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Let’s have a ‘national conversation’ about the fact of American life that matters most, hurts worst and offers the best promise of redemption going forward: Fatherlessness.By: Yvette T.

You bet.

So it’s stupid, I suppose, to presume to lecture big-name national politicians about how to engage people in ways that just might change minds – and hence votes. Stupid because no one is listening, anyway, but stupid, too, because the only response to those kinds of observations is a roaring silence, punctuated, eventually, by some act of petty vengeance. The last thing mediocrities want to get is better, so they hear nothing but the criticism, none of the coaching.

That’s okay. I’m talking to you, not them.

We are chastised all the time about our palpable need to have a ‘national conversation’ about this or that – racism, poverty, hunger, inequality, blah, blah, blah. The words ‘national conversation’ mean Lucy will hold the football in place until the last second, and Charlie Brown will land flat on his back again. ‘National conversation’ means: “You lose, and if you don’t like that, you’re a racist!”

I have a solution for that problem: Let’s have a ‘national conversation’ about the fact of American life that matters most, hurts worst and offers the best promise of redemption going forward: Fatherlessness.

Marriage and family are the man’s relationship. He creates these institutions for his own purposes, engendering all of human civilization as a secondary consequence. Accordingly, only men can fix marriage and family, but, when they do, they will redeem all of Western Civilization:

Fathers are hoplite Greeks, like Leonidas and his Spartan warriors, beating back savagery by pushing back and civilizing the frontiers. Fathers have been denounced and ridiculed for so long, from so many different directions that they have have forgotten to be the heroes their wives and children need:

• Families with dedicated fathers thrive, the rest sunder.

• Children raised by their fathers are far more likely to prosper as adults and make good parents themselves.

• Parents who (more…)

This is a chapter extracted from Father’s Day. If you don’t want for your children to be delivered to the tender mercies of Family Court, you should be working through this book chapter by chapter.

10. The Long Goodbye

Tell me what your mouth looks like in photos. Mister Married has a warm, gentle smile that he wears almost all the time. Mister Divorced has a big fake grin that he flashes in any photo he lets anyone see. What does Mister Maybe’s face look like? What does your face look like? How about your wife’s? What do your children’s faces look like in photographs?Photo by: Ding Yuin Shan

I don’t love everything about social media, but I love looking at other people’s family photos. So here are the Maybes, as best we can imagine them, all dressed up in their holiday best. Little Junior is a stoic, isn’t he? That tight-pursed line of his mouth, razor sharp and perfectly level to the ground, is his way of telling the world how much he hates his situation and his powerlessness to change it. His little sister Sally looks scared and needy, and she’s already puffing out from the cookies and candy she wolfs down when no one is watching. Mom is even puffier and even needier, but she is less scared than angry. And there’s Dad, showing each one of those emotions – fear, anger, need – with Junior’s tight-pursed mouth surmounted by a thousand-yard glare, resentment masked as indifference.

Am I getting the details wrong, dude? Dang. Tell me what your mouth looks like in photos. Mister Married has a warm, gentle smile that he wears almost all the time. Mister Divorced has a big fake grin that he flashes in any photo he lets anyone see. What does Mister Maybe’s face look like? What does your face look like? How about your wife’s? What do your children’s faces look like in photographs?

And am I being too hard on you, Dad? Too soft on Mom? She doesn’t think so. But unless she’s (more…)

The best parts of the fully-human life are met with a smile, at a minimum – and a smile and kiss is even better.

That’s a country song, ain’t it? It’s the first line of the hook. That’s fun for me, and everything like that is fun for me, but it’s more fun because it’s so painfully real.

In love more than anything, and in my marriage to Cathleen more than once, I have seen myself at my worst, much to my shame. Those are good words – I have seen my self at my worst – the kind of words that, the more you worry them over, the more you find yourself thinking the way I think.

But: Being eloquent about bad behavior is ever the poet’s absolution, and I absolve myself nothing. I know I have done badly by Cathleen, because I have seen myself doing it. And because, having done it, by impetus of memory I can never stop seeing myself doing it.

And yet, when she looks at me, she almost never sees anyone but the man I could and should always have been.

I want to be that man.

I want to be good, I want to be good, I want to be good – I’ve always wanted to be good, and I’ve always known what the good was to me – my own ego. And I’ve done a pretty good job of developing and defending my ego, I think, not so much in spite of the resistance I’ve run up against but because if it.

But I’ve won much of my freedom, I know, by scaring would-be bosses-of-me away. I’ve never hit anyone, not since I was a boy. I’ve never needed to: I can lay a lash on you that will sting forever in ten words or fewer.

But here’s a fact of nature I managed to learn in just fifty short years of careful study: Not everyone is trying to be the boss-of-me.

Many people are, of course, and one of the things I’ve (more…)