I was having lunch with John and Beatrice, a couple I know, recently. A piece of mine had appeared in the Lowell (MA) Sun, asking the question, “Why do we stigmatize and disrespect single fathers so extremely?â€Â
The sweet Beatrice, sitting across from me, had a stroke recently. She doesn’t talk that well, although she is improving every day. When I began speaking about my article, which they had both read, and about the punishment of single fathers by draconian child support bureaucracies, and the insulting of men by paid PR men, a pained look came across her face.
Her husband asked, kindly, if she was thinking about her own divorce more than twenty years ago, and the life she and her five kids had afterwards.
She nodded yes; I could see her, the stroke victim, concentrating hard to get words out. It took a few seconds. “So much waste!†she declared explosively. “So many years!†She shook her head sadly.
Later, outside the coffee shop, I talked with John. “No one outside the system grasps what it’s like,†I said. “It’s so complicated, and the parts don’t mesh that well, and people inside the system do not understand. There’s a whole bunch of forces driving this system, and they interact in ways that no one designed.â€Â
“Isn’t anyone concerned about the unfairness?†he asked.
“There’s too much money to be made by being unfair,†I said.
“Doesn’t anyone have responsibility for the system?â€Â
“No. It just grew up, and no one can see all the parts of it,†I said. “It’s a maze of dark spots. No one knows exactly how it works. It’s dark. It’s Dickensian.â€Â
John was an English major–he got the connection. He shook his head, and helped his wife, not walking that well but doing better every day, across the parking lot to their car.
They are not going to be having any children. They are older. But I know them and know they are moral people. They are not happy to be living in a society where the divorce courts and the child support collection system turn men into virtual slaves. It weighs on John and Bea.
Dickensian.
In Oliver Twist (I’m reading it again) the innocent young boy is surrounded by villains of all types–women and men, children, young people, and middle-aged people. And they are nearly all sanctimonious–they act holier-than-thou. They have no sense of conscience: these wicked, self-serving and money-grubbing women and men think they are saints. The cruel administrators in the poorhouse are enraged that Oliver is not grateful for his mis-treatment. Even the really wicked Fagin calls everyone “Dear.â€Â
For those of you not actually trapped in this system–if you want to know what it feels like–it feels like Oliver Twist.
How does this shadowy and Dickensian jungle work? I can’t name all the parts of the dark machine, but I will list some. Each of these following items is a machine-part, and the whole machine grinds up children and men and grandmothers and grandfathers. Here are the parts of the machine:
- Child support is not really child support, because these payments need not be spent on children at all. The phrase “child support†is a falsehood but it’s off limits for investigation. Child support is sacred, doncha know.
- Divorce lawyers urge women to be unfair and vicious to their husbands when it comes to “child support†and visitation. “If you won’t swear out a restraining order saying you are afraid of him, I won’t represent you.†“But I am not afraid of him.†“Doesn’t matter–just think about it–you could become a little afraid of him couldn’t you?â€â€you could if you focused on it–we have to do it this way–anything less would be malpractice.†Lawyers say these things in private only. But they help drive the system.
- The state agencies that run the huge computers that process all these transfer payments from fathers to mothers are just big zones of hackdom. The clerks in those agencies are no more competent than the clerks, say, in the motor vehicles bureau, and maybe less. They are in it for the job security, the easy working conditions, and the retirement. Actually being concerned about children–forget it. What do you think they are, pediatric nurses?
Newspapers give state agencies a pass.
- The state agencies that run the huge computers are often incompetent. Fortunately, they are immune from aggressive investigative reporting for two reasons. First, they are on the side of the angels–collecting “child support.†And they have large public relations staffs who flack out press releases, photo opportunities, and melodramas in which impoverished men are paraded in front of TV cameras in chains, as “deadbeats.†The newspapers need these PR offices for cheap dramatic news events; thus the agencies get a permanent pass.
- The “deadbeat dad†as a propaganda phrase is about equal to “axis of evil†or “the great Satan.†Clipped, brief–it just rolls trippingly off the tongue–the alliteration is perfect. But it means nothing at all now. A deadbeat is someone who refuses to pay a debt. Most men who are arrested for these debts are broke–they have been fired, they are out of work, they are sleeping on a couch in their parents’ basement. But the phrase gets the juices of dim-bulb city editors going, and if you search on Google News you see that in smaller cities in the middle of the country, it’s used as if it were a factual description
- The states arrest these impoverished, and claim they are not supporting their children–but the law now allows the states to call repayment of welfare payments “child support.†So often, in these child support pageants, there are no children at all–they are in their thirties and forties.
Debtors prison
- The system is now a debtors prison. Any man with arrearages can be thrown in jail–and in some jails, a third of the inmates are there for debt.
- Judges in the system are not neutral. They receive training in anti-male and draconian attitudes toward men in “judge orientations†run largely by professional feminists of the “all men belong in prison†stripe.
The absurdity of imputed income.
- Men accumulate these huge child-support “debts†for a series of reasons that would have challenged Dickens’ expressive ability. The child support level is supposed to be geared to the man’s income, but you cannot get your child support lowered easily. There is a deadly assumption–truly Dickensian, again–that any man who has an economic hardship has somehow it arranged it deliberately. If your company goes out of business and you get laid off, somehow you are responsible. The judges can “impute†the income to you–which means if you once made $50,000 a year, any drop from that level of income is your fault–and you are assumed to be “capable†somehow of complete independence of the economy. For comparison, consider the IRS: it is tough, but not insane. If you paid taxes on $50,000 last year, the IRS doesn’t insist you pay the same level this year if you had less money. But the court-child support-jail system is actually insane. It will insist you pay money you do not have. It’s a basic principle of democracy and our system that you cannot be held to be at fault if something is out of your control. But in family court, if your company goes bankrupt and you have a child support debt, you are considered somehow to have caused the company bankruptcy and if you cannot produce the money you once had, you could be locked up for a substantial length of time: months or years.
- The Bradley amendment is a hysterically irrational federal law that requires judges to be irrational–it refuses to let any child support debt ever be reduced on the basis of realism. If a short-order cook is said to owe $140,000 in child support debt (don’t laugh, this happens) the Bradley amendment says no judge is allowed to write off that debt. Ever. Such a man, one of our fellow American citizens, will be on the run for the rest of his life. Aren’t we a great country?
- The men and women who invented the regulations as consultants to federal agencies in the 1980s and 1990s now run private businesses and are making obscene money from the near-fascist regulations they recommended a decade ago. The prime example of this is the deceptively named Policy Studies Institute. PSI sounds like about five tweedy academics in an office just off campus somewhere, right? Un-huh–fooled you. PSI , founded by the mild-mannered Bob Williams, may have started that way, but with federal dollars flowing, it’s bulked up to the size of Battlestar Galactica; it has 1,350 employees in Boulder, Colorado.
I can’t go into detail about the other parts of the machine–my energy is flagging–but I could name about 15 other parts of this dark system that are chugging away on auto-pilot. No one designed the whole of it, although parts were certainly arranged in back rooms for the sake of enriching interested parties. This system brings despair and prison terms and depression to men, women and children. All this is done in the dark with our tax dollars, in the sanctimonious name of protecting the children.
