Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, December 24, 1993 TAG: 9401140032
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
I take the occasion to salute the gentlemen in gray, who suffer the deprivations of foolish and misguided leadership, and commend them for realizing that ``women at VMI'' has more meaning than previously thought.
Specifically, a hearty huzzah for the guy - he had to be a guy, of course - who conceived and now has marketed a fund-raising poster, for the rising first (senior) class, showing a beautiful blonde not wanting in feminine charms, which are adequately revealed, wearing a VMI coatee (dress coat) and naughtily angled shako (dress hat) and bearing, if that is the word, an officer's saber across her white-ducked, not fully buttoned lap.
The effect is magical. Patricia Ireland and her hordes of humorless feminists notwithstanding, most of the 100 million males who make up our declining civilization agree, I will suspect, that life offers few greater pleasures than a pretty blonde almost in the altogether.
The poster's headline, which mercifully obscures only the plume on the shako, runs: ``Women Out Of Uniform/A Gratifying Spectacle.'' Since Col. J.T.L. Preston's conception of VMI, emblazoned on the parapet before the Washington Arch, imagines cadets as ``a gratifying spectacle,'' it suggests that all is well with the world, after all.
Or all right with the Corps of Cadets. Everyone in authority was quick to take the high moral ground. VMI Commandant N. Michael Bissell delivered an oral reprimand to the perpetrators of this despicable crime, then had the unsold posters locked away, though, thank God, 1,500 were sold at a downtown Lexington store first.
VMI's movers and shakers, star-spangled stuffed shirts by design and decree, have never shown much appreciation of a joke, especially if it's funny, so this was to be expected.
What they hadn't counted on, being oblivious to modernity, is that in this case the joke was too funny for the news media to ignore. The news media, after all, had a quiet lull between Somalia and the forthcoming candidacy of Oliver North. They needed a funny story. So before it was over VMI's p.r. machine, as well as Mark Kincer, the cadet responsible for the poster in the first place, found themselves being grilled by such high-minded organizations as the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Associated Press, CBS, the New York Post and the Rockbridge Advocate, a Lexington sheet, whose editor, the worthy Doug Harwood, had broken the story in the beginning.
A high moral tone carried the day, of course. No one seemed to know how such a shameful thing could happen, or even whose coatee the fair damsel was wearing, sort of, though it bore a first-captain's stripes and there ain't but one of them.
Well, high-mindedness always wins, praise Allah, and now virtue has been restored to the VMI post. But I cannot shake from my mind the memory of other VMI jokes of the past: the (private) designation of one VMI superintendent, whose only generalship had been when he worked for General Electric, ``The Unknown Soldier;'' another, a cheerful Marine the size of a mature oak tree, became ``The Jolly Green Giant.'' Or the cartoon showing a VMI alumnus, now a sheikh, returning with his harem and being asked, ``Where, Brother Rat, would you like us to put your bags?''
Cadets have always been superior jokesters, and I trust no mere federal lawsuit will halt them.
Patricia Ireland will not believe it, meanwhile, let alone trust, that I want to see women admitted to VMI, do not want to close it down and still wish its cadets well. All I regret, at the moment, is that I didn't get a copy of the poster myself.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB