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Conventional wisdom sure takes some amazing turns. Just 10 or 15 years ago, I couldn't pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading how useless I was.
Men in general, and fathers in particular, were
irrelevant. I worked with women who wore T-shirts which
announced that A woman needs a man like a fish needs a
bicycle
and The more I know of men, the better I
like my dog.
A household with an adult male in it was an oppressive patriarchy, an environment of physical and emotional violence and abuse, a veritable factory for the mass-production of traumatized victims who would grow up to be dysfunctional serial killers.
Occasionally, after reading through a dozen or so such learned articles, I would concede my irrelevance to modern American life. There weren't many new jobs that required a strong back, the main thing guys had to offer, and the next generation would do better without men around the house.
Now it's just the opposite. Every problem in American society is apparently caused by fatherless households.
Do adolescent boys become street thugs? They don't have
positive male role models. Is there grinding poverty at
home? The family needs another income. Are your taxes too
high? It's all those promiscuous welfare queens who don't
read stories from the Book of Virtues
to the
children they beget just to increase their AFDC
payments.
Are test scores declining? Dad's not there flexing a razor strop to insure that homework gets done. Is social civility on the decline? No father to teach boys that there's one way to talk when you're around the guys, and a different way in mixed company. Innocent by-standers dying from drive-by shootings? No father to take boys out to a gravel pit and teach them how to shoot straight.
I cannot fully express my gratitude to the social scientists for their recent discovery that men are of some domestic use. It's the best father's day I've ever received, and I'm eager to learn what they discover next. That the sun rises in the east?
To continue on a Father's Day theme, during my youth, my dad often took us on family rides up the Big Thompson Canyon between Loveland and Estes Park.
In those days, we seldom stopped in the canyon, because
every wide spot had a cabin or house, a stout fence, and a
row of signs that said Trespassers will be shot, and
survivors will be prosecuted.
So all these parcels were private property. Fair enough, but then came the big flood of 1976, and guess who had their hands out? Those same property owners. We weren't good enough to fish from their shores, but our money was certainly welcome.
For the past week, we've been inundated by flood warnings as a record snowpack begins to melt. As soon as the water ebbs, we'll be inundated by requests for public assistance to rebuild structures that were flooded.
Here's a suggestion for this year's flood assistance: If the property owner kept the public out before the deluge, then the public -- especially the public treasury -- should stay away after the flood, too.
Much the same holds for palaces on East Coast islands
that get hit often by hurricanes, and for mansions in
California mudslide paths. They're private property
until the owners need to tap the public till. I'd have a
lot more respect for the property-rights movement if it
meant that we weren't always writing welfare checks to
people who built their houses in the wrong places.
Perhaps it is fitting that, just before Father's Day, our government got even more paternalistic. The U.S. Senate passed a bill, sponsored by Nebraska Sen. James Exon, which would provide fines and prison terms for people who transmit indecent material over a computer network.
We have enough trouble defining obscenity when it's
printed or spoken; no matter how stupid or trashy something
may be, someone can usually find some redeeming social
value
in it.
Now consider that computers transmit data in thousands of different formats. It wouldn't take much thought to come up with a way to transmit something that looks like regular text but which, if the proper translation program were applied, would present a lascivious image on the screen.
There's a major challenge for any prosecutor; just thing
of explaining to a jury that this may look like normal
text, but if you take the high bit of each of these
4,159,265 allegedly seven-bit ASCII characters, assemble
those bits into bytes and feed that stream into a Level 2
PostScript interpreter, you'll get a vector rendition of a
nubile ...
Then there's the fact that most computer networks are international. No matter how illegal it is to transmit smut in the United States, American laws are meaningless in Denmark or Australia. It's hard to imagine any civilized country extraditing one of its citizens to the United States for prosecution under such laws.
Besides, we're learning that fathers are good for something. Why don't we worry about what our children might be fetching from the Internet, and let the government get on with its real business of allowing the cable and telephone monopolies to find new ways to gouge us?
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