Author: rakemag

The Rake’s parenting editor Renata Frears recently had an opportunity to speak with Roy “Buck” Prescott, controversial author of Breaking the Spirit of Your Unborn Child and Breaking the Spirit of Your Newborn Child (Regnery Publishing). Prescott was in town for the first annual “It’s a Man’s World” symposium at the Best Steak House in Richfield, where he was honored for his pioneering work on the benefits of fetal deprivation.

You argue that not a single drop of breast milk should ever touch a baby’s lips. What’s wrong with breast-feeding?
The breast is the incubator of all manner of harmful pathologies. Every time a mother takes an infant to her breast she’s teaching that child to say, “Give! Give! Give!” while at the same time ensuring that for the rest of her life she’s going to be viewed as a sort of unhappy and unfulfilled ATM machine molded out of flesh. Breast-feeding is the infant’s introduction to America’s pernicious culture of permissiveness; if a child can have easy access to its mother’s breast, what can’t it have? Where do you draw the line?

But many so-called experts claim that breast-feeding helps the mother and baby to bond, and increases the baby’s immunity to many common and potentially devastating diseases.
I have another word for what you refer to as ‘so-called experts’: parrots. Teach any addled child of the ’60s to utter a handful of useless phrases—“nurture,” “self-esteem,” etc…—and you have a so-called parenting expert on your hands. These characters have sown the seeds for an epidemic of social erosion.

You’re a proponent of infrequent physical contact between parents and their newborn. How is a child harmed when it cuddles with its mother or father?
I despise all those feel-good words with doubled consonants—cuddle, snuggle, coddle, etc. Look up ‘affection’ in the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary; it originally meant a sort of passion or lust that was in direct opposition to reason. The primary job of the parent is to communicate rigorous expectations and strict personal boundaries that convey the severity of the life experience and the sort of discipline necessary to survive in a world that is generally indifferent if not outright hostile to any individual’s feelings of self importance or ‘self-esteem.’ I would hope that you have some way to indicate the horror with which I speak that phrase.

In your book you say that corporal punishment is the only way to discipline a child. This goes against the wisdom of many other writers on this subject. Why do you advocate spanking?
Quite simply, because hundreds of years of historical evidence indicates that it’s the single most effective means of communicating parental displeasure and the consequences of misbehavior. This notion that you can bargain with a child without relinquishing the necessary upper hand in a parent/child relationship is utter hogwash. Children are brutal, unscrupulous, and relentless negotiators, and recognizing the distinction between behavior and misbehavior is critical from the moment an infant is born.

What do you say to those who call spanking abusive?
I’d say they’re dangerously naive. These are the people who have turned America’s children into a zombie army of overweight therapy drones. They’ve produced what I call “the unaccountable generation.” When it comes to the nature vs. nurture debate, believe me, nature wins every time. The nurtured child is the child that gets eaten alive when it is eventually thrown to the wolves.

Several other experts, including Dr. Phil, have called your methods “the ranting of an unqualified lunatic.” How do you respond?
I’d say that’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Dr. Phil is a charlatan of the sort this country has been producing—and rewarding with obscene wealth—with alarming frequency for far too long. One of his own children is married to a former Playboy bunny, and anyone who would take parenting advice from such an odious fraud is guilty in my mind of criminal child neglect. I’ve repeatedly offered to arm-wrestle Phil McGraw on the Oprah show, but thus far he has ignored my challenges and spared himself further humiliation.

You’re unmarried and don’t have any children of your own. How have you developed your approach?
You don’t have to build a banana to know how to peel and eat one. I was a staff sergeant in the United States Army for a decade. I bred and trained bloodhounds for almost twenty years. I’ve had more dinners, dates, holidays, and public outings ruined by the misbehavior of other people’s infants and children than I could even begin to count.

You write that every child is born with “serious inherent defects,” yet others have argued that every child is born perfect. How are babies
defective?
Every baby is a constellation of defects, some of them unique to the individual child, others endemic to all infants—some might call this constellation of defects ‘human nature.’ Parenting is precisely the process by which these defects are eradicated and the child is trained to be a competent, responsible, and functioning adult. Show me a child who doesn’t learn conformity and strict obedience to authority in the home and I’ll show you a monster that hasn’t yet burst from the laboratory.

How do you explain sex to a young child?
You don’t.

What would be the effect on society if all children’s spirits remained intact?
A nation of ‘enlightened’ depressives who buy their potatoes at co-ops and are prisoners to their increasingly disenchanted and depressed children. ‘Spirit’ is one of the most abused words in the English language, and what this world does not need at this moment in time are any more spirited—and spoiled—children. Deprivation and disappointment breed initiative, and what we desperately need are responsible, realistic kids who are fully prepared to take their licks and who recognize their place in a functional, moral, and civilized society. Dog eat dog, of course, implies that some dogs are going to be eaten. That, in a nutshell, is life, and it’s the essential message of both my books.

Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults can refuse marriage proposals, experiment with substances, and indulge their bi-curiosity. This got us thinking: If this provocative book had a soundtrack, what might that sound like? We asked McElhatton to describe her top ten favorite albums and songs.

1. “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” by the Flaming Lips, off the album Live at KEXP
When I listen to this song I feel like I’m eating a fluffy poof of pink cotton candy, while simultaneously getting a pedicure from a sexy robot. I love the Flaming Lips in general, and this album is going to be made into a Broadway musical. I hate Broadway musicals on principle, but I might make an exception in this case. I want to see robots fighting on stage.

2. “Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp
This is one of the songs I blast in the house while vacuuming, which I think has caused my pug, Walter, to hate it. When he hears it, even on the radio or whatever, he’ll start to bark, because he thinks it means the vacuum (his mortal enemy) is about to make an appearance.

3. “Peach, Plum, Pear” by Joanna Newsom
You either love Joanna Newsom or you hate her. She’s got this weird whiskey-soaked little-girl voice like Shirley Temple belting her heart out at the docks. Very hypnotic. Plus, there’s a harpsichord in this song, which is always a bonus.

4. “Goody Two Shoes” by Adam Ant
This song just seemed to change everything when I first heard it. I had formerly been my own brand of Edina Punk (plaid skirts, torn black tights, clompy black shoes) and after this song debuted I realized I wanted to be a New Waver and bought one of those huge economy tubs of Dippity-do. The result was … well, let’s just say that when a gangly, pale, teenaged, redheaded girl tries to look like Adam Ant, the result is tragic. Nevertheless, I loved the song then—and I love it now.

5. “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin”
by Magnetic Fields
I like the lyrics to this song. “It makes you blind, it does you in/ You just get out what they put in/ Love is like a bottle of gin/ But a bottle of gin is not like love. …” Of course I can’t listen to songs with good lyrics when I’m writing or I just start to absent-mindedly plagiarize.

6. “A Smile and a Ribbon” by Prudence
In the ’50s, the eight-year-old who sang this was part of a little-girl group called “Patience and Prudence.” Patience was Prudence’s sister, and considered the pretty one. Patience usually got more attention and more stage time. This album was Prudence’s moment in the sun, but it didn’t do very well and now it’s out of print. I like the song because it sounds like an eight-year-old on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

7. Hi, My Name Is Jonny by Johnny Polansky
I suspect this could be the theme for many wayward souls past or present: “I am unable to resist your evil scurvy love!”

8. “Granny Do Your Dog Bite?” by Othar Turner
This is a “drum and fife” blues song, a medium they say originated from African Americans serving in the Civil War. It’s blues, but there’s a heavy snare drum beat in it and a definite marching theme. At first I thought the name of this song was “Granny—do your dog bite.” Like, “Granny, go ahead and bite me like a dog!” But now I realize it’s a question, not a command, which makes it a little less interesting lyrically, but a great tune nonetheless.

9. “Sugar Town” by Nancy Sinatra
She’s sassy, she’s sexy, she’s Frank Sinatra’s daughter. Though she’s known for “These Boots are Made for Walkin’,” I actually like this song a little bit better because of its vague cocaine-party reference.

10. “Glósóli” by Sigur Rós
When I write I usually listen to music without lyrics, but the lovely and haunting Icelandic band Sigur Rós lets me listen to vocals without having any idea of what they’re saying.

McElhatton reads from Pretty Little Mistakes at the May 15 Talk of the Stacks event at the Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis.

Using samples from obscure movies, as well as their own singing, mixing, and instrumentation, Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto construct melodic sound collages and electronic songs so catchy as to be genre defying. On the Massachusetts duo’s 2003 release, The Lemon of Pink, for example, the title track alone contains seamless movements between folk song, art singing, and acoustic picking. In “Be Good To Them Always,” from their latest, Lost and Safe, a squall of reverb and electric guitar is paired with the intoned refrain: “You know, I simply cannot understand people.” However, the Books’ technique and repertoire, while rock solid, don’t always translate to the stage. And so their live concerts are a whole other beast—sometimes inconsistent, but worth checking out. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org

Of all the theater companies in town, none has better taste in classic literature than Ten Thousand Things. Now, the troupe takes on Federico Garcia Lorca’s saucy Blood Wedding. Deeply poetic yet also accessible, this play sets up a gut-punching war between the heart’s passion and the human brain’s limited capacity for reason. Armed with nothing but their wits and a bucketful of puppets, the five standup cast members (including local favorites Sha Cage and, again, Barbra Berlovitz—see Animo above) capture a Spanish countryside full of characters. Audience members will get to sit up close at the lo-fi venues to which this show is touring. Performed in the style of street theater, with no set or theatrical lighting, these acts of infidelity, murder, and betrayal are infused with the appropriate stark, emotional rawness. 612-203-9502; www.tenthousandthings.org

Despite every possible setback, The Minneapolis/ St. Paul International Film Festival soldiers on, though with fewer films (which is, perhaps, a blessing). Screenings will include Waitress, the comedy hit of this year’s Sundance film festival; it was also, tragically, the directorial debut for Adrienne Shelley, who was murdered soon after completion of this film project. As usual, the festival is the sole Twin Cities venue for a variety of international features, including some from Australia, Bangladesh, and Tunisia, among many others. This year’s festival might also be your last chance to see a movie at the Oak Street Cinema, which still threatens of being on its last legs. 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org