The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

Although this book was published 18 years ago, it is, regrettably, even more relevant today.

The Garbage Generation by Daniel Amneus
Paperback: 298 pages
Publisher: Primrose Press (November 1990)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0961086459, ISBN-13: 978-0961086459

The Garbage Generation
Chapter I
The Pathology of the Female-headed Family

“Women,” wrote Ramsey Clark in 1970, in his celebrated book Crime in
America, “are not a threat to the public.” But he also wrote, in
discussing the male juvenile criminals who are a threat to the
public, that “three-fourths came from broken homes.” That means
mostly female-headed homes. That means that while the single mothers
of these criminals do not themselves commit crimes and go to prison,
the socialization they give their children has an extraordinarily
high correlation with the male crime of the next generation. This
socialization, in fact, is the “root cause of crime” which Clark
wrote his book to explore. He had found the explanation he sought and
he didn’t know it. It was concealed by the generation-long time-lag
between cause and effect and by the sex-switch between generations:
like hemophilia, crime is manifested in males but carried and
transmitted by females–or rather by single females. Instead of
seeing the true connection, Clark gave his readers this:

If we are to deal meaningfully with crime, what must be seen is the
dehumanizing effect on the individual of slums, racism, ignorance and
violence, of corruption and impotence to fulfill rights, of poverty
and unemployment and idleness, of generations of malnutrition, of
congenital brain damage and prenatal neglect, of sickness and
disease, of pollution, of decrepit, dirty, ugly, unsafe, overcrowded
housing, of alcoholism and narcotics addiction, of avarice, anxiety,
fear, hatred, hopelessness and injustice. These are the fountainheads
of crime.

Not so. If we are to deal meaningfully with crime, what must be seen
is its relationship with the female-headed family. Most criminals
come from female-headed families. Most gang members come from female-
headed families. Most addicts come from female-headed families. Most
rapists come from female-headed families. Most educational failures
come from female-headed families. Every presidential assassin before
Hinckley came from a female-headed family or one in which he had an
impossibly bad relationship with his father. Most illegitimate births
occur to females who themselves grew up in female-headed families.

If we are to deal meaningfully with crime, what we must do is reduce
the number of female-headed families; what we must do is prevent the
divorce courts from expelling half of society’s fathers from their
homes; what we must do is terminate a welfare system which displaces
millions of men from the principal male role, that of family-
provider. What we must do is make the father the head of the family.

The female role, says Margaret Mead, is a biological fact; the male
role is a social creation. This is the primary reality concerning
human society. Motherhood has been the dominant feature of mammalian
life since its beginning some two hundred million years ago, most
conspicuously since the great reptiles became extinct and the Age of
Mammals began sixty-five million years ago. Fatherhood in the sense
of major male participation in reproduction is only a few million
years old. Fatherhood in the sense of male headship of families is
only a few thousand years old.

What is happening to our society is that it is discarding patriarchal
sexual regulation and reverting to the primeval mammalian pattern of
a reproductive unit consisting of the mother and her offspring, the
male putting in an appearance to perform his minuscule sexual
function and then disappearing or being hauled away to the sausage
factory or being reduced to the role of stud who can be discarded
when his female tires of him. “Men and women,” rejoices feminist-
anthropologist Helen Fisher, “are moving toward the kind of roles
they had on the grasslands of Africa millions of years ago….Human
society is now discovering its ancient roots….The recent trend
toward divorce and remarriage is another example of a throwback to
earlier times….[T] he so-called new extended family [read: broken
family] may actually have evolved millennia ago….At long last,
society is moving in a direction that should be highly compatible
with our ancient human spirit….The ‘traditional’ role of women is a
recent invention.”

Biologically speaking, it is indeed a recent invention, scarcely
older than the civilization which it made possible and which emerged
coevally with it and created the wealth which reconciled women to
accepting it. But women’s new economic independence is leading them
to yearn for a return to the prehistoric mammalian arrangement. “[W]
herever women are economically powerful,” says Fisher, “divorce rates
are high. You see it in the Kung and you see it in the United
States.” Let’s say, wherever women are economically powerful and
there are no social guarantees to ensure male headship of families,
divorce rates are high–such being the case among the Kung and the
Americans. The Kung have no social guarantees to ensure male headship
of families because the Kung never emerged from the Stone Age. The
Americans have no social guarantees to ensure male headship of
families because there exists an elementary confusion in the heads of
policy makers, lawmakers and judges, who imagine that the obvious
strength of the biological tie between the mother and the infant
(the “biological fact” Margaret Mead refers to) means that it
requires their assistance. A biological fact does not require the
services of the legal system. What does require these services is the
weakest biological link in the family, the role of the father. It was
the creation of this role–only a few thousand years ago–which made
patriarchal civilization possible. Prior to that, mankind had to
muddle through the million years of the Stone Age with the female-
headed reproductive arrangements of the ghetto, the barnyard and the
rain forest.

Annex to Chapter I

The Annex is an essential part of the argument of this book and
logically belongs at this point in the text. To place it here,
however, would be placing a stumbling block in front of the reader,
asking him to plow through fifty pages of tedious documentation,
filled with repetitious overkill, proving the assertions made in
Chapter I. Like the textual notes in an edition of Shakespeare, which
nobody reads and which only one reader in hundreds consults, it has
to be in the book but it does not have to be read. It is enough that
the reader should know that there exists (and can be consulted on
pages 000-000) proof that the high-crime, low- achieving areas of
society are those with the greatest numbers of families headed by
women and that the low-crime, high-achieving groups in society are
those with stable, patriarchal families–that the feminist/sexual
revolution and its attempt to impose a social organization based on
female kinship is a failure and that it is necessary to return to a
social organization based on male kinship.

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