Happy Birthday Chloé!

With your cousin Louise

Chloé, I am thinking of you on your sixteenth birthday.  Je t’embrasse.

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Louise

Girls,

Since we are incomunicado, I have to keep you posted about the part of your family you don’t see. Remember Jean-Baptiste, your cousin? He and his girlfriend, Pia, had a little girl,  on December 8.

Her name is Louise, like Madame de Rênal, one the heroins of Stendhal’s the Red and the Black, my favorite novel. I don’t know about you, but just looking at her on this picture, I can’t wait to be formally introduced to her.

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Rodriguez Is My Man

Since I live in America, I have been growing a distaste for the word “dream.” Rodriguez, the unwitting main character of the documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” (2013 Oscar to the best documentary) has reconciled me with it.

Perhaps because Rodriguez did not have dreams, or because if he had any, they were not aspirational. It must have to do with his Mexican blood or the fact that he’s from  f…    Detroit.  Not even:  from Dearborn, in the suburb of Detroit.

In the 1960s, Rodriguez for sure has a voice that gives you the chills and lyrics that kill. A few people in the music scene in Detroit noticed it,  and an album of his songs was produced but it did not go anywhere. A few years later, Rodriguez was bigger in South Africa than Dylan or the Beatles. An American had indeed brought a tape with Rodriguez’s songs and the tape was duplicated. The upshot was a “viral” success that nobody could ever dream off, some forty years before the advent of social medias. Except that Rodriguez did not have a clue about it. In 1998, he finally does and he’s invited to give a concert – in front of thousands of people. He gave some thirty concerts there. And he then went back to his job – construction worker- and his house in Dearborn:  no tour in the US or in Europe in the pipeline, no move in a glorious mansion in Marta’s Vineyard, no lawsuit against the record company  he never got a penny from.

At some point in the documentary, a music journalist said about Rodriguez “that home is acceptance.”  You don’t pay much attention to this sentence if you get it inside a fortune cookie. While watching the movie, I was weeping in the bucket of popcorn of my neighbor.

What does it have to do with fatherhood?  Rodriguez has three daughters, and they talked about him in the documentary;  About him and them being poor and working class. Not proudly  -pride assumes somebody in front of whom one is proud of-  but calmly, peacefully. That’s just what it is. From what the three daughters say, you sense how much they acknowledge what he gave them. That’s when I started becoming jealous of Rodriguez.

Missing “Searching for Sugar Man” may not be unamerican, but it is inexcusable.

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Bon anniversaire Camille!

 Je pense à toi lors de ton premier jour de ta vie d’adulte.

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Parental Alienation Is Sandy Proof

8:50 pm on October 29, 2012. I just saw the pictures of Lower East Side under water
because of Sandy.  I decided to get news from my girls who live in Soho.  As I have told the readers of this blog many times, I do not have their personal cell numbers nor their email addresses. Nothing. I had to call my ex-wife.

- Hello. This is Pierre. How are you?

- Great. Speak to you later.

- Can you tell me how are the girls?

She had already hung up.

Camille and Chloé, hope you are fine. Feel free to call or write anytime.

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My Girls, Ernie and Bert, Romney and Chinese-Owned US Debt

I am having one of these gloomy days I usually have after one of these dreams with my girls. The plot is often the same: I met with them again, I am dazzled by how beautiful and tall they have become, we are immensely happy to be together again. Joy is mingled with pain during the dream, and I don’t know which is the most acute.

After such dreams, I am a wreck: I am awake and they are not there. I spend time chewing memories and that does not help.  One of these was the magical quiet moments I had with them when they were little, before diner, watching Ernie and Bert. This is perhaps one of my favorites of their episodes:

This led me to drift to the guy who wants to loosen Chinese grip on US public finance by dumping funding for public television and radio. And that’s my thought (not very articulate, but as I said, I am a wreck) about his proposal: “La, la, la, lavatory; La, la, la, laxative; La, la, la, leitmotif; La, la, la, listeria; La, la, la, lichenology; La, la, la, liposuction…”

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One More September 10, Seven Years Later

Some readers of this blog may know that September 10 is a special day for me. Seven years ago, September 10 2005 was my last supervised visitation. Looking back at it, this last supervised visitation had to be the inevitable fall off a cliff of a supervised visit process that was not ever seriously monitored by Manhattan Family Court.  It’s all about regulation and public scrutiny having deserted family justice for a long while.

But today I want to rejoice with the haves fathers, like this man:

Just wish the haves would give a thought to the have-nots.

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Father’s Day on This Blog

Le chêne et le roseau (La Fontaine)

I don’t know exactly how to take this damm Father’ s Day. For so long I have not had any acknowledgment from my girls I have a life, a family, which is also theirs, and a birthday. As a father, I am just “out there” with this blog.

Cheers to fathers like me, happy Father’s Day to all.

And a day in advance, happy birthday to you, Chloé.

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On Florence Cassez’s Path to Freedom, Felipe Calderón

I have been holding my breath for more than a  week, since the President of the Mexican Supreme Court Arturo Zaldívar put on the Court agenda Florence Cassez’s unconditional and immediate liberation. I thought this time, Florence would be whiffing Spring time outside of jail for the first time in six years. The Court decision came yesterday, March 21 and it is disappointing, for Florence Cassez and for the Mexican justice system: although four judges acknowledged serious violations of Florence’ human rights had flawed due process, only two voted for her immediate liberation. A majority of three was needed.

I am no Mexican constitutional lawyer, but I have to confess that the positions of those judges who did not see yesterday the legal imperative to let Florence go are quite puzzling: Pardo Rebollado for instance, stated that it was not “the appropriate legal moment” for the Supreme Court to take on the task to liberate Florence (when will it be if not now, let alone yesterday?); For Ramón Cossío, violations to due process in Cassez’s case were not serious enough to warrant her liberation; he wants another trial.  As if the Mexican justice system had not shown enough it was prone to commit type I errors – put innocents in jail and for that matter, Florence- not to give it another chance to do so…

It is clear one would not be that tempted to second guess the Mexican Supreme Court decision had President Calderón refrained from telling it how he wanted it to rule. Before the Supreme Court rendered its decision, Felipe Calderón urged it to take into account the victims of kidnappings. In so doing, Calderón encroached on the prerogatives of the judiciary. This is actually quite consistent with his administration practices, which blur the borders between justice and police actions:  Genaro Garcia Luna, the Secretary of Public Safety since 2006, cooks proofs, produces victims and culprits and stages them for TV.

President Calderón posturing as the knight of victims of kidnapping has something tragically ironical to it.  According to Damien Cave in a March 17 New York Times article, reported abductions in Mexico are up 300% since 2005.  There is even a new trend going on: the kidnapping of entire families.   Keeping Florence Cassez in jail at any price is about all that Calderón has yet left to mislead the Mexican people on the calamitous outcome of his administration in the area of crime prevention, kidnappings included.

One day will come, soon I hope, when Mexicans will not buy anymore the Calderón-Wallace propaganda that sells Florence’s liberation as a favor to a foreigner,  but will realize that liberating an innocent – who happened to be a foreigner- is a favor to the Mexican justice system and to Mexicans. Meanwhile, hold on Florence.  Abrazos.

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Parental Alienation:The Nurturing of Hate

You don’t know what parental alienation and parental alienation syndrom are? Take a look at what follows:

On December 19, on Camille’s birthday, I sent my girls two watches – one for Camille, one for Chloé- and a card. On Tuesday January 24, I received – in the very envelope I had used- the two watches – unwrapped- and my card with the following line on the lower right corner:

We want nothing from you except the return of our privacy, starting with the removal of your disgusting website.

What’s the intention of these words?  To hurt, to rubb hate to my face. Touché.

This line is not signed. Camille? Chloé? Mom?  A “we” wrote to me. At this stage, the alienating parent has won. The brainwashing has been completed. Mom does not need anymore to tell her victims their father is to be hated, for mom’s hate  has been appropriated by the victims. At this stage, why would mom feel she is doing anything wrong, if she has ever?  Two seemingly rational girls reflect back her own hate. The privacy my girls say they want back?  Although they live in New York City, it is as if they were living in a bunker to me. I have no contact with them except through mom’s email, through mom’s phone, under mom’s control. But mom wants the removal of “my website,” which is the only thing that keeps her from evicting me in peace from the universe of the girls. The victims take side with the executioner, that’s the beauty of parental alienation.  The request to remove my blog is a starting point without any end. In fact, I am deep fried in eternal hate: Mom’s.

Girls, I love you no matter what.

But this blog will go on. For a long time now, it ‘s not just been about you. It has been about preserving the privacy of other children like you with their dads; And to try to keep the irresponsible amateurs of Manhattan Family Court -the Sturms, the Octobres, the Spitzers, the Berrils – to give a free pass to parental alienation.

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