The Duh Files: Laughing at the Mighty Sword

 

The big game between the Red Raiders and the Aggies is coming up this weekend, so let’s continue our more-or-less humorous retrospective of the Aggies’ greatest hits, along with some classic old Dirk West cartoons about Texas A&M.

Hey, remember the big A&M-SMU game back in 1981? I expect not, but I’ll tell you anyway. Now you see, the members of A&M’s Corps of Cadets traditionally carry sabers. Strictly for ceremonial purposes — it’s part of the uniform. Well, in 1981, on Halloween night, the Aggies fell to the Mustangs 27-7. Words were exchanged, the cheerleaders got rambunctious, and one of the cadets actually threatened the cheerleaders with his saber!

You think I’m kidding, but here’s a photo:

 

Now I’m sure this was not a particularly serious threat. Oh, sure, the cadet was well-and-truly honked-off, but I’m assuming the sabers aren’t actually sharp. If they were sharp, and all these hormonal college kids had them lying around their dorm rooms, I think we’d hear a lot more stories about students killing their roommates in College Station. Besides, these are Aggies. If you gave them real swords, they’d use them to pick their noses, and they’d end up skewering their brains. So it’s safe to assume that this was a mostly-harmless saber.

So the Aggie, this quasi-military cadet, felt so threatened by a cheerleader — and an unarmed cheerleader at that — that he drew his sword to defend himself. Except it was a dull sword, so he wasn’t really going to manage to defend himself real well…

Yeah, the Aggies don’t really cover themselves with glory in this anecdote, do they?

And on that note, let’s check out another Dirk West cartoon about our Aggie friends!

 

Oh, mercy. I’ve done corrupted the youth with pictures of nekkid idjits.

(And again, if you like these old Dirk West cartoons, you’ll want to shell out the fifteen simoleons to get Dirk’s “SWC Cartoon Book.” We sell ’em here at the Avalanche-Journal. I wouldn’t recommend it so much if it wasn’t so durn awesome.)

UPDATE: Robin, in comments, has a more complete summary of the incident in question, which my online searching was unable to turn up before. And yeah, the Smew cheerleaders were acting like rampaging dillweeds. Discipline, either from SMU or from local authorities was certainly called for. But I still say that pulling a sword, even a fake, dull one, is pushing the discipline way too hard.