The worst day of Sugar Bear’s 55 years

That was as far as I got.  It gets worse?

This seemed like standard poverty porn. I had a hard time understanding what Will’s point was, until I got to the last sentence: The people he’s writing about “exemplify a very American approach to social regeneration: one by one, from the inside out.”

That’s a great way to absolve both yourself and society at large of any responsibility to help the needy. “Sorry, your regeneration has to come from the inside out.”

The hell? I’m all for promoting the responsibility of parenthood, but it sounds like the poor women in this guy’s life experienced not much else but traumatic and horrifying episodes of male violence. Just how is having these males around more supposed to have helped him? A tragic life, but his problems are by FAR larger than not having a father around. If he did, it may have been worse.

That column didn’t make sense to me; I could not see his logic.

@2
Agreed. After reading that last line the rest of the article was suddenly clear, especially this:

“In 1965, immediately after the Watts riots that announced to a largely oblivious nation the volatility of some pockets of social regression”. I had no idea that the systematic and racist oppression of African Americans was merely “some pockets of social regression”.

George Will: making America better one assholish euphemism at a time.

I saw the point of the article as “this guy had terrible male role models, and grew up surrounded by horrific violence. Maybe if he’d had some better male role models and more parenting he might have had a happier, more productive, less violent life.” What about that requires brain boiling? Even if it wasn’t a masterpiece article, the idea shitty fathers contribute to shitty childhoods can’t be that controversial.

“Sorry, your regeneration has to come from the inside out.”

We’re not all of us time lords, sheesh.

Jeebus, blashimov, did you read that creepy column?  His mother was mentally ill, his daddy-grandpa a rapist - & the rest of the extended family was deeply troubled as well.

I could try to explain ‘intergenerational trauma’ and parental PTSD to you, but somehow I think it’d be a waste of my (metaphorical online) breath.

Must de-lurk because my brain is exploding…

Born to an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute, he acquired his interest in driving from his grandfather, who would drive around the block with Sugar Bear in his lap. Not until Sugar Bear was 25 did he learn that his grandfather was his father, too, having had a sexual relationship with Sugar Bear’s mother.

That whole column is just so messed up, but it was the blatant dehumanization of Sugar Bear’s mother (because crazy, dirty sluts aren’t worth anything) and casual dismissal of the incest/rape committed against her as a “sexual relationship” in this paragraph that really got to me.

Yet another shining example of just how deep misogyny runs among conservatives in this country.

Column about how fucked-up a family full of incest/rape, decorated by ad by Google from the nationalprolifealliance asking me to sign a petition to overturn Roe.

I do believe my brain just said “fuck it” and went to bed without me.

I realize it was 50 years ago but, they ARRESTED A FIVE YEAR OLD FOR GRAND THEFT AUTO??!

No, I think it’s a great article. It really highlights the Dickensian aspect. This sort of work is exactly what newspapers need more of, presenting the challenges of life in a studied, thorough way they don’t get from 24 Hour News. With the way the industry is today, we just have to get used to doing more with less.

</obtuse Wire season 5 reference>

Good fucking crap. Can’t he go back to writing about how much he hates trains? At least that shit is funny. This is fucking morally offensive to anyone with *actual* (read: non-GOPer) morals.

Let’s see:  Mr. Will seems to think that a father figure would have negated an entire culture of poverty and a lifetime of neglect.

Mr. Will does not get out much, does he?

That stuff they use to disinfect in hospitals ought to work reasonably well on the brain.

Tis a twisted world and Mr. Will like Mr. Paul, only sees the half of it.

What about that requires brain boiling? Even if it wasn’t a masterpiece article, the idea shitty fathers contribute to shitty childhoods can’t be that controversial.

Except the entire lesson of the story is that everyone would have a.) been better off had the father/grandfather not been in anyone’s life and b.) no matter how great a father figure is, what the guy needed was someone, anyone, in his life who wasn’t dying or entirely dysfunctional.

But mainly the whole “glossing over the rape” issue.

I’m honestly struggling to work out how the takeaway from that story is that the solution to Sugar Bear’s massive range of problems would have a been a father.  And that’s it.  Just that.  The end.

So weird. I had to register just to say this: He had his father around, masquerading as his grandfather since that’s how he learned how to drive, his grandfather used to drive him around and how he got the idea of stealing a car when he was aged 5.

So Will’s theory all boils down to “he didn’t know his grandfather was his father and that ruined everything”. My brain just decided enough is enough and gone for an extended holiday.

My brain just decided enough is enough and gone for an extended holiday.

Where it will join George Will’s, which has been on holiday for decades. Every picture of him needs the New Yorker cartoon recaptioning treatment- Christ, what an asshole.

Aside from everything else wrong with this, did GW not grasp that, for better or worse, this guy’s father </em>was<em>involved with his early life. How’d that work out for him?

Born to an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute

This line is pretty great if you read it in Rod Serling’s voice.

...had a sexual relationship with Sugar Bear’s mother.

Barf. How about he raped and impregnated his daughter.

His daughter who </em>also<em>had a father present in her life. So we can see that magically fixes everything.

Excuse me while I go throw up.

Fuck George Will and the rest of them.  This week has just been one piece of fuckery after another.  Kansas wants women to die rather than have abortions, the banks get off scott-free from the massive fraud they perpetrated on the country (and will start racing to kick people out of their homes again now that they have immunity from prosecution), and now Obama is caving to the religious zealots on birth control.  I can’t even.  I’m livid.

I know it’s not as obviously disturbing and creepy as Will’s “sexual relationship” line, but I’m possibly even more creeped out by the line about the relative who had Drano thrown in her eyes “for reasons Sugar Bear cannot remember.”

Like… Will imagines there are REASONS for someone to do that? Reasons that could conceivably matter? He heard about this poor woman who had Drano thrown in her eyes and his immediate response was to ask what the REASON for it was? It just makes my skin crawl.

For sheltered assholes like George Will, all this human suffering is like watching a play. Just events passing before his eyes in chronological succession. “An unmarried, mentally ill prostitute who had a sexual relationship with her father” sounds like a CliffNotes summary of a fictional character, not something you’d say about an actual goddamn human being. But that’s because that’s the kind of detachment Will has from this level of suffering and the people who experience it; they might as well be fictional characters. And all this human misery is just a movie to people like him, a movie from which we can all learn a moral lesson about bootstraps and such.

It’s like watching hardcore Star Wars fans discussing the expanded universe. Only worse, ‘cause, y’know, this shit actually involves real people suffering.

How normal people read this article: “an unmarried, mentally ill prostitute who had a sexual relationship with her father”

How George Will sees this article: ” an UNMARRIED mentally ill prostitute who had a sexual relationship with her father”

Sometimes you just have to sit back and marvel at how truly disturbed these people are. If you think that woman’s number-one problem was that she had a kid without being married, there is something dangerously wrong with you.

For sheltered assholes like George Will, all this human suffering is like watching a play.

QFFT. It’s not important to them; that’s why they come up with the dumbfuckiest ‘solutions’ to other people’s problems. Who cares if it works? It’s of no more consequence than having to load your Save file in a video game because you used the wrong strategy in the boss fight.

George Will’s waaaaaay past his sell-by date.

Oh Dawg, Sophronia @27, you’re right.  Will glosses over the incest and rape, mental illness…but he just has to mention that Sugar Bear’s mother was *gasp* unmarried.  As though that poor woman and her son would have been better off if she had been married, mentally ill prostitute with an evil abuser for a father.  </em>Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight<em>  Mawwiage is magic, don’t you know, and will make everything shiny and wonderful!! Nothing bad will ever happen ever again!!!  (I’m sure puppies, kittens, and totally non-gay rainbows are in this Conservative Mawwiage Dweam too.) 

George Will isn’t just sheltered, he seems to be lacking in empathy and understanding entirely.

I really don’t understand the point of Will’s example. Would their family have been better off if his father/grandfather had married his own daughter? Is that what he’s advocating?

Or maybe George Will is just ten pound of shit in a five pound bag, sealed off at the top with a bowtie.

My questions exactly VitaminC.

Who, precisely, was she supposed to marry? Obviously Sugar Bear’s actual father couldn’t do the “honourable thing” and marry his mother because THE MAN WAS HIS MOTHER’S FATHER TOO.

But shame on her for not getting married.

Sheesh.

I almost never disagree with Amanda, blogger extraordinaire that she is, but here I think she’s uncharacteristically missed the boat. Please hear me out. 

George Will’s article is actually not about “the importance of fathers in people’s lives”—it is about the importance of _god_ in people’s lives.  Now, before everyone jumps all over me, let me be clear: I’m an atheist, feminist, left winger who loves pandagon. But I was raised in the south and I think it would behoove the rest of us lefties to understand the code and learn to read it.

First, the title of the piece: “Lifting up the fatherless.”  This is religious terminology that any conservative religious person would understand. It means, roughly, lifting up, taking to god in prayer, the believer’s concerns for someone.  “Lift up grandma in prayer, preacher, she’s about to have her hip replaced.” That sort of thing, though it seems most frequently used when large groups are in need (lift up the folks in XYZ who’ve been flooded, lift up the homeless, etc.) So from the get-go, Will is signaling to his usual audience that “we” the readers ought to have special compassion for the fatherless.

Second, note the structure of the piece: it is a tale of redemption.  It opens with the picture of abject hopelessness, a life mired in “sin”— a string of nearly unbelievably horrific details about Sugar Bear’s life, including the absence of the kind of father figure Will’s christianism would hold up as exemplary—followed by an almost equally unbelievable redemption.  First, there enters Keith Phillips, the missionary founder of World Impact (which is even linked in the article—this is how much Will believes poverty requires a religious answer, even though he elides the religious aspect and claims its focus is on fatherlessness and social pathologies that follow; the organization is actually a missionary org for the “urban poor”).  Then there’s Ken Canfiled, who introduced Sugar Bear to Psalm 68, which speaks of god being a father for the fatherless.  So, the point of the article is that Sugar Bear was actually fatherless, until he found god. Now Sugar Bear himself serves in a ministry that helps the homeless (again, notice all the embedded links to these organizations).  The whole “one by one” thing at the end is also code for personal salvation, though it’s so readily recognized by religious folk that it’s almost not fair to say it’s “coded”. 

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty to slap our foreheads about in GFW’s writings, but we first need to understand how such people think. Then argue intelligently with religious conservatives about how poverty is not so totally hopeless that the only answer is personal salvation—because I think it is the utter overwhelmingness of the effects of poverty that actually makes conservatives throw up their hands and think that all that is left is divine intervention.

VL @ #33:

I don’t need to “understand how such people (religious rednecks) think”. I’m from Tennessee and I’ve lived it. That’s why I don’t live in the south anymore.

As for George Will, I can guarantee you, he doesn’t have a fucking clue as to how anyone who doesn’t live in Washingtom, D.C. thinks.

But that’s just my opinion.

That column didn’t make sense to me; I could not see his logic.

In my experience with Will’s columns, that seems to be a defining characteristic of his “writing.”

That column didn’t make sense to me; I could not see his logic.
—-
In my experience with Will’s columns, that seems to be a defining characteristic of his “writing.”

Yeah, I’d be a lot more weirded out if you COULD follow George Will’s logic.

@33,

Amanda didn’t write this.

That whole column is just so messed up, but it was the blatant dehumanization of Sugar Bear’s mother (because crazy, dirty sluts aren’t worth anything) and casual dismissal of the incest/rape committed against her as a “sexual relationship” in this paragraph that really got to me.

I think there’s also an undercurrent of “bitches just be crazy”.  Did Will stop to consider that Sugar Bear’s mother’s mental illness could be linked to her father raping her?

VL, you moron.  You wrote all that but couldn’t be bothered to notice this was written by Jesse?

As an act of redemption, I’d be a hell of a lot more impressed if it had ended with the guy taking care of and knowing about his own children, only one of whom is mentioned.

Also, what Mark said @ 34, except it was TX, my mother’s home town, and I only had to suffer a year plus a bit of it as a child.

With you Keshmeshi.  No, I don’t think it ever occurred to Will to wonder why the woman was mentally ill or what might have worsened that state; she just was.

I think VL is right that this is *supposed* to be a story of the religious uplifting of a man whose life was shit because of really, really bad/absent father figures.

The fact that George Will dismisses the mother with “unmarried mentally ill prostitute” and does not use the correct terminology to refer to the incestuous rape by her father that produced Sugar Bear, however, is because George Will isn’t really interested in women’s role in anything. As far as he’s concerned, Sugar Bear had no parents whatsoever, because his only parental figures were women. “lifting up the fatherless” is exactly the same as “lifting up the orphaned/parentless” because the women in Sugar Bear’s life were worthless… in George Will’s eyes.

What jumps out at me, though, is that the unmarried, mentally ill prostitute who was raising the child that was conceived on her from a rape by her own father would have been infinitely better off in a universe where Christianity doesn’t exist, where women are not automatically discounted and thought to be less than human because they’re not married or because they’re prostitutes, where women who are raped by their fathers are not forced to bear children from that rape. Sugar Bear wouldn’t exist, but maybe some other little boy would have, who might have had a happier life, if Sugar Bear’s mother had had a child out of wedlock with a boy her own age that she loved and chose for herself, and had then not been stigmatized for it, and was either not forced into prostitution, or if she chose prostitution, was not treated as if she were sub-human for it.

And the religion that George Will is selling as a solution to this problem is one of the primary proximate causes of it. Non-Judeo-Christian religions can be just as patriarchal and sexist, but they don’t automatically demonize prostitution, most of them anyway, and many of them are much, much kinder in their treatment of unmarried women.

What George Will thinks this story says is that religion can turn around a broken man who’s suffered the lack of a father (read: any parent at all, because women are not worth talking about) in his life. What this story actually says is that Sugar Bear’s mother would have been better off growing up in a community of lesbian separatists, and that fathers, and the dependence women are forced to have on their own and their children’s fathers, are one of the greatest causes of misery in the world.

I don’t actually think fathers are a greater cause of misery than most other things, but I do think that breaking women’s ability to care for their own children, independently, without the input of a man, was the worst thing humanity ever did to itself, and that while the human male capacity to be a father is a wonderful thing, coming out of a species that evolved from mammals (mammals being, for the most part, spectacularly incapable of being fathers, to the point of being driven away from their mates’ dens because their mate has reasonable fears of them eating her babies), it was never something that should have become *required* by culture for human happiness. Because, biologically, it’s a much weaker trait than the capacity to mother. So when good fathers exist, fantastic, I love ‘em, give them every tool they need to help and support and raise their kids… but there were far, far too many bad fathers throughout human history to justify us ever adopting cultural rules that demand paternal investment.

Congratulations, George Will. You thought you were making an argument about how bad life can be without a father. You managed to make it an argument about how bad fathers can make someone’s life. It’s hard to achieve that level of argument fail.

Bah, what an asshole.

Is it just me, or do you all see that the logical explaination is that not only was the poor woman’s father her rapist, but he was also her pimp? After all, he was obviously still being involved in her life (and has absolutely no shame or fear as to what might happen to him if the situation was found out).

I don’t think saying ‘there is a record of bad fathers’ being synonymous with ‘therefore all men are bad fathers’, Alex.

to the point of being driven away from their mates’ dens because their mate has reasonable fears of them eating her babies

Can you cite us a relevant species, Canidae or otherwise?

Because it is true that in many species of bears, a male will kill a cub unless protected by the mother(but the parents never spend any time together after the mating), and in the case of lions, a male taking a pride from another male will kill all the cubs from that male so the lionesses will come into heat again and he can father their replacements, but what you’re describing doesn’t ring true for me with my knowledge of mammalian behavior.

NOOOOOO!!!

VL, sorry about the moron name calling; I should not take cold medicine and then post.  Point still stands that you should at least notice who wrote something you are going to go on about for that length.

Motherfucker. I registered there to point out the flaws in his arguement. Sick SOB. So if Sugar Bears slut of a mother would have married her dad(!!!) his life would have been just dandy. Did this sorry sack of shit even think that the poor mother was mentally ill and a prositute because she was raped by her father?! She wasn’t in a sexual relationship, she was a victim. JHC.