Last Sunday I happened to catch”Burned,” an old episode (2007) of Law and Order, Special Victim Units, starring Hargitay (Olivia Benson) and Meloni (Elliot Stabbler). What pulled my attention was the situation: a father (Miles) having a supervised visitation with his daughter, Tessa. The episode starts very well. Any divorced father who had the misfortune to have supervised visitations with his children can sense the tension of such visits in that of Miles and Tessa. Time is counted, it cannot be wasted and fully enjoyed. Realistic touch: the social worker supervising the visit is a bitch. Out of the blue, she decides to cut off the visit, despite Miles’ protest. You just want to have her eat her degree of social worker somewhere, and have her do a job that will entail no contact with people.
At some point tough, Valerie-the divorced mother- is violently dragged out of the shower while at home. She does not see her aggressor and says to the police she has been raped. Fellow Miles, the former husband, is naturally the prime suspect. From then on, the story tends to slide into a politically correct, even-handed distribution of clichés: one bad feature for Valerie, one bad feature for Miles. Valerie is a neurasthenic control freak; Miles is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. There is a potential there for uncontrolled violence. Indeed, Miles has temper tantrums, some motivated by the fact of not been able to see his daughter Tessa as he pleases. Cliché over cliché: Elliott understands this anger, Olivia doesn’t. Miles and Valerie’s antagonistic divorce is the sample of the larger fight between men and women.
I know I cannot expect a TV show to have the depth of Kramer vs Kramer. Yet “Burned” did not do it for me; the story cannot escape its clichéd premisses. While dying, Valerie cannot bring herself to tell Olivia – an understanding woman- that she was in fact not raped (she had the day of the aggression consensual sex with a colleague); the loving Miles is nonetheless a beast: He eventually throws butane on Valerie who burns to death, in horrendous sufferings. The Ice-T touch. Too dammed dark for me.
this information on your record of child support payments that you get in the Child Support Unit in West Broadway, New York City. You won’t. You might learn that over the phone, if you call the NYS CSU 800 number.
Friday January 9, in the train on my way to Manhattan Family Court, trying to get -without much hope- a revision of my divorce agreement that would include, among others, bringing down child support payments and having sicko ex-wife use my health insurance for dental and vision expenses. In the billboard of the train, I noticed the sentence “This is one of 10 ways to be a great dad” followed by nyc.gov/NYCDADS. Below, the picture of a young, black man at a table with a kid that you imagine being his son.
Baskerville’s point is that behind the breakdown of families, there is the hideous hand of the government, in the form of “massive federal funds devoted to domestic violence, child abuse, and child-support enforcement” that “are little more than … ‘feminist pork,’ taxpayer subsidies on family dissolution that also trample due process protections.” I am not following him there. To me, the feminist rhetoric is instrumental to the project of the Reaganite, neoliberal wave (on which Clinton surfed) of a “weak” government, which did not mean that the government was supposed to be less coercive or intrusive, but less involved in the economic and social spheres: less taxes and government programs reduced to what is now food service on US Airways – zero. First, you attack a mythical “welfare queen,” a single black women who is supposed to strive on taxpayer money thanks to children out of wedlock, and you dismantle welfare entitlement programs. When times prove – surprise, surprise- that rationing welfare does not help reduce poverty, you use feminist rhetoric and point at fathers for solution. I do not have the data at hand, but I bet that the “massive funds devoted to domestic violence etc..” that Baskerville is talking about are peanuts compared to the welfare programs targeted at families slashed during the glorious eighties and nineties.” This is what is nice with current feminist family policies implemented by family courts: the suckers – fathers- pay.
