“Hey, hey, hey! Who’s your daddy?”Photo by: Mike Mozart
Just kidding. It’s an evergreen story, one that comes up every 18 months or so: ‘TV dads are dopes, dupes and dumb-asses.’ This trenchant essay is based on eight whole hours of intense TV-watching research, so strap yourself in tight before you click the link.
Meanwhile, for the benefit of anyone who wants to break into show-biz on the ugly-peoples’ side of the table, here are the rules for writing a Hollywood father:
1. A Hollywood dad can be absent, awful, inept or unrelated. Inept is the one that’s decried all the time, but actual screen-time for father-figures is almost always unrelated men – step-dads, boyfriends and especially mom’s own father – who, amazingly enough, is present, conscientious, competent and family-by-blood.
2. A man raising children in film or on TV cannot be a father: Masculine, firm, sure-footed, resolute, courtly, wise, fore-sighted, patient, tolerant, wry.
3. In his choices and behaviors, a present-and-ongoing Hollywood dad must simulate either an hysterical woman or a helpless child – or ideally both.
What’s the agenda?
• Much writing, like all Marxism, is patricide-by-proxy, so the kid going one-up one his dumb-ass dad again and again could just be more of the incessant puerile rebellion that makes the “entertainment” “business” possible.
• Arguably, Disney and others are grooming children wholesale for future exploitation. By undermining fatherhood, they weaken moral standards even as they displace morality’s real-world avenger.
• Everything of Marxism requires the elimination of the Hoplite father from the homestead, so continuously undermining fatherhood greases the works of the soul-shredding machinery.
• Best bet: The sleazy selling crazy to the lazy. “Entertainment” media is an habituated evasion – all of which are ‘as addictive as cocaine!!!’ What is being evaded by the “entertainment”? Self-responsible adulthood, including thoroughgoing parenthood. By what means? By ridiculing thoughtful maturity, especially masculine maturity.
There definitely IS a nefarious motive behind that: Rent-seeking. A world of adult-babies promises only catastrophe tomorrow – but look at all the corn chips and beer they’re buying today!
So: Whatever the agenda, it’s working. And the opportunity is ripe: It’s never been a better time to be an anti-father/anti-family/anti-future Hollywood hack.
Do you hate yourself enough to cash in on civilization’s pre-Dark Ages sale? The world’s gotta end somehow, after all. Might as well die laughing…
