Kick 'em when they're down...

One of the excuses given for not enforcing visitation orders in the face of a recalcitrant custodial parent is that it is supposedly not in the child's best interest to punish that parent. Supposedly, there are no sanctions that can be made against the custodial parent that will not have some sort of negative backlash on the child. Result: carte blanche for the custodial parent to mess with the non-custodial as much as (usually) she likes.



In a reasonable world, we might expect that the same sort of reasoning ought to exist for the non-custodial parent, at least to some level. To publicly humiliate a child's (usually) father for not fulfilling his obligations would presumably have some sort of knock-on effect for the child. His or her classmates, for example, might have fun targeting him for a little schoolyard taunting, not to mention the chance for the mother to tell him or her: "see, your Dad's a bad man, the government have had to lock him up." Not that today's kids need any additional encouragement to devalue their fathers, any number of sitcoms, soaps and news reports will do that for them quite adequately.



Hence it is no great surprise that the hounding of disenfranchised fathers gets bolder and more hypocritical by the day. There are plenty of tales of the abuses perpetrated by child support collection authorities (here is just one of the latest I've seen), but Kafkaesque bureaucracy is only one of the torments available. The governments of Canada and the UK now seem determined to augment the repertoire with public "naming and shaming". At least the British article has the decency to put forward an alternative point of view: "Naming and shaming would fail the test of whether the interests of the child are paramount." Of course it would, but then the best interests of the child are not and never have been paramount. I fully expect to find stocks being legalized again sometime in the not too distant future. Or, guys, how about tarring and feathering, that would be quite a lot of fun, don't you think?

I make my living off the evening news,

Just give me something that I can use.

People love it when you lose,

They love dirty laundry.



Well I could have been an actor,

But I wound up here.

I just have to look good,

I don't have to be clear.

Come and whisper in my ear,

We need dirty laundry.



Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em all around.



We got the bubble-headed beach blonde,

Comes on at five,

She can tell about the plane crash,

With a gleam in her eye.

It's int'resting when people die,

Give us dirty laundry.

Can we film the operation?

Is the head dead yet?

Y'know the boys in the newsroom,

Got a running bet.

Get the widow on the set,

We need dirty laundry.



You don't really need to find out

What's going on,

You don't want to know just

How far it's gone,

Just leave well enough alone,

Keep your dirty laundry.



Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em where they sit,

Kick 'em all around.



Dirty little secrets,

Dirty little lies,

We got our fingers in ev'rybody's pies,

We love to cut you down to size,

We love dirty laundry.



We can do the innuendo,

We can dance and sing.

When it's all over we haven't

Told you a thing.

We all know that crap is king,

Give us dirty laundry.



Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,

Kick 'em when they're down.

Kick 'em when they're up,



Don Henley, Dirty Laundry.



Kick 'em all around.

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