TBT: The Brutal Truth

At the end of Part II, I said the following:

Let's face it -- a good portion of men and women in this country today have no fucking alternative whatsoever to be a "Deadbeat Dad" or "Deadbeat Mom" Why? Stay tuned for Part Three of this. I'll be happy to spill it out for you because by the Fathers Rights crowd selling out to Big Religion and the conservative media, and by the Womens Rights crowd allowing Lenore Weitzman to hock themselves out to Big Business the U.S. Government, you both in your boundless naivete have created your own undoing at the very cost of your own interests -- be they financial, personal, or political -- and, therefore, you both need to re-learn a very valuable lesson. The faster you do, the faster Kansas and the rest of the nation can.

It's the "boundless naivete" amongst both the mostly conservative Christian fundamentalist Father's Rights crowd and the mostly liberal feminists within the Womens Rights camp that I'll be dealing with this installment. And, rest assured, there's plenty of it to tackle so I'm just going to come right out with my promised Moe Howard ceremonial skull-cracking manuver which will break the monotony of both groups' boundless naivete. How so? Simple: by reminding them that the very reason why we've got a Republican "Culture of Corruption" along with a Democratic "Culture of Complacency" in this country right now is because of ...

*pulls ripcord showering the country with mirrors*

... A 300 MILLION-STRONG CULTURE OF APATHY!

That's right, motherfuckers. This entire country has neglected to remind themselves of the very career choice that has done nothing more than spawn an entire city ripe with the all-time, undisputed, heavyweight champions of everything worthy of the title "Deadbeat" but, unfortunately, it is my opinion that the Fathers Rights and Womens Rights crowds has been the worst offenders, because, by sheer numbers alone, both of these groups make up nearly the less than 50% of the total electorate that still bothers to even vote anymore. Who famously said the following:

If everybody in this town had to leave because of chasing women ... you'd have no government.

That's right - A POLITICIAN! Barry Goldwater, to be exact.

Politicans have always been, always is, and always will be FUCKING DEADBEATS! Deadbeats because they've engaged in broadchasing long before any of us started the habit of breathing. Deadbeats for fucking them, whelping kids, then leaving them all hanging because they found a new broad to chase while using their power and influence to keep it all hush-hush. Deadbeats because the moment they get into office, they start fucking things up. Deadbeats because they don't really represent us at all and instead are nothing more than outsourced employees of the Corportocracy -- the same 5 or 6 dozen nefarious, amoral, multinational corporations who develope their sordid money-grubbing schemes in their boardrooms and whose lobbyists then plead, bribe, cajole, and threaten politicians to play stickball by selling the bullshit on us or else. Deadbeats who, in order to keep us in the dark from discovering it all as well as from pestering them with our petty grievances, must find a scapegoat that can be molded into being the cause of all of societies ills. Where such a scapegoat does not exist - don't worry; they'll be happy to djinn one up, over-hype and over-glorify the sonofabitch using the same old and tired justifications ("We got to stop [insert scapegoat here] before it adversely harms our children!"

The last 10-15 years has brought us a lot of motherfucking scapegoats that a bipartisan cadre of politicians claimed to be the next Great Satan. The 80s brought us "Judas Priest and Dungeons Dragons Will Turn Your Child Into A Leatherclad Wearing Goblin That Eat Kittens And Commits Blood Sacrifies Upon The Altar of Satan" quickly followed by "2LiveCrew Will Turn Your Child Into A Crack-Smoking, Gun-Toting, Mac Daddy Gangster With A Brigham Young Complex". The early 90s spawned the "Mortal Kombat And Vince McMahon Will Turn Your Little Billy Into A Spine Plucking, Child Killing, Suplex Machine With A Fetish For Having His Ass Kissed At Show-And-Tell" and in the past 6 years, we've had the "Grand Theft Auto And Vic Mackey Will Turn You Little Suzie Into A Car Jacking, Bald-Headed, Cop-Killer (Unless They Listen To Liberals -- In That Case, The Liberals Will Turn Little Suzie Into A Jesus-Crucifying, Troop-Bashing, America Hater That Wants To Smoke Osama Bin Laden's Pole And Have Michael Moore's Babies".

Every few years or so, these scapegoats get recycled.

Do any of them really give a flyin fuck about children? Other than their own, hell no. And neither does all the board members of the National Child Support Enforcement Agency (NCSEA) -- board members who include corporations whose vested interest is to keep the gravy train of business expansion going through those lucrative government contracts:

Policy Studies (PSI) -- Got Deadbeats? Toss us a couple million, Uncle Sam, and we'll help cuff 'em and stuff em! Got an overcrowded jail or prison because of our cuffin' and stuffin'? Ooops - toss us a couple more million and we'll take care of that shit, too! Round and round, here we go, it's a big shell game, wouldn't you know!

ACS INC. -- Processes more than 50% of the nation's child support payments ... but only helped 300,000 deadbeats find jobs since 1996.

PNMit -- I love these lines: "All information PNMit receives is kept strictly confidential. We guarantee this in our contract for services." Hey guys, was your company's involvement with the NCSEA part of that confidentiality agreement? If so, having your Vice President on the board kinda of blows your cover.

Meijer -- This blows my mind. Meijer's payroll manager, James R. Owen, is on the NCSEA board. Meijer is a decent-sized retail/grocery chain based in Michigan. They've got a store and distribution center right here in Monroe. Meijer and the UFCW union is notorious here on exploiting the entire 90 day probation process with new hires. The UFCW takes union dues out of their paychecks from the date of hire but they're not fully protected by the union until 90 days on the job. On the 89th day, Meijer terminates the majority of those new hires. Since the UFCW knows that most of them won't contest their union deductions, they end up keeping those deductions. I know this because Meijer fired me on my 90th day -- just 3-4 hours after I had signed my UFCW papers that officially welcomed me into the union on my lunch break. If this nefarious practice is still conducted by Meijer today, then it's possible that James R. Owen -- in his capacity as payroll manager of Meijer and a NCSEA board member -- is also helping the entire federal bureacracy create "delinquents", thus giving more credibility to Baskerville.

This is just a sample of some of the corporations that are in on this unconstitutional and uncivil racket -- a racket that's also supported by a bipartisan bastion of crooked, criminal-ass, deadbeat politicians from both sides of the aisle (how do would know your Senator or Congresscritter doesn't hold stock or a blind trust in any of these companies?). One particular document from a website I printed up two years ago but has since gone dark that bitched about Lenore Weitzman's bogus statistics said the following:

Where is the compensation -- the refund -- for all the fathers who have been massively overbilled (in some cases by more than twice than what they should been assessed) in child support as a direct consequence if this fraudulent "study", and when will these laws and "guidelines" be overturned now that the truth is known?!?

Oh, that barely scratches the surface -- what about the hundreds of millions of TAX-PAYERS -- be they a Christian conservative Fathers Rights activist, a progressively liberal feminist Women's Rights activist, or anywhere in between -- who were propagandized and bullshitted by deadbeat, punk-ass, broadchasing, backstabbing, projectionist politicians, craven and amoral money-grubbing corporations, and complicit media pundits into bankrolling what has turned out to be a 20+ year long, three-fold denial of Consitutional and Civil rights (e.g. father, mother, and their children) all under the guise of a fucking apocryphal scapegoat?!?

The silence to that question is deafening and I think its because, deep inside, we know the answer. To dignify that answer is to admit culpability on a mass scale that hits too close to home, especially for the Christian Conservative fundies within the Fathers Rights crowd and the Womens Rights feminists. Why? Because they each took the human rights values of preached by Jesus Christ and total gender equality espoused by Susan B. Anthony and sold them out at the same time politicians from the Reagan era sold America out of the realm of compassionate selflessness and into the quagmire of competitive selfishness: The Child Support system is just another of the many gadgets our bought-and-sold Corporatocratic government employed to distract the poor and middle class American people from paying attention to their ultimate goal of furthering the divide between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in this country -- be they man, woman or child, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat.

By making the poor and middle class people fight amongst themselves over social issues -- be they real or imagined -- it has allowed the rich elite to run off with all the fuckin' money. That is why today, millions of American men and women have no real alternative to be "deadbeats" because when you take the unmitigated loss in our steel industry, our textile industry, and electronics industry, and every other industry where America lead the free world prior to 1970, and not will you have created a mad, mad, mad, mad dash to the bottom for every McJob and McDollar out there because of today's vast divide between the "haves" and the "have-nots", but that very divide and the decline of the dollar's purchasing power is going to directly or indirectly create the explosive atmosphere and justifications for divorce. It's not the lack of spirituality in the public square or gender wars -- it's economics and the errosion of the middle class.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, The U.S. Government -- under extreme embarrassment for their diabolical misadventure in Vietnam and under pressure from the rich corporate aristocracy who saw it all as a success -- had to do two things in order to keep justifying its unholy and inhumane rougery and tyranny not only all over the globe in the name of "Manifest Destiny" but also domestically via self-serving propaganda:

(1) Silence Christians that exposed and blasted capitalism as a false God.
(2) Silence feminists whom demanded financial equality under the dominion of capitalism.

Luckily for the U.S. government, the propaganda campaigns to re-manage the perceptions among Christians were well under way due to the growing influence of belligerent yet charismatic fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, and Donald Wildmon -- rich fraudulent Christians who benefited greatly under capitalism's dominion and had no qualms about shifting the blame away from Mammon (the Balaam of Capitalism and their true master) and onto progressive liberalism and secularism in a contrivance to filch even more personal wealth from the wallets of the unsuspecting naive residents of red-state Jesus-Land.

However, the U.S. Government didn't know what the fuck to do in order to re-manage the perceptions among feminists because of the fact that while men did indeed dominate the country as a collective, feminists trumped their dominion as autonomous individuals. In other words, every feminist was a one-woman libertarian militia whose partisan activism and glib tongue could strike fear and doom into politicians. Sadly, the government didn't have to do much to shut up the feminists because there was allready a growing whisper campaign among rightwing Conservatives and the forementioned Christian fundamentalists that blamed feminism for chasing fathers away and protecting and encouraging the expansion of the welfare state through divorce (mostly likely fueled by a twisted interpretation of the flawwed 1983 study by Frank Furstenburg and Reagan's "no-fault" divorce legislation -- legislation that even earned the ire of some feminists).

Once Wietzman spewed her bogus 73/42 statistic, everything was turned on its head. The feminists were duped but yet joined in the "deadbeat dad" bandwagon along with the politicians and the media whom to this very day continue to churn the "Deadbeat Dads Are Alive, Well, And Rich As Hell" meme to keep all the good little duckies lined up in a row.

And right here lies two instances of naivete that are common among feminists today: For one, in a country where the last 6 years have brought us the bursting of the dot.com bubble, millions of job losses due to outsourcing, the rise (and the inevitable bursting) of the housing markets, staggering inflation on the price of oil and energy, hurricane Katrina, the shutting down of numerous automotive plants, and Ms. Shakes's own recent blogging on the hellacious increase of people seeking emergency food assistance, they continue to assume -- possibly expect, maybe outright demand -- that all of these non-custodial "deadbeat" mothers and fathers can just heeble-hobble on over to the nearest tree, pluck off a few hundred bills, cram 'em in an envelope, and send it off to the lucrative Child Support collection bureacracy?!? At least, that's what I gathered from the rather callow words of Eponymous at Ms. Shakes's sandbox:

Eponymous: "I mean, she's the one who carried your child for nine months and bore it and you're bitching about a few hundred dollars a month?"

I could tear this and other things Eponymous said that gathered agreements within the Shaker community seven ways from Sunday but in the face of such callow disregard towards an honest human critical analysis, I must say we can forget the moon -- their tin-hats just sent them into orbit somewhere past Pluto!

The second instance of naivete stems from a harrowing cognitive disconnect about how the custodial parent spends their Child Support money. Although they say child support helps the children, I can tell you affirmatively that, aside from the children whose parents are gainfully employed by the federal government and corporate collection bureacracy, it doesn't help the deprived fatherless or motherless children at all, especially within middle and low income families (some of whom I'm convinced absolutely adore living paycheck to fucking paycheck). Why? Simple: the custodial parent typically doesn't treat those checks as child support. Instead, they treat it as reimbersements for their lifestyle. How so? Remember at the start of this series when I said my divorced sisters and brothers hate to see me coming? Observe:

CASE #1 -- one sister of mine is the custodial parent of 4 kids that I took care of through Michigan's "Relative Care Provider" program while she went to work. I can not count how many times -- SERIOUSLY -- how many times I walked into her place only to witness my sister slam her purse down on the kitchen table and bitch, "That asshole! I was hoping to get my child support check so I could go to bingo before work but noooooo!" Now, I have no use whatsoever for her piece of garbage ex-husband but you'd think she'd save that money for ... well ... CHILD SUPPORT! You know? Anything that benefits the children such as paying the bills, rent, etc. Nope. In her eyes, she'd let some of those bills go in order to hit the bingo hall (which means before she gets to the bingo hall, she'll stop at a store, cash the check, and immediately chuck $50 at the cashier for a cartoon of cigarettes and a stack of scratch-off lottery tickets). When she comes home from bingo, she'll bitch about either her electric or cable being too high. I got mad one day and took her on one of my "Critical Analysis Tours" which extended about as far as the boys bedroom. Our conversation went like this:

Me: "Tell me what's wrong with this picture."

Her "What? I don't see anything except for Harley (the cockatiel)"

Me "That's exactly the problem."

Her "What do you mean?!?"

Me "You don't see that there's two box fans running, that 100 watt lamp blazing, and a TV with a screen more blue than a smurf's ass because of the VCR -- all in just one room in your house where the only object that has a pulse besides you and I is that flying shithouse of yours on the curtainrod. Wonder how long this room been like this? That clock says 6PM. School gets out at 2PM. Do the math. Ready to see your daughter's room?"

Her "Oh, so I'm a bad parent now?!?"

CASE #2 -- my other sister is the non-custodial mother of 4 children - 3 girls and 1 boy. Her ex-husband turned the three girls against her via "parental alienation" in the early mid-90s. The alienation ceased the day my father died in my lap -- no matter how much brain washing her ex-husband did, those girls remebered and loved their grampa. Just before the old man died, however, my sister got a letter from the Friend of the Court where her ex-husband was requesting a child support hike. She could barely afford to live on her $9 an hour job as it was under her current payments and here he wants to jack 'em up. She called to ask why since the girls were well into their teens save for the youngest. His justification for the hike request was "because the bills are piling up and they need school clothes". This is from a guy who shacked up with a woman who has two kids of her own, are middle-class due to their dual incomes, and definately rake in some serious quid come tax-time. I agreed with her reasoning: two of the three girls were above the age of 15 and she felt, as their mother, it would be a good economic learning experiance for them to get summer jobs. A summer job at 14 did wonders for me -- I once blew an entire check at an arcade within hours, leaving me with no lunch money for two weeks. It never happened again. The stomach was a priority; Rastan and Punch-Out wasn't.

CASE #3 -- my ex-fiance came from a divorced family. She was only 10 and her kid sister was around 4 or so. Whenever their father (a great man) was employed, he paid his child support only for his ex-wife to use it to go gallivanting the weekend away out of town, leaving my ex and her sister to basically depend on their grandparents and friends for their needs. I should know -- I was one of those friends that would toss her cash to get groceries. As an aside, some of the old man's child support checks erroneously would go out of town to a woman with a simular name as his ex-wife. I told him, "Look at the bright side - maybe this strange woman is supporting her kids with your money better than your ex-wife would," and he cackled, "That's what I'm saying!!"

Now, it's possible that any feminists that read these personal anecdotes of mine may feel inclined to smear me for tossing members of my family under the bus. My only defense to that is simply what part of the words "the", "brutal", and "truth" don't they understand? Blood is indeed thicker than water, but that doesn't mean blood nor water doesn't deserve to ride baggage on the Greyhound every once in while -- friend, family, or foe. I get stuffed in there myself on occassion, so it's all good. Besides, I look at it this way: if I ever decide to run for public office (shoot me now, please), it's best that people can get the truth out me here. Otherwise, they won't ever be able to get it out of me over there.

Of course, feminists may very well argue that this entire series was unblanced as all fuck because I was more combatative towards them than the Fathers Rights crowd and they'd be right. However, there's a reason for this: I was a Fundy Fristian for 7 years and I know that nature of that mental block: TITANIUM! In other words, between the Culture of Corruption Republicans, Culture of Complacency Democrats, the Masculine Rights crowd, and the feminists, I feel like I'm banging my head against not just one but four fuckings walls and, at the onset of this series, I made what I hope is an accurate observation: the feminists are probably the mose receptive wall to my headbutts. That's not a dig on feminists at all - it should be compliment. I made this observation because I believe that the dialectic synthesis between Fathers Rights and Womens Rights is HUMAN RIGHTS! If this world was a little more real; a little more human, it would certainly be right world for eveyone - man, woman, or child.

I close this series with the following general advice for all non-custodial parents -- man or woman:

1) Don't Pay Child Support Through The System! Neither you nor your child(ren)'s birth certificate(s) have either the Halliburton logo or the Policy Studies logo. Besides, the federal government has demonstrated -- by the very corrupt and craven Republicans and the complacent and spineless Democrats -- that they're aren't even worthy of recieving your tax dollars let alone your child support payments. If Diebold and ES haxored machines can't be trusted to flush the cankerous masses right down the Potomac, then the only option for us is to starve it.

2) If/When you're released from jail for non-compliance, make a payment on your child support using jailhouse currency: Marlboros, Newports, Herbert Tereytons, license plates, etc. If the judge asks you if you're being a smart ass, sarcasticly reply, "No, your honor. If I was being a smartass, I'd be giving you a tattoo right now." You might as well pull a Larry Flynt and smear the judges, the clerks, the whole fucking lot of them. Afterall, you've done lost it all -- how much more you got to lose other than what's left of your life and time? Nothing. So go right ahead and smear away. Just don't kill 'em like those Republican fuckwads in the wake of the Schaivo Shitstorm threatened to do. That judge is more usefull to you alive than dead.

3) If politicians give you any shit, call them and leave the following promise on their voicemail: "A person who justifies blowing millions of dollars campaining for the privilege of a $180,000 job doesn't have the right to lecture me on a damn thing nor give me a civics lesson. It's the other way around, and if you ever forget that again, I'll remind you of it personally by defeating you in the next election, sending your sorry hide back to the hole you crawled out of." Notice I said promise up there -- threats are for the insecure, hence the reason so many politicians make 'em. Make promises instead and own up to them. It'll go farther.

4) If any great number of Americans give you a couple acerbic pennies for your thoughts or actions, remember that 70% of them at one time thought Saddam Hussein was connected to Al-Queda. So much for the quality of their thoughts, eh? In other words, don't count your critics; weigh them. Most of them are going to ammount to about 20 pounds of shit in a 10 pound bag at the end of any given day, anyway. Guaranteed.

5) If your child support check is late, don't call up your ex-spouse and complain. Instead, call your damned Senator. Hold the elected fuckers that collect six figure salaries and millions in bribes accountable not just on November 3rd but EVERY SINGLE GODDAMNED MOTHERFUCKING DAY! Look - our government clearly has a vested interest in deliberately delaying your child support check for any reason whatsoever. Why? Simple: so that you'll accuse and fight with your ex-spouse for not paying! The politicians and corporations who bought their asses loooooooove that shit because, by blame-shifting and creating scapegoats, your politician is off the hook and accountability goes with it. Unpeterbed by your pesky ass, they can go about "Official Corportocracy Business" such as waging wars, sending your kids to die in them, taking away your rights, rigging elections, plundering third-world countries with cheap labor of its natural resources, and further enriching themselves and their crony friends for the damned privilege. To them, you're just an ATM and a vote to hit up every few years. After that, those motherfuckers don't give a rat's ass about either you, your ex-spouse, or your kids.