There were things we could potentially affect, though. Even with those, there were endless questions. Should we try? What would it do if someone caught us trying? Would that destroy our lives? Potentially make things worse? What if we tried and failed — would we feel worse than if we hadn’t tried?

Or, what if we tried and succeeded, but the aftermath made something else much worse? What if, say, preventing the Columbia disaster resulted in some future Shuttle (or even Columbia herself) crashing in a populated area while landing? Columbia was not our fault. Something that happened because we got involved with the very best of intentions might be our fault.

These were questions I would love to discuss in an ethics class with someone like Dr. Hickman if that wasn’t completely impossible. Oh, we could talk to Jane (and we would!), but that was psychology, not ethics. Jane was a very important sounding board about ethics, but it was a different discussion with her than it would be with someone whose business was philosophy rather than psychology.

Perhaps there would be an opportunity to discuss hypotheticals in such a class. If so, we could have a field day with that!

The other notable article in the Batt concerned starving Ethiopians. It coincided well with yesterday’s release of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, a song I’d always considered both very well-intentioned and awful at the same time. The line ‘Well tonight thank God it’s them instead of you’ stuck me as vaguely horrifying. If I were to speak to God about it, I wouldn’t be thanking Him for making someone else suffer, I’d be asking Him why anyone needed to suffer at all.

Still, it’d been written in nearly no time at all, and it had raised quite a lot of money which benefited the starving people of Ethiopia. It had also unquestionably raised awareness of the famine in the first place. Few in the West had really known it was happening before Bob Geldof got fired up to do something — anything! — about it.

It was also a reminder that Live Aid was coming up somewhere in the next year. July? I thought it was probably July.

With that thought came the obvious next step: we could go to Live Aid! Angie and I (and Laura, I suspected, unless her universe was different — and, if so, maybe ours now was, too) knew it’d happened. We knew it was, in many people’s opinion, the concert of the 20th century. It was one of only a few concerts legendary enough for me to go well out of my way to attend.

I doubted Cammie and Mel would go, and it wouldn’t be something I could easily convince them to accept help with. Cross-country or international travel for a concert was likely something they wouldn’t do. Maybe, though. We could always ask.

As for Laura, she might want to go. If so, we could go together. That was probably not too high a hurdle, but who knew?

We’d have to keep an eye on the papers and pay attention to what Geldof was up to. There were two parts: Philadelphia and London. London might well be out of reach simply due to ticket availability. If it was in July, though, being in position to buy tickets for Philadelphia in June would be doable.

Of course, we could always pay a scalper. This would be worth it.

I got a call back from Marc Viguet while I was out. He gave me a time to call him in the afternoon if I could. Fortunately, that time worked for me.

He proposed a few times for us to talk. Unfortunately, I had conflicts most of the times he was available. We wound up agreeing to sacrifice a few precious hours in the middle of the day on Wednesday of finals week to meet and talk.

Jas was free then, too, and was planning to come along. Whether her name would be in the paper or not was up in the air right now, but some support from ‘the girlfriend’ was good. Marc was particularly pleased about her being a journalism major. Jas, meanwhile, was thrilled to be talking to a Batt writer. It might be a very useful contact to have.

I spent about half an hour on the phone with Jane talking about Bhopal in the early evening. We didn’t come to any grand conclusions, but I got the things off my chest I needed to.

Jane agreed with me that guilt was misplaced. We had done nothing wrong, and the sin of omission (if there was one) was mitigated. After all, we could not know when (or even if) the Bhopal tragedy was going to happen until it actually happened. Maybe this universe was different. Maybe ‘meddling’ would make things worse.

At the same time, if we could ‘meddle,’ and felt it was worth the attempt, she’d back us. Unintended consequences would happen, but a choice to do something was justified.

In a corollary to Godwin’s Law, Nazi Germany came up. Had we come back in the early 1930s, would we have been justified in bumping off Hitler, even knowing we were in a different universe and that universe’s Adolf might be a happy, fun-loving guy who would never turn into a genocidal egomaniac? We generally agreed that choosing to act would be defensible. If, in bumping off ‘good Adolf,’ we inadvertently put ‘bad Franz’ (a name picked at random) in charge, that was also defensible. The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but good intentions still mattered, and sometimes the road to hell was paved with ‘analysis paralysis’ or fear of unintended consequences.