September 04, 2003

Though it very unPC of my to say anyone who says that Title IX, the sinister sister of Affirmative Action is all about state imposed quotas. Title IX and Affirmative Action aka Positve Discrimination often travel together incognito as "the Diversity Twins". From what I understand since the mid 1990's there are three ways defined to show compliance.

1) The percentage of female athletes equals the percentage of female students (regardless of interest in sport). That is a government imposed quota pure and simple.

2) Now a school can instead, if they dare, PROVE that they have a history of expanding opportunities for women in sport. (GOOD LUCK; tried Russian Roullette lately??? there at least you have a chance and if you lose your pain is over and you don't have to clean up the mess)

3) Also a school can DEMONSTRABLY PROVE (Good Luck) that the sports offered for young ladies (excuse me, women) meet all the requirements, interests and abilities of the campus student body.

If you don't want to be sued and harassed into bankruptcy you had better have an air tight quota. Local community colleges in California have closed down their football teams as well as their baseball teams. Fortunately we still have San Pedro de Macoris to look for ball players plus all the High Schools. Baseball's real problem is that father's are not home to teach the game to their sons and there are fewer big brothers and neighborhood games. I didn't realize it at the time but I lived the last golden twilight of the Sandlot leagues in Brooklyn and New Jersey in the 1960's. Today the Sandlots are empty. It is true the prep leagues are full but the casual fan and players won't be there in 20 years.

But we really shouldn't worry, even though the percentage of males in colleges is declining, there are plenty of places in gangs, drug trafficking and terrorist organizations and in all the law enforcement agencies and military needed to FIGHT THEM off.

The U.S.Department of Education projects that by the year 2010 male students will comprise only 42% of college students
population.http://www.langhummitchell.com/pdf/news-morehousecollege.pdf

On some campuses, their majority tops 60 percent.

This phenomenon is not a new one. Women have outnumbeed men on U.S. campuses in 1978 and by 1999, women made up 56 percent of the country's undergraduates and men only 44%

The gap is even more pronounced for minority and lower-income non-preferred white males. A colleague of mine was a probation officer who took a year off to get a teaching credential. He liked teaching well enough but not all the testing required particularly the onerous PRAXIS exam and the requirement for a Master's Degree. He did the math and said investing in those studies just wouldn't pay off. He had bills to pay now and a new girl friend so he quit teaching.

I used to live in Washington State so I read the Washington press from time to time. Here are some interesting statistics:

In 1993, 45 percent of the students in the UW School of Law were women.

By 2002 52 percent of the total enrollement of 665 were women.

And Profiles, a UW publication, noted that 66 percent of 2002' s first-year law students are women.

Let's look to Canada:

Statistics Canada reports that in 1998, males comprised fewer than 42% of all university graduates, a drop of more than a percentage point in just five years. By 2000, fully 29.6% of all women aged 18 to 29 participated in some form of post-secondary education, while just 24.8% of similarly aged men did so.

Finally I can speak for myself. I consider myself a bookish man. I love books, I love reading, thinking. I write poetry, translate poetry. I write plays -mostly one act plays for youth- and many have been published. But I never really liked colleges. My best friends at NYU were Irish security guards who quoted Gaelic poetry, lonely Japanese baseball fans and eccentric exiled Pole, Cubans with the occasional Highlander thrown in. I actually had a drink with an attractive Highland woman who also worked as a Security guard at NYU but I was 19 and she was 42 so it was more a cultural experience than a date. But it says a lot that I liked her better than most of the young ladies -excuse me- women I met in college. Most of them did try hard to do anything it seemed to me except boast about how long ago they lost their virginity, what pill their were on, what yeast infections they had, their last live-in boyfriend or their current live-in boyfriends or even their most recent visit to Planned Promiscuity to have an abortion. One girl -young lady- excuse me had a key ring with an X on a fertized egg. ZPG was her big topic ZERO POPULATION GROWTH. Just as well. She was nuts in my book. Just the kind of Westerner Bin Ladin likes.

Not the kind of girl you would take home to mother or to High Mass at the Oban Cathedral. But like I said I was from the old school; never date a lassie who wadna make a guid mate and who ye wadna be prood to bring hame tae mither. Seadh gu dearbh! Yes, indeed! My mother ALWAYS approved of the girls I brought home. I actually only brought whom one, the girl I married. The rest ran off before I could get them on the bus. I suppose they thought life with me would be a cross between the Spanish Inquisition, a baby farm and Harry Lauder but all that talk is just a vicious lie I really am quite a nice fellow and more liberal and more reasonable than the Pope. Liberal enough to be thought a paragon by "modern Catholic" girls of a conservative stripe. Why Highlanders don't even beat women. That's a Moorish custom that crept into Greece, Sicily and Spain. It says in to good book "love you wife like Christ love the Church". That means make sacrifices for her and the family. It doesn't say anywhere that you beat her up. Seems very unmanly and cowardly to me. Anyway if one blow by a Highlander can kill an Englishman what could we do to the fair sex or the bairnies. Hence the prohibition on bullying or hitting except your peers. That was OK and so -in my day- I did more than my share. Sent a few to the hospital but they were fair fights and they started it. Touch not this cat but with a glove. I stay out of trouble but if trouble looks for me I am prepared to push back and defend my peace, privacy and my turf.

But I don't blame LASSIES for being up-to-date New Yorkers; I was not up-to-date even in Glasgow or Oban.

That was just the way I was. A throwback. I was medieval. Actually I thought I was rather more Renaissance with a dash of the Englightenment but why split hairs? I wasn't a pacifist. I loved the military and cursed my dim eyes that preclued re-enlistment. Yep, I was not meant to be a scholar it was all a mistake.

I liked the charming, polite ways of the older generation and I lived among them as long as I could. Sure sometimes I met their daughters -many were the Aunts and Mothers who eagerly introduced me to their attractive an so-called marriageable daughters but the more enthusiastic the mothers were the colder the daughters were. So I spent years in places where whispers could be heard and if the truth can be told and I think it can be told now -just missed getting hooked to bonnie Madeira maid of mixed Portuguese-French-English-Irish descent, followed by an intriguing Breton beauty, a voluptuous Catalan trade unionist and a bevy of Castillian zagalas. The zagalas cornered me and finished me off with that good Spanish cooking. My wife tells me to stay out of her kitchen -unless I make capucchinos or Scotch meat pies- and as long as the chow comes out good and hot and plenty I ain't complaining. I got plenty of Scotch in the library so I needed emerge for that.

The Frenchie didn't want to come to America and wanted me to hang out in Paris a la the New York dames so I said nix. It is just as well; her ferocious anti-Semitisim (and I mean ferocious) and faint ritualistic Catholicism weren't for me. She despised her brother's wife who had five children and I though her brother's wife was an ideal wife, devout, family oriented, surrounded with children, her own and her nieces and nephews well-mannered, charming and happy. She had a very clean complextion and an attractive Celtic -looking face. She wasn't a Twiggy model but instead a buxom country girl easily 150 pounds on a 5'5" frame. Her teeth weren't good (she had a bridge or dentures I didn't inquire) but she seemed to keep her man happy. She knew that much. She said it was nice to have a man around the house. Heck if her husband had gone off in a boat and got drowned I might have stayed right there to live on her father's farm and feed chickens and write poetry and maybe just maybe inject some guid Highland blood in that thin French gene pool.

So she never read any books! She did them in school and the papers just make you upset. She didn't nag or theorize how to make her husband unhappy but instead had a "gay lust for life" (in the traditional sense). But her husband didn't drown -not even in his drink- or die prematurely from oversmoking so Chantal -that was her name it just came to me was out. I hope Chantal is still as happy now as she was 25 years ago. I remember she said a blessing for me and said domestic bliss was just beyond. She knew nothing of the world and didn't want to know. Well they say ignorance is bliss and when it comes to Marxist-Leninist theory and Post Modernist Feminism I guess that statement is very true. A little learning is dangerous thing and makes for a lot of arguments. I know my place. I just say yes dear and do what my wife tells me to do. What do I know of patriarchal cultures? As far as I can see women rule the American world and men hide out in caves and bars.

Well, that is all I can say about my very brief French adventures immortalized in a song I sometimes sing..which does admit the "French girls are braw" but can't hold a candle to the Spanish girls.

We shan't dwell on other brief -but gentlemanly encounters- but to say I courted by letter and really I favored the girls who wrote back and who enjoyed romantic poetry and light classical music and a fine song for singing.

I never dated any Rock-an-Smockers. Dreadful banging about. Or Butch female athletes who looked like refugees from the East German Woman's Swim team.

Well I married and lived happily ever after. The world may change its pattern but my world will stay the same.

I only pray that my daughters don't join the enemy.

Not Bin Laden, Title IX, the NOW gang, the Margaret Sanger Memorial League.

I know its possible but I trust in the Lord and their Bible thumping friends to keep the Satanic Man-hating Witches away. So far so good.

I could go back to school at the local colleges but they don't offer any courses I would be interested in.

I really don't like going to the local colleges and rarely go there. My own personal library is very complete and in its areas of specialization and my personal interests is far superior to the Local cow college. Just try to find Dryden's translation of the Aeneid there or Chesterton's essays on Dickens or the Poems of Father Allan MacDonald or Eriskay or biographies of the Spanish Romantic poets and dramatists like the Duke de Rivas (author of Don Alvaro made into an opera by Verdi).

What they call culture, lesbian forums, gay forums, feminist forums, Mecha Chicano Nationalism, bowlderized "corrected" Shakespeare has absolutely no attraction to me whatsoever. I do go to the Bakersfield Junior College Baseball games though and support their Hot Stove fund raising dinners. Last year 2,000 people -mostly fathers and sons- signed up to meet the guest speaker Dave Roberts of the Dodgers. It was very much a lower middle class thing. Farmers, oil field workers. I was the Aristotle but as I can pose as an "Irish" immigrant or a "Canadian" I am not scorned for my foreign accent. Though I was born in New Jersey many people thought I served in the Royal Marines (not the US Marines) and just came off the boat. Unless I become intimiate I don't go into big explanations. The rumor is that I am Spaniard of Irish descent! This is not a rumor I have spread it is just what people surmise from my manner of speech in Spanish or English. I have also been pinned as an Argentine but that must be because of my fair skin color not because of any real knowledge of Argentina.

The Cal State school doesn't have a baseball team, of course. It does have lots of women's teams though including Softball.

The Public Colleges in Calfornia are practically an alien culture to me.

My chief memories of college was being an outsider except among a small minority of religious and traditionally minded students. As a NROTC and then PLC Marine Option student I was definately different. I was about as welcome as Jesuit seminiary student in Penal England. Being poisoned or drugged was a real concern and when I ended up in the hospital one time my mother, a nurse, was convinced I had been slipped a mickey.

I was much happier, really, when I worked in construction and when I was in the military and of course in High School I have not totally divorced myself from the military. I actively help the local Navy and Marine recruiters and the full time JROTC program at our school. And I am active in a Veteran's organization where former Marine Gunnery Sergeant's and former combat Veterans of Vietnam "talk treason". They read books but they "ain't" going to college. They subscribe to Military History magazine and the history book club and say without qualms that they have zero interest in taking classes in college "with a bunch of wimps and commies". They are interested in .44 Magnums not fairies and pardon the expression I am quoting now, "Dikes".

They listen to Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and when they are feeling moderate O'Reilly. They all signed the recall and support Arnold.

It is true that they make me feel "liberal" - I am not a gun slinger really, I think illegal immigrants are human beings caught in a politic quandry and I belong to a Union- but at least we get along. We listen to the Dodgers and Angels and they talk me into watching the Superbowl with them (I don't suffer too much I am glad for the company and the beer).

We hate women's sports except Ice-skating because our wives like that but for the rest...ugh!

I myself don't care for World Wide Wrestling but I know why young boys LOVE it. It is so politically incorrect and super macho and the boys are desperate to be boys in a world that won't let them. Hey it doesn't break my heart that my son hangs out with Tom Candiotti's son and ASU ball players. They seem like nice kids to me and so heterosexual. They like beautiful, feminine girls period and they get 'em. Men always vote with their eyes and their feet. And as I tell my young charges. "Don't kid yourself. No one has to marry you and you only have so many good years. That's a fact of life. When it comes to the Biological Clock God didn't treat the sexes the same. You have some pluses and you have some minuses and so do we vive l' difference!"

We support the troops -heck most of them come from where we come from anyway- and the president.

We wonder why anyone in San Francisco or New York should even have an opinion after al it's not their war or their boys -or the occasional girl- BUT OURS. Most of us think New York City is just full of freeloaders, egg head professors, crazy feminists and former draft dodgers. A nice play to visit -nicer now than San Franny- but so what it ain't home and it's damn expension.

But that statue of Lady Liberty sure is beautiful. It will always remind me of our adopted home and the good old days. According to same it was a "nightmare" for everyone except for DWM but that not what granny said. She thought the young women and men -except for me- were going to hell in a handbasket. She lived long enough to see me married and blessed our marriage. She said I married the finest girl in the world and I agreed. So I had to import her. I was imported myself.

But that statue of Lady Liberty sure is beautiful as the sun sinks in the West.

Thinking of it reminds me of the old days in the late 50's and into the early 70's looking out my granny's 41st coop apartment in Brooklyn. Of course I have been to the statue several times but I SAW it hundreds of times for free at granny's breakfast table listening to tales of her first sight of New York Harbor way back in 1910.

But those are days far far gone. The Dodgers are gone and all the Clyde Side Scots of the nearly Brooklyn Naval Shipsyards are gone too. Yes, a man's a man for a' that and I man like the dignity of a man's work. That's why we have so many gangsters. They may be mierdas secas -dry turds- but they are MEN and they are FEARED. That ain't respect but it's a sight better than being called a school boy.

Yep, who cares about college anyway. If they don't have a ball team -like NYU-people have never heard of it. So much for prestige.

And I am straight arrow happy once more to be called the Moose and the Rev. Ric. There's money in the bank, food in the pantry, fresh water in the well and a roof over our heads. I don't worry too much about the big colleges anymore. They seem like another time and another world. I am just lucky to be alive myself and to have survived the 20th century. It's always been like that en todas partes cuecen habas---it's the same all over. Ni uasal na iseal ach thuas seal is thios seal....Life always has always been about those who are privileged to be on top and those who are privileged to inhabit the lower orders of society as in the days of the Protestant Ascendancy- "but in this life whether you are up or down you can't escape the fact that ups and downs are part of life and what comes after too.

Posted by: Ricardo Munro on September 5, 2003 02:59 AM

Dear Stephen,

Please, if you are a supporter of the Iranian struggle for freedom against a brutal repressive islamic terrorist dictatorship, then join with us and bloggers from around the world with BLOG-IRAN Campaign. If you are interested please visit http://www.activistchat.com/blogiran/

Keep up the great work!

In Unity & Struggle,
Farah
Activistchat.com

Posted by: Farah on September 5, 2003 01:17 PM

I don"t know how baseball defined american culture, I mean : in what way baseball can be symbolized american culture? please I need the answer. anyone out there can help me???

Posted by: al rasyid on December 12, 2003 08:09 AM

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