The Laughing Salutes America’s Neglected Fathers

An-Unromantic Look at Fathers in America
To Honor The Man In The Doghouse
The 430 Uniformed Men and One Women Who Gave Their Lives At the WTC

June 7, 2002

by Andrew E. Carlan

Doesn’t Clarence Thomas Think We Bleed?

Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same
weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, shall we not die?"
Merchant of Venice, III, i, 58-66

Thomas and Scalia as often as the rest of that bunch created the Supreme Court’s "domestic relations exception," out of thin air. More often than any other branch of law, divorce and custody raises federal constitutional questions. Both wings of the court are equally spineless toward the feminists. Sorry, I am dry-eyed.

Supreme Court Justice Thomas established his credentials as a New Age guy this year on May 11 by weeping during a speech to the Savannah Bar Association. Given the venue, one thinks of crocodile tears among sharks, or of Lewis Carroll’s Walrus weeping over the juicy little shrimp he just can’t help consuming. But no, the grief of Thomas seemed real enough. The problems were hypocrisy and a failure of empathy. Eugene Narrett, Ph.D.

Clarence Thomas broke down before the Savannah, Georgia bar and cried hysterically as he related his adoption of his great-nephew. Could you just take your nephew from his mother? We can’t even see our children.

Thomas said his life has been transformed by the addition three years ago of a great-nephew, Mark, to his household.

"My wife and I have devoted our lives to raising this child," Thomas has said of the 9-year-old grandson of his only sister, Emma Mae Martin. Thomas will not discuss why he took in the boy. A few years ago Thomas drew criticism for belittling his sister for being on welfare.

We were poor. If I wasn’t a boy, I wouldn’t have had nothing to play with. -- Redd Foxx

Notice the absence of humor in all the Columbia University Press World of Quotes. It could only be at Columbia University renowned for its revival of the feudal law of ordeal to better protect porcelain delicate female law students than the Bill of Rights who make up charges of rape. These professors didn’t like the guarantee of facing your accuser and the presumption of innocence. Of course not, what these professors mainly teach is how to lie with a straight face.

Feudal Law Ordeal: On the belief that holy water would reject a liar who had forsworn a holy oath, it was believed that the guilty would float and the innocent would sink. Modern law has tended to reverse the test for no apparent reason.

As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence. -- Frank Pittman (20th century), U.S. psychiatrist and family therapist. Man Enough, ch. 5 (1993). Columbia World of Quotations, 1996

The information learned for attending Columbia for four years at a cost of $100,000 is absolutely extraordinary. I did know this. I’ll bet the reader didn’t either.

It saves time and money not to bother with disinterested scientific research; it also helps to just put on that feminizing boys and men is a good thing and therefore punishing fathers even if they are innocent is just for some man somewhere, if not the accused in particular. No wonder Columbia University males accused by hysterical and defenseless females training to argue before big bad judges have a higher mortality rate than Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Is Pleck one of those? You know what I mean. This is the land of free speech, but there has to be some limit drawn of what you can say or even think without being punished for it. It might as well be our Ivy League betters.

Are You A Prisoner of Manliness?

Many people now believe that if fathers are more involved in raising children than they were, children and sons in particular will learn that men can be warm and supportive of others as well as be high achievers. Thus, fathers’ involvement may be beneficial not because it will help support traditional male roles, but because it will help break them down. -- Joseph H. Pleck (20th century), US professor, psychology. "Prisoners of Manliness," Psychology Today (September 1981). Columbia World of Quotations, 1996

I don’t know whether the Amish are serious or whether they, too. have been co-opted by the feminists.

We did not inherit this land from our fathers. We are borrowing it from our children. -- Amish Proverb. Columbia World of Quotations, 1996

I put this in largely because it rung familiar.

Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children. Sam Levenson. Levenson taught high school students. Only after retiring did he regain his sanity and go on to be a successful comedian.

And they say Nietzsche was mad from syphilis. One man’s disease is another’s cure.
Follow in the footsteps of your fathers’ virtue! How could you hope to climb high unless your fathers’ will climbs with you? -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Columbia World of Quotations, 1996

This editor was fired. But it was too late to pull the quote.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
-- James Wright (1927–1980), US poet. Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio . Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Columbia World of Quotations, 1996

Bob is an expert on his crimes. He is a rehabilitated feminized prisoner. Such good judgment. It is like a prisoner up for parole giving an unsolicited endorsement of the head of the parole board. You never read about mothers taking or selling drugs.

Behind the façades of respectability, family life and surprisingly modest homes [are] fathers who hate drugs but sell tons of heroin, gambling czars who lose heavily on the horses, murderers who take offense at off-color language around women and Runyonesque characters with funny nicknames who beat people to death with hammers. -- Pseudonym to protect me from a libel suit. On evidence presented in trials of organized crime figures. J Columbia World of Quotations, 1996

What’s all this fuss about fathers being present at the birth of their children? The way events are shaping, they’ll be lucky to be present at the conception. -- George H. Davies, Letter to the editor Manchester Guardian 26 Aug 84

Divorced fathers are forced to recognize that there’s no substitute for being there; or rather, there are only substitutes for it. -- C. W. Smith "Uncle Dad" Esquire Mar 84

And fathers are a blessing, too, they give the place a tone;
In fact each child should try and have some parents of its own.
-- Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977), US poet. Mother Goose Up-to-Date: Edgar A. Guest Considers the Good "Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe."

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Only the jingle in their pockets or crinkling of bills should break the otherwise quietude of mother’s home. -- AEC, adapted from Oscar Wilde.

What would Wilde know about family life? He was also one of "those" which prevents me from even whispering. What’s wrong with this Columbia World of Quotes. Aren’t there other people in the world?

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. -- Mark Twain

One day my father took me aside and left me there. -- AEC

No wonder me a fathers rights lawyer keeps wondering how all other lawyers can play the game that the king is magnificently dressed when he has no clothes. Not only doesn’t he had any clothes, his parade route keeps changing.

We are being shot and killed for sport like the 50 million buffalo who lumbered on the Great Plains, a easy mark for feminists whose power today is backed up by judges, our legislators and gun-slinging feds. And they favor sexual harassment codes, intolerance as a crime and targeted gun control. They continue Stalin’s tradition. He said: Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

We ought to forget about marriage and divorce laws and get on the government’s endangered species list.

Thank God for humor and Marx. No not Karl, Groucho - or I would have shot myself years ago. He chiseled and also in stone the motto of the American Bar Association: "Those are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others." -- AEC

My father asked for breakfast in bed on Father’s Day. So mom put a cot in the kitchen. -- AEC

I am determined that my children be raised in their father’s religion, if they can found out what it is. -- Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

If shrinks with shrink to nothing the phenomenon of the "Soccer Mom" would disappear overnight.

My father had always said there four things a child needs: nourishing food, regular sleep and of soap and water. After that, what they need is some intelligent neglect. -- Ivy Baker Priest, Treasurer of the United States during the Eisenhower Administration

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father. He’s more particular. -- Robert Frost, Poet. He also wrote: Every Mother is a Democrat and every father a Republican.

Unfortunately neither Flaming Bushes could ever seem to grasp this complex idea.

As you journey through life you will encounter all sorts of nasty little upsets, and you will either learn to adjust yourself to them or gradually go nuts. -- Groucho to Son, Arthur

The child has every toy his father wanted. -- Robert Whitten

To her the name for father was another name for love. To her mother’s lawyer, it was a miscarriage of justice and a contribution to his dying early of ulcers. -- Fanny Fein and AEC

Equal time for the feminists. That’s an open mind. That’s also why we’re losing. Would Hitler have given Winston Churchill a forum?

I got married late in life. It surprises some who don’t know me that I got divorced early in life, too. When I was younger I just couldn’t find a girl who liked to do the same things I liked to do. I liked to hang around the poolroom, drink beer and chase girls—and I couldn’t find a girl who would do all of those things with me. -- AEC

Do not marry
Do not date,
Hibernate

But if you must
Relieve your lust
Negotiate and pay

If you let a girl in
And neighbors hear a din
Hope you taped
The consent of sin. - AEC

My father invented a cure for which there was no disease and unfortunately my mother caught it and died of it. -- Victor Borge (1909) Danish-born US composer, actor, and musical comedian.

You can’t compare me to my father. Our similarities were different. -- Dale Berra, Son of Yogi.

One of 20th century’s greatest medieval scholars and Christian apologist, subject of the film "Shadowland," C.S. Lewis married Douglas Gresham’s mother when she was in remission from cancer. She died and Lewis raised Douglas.

RQ: As you observed it, how did Jack approach his role as a parent?

DG: The first thing Jack did was to properly identify the role the Lord had cast him in. He never tried to be a father to me, but tried to be the very best stepfather that he could be. It is here that so many people make a very bad mistake. You cannot become, and should not try to become, a father to a child whose real biological father is someone else, for to do so flies in the face of the scriptural instructions to honor your father and mother.

My father got his religion mixed up. He said he was a Seventh Day Mason. -- AEC

My father said, "Mike, if you masturbate you’ll go blind." I said, "Dad--I’m over here." -- Anon

Anon is far and away the most prolific joke writer of all time. He has several aliases. The one most recognized is graffiti.

I had to go to analysis. They told me I had an unresolved Oedipus complex, which, according to them, meant I want to sleep with my mother. Which is preposterous. My father doesn’t even want to sleep with my mother. -- Dennis Wolfberg