Our parents are basically to blame for everything that goes wrong in our lives. If it were not for them, we would not exist, and who asked to be born? We might believe that we are free, just as the planets might believe that their cycles are due to their own volition; but the truth of the matter is this, we are doomed to begin with, and once the die had been cast by our parents, our various ruts to the same damned end were determined. If we did not have parents around, we should not complain: we should count our lucky stars.
First of all, mothers are at fault simply for giving birth to both sexes, but our fathers are naturally more at fault for our faults because they allowed our mothers to make them do the dirty deed in the first place. Yes, she made them do it, but she could not help it, because her father, after all is said and done to excuse him, must be responsible for her faults, so let us not try to shift the blame back to Eve. Forsooth, it is best that fathers alone are blamed for everything, and even when they are completely unknown – that is why the infant whose father abandoned her to her mom when she was less than a year old grew up and tracked him down, with the help of television producers, to a Starbucks twenty-three years later, and spit in his face on camera.
Such anecdotes suffice to show that little girls hold their fathers responsible for determining the difference between good and evil, clean and dirty, and punishing evil and dirtiness. Another little girl, straggling a bit behind her father at 79th Street and Broadway, espied a wad of gum in a crack of the sidewalk, quickly stooped over, pried it loose, popped it into her mouth and vigorously chewed it while her dad window shopped. Now everyone knows that Manhattan has the dirtiest sidewalk gum in the world. Suddenly, a twinge of conscience caused the little girl to spit the gum out. None of this had been observed by her father. She took it upon herself to run up behind him and spank him as hard as she could, much to his surprise and bemusement. The fact that she had put the dirty thing in her mouth and had gotten away with it was of course her father’s fault – it was as if he had done the dirty deed himself.
Another anecdote, from Bank Street in West Village, reminds us of the difference in this respect between boys and girls: how good boys, although they band together and blame the opposite sex for their existence and misconduct, tend to valiantly punish the man of the world when things go wrongly – bad boys prefer to wallop their girlfriends. This particular boy was a big boy being treated like a little one; that is, he was much too big to be confined to a stroller, but there he was, firmly restrained by straps, and when he entreated his mom to let him get out of the stroller and walk, she ordered him to be quiet. He visibly reflected on her command for a moment or two, grimaced at her hatefully, and then began to beat himself in the face with his fist. His mom apparently approved, for she did not intervene; we might reasonably conclude that she is the sort of mom who expects her husband to punish the child when he comes home from work; in this case the father probably travels on business frequently, so the boy is held responsible for his own punishment while he is away.
Now those of us who have suffered the fatherly distinction made between original evil and future good should honor their conscientious fathers every year with a Father’s Day card in their very own words. For example, here is one from one of the most adequate women around – she feels she is wholly inadequate, and loves her father very much:
Dear Daddy,
Happy Father’s Day!
I shall never be able to adequately express how much I love you, Daddy, and I am thankful that I have you to thank for that. And thanks to you, Daddy, I have nothing to do with my inappropriate self. If it were not for the basic training you and the boarding school gave me, I would be bad tonight instead of doing the laundry and scrubbing the walls and the floor so the world can be bright and clean and good. I wish you were here to inspect everything, because I know I must have missed something. Oh, Daddy, you will be happy to know that I bleached, starched and ironed seven sets of sheets and pillow cases for this week, and after I turn the lights out and put on my flannel pajamas, I am going to pray for you on my knees, then tuck myself in under the Army blankets you gave me and go right to sleep!
Here’s a kiss on your cheek, Daddy. Happy Father’s Day!
Your Little Sissy
P.S. Mummy says the doctor told her you must go to the Better Place next week. I really would like to see you before then but I have a deadline to meet, and you know how important deadlines are. But please don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll definitely come down and help Mummy clean up the estate. Love you!
Thus does Daddy’s girl (Sissy) appear to be split off from her real self (Cecilia) to this very day. Thanks to her father, she has joined the ranks of a huge market barely tapped by licensed psychotherapists. Brief self-therapy might begin with self-medication with a few disinhibiting drinks, and proceed to a screaming match with a father substitute, progress to a few slaps or a good beating, and then on to hysterical sobbing, and rape in the end, if not mad passionate sex – physical abuse might be better than being too touchy or totally out of touch with oneself.
But there is no substitute for love. As every baby knows very well, the baby within needs to be babied; to be fed, kept warm and dry, picked up and held and otherwise stimulated, and allowed to develop at her own rate. She has her psychological needs as well. When a child’s needs are not met and her efforts to obtain them are denigrated by her father from birth; when she feels that nothing she can do will be good enough for him; when she realizes that she cries in vain; - she is likely to hide the baby within under the bed if not smother it in the crib. Instead of being her real self, she dons defensive armor, resorts to devious strategies, attending to symbolic substitutes that she may at least survive at any cost – the cost is neurosis. She will help her mom with the chores and try to be what her mom wants her to be; she will be quiet around the house and not compete for her father’s attention; she will demand nothing in her own right; she will say “please” and “thank you”; she will be a bright girl, struggling to get the right answer to every question, to get straight A’s in school; and so on. In sum, if she does not become a juvenile delinquent, she will behave as expected. What she will not do is be her real self – that self, if she would survive the deprivations, negations, humiliations, will be submerged in a bottomless reservoir of pain. And for that her father should be blamed and prosecuted.
Now a public prosecutor has an ethical duty to apprize the court of evidence that might exonerate fathers from the charge of abuse, especially in the event the defense attorney is incompetent, or, as in this case, absent. Wherefore we shall proceed in that capacity:
First of all, if parents did not persecute their children, the consequences of such permissiveness would be a plague on society. For example, consider the case of Tara, one of the worst specimens of the female race in our neighborhood. Her father, who is of course a liberal, did nothing to curb the expression of her real or originally evil self when she was small. She was a talkative yet lazy little girl with a tendency to say stupid things and to make her self quite useless until she reached puberty. She flunked out of school and is now an all-around flunky and floozy, hence decent people are now confronted with a loud and demanding brazen hussy on welfare whose drunken lewdness is a disgrace even to Mel’s Bar and Grill. The only hope for her several children are that they do not have fathers around the house, which resembles an old-fashioned pigsty.
In any case brought before the family court, our fathers, gods of paradises and kings of castles, must be held responsible for determining what is right and wrong and for causing their children to act accordingly. “Chasten thy son while there is hope,” advised Solomon, “and let not thy soul spare for his crying,” for “He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes,” because “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” Indeed, “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.” Clearly, avers the prosecutor, the father must intercede and impose conditions to save the mother from being shamed as a result of her unconditional love; he must train the children to violence and thereby save the human race for boot camp and the global warfare that will eventually bring total peace to earth.
Of course courageous mothers will step up to the plate when feminized fathers are remiss; acting as surrogate fathers, they shall subject their children to righteous chastisement to save them from hell: “Thou shall beat him with a rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell,” writes Solomon. Over two thousand years of violence against children has been all ready been justified by the progress of Western civilization.
Nothing shall be good enough for a king if he wants his subjects to be good subjects, and likewise for fathers. Just as evil is the origin of good, for without evil there is no good, war is the father of civilization; wherefore let the child be regularly punished for good measure - whether or not the punishment is just is moot. But the simple law of divine nature, that humankind requires domestic violence for its well being, has been repudiated by perverse, liberal courts and by parents who believe, preposterously, that the god of love appeared to abrogate the old law and not to fullfil it. Still, a father may legally fulfill his divine duty by making sure his children are frightened by violent fairy tales and biblical stories as well as television shows; and then he can behave as if he would brutalize them if they disobeyed his slightest whim. They will learn to hate and fear and love him, and their repressed desire to kill him can then be directed to serve the power elite and to destroy the enemies of the nation. Therefore an enlightened father today will have physical mercy on his children; instead of beating them daily and risk being jailed by judicial activists, he will frown regularly, nod negatively, and reproach his children with reproofs, always withholding his approval for the best long-term effect. “Is that the best you can do?” will be his favorite question, and an “uh-huh” in response must never do.
Alas for the defense; our prosecutor might have fulfilled his ethical obligation to the court, but in the process he has reinforced the court’s notion that fathers are in fact responsible for their children and are definitely to blame for their children’s real selves and neurotic selves. In any case, fathers are damned. They might be held accountable by way of taxation for the cost of imprisoning real selves and the cost of long term therapy for neurotic selves. Of course that is unfair; but why should life be fair? Why should our fathers be any better than their fathers or better than the omnipotent father in heaven who has no obligation whatsoever to be just, nor any reason to even think about justice?
Martin Luther, who was repeatedly chastised by his parents and schoolmasters, and who chastised himself at legnth after he was frightened by a storm and became a monk, had a serious problem with authority – with fathers and with the original father of the universe. He wound up hating the pope with a passion, but he gave fathers a break so he could love the heavenly father, no matter what. A few select people are born righteous and are destined from birth to wind up in heaven; others shall forever burn in hell no matter what they do; - our psychological salvation is in having faith in Father, and not in doing works. Twins of the same parents turn out differently; one is a crook, the other a saint. Simply put, we are not to blame: Luther once blamed Father for being the first cause of evils, but we are to let Father off the hook: we are to love him.
And we are to forgive our fathers on earth for they know not what they do. Notwithstanding the doctrine of predestination, much of what happens in the material world is a matter of chance – mind you that Luther represented God’s mysteries with logical contradictions. Why should anyone be held responsible for some chance event?
Say, in the case of our anecdote above: Why should a father be blamed by his daughter for not punishing her when she popped dirty sidewalk gum into her mouth? He happened to be looking away at the time she committed the dirty deed. She figured he should be omniscient; but he was obviously not; the general rule, to be a rule, must be generally applied, therefore her father was in for a spanking. But Luther would forgive him his ignorance, and I think most of us would too, despite the fact that we happen to know that she will most likely conceal many misdeeds in the future and blame others for them.
Another anecdote, this one from a Miami Beach Starbucks, is meet in this context: A little girl was playing with an empty plastic cup and a straw, or rather she was working at putting the straw through the hole on the cup’s lid, and in the process she knocked the cup off the table several times, picked it up and put it back on the table. Her father was reading his paper, yet he was attentive to her activities; for instance, making sure that she did not bump her head on the table after she stooped over to pick up the cup time and time again – it was as if the cup had a will of its own or was supposed to fall to the floor. Her father’s love for her was written all over him. She was frail in appearance, an invisibly trembling leaf before the awesome world, but she found her own will and deliberately threw the cup onto the floor for once, at which time her father loomed over her, sternly shook his head in the negative while waving a finger back and forth in front of her face. She was shocked by his disapproval, and it was some time before she recovered and went back to working with the cup. She accidentally knocked it off the table again; not knowing the difference between an accidental event and one deliberately caused, she was frightened at the occurrence and looked to her father for disapproval, but it was not forthcoming, because this time he had not been watching. She looked confused for a moment, and then went back to her task.
Who knows what long-term effect the early confusion might have on this budding person and at what expense? Shall we blame the little girl’s father for the consequences? Of course we should. It is not her fault that he was not looking at the very moment she became willful, or that she was not mature enough to understand his lesson. We are not deceived by Luther’s new understanding of bible lore. No matter what father’s do or do not do, no matter what they know or do not know, no matter how nice or cruel they might be, fathers are to blame for everything that goes wrongly, and of that much we can be certain. Otherwise we would be at fault, and that would simply not do as far as we are concerned. That is why we love our fathers, for our own good. Only God knows why blameless boys and girls become blameworthy when they become fathers and mothers, or why we contradict ourselves in so many things, but at least we know fathers are to blame for everything.
