DADWAGON

A few weeks ago, I wrote a little thing about how daddy issues are pretty much at the center of ‘Lost.’ Jack, Locke, Ben, Sawyer—just about everyone on the show has been fucked up by his father.

Except, we know as of Tuesday night, Smokey Locke, the crazy creature who seems to be evil incarnate (but possibly is not—cuz who knows?!?!). In a mysterious monologue delivered to a frowny Kate, he revealed that his mom was crazy, and if she hadn’t been, or if she’d dealt with it better, he might not now be a creature that can turn into a pillar of black smoke and smite enemies at will.

Is this a recurrence of Momism, the 1950s media trope in which overmothering was supposedly producing a generation of wusses, Communists, and possible homosexuals? Or was this just an acknowledgment that we all of us have—pace Philip Larkin—bad parents? And, if so, that those of us with daddy issues are the good guys, while mom-wrecked kids wind up evil? Sure, I can live with that. It’s just TV, after all.

When we first e-mailed pictures of our wee newborn to his grandparents, one of them responded, “Looks like a future president!” My reaction was a proud chuckle; my wife’s was mild horror. “I would NOT want him to be president,” she said.

Not even a little? I’ve been thinking about that question ever since. Extreme achievement can do extreme good, and it can also damage and warp people. It’s often said that the qualities that allow one to become president (an almost pathological urge to power, a willingness to shill for campaign funds, a potentially dangerous ability to persuade) should automatically disqualify you from the job. It would be difficult, as a parent, to hear the absolutely vicious things said about your kid should he achieve high office. The last few presidents have all been called treasonous, traitorous, murderous.

Then, of course, there is the other possibility. Every presidential family knows that there’s a shadow over that house. Forty-three men have been president, and nine of them have been shot at. Four have been killed. That’s nearly 10 percent.

This came to mind this morning at daycare, when one of the teachers remarked upon our little guy’s ability to throw his sippy cup a great distance. I made a little crack about our future Olympian, and she responded, “Little guy’s going to make you proud.” And not to get all squishy about it, but I did realize that almost anything productive he found himself doing would, in fact, make me proud. If it comes with a motorcade, well, that’s very nice, too.

Let me stipulate up front, for those readers unhappy about my having poked fun at really small people (who happen to look like old men dressed up as newborns): What I’m about to write about is not funny. Not at all. Not a little bit. Definitively not funny.

There. Can I proceed to make fun of this?

So, it seems, according to the BBC, that last year the local residents of Maharashtra state in India “sacrificed” eleven children in “black magic rituals.” Nothing new there, you say? Yet another magic-realism story minus the love (but probably with added cholera)? A passage to India that ends up in the seventh circle of Hell? A suitable boy who kills children to make children?

Perhaps so.

But this story is a little different. The BBC relates that the criminals were a childless couple in a village of 300 people. They had been married twelve years but had been able to produce nary a crotchfruit (BBC makes no effort to determine if they had really been trying).

Said couple decided to kidnap children from the village (did I mention only 300 people live there?), perform arcane and murderous rituals upon them, and then hope for babies to rain from the sky like nuts from the banyan tree in Siddhartha. (Fact-check: Are there nuts on a banyan tree? Ed.: If Wikipedia counts as a fact-check, no. They bear fruits with seeds, but no nuts.)

Horrible. Awful. Inhumanity of man. All conceded 100 percent without argument.

However, what also struck me was the ratio being employed here: eleven kids to produce one? What kind of math are they doing in India?

To this place is where we Americans have outsourced our very future? Get thee to an abacus!