The ultimate outsourcing

If you’re wondering why many worthy American men are looking for Asian wives, consider the conceptual poison that was being sold on a Los Angeles Times screed that saw print right here in the Saipan Tribune yesterday. “Predictions of doom don’t help families cope with change,” whines the title on our editorial page, scribed by one Stephanie Coontz, teacher of “family history” at Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington.

Family History? Now there’s an academic discipline that will build bridges and cure cancer. And you wonder why all the good jobs are being outsourced to Filipino computer programmers and Chinese scientists.

And the good marriages are, too, since the death dance of American manufacturing is rivaled only by the fatal dose of self-absorbed decadence that has killed off the American family.

Not that Coontz, the radicals, and the child molester lobby (which are not mutually exclusive categories) are lamenting the fact. Though Coontz, in true Marxist style, laments the fact that “Politicians shredded the social safety net. The purchasing power of a welfare check decreased by 42 percent,” she seems gleeful that divorce is part and parcel of modern life in the Prozac Nation. “People began to handle divorce better,” she gushes of the great, family-bashing transition into the modern age.

Handle divorce better? How does that happen? As a kid, you spend Christmas morning with Mom, then have Christmas lunch with your estranged father in some cheerless hotel room, and for dinner, you’re back home where you get to meet Mom’s latest boyfriend. Ho, Ho, Ho, all right…but there is no “better” in this, and I know a lot of men who won’t marry into a culture that considers it an acceptable part of life.

The rule of thumb these days is that half of all American marriages will end in divorce. Those odds of failure are 300 percent higher than the odds of failure playing a round of Russian roulette. One of my best friends, Steve, is a divorce attorney, and his future is brighter than a hot day on Alpha Centauri. “As long as people are insanely selfish, I’ve got work,” he told me.

I am at the age where most of my stateside friends are on their second marriages, and many are on their third. Television and school programs are the modern parents, since the biological ones are too busy meeting with their divorce lawyers, psychological therapists, and latest romantic interests gleaned from web dating sites (“Boring, cat-loving suburban neurotic seeks same for walks on the beach and candlelight dinners…”)

Kids are mere pawns in the systemized dismemberment of the family. Indeed, they’ve bred a nation of institutionally-produced robot-children, and, at least as far as the boys go, they will never learn the craft of manhood, having never had a genuine father around to teach them how to fish, how to sail a boat, shoot a rifle, change a spark plug, or pitch a tent.

This is Huxley’s Brave New World, using the sharp shards of a shattered society to accomplish what genetic engineering can’t. Indeed, there’s more than one way to shape a blob of clay. Well, they’re all Human Resources now, and as long as they take their medications, I guess most of them will dutifully shuffle from the cubicle to the big screen TV and only occasionally wonder why they are such empty human shells.

Meanwhile, the wise guys who chided me for years about the rice cooker in my kitchen, the strange fish on my dinner plate, and the devotion I feel toward my Filipino in-laws…well, these wise guys don’t look so wise now, as they meekly ask my wife if she has any “available” sisters or friends. My ex-patriot friends, on the other hand, long ago voted with their feet and their hearts, and outsourced their family goals to cultures that hold the family in esteem, not contempt.

This is, of course, a totally raw deal for the many worthy American women out there, but the fact is that odds are odds, and a 50/50 shot at marital failure, and the cruelty it inflicts on innocent children, is simply too big of a risk to run.

But the real cap on this gig was yet another request my wife and I got from a friend specifically looking for a non-American spouse: It came from Heather, a school teacher in California, a charming blonde who is looking for a husband. “I need a man who is a man and I want a family that is a family,” she told me. “All I see around here are divorced creeps.”

Well, come to Saipan, Heather…and all the rest of you folks looking for traditional marriage. We still have it here.

(Ed Stephens, Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. Ed4Saipan@yahoo.com)