Rebecca de Winter According to FLOTUS, today (April 26, 2016) is College Signing Day, a celebration of students seeking higher education after high school. On Twitter, look for the hashtags #CollegeSigningDay and #ReachHigher to see inspiring examples of students proudly taking “signing selfies” and showing off their school spirit. Politics of FLOTUS aside, I love this. It makes me happy to see young adults reveling in the excitement and accomplishment of college acceptance.
Now of course I have to rain on that parade. While the media has been relentless in its hammering the narrative that women’s rights are still not a thing (seriously?), young men have been quietly disappearing from college campuses across the nation over the past couple of decades. According to the latest data available, women outnumber men in college by a large margin, male-female ratio of 43.6–56.4. There are a lot of theories as to why this is occurring. According to the Pew Research Center, scholars have speculated that it could be due to economic factors, or perhaps behavioral and disciplinary issues boys are more likely to experience in school. While boosting and encouraging our young girls to aim for the stars is good and noble, are we neglecting our boys? It’s not a zero-sum game. We can manage both, though many feminists claim otherwise. Some seem to be taking a kind of perverse pleasure in this reversal of fortunes for young men, and claim that the changes have to do with, what else? Sexism. I can’t claim to have the answers here, I’m just discovering this phenomenon. As a mom to two boys and one girl, I have a horse (or, three) in this race. My oldest son is in college, but it was not an easy accomplishment for him. Not that it is for anyone, of course, but nine of the top ten in his class were young women. I found that interesting. There is certainly much to celebrate today about the increasing academic success of young women, and I’m the last to complain about that. However, something is clearly amiss when young men are disappearing in droves from campuses across the nation. Maybe we can take a time-out from the fake college “rape epidemic” and try to find out what exactly is going on. Let’s bring back our boys.
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Ted Cruz and John Kasich announced Sunday that they would be conspiring to impede Donald Trump’s path to the nomination. Per the agreement, the Cruz campaign will cede Oregon and New Mexico, while the Kasich campaign will drop out of Indiana. Leaving aside all of the questions about the potential efficacy of such a plan, and the level of desperation that it exposes (for the record: a) not very, b) a lot) this has led to a swarm of reaction from anti-Trump forces that can be summed up as “Finally!”
The first suggestions of an “alliance against Trump” go back at least to mid-March, when the Rubio campaign suggested that its supporters should support Kasich in Ohio and that Kasich’s supporters should support him in Florida. Criticism from many corners was launched at Ted Cruz (and his allies) for competing in Florida – a winner-take-all state in which he had no realistic chance of winning – at the likely detriment of Rubio. Seemingly since Trump surged to the lead of a very large field in late 2015, the campaigns and observers have been accusing each other of “handing the election to Trump” by not cooperating. Cruz, Rubio, Kasich (from same writer a week later) have all, at one point or another, drawn criticism for continuing to compete and diluting the anti-Trump support to a point that no individual candidate can beat The Orange One. So why, when their supporters have been so heavily invested in stopping Trump, have the candidates resisted the obvious strategies to stop Trump? Why didn’t Rubio call Cruz and Kasich one day and say “Hey, guys, let’s just get Donald out of here. Ted, you campaign in the lower Midwest and the South, John, you take the rust belt and the Northeast. I’ll grab Florida and the mid-Atlantic, and then we can meet out west to settle this. Just tell all of our supporters to vote for the right guy in each state and we should be able to keep Trumpelstiltskin from winning much of anything. Deal?” If your objective is to keep Trump from winning, that is obviously the best strategy, right? The answer, of course, is that denying Trump was never any other candidate’s primary objective. Rank and file GOP voters (and donors) may hate the idea of Trump as their nominee and be (at least) comfortable with the idea of any of his opponents, but the candidates don’t think that way at all. Ted Cruz wants to be President. Marco Rubio wants to be President. The same is true of John Kasich and Jeb Bush and Rick Perry and Scott Walker and everyone else who ran. And if he doesn’t win the Presidency, then your candidate doesn’t really care who wins instead. Take Cruz, for example, who was accused of facilitating a Trump win in Florida by competing in a race he had no chance of winning. Why would he do this? He did it because it increased his odds of being President, and that is the only thing that matters to him. By ensuring that Rubio lost Florida, he ensured that Rubio left the race, and that is good news for Cruz. The fact that it is also good news for Trump (in fact, probably even better news) is wholly irrelevant to the decision. In a four way race, Cruz may think his chances of winning are, say, 20%, with Trump’s being 60% and Kasich and Rubio 10% each. When Rubio drops, his chances may rise to 21% while Trump’s rise to 69%, which causes the unbiased observer to note that Senator Cruz has benefitted Mr. Trump much more than he has benefitted himself. That, however, misses the motivation: Cruz improved his own chances of winning, and he doesn’t really care about anything else. This brings us back to the Cruz-Kasich alliance, which seems like a sudden change of heart for both camps. Only it’s not, really. It is perfectly in line with both camps singular focus of maximizing their chances of being President. After his worse-than-anticipated beating in New York last week, the Cruz campaign is (I am speculating here) substantially less confident in keeping Trump from the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination. They feel like winning in Indiana is an absolute necessity, and they aren’t confident that they can do it on their own. That means that the need to win Indiana is now greater than the need to keep Kasich from winning any more states, so the rational decision is now to make that trade-off. For the Kasich camp, allowing Cruz to win another state and a bunch more delegates is a pretty easy choice. It decreases the chances that Trump clinches on the first ballot, and it gives him the very real chance to win at least two more states. His (longshot) path at this point is to get to the convention without a clear winner, hope that a multi-ballot failure to pick a nominee will cause the delegates to ignore the bulk of the voting and focus solely on the likelihood of winning in November, and then hope that they also view him as the most electable. Having won more than his home state matters in that sense to him much more than the actual number of delegates he has. This has been a very odd election cycle, especially on the GOP side. It’s been dominated by an outsider who draws intense animosity from many within the party whose nomination he is seeking. There is a desire among voters to deny him the nomination unlike anything that we have seen in any primary before, but a general unwillingness for candidates to do what their supporters wish that they would. All of their decisions, though, are completely logical and make perfect sense if you remember one salient fact: you might be #NeverTrump, but your candidate is not. Rex “I'm your ice cream man baby, stop me when I'm passing by.” If there is a better lyric to encapsulate the wonder that was the original (real) Van Halen, I probably just haven't thought of it. For those too young to recall, Alex (drums) and Eddie Van Halen (lead guitar), Michael Anthony (amazing bus driver), and David Lee Roth as the frontman in Spandex and chaps was the winning formula. Those four guys were more influential than perhaps many people think. KISS' eponymous first album in 1974 introduced what I think of as the hair band era, but no one was using the term yet. And KISS was a formative piece of what became the hair band thing. When I was a kid, I came to think of it as 'clown rock' (not a term of derision – I love KISS, but that's for another time). But Van Halen, that was something else. No makeup, but still plenty of gimmicks (ever see Diamond Dave jump off a drum stand and kick his palms?), and enough talent at every position that they could win the Super Bowl of rock every year. I was 15 when I first heard of Van Halen in 1978 or 79. They burned bright for 6 years, from 10 February 1978 until 9 January 1984. They were the first group I remember thinking 'hair band' about. When I think of the term “hair band,” the first thing that comes to mind is the cover of “Women and Children First.” That's a hair band. In that short time they released six albums which included some of the most memorable songs of all time for fans of rock. A lot of the material from the discography is sexist in the high school vein and some of it is sexist in the... nope, it’s pretty much all Fast Times at Van Halen High throughout. But that is the charm of it. Van Halen was the Beach Boys, but with a lot more direct sexual innuendo and many fewer years of success. But they make me smile and sing along just as easily. If you're of a certain age, listen to it to remind yourself how good it was. If you're young and don't know it, give it a try. And remember we didn't have smart phones or iPods. Also get off our lawns.
I did see them five times out of those first six album tours. Even met Dave briefly backstage. 'Welcome to Club Dave' he said. Then he followed the chick with the coke and I went to Waffle House. This is not an anthology of their music nor an historical piece, obviously. If you would like to know more, just visit your favorite search engine. It's a pretty rock and roll story, and the music will never let you down. Everybody. Wants. Some. Smooches, Rex |
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