Father of the Year

Some 36-year-old donkey in Wisconsin was arrested Monday on tentative felony charges of causing mental harm to a child and false imprisonment. However, despite the big scary words in the previous sentence, Matthew Kowald was issued only a disorderly conduct citation for the incident. What caused all this ruckus you ask?

Well, apparently Mr. Kowald really wanted his 7-year-old son to don a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt for the Packers game against Seattle. The son, he did not so much want to do this. After threats of grounding got the elder Kowald nowhere, he took the next logical step (if you're Joan Crawford) and taped his kid up. From what I gathered, he taped him to a chair AND taped the shirt to him. Way to be thorough Matthew.

Apparently after an hour Kowald's wife had enough, and turned him in. I'm pretty sure the encore for Pack/Giants this week is Kid Kowald escaping from Houdini's Chinese Water Torture Cell.

After all was said and done, I really enjoyed this understatement from one of the cops:
"He wanted the juvenile to be a Packers fan, and I would suggest he went about it the wrong way."
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Analysis from Gheorghe: The Blog’s resident Armchair Psychologist & Philosopher, Dr. Gheorghe:

Before you file away this episode under “Yet another inane installment of TJ’s News of the Mentally Impaired,” consider the deeper discussion of why this event took place. It’s tremendously sad to report, but it’s hardly a surprise: this is merely an extreme case of a pox that’s invaded our world, that of fathers and their increasingly skewed outlook on their sons or daughters. Insecurity is at an all-time high in adult males, despite this era of openly discussing our innermost problems and secrets in global forums. The supposed balance of wanting our children to resemble ourselves in appearance, action, and thought, while maintaining an over-arching sense of “what’s best” for them has begun to seriously lean in the wrong direction. Are we so uncomfortable in our own pale, pasty skins that we can’t rest until our progeny has emulated our very behaviors to a tee, presumably in some subconscious attempt to create a hip crowd out of our own offspring if we aren’t “cool” enough to fall in with an existing one? Or is it a more deep-rooted and time-tested fear, one of fathers unsure about matching DNA strands? The chances of speculation about our children’s biological tie (and, in turn about our mate’s love, honor and obeyance) are apparently diminished with every instance of the younger mimicking the elder, both in attire and outlook. Further, the father who cannot control his own son enough to coerce the Wisconsin-born-and-bred boy to root for the local juggernaut Green Bay Packers must undoubtedly be the softest, sorriest excuse for a father figure in the history of Lambeau Field, no? And such gnawing insecurity can only feed upon itself. The little boy inside the man is crying for acceptance and love, but the outer shell knows that any exposure of such an image will induce further humiliation. Conversely, the Greek school of thought (“the man inside the little boy”) . . . well, people, clearly it was simply time for a potshot at the Greeks what with those pictures of gay Athenians on motorbikes and moustaches floating around the blogosphere. (You know how they separate the men from the boys in Greece?) But I digress. What’s really deviant, what’s actually perverse and unacceptable in this society is the perpetuation of this self-afflicted perception that the father is a failure based on any behaviors of the son. I myself have been blessed with the good fortune of a father who has never felt this way and reiterates his rejection of this notion, vehemently protesting for all of you insecure fathers out there to hear, “Lo, tho’ my son may embarrass me, his entire family, and himself, tho’ he may bring shame on every soul who has come to know the boy, tho’ he may, at steady intervals, soil his family name and reputation as surely as he soils his underjohnnies, not one drop of that ignominy shall reflect upon me, the father. I am my own man and, at this point, only responsible for myself and only beholden to my God; as the words in my last will and testament reflect, I bequeath to him only my surname, my pity, and the brown liquor which he has already pilfered from my garage.” My fortune, however, is the exception rather than the rule in this society. And so, if there is but one lesson to take from this intellectually staggering slice of deep thinking, it’s this: what, dear friends, the fuck is it about Brett Favre that makes people do and say the stupidest fucking things ever conceived of? Dear Lord. Rooting for the guy must be more cerebrally toxic than huffing airplane glue. Cripes, people. Get a fucking grip.