The decent thing... by Greg Swann I write about honesty and deception, that's what I do. It's not by plan and intention. I noticed it only by accident, by the accretion of essays and stories on the subject. It's always been there in the Willie stories; the prototypical Willie story is about how people avoid awareness of their own dishonesty. But lately, the theme of honesty has come to dominate everything I write, with the result that it's virtually _all_ I write about. It's my stinking divorce that's doing it, of course, although it took me a while to realize it. And while I don't want to turn into one of those people who talks about nothing but his divorce, the fact is it pretty much monopolizes my attention right now. And while I suppose it is common to hear someone going through a nasty divorce growling, "Lies, lies, lies!," in my case it happens to be true. I have written about deceit and the consequences of deceit for years, but I have never seen so much of it, so close. Witness: >> Have you (plural) examined this belief in the context of Greg's being a father raising a daughter? How does he (or does he?) keep this from affecting the way he relates to Meredith? [*I* have looked at this issue, and continue to do so. As for his current relationship with Meri, he adores her. They have a tremendously warm and loving relationship, and I have to say that he's done well by her. But I have to be honest and speculate that part of his regard for her is her unconditional acceptance of him. I think that because I do not offer him this, he interprets my trying to make changes in our relationship as my trying to make changes in HIM, which pushes his "dominance" buttons, etc.] Actually, I'm more concerned at the moment about what messages Greg is communicating to our son. What I left out about that exchange in our counselor's office is the other part of it: that he "sees me doing to Cameron what was done to him, and it is breaking his heart." Specifically, I think, he is objecting to my sometimes yelling at Cameron, and he is projecting his whole context onto this little 2-1/2 year old. (Greg does not raise his voice at all, with me or with the children, and it has been an ongoing source of controversy that I sometimes do. I do not scream at them; I do not harangue them; I do not denigrate them. But, when my impish son gets a hold of a marker, comes over and deliberately catches my attention, then heads for our new sofas as fast as he can, I *have* been known to raise my voice. ) My wife submitted the matter quoted above as an addendum to a court document. That is, she attested under oath to the truthfulness of the representation of the text. The paragraph enclosed between brackets was omitted from the version of the document she submitted, which means that my wife submitted a falsified document to the court. Viewers of Perry Mason may be wondering when she will be jailed for perjury; they are advised to refrain from holding their breath. When I asked my wife why she had submitted this falsified document, she said it was an inadvertent error. We all know the mechanics of selecting, copying and pasting, and so we all know that it is impossible for a paragraph to inadvertently fall out of the paste buffer. Ah, but give the girl a break. It's only one falsified document, isn't it? Well, not quite. In an 88-page letter to our custody evaluator, my wife repeatedly falsified quoted documents, omiting text favorable to me or unfavorable to her. The longest omission was 116 lines. The next longest was 100 lines. The same 77 lines (the first 77 lines of the file Father.txt) were omitted in two different places. But the doctrine of plausible deniability covers this: perhaps she was just trying to save space in her 88-page letter. Surely this does not explain the shortest omission: 95 characters. Ah, but give the girl a break. It's only falsified documents, isn't it? Well, not quite. This idiotic divorce is quite literally destroying my wife's character, with the result that by now she will lie about _anything_ when she feels threatened. We're competing for custody of our two children, after all. And the trouble with competition--free, honest, open competition--is that you could lose. If you're desperate to win, to win at any cost, and if the game is designed to reward but not penalize deceit--it's hard to do the decent thing... In "Janio at a Point," I wrote: "Deceit inquires, 'Is it necessary to be right about this? Is there something I could pretend to be wrong about? Is there something I could pretend to know less clearly?'" Someday I'll write a lot more about the mechanics of lying, because I have a lot to say on the subject. A plausibly deniable lie requires the construction of two possible interpretations of the available facts. For instance, if it is even remotely plausible that the middle paragraph quoted above could have been omitted inadvertently, then the lie has not been exposed and the liar has not been discovered. Consider this: My wife's attorney said in a filing to which my wife attested: "During the time the parties were residing together, Ann merely logged the jobs as they were billed, recorded deposits as invoices were paid, and recorded checks written on the business account." Contrast that with this from my wife's email to her paramour ("JDanvers" is my wife's pseudonym): MaRandolph: You started to talk about finances, how do you do it? JDanvers: I handle the whole package. MaRandolph: You do? I could sure use that kind of help! JDanvers: I even do the books for G's business. The first passage quoted implies that my wife was an automaton, a financial robot. The second passage makes it plain that my wife knew all about our finances, and I knew nothing. The purpose of the first passage is to imply that my wife did not lie in earlier court filings, while the second passage makes it plain that she did. In her 88-page letter to our custody evaluator, my wife attempts to add a second layer of deniability by arguing that there is some distinction between our family finances and the finances of my business. In fact, my business is run on a strict cash accounting basis, which means that the finances of the business _are_ the finances of the family. But what's worse is she says, right there, plain as day, "I even do the books for G[reg]'s business." If it is even remotely plausible that "I handle the whole package" means "I was only following orders", then the lie has not been exposed and the liar has not been discovered. Or so we are expected to believe. The trouble with the doctrine of plausible deniability is this: for any particular instance, you might say, "Well... okay." But when the instances begin to pile up, and when there's always an extra special reason why the misunderstanding was inadvertent but unavoidable, decent people cease to doubt that they are being lied to. And mine is very far from being the worst case, I promise you. I hear from fathers every day who have had the most vicious things done to them, all in the name of winning without having to compete in the divorce courts. In fact, though, mine may yet become the worst case I know of. Should I prevail in either my appeal of the paternity ruling regarding my daughter or in my appeals to the legislature to change the awful law that resulted in the paternity ruling, I fully expect to be accused of physical or sexual abuse of my children. This would be utterly false and the investigation of the charge would be horribly damaging to my children, but that wouldn't matter, now, would it? The important thing is winning, winning at any price, and what does it matter if lives are destroyed in the process? My wife has demonstrated beyond question or doubt that she has no intention whatever of doing the decent thing, and we can only speculate as to the depths of _in_deceny she will plumb. For example, in a court document filed on December 27, my wife's attorney said of her paramour that he "offered assistance throughout the years and Greg absolutely rejected any financial or other contributions from him." This is simply a lie. It cannot be documented, not even in the 5 million characters of email that passed between my wife and her paramour in 1994, and so the plausibly deniable rejoinder is that these supposed offers were verbal. As it happens, I had contact with my wife's paramour on five occasions in the years of our marriage, all of them public events, all of them in the presence of witnesses. The purpose of putting forth this lie is to attempt to absolve him of the obligation to pay child support for my daughter, should he and my wife succeed in denying my fatherhood of her. My wife's paramour documents every contact he had with me, with my wife and with my children (see Sightings.txt), and nowhere does he mention any attempts to pay child support for my daughter. Similarly, in a court document filed on August 23, my wife's attorney asserts that her paramour "has a college fund that he has been contributing to regularly since the birth of the child." This is _also_ a lie; in email, referring to his financial goals, he said, "It feels really important to me (college funds, retirement.) But I never seem to do very well at it." The point of bringing it up is this: the purpose of the August 23 document was to argue falsely that my wife's paramour _has_ been an active and involved father to my daughter. That being the case, _that_ was the time to claim attempts to pay child support, not in the December 27 document. They can't claim any attempt to assert paternity, ever; _she_ sued _him_ for paternity, and she did it only when doing so was necessary to usurp custody of _both_ of my children, nearly seven years after my daughter was conceived. They can't claim any attempt to obtain visitation; there were no such attempts, and in Sightings.txt my wife's paramour makes it plain that he wasn't interested in seeing Meredith for her own sake even on the 11 occasions in six years that he actually _did_ see her. They can't claim any attempts to pursue telephone visitation; there were no such attempts. Telephone visitation is pitiful, barely contact at all. Certainly it is not exacting, demanding, difficult. Yet in all of those six years, my wife's paramour couldn't even trouble himself to pick up the phone to _talk_ to my daughter, the daughter he would now claim as his. He didn't rear my daughter. He didn't pay child support, and he never once offered to. He didn't make any contributions into any college fund, which makes him less a "father" to my daughter than my mother's elder brother. He didn't visit, nor did he seek to. He didn't phone my daughter, nor did he seek to. He didn't do _anything,_ ever. If in the August 23 document my wife's attorney wanted to portray him as an active, involved father, she needed to demonstrate some activity, some involvement. There was none. But if she had in her quiver the pitiful little arrow of even _one_ frustrated attempt to pay child support, she surely would have brought it out then, and not on December 27. The failure to assert attempts to pay child support on August 23 makes it very plain that the claim of attempts to pay child support made on December 27 is entirely false, made up on the spot to skirt the financial responsibilities of the "fatherhood" my wife's paramour is attempting to usurp. And here's an interesting twist: everyone involved in this dispute is an Objectivist, a student of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. It's interesting because Objectivism is dead set against giving or receiving unearned values. My wife admitted to me on April 20 that she knew my income figures were overstated in court documents. Soon thereafter, my attorney demonstrated that the payments demanded of me by the court actually exceed my total income, _before_ any of my living expenses (see Appendix A). The decent thing to do, surely, was to get a job and support her own life, with a copy of John Galt's oath--"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine"--in her lunch box. Failing that, the decent thing was to volunteer to reduce my mandated payments to reflect my actual income. Instead, she instructed her lawyer to tell the lie reproduced above. There is nothing decent about usurping my parental rights to my daughter. In California, my wife and her paramour would have been laughed right out of court; a so-called "biological" father has two years in which to assert a paternity claim, after which the claim lapses. There is no one who will claim seconds of egg fertilization _is_ fatherhood but seven years of child-rearing _is not._ The position is absurd, and no one will argue it. My wife and her paramour are taking advantage of a temporary peculiarity of the law in Arizona, but _no one,_ not even themselves, is willing to argue that this is _right;_ it is merely legal. There is nothing decent about this, so it is absurd to discuss what the decent thing might be. But if we accept what the law has done, what _then_ is the decent thing to do? Suppose I had raised a dog for seven years. Stipulate that someone could come along and demonstrate a prior claim to that dog, and stipulate that a judge upheld that prior claim. Would the judge then say, "Sorry, buddy. You're out your dog, but you're also out everything you paid to feed and board and maintain this other man's dog"? Or would he demand that the original claimant compensate me in full for the costs associated with raising the dog now being taken away from me. I am not comparing my daughter to property, nor am I demanding to be compensated. I am asking, "What would be the decent thing to do in these horrible circumstances?" Reasonable people can differ, but surely no one can argue that the decent thing to do is to cut and run. Decent people don't wait to be ordered to do the right thing, and my wife's paramour, had he actually regarded himself as my daughter's father all along, would have been paying child support all along. He didn't, and he didn't volunteer to pay the arrears when my wife had the courts of Arizona declare him to be my daughter's father, and, as we have seen, he and my wife are paying her attorney to tell an outrageous lie in a court document to skirt his obligation even now. There is more, and a _lot_ of it. Over time, I have evolved a fairly useful lens for predicting my wife's behavior. I call it the Mercenary Hypothesis. The Mercenary Hypothesis argues that whatever is venal and vile and grasping--whatever is the diametrical opposite of the decent thing to do--that is what my wife will do. For example, in the document filed December 27, my wife's attorney allows that I may keep "the automobile in [Greg's] possession," provided its value is offset to my wife in credit against other assets. That car was purchased in March, almost three months after my wife abducted my children, abandoning me in a hopelessly crippled state with no food, no money and no transportation. At the time that she abandoned me, she left me with with $6,000 in accounts payable, $2,500 of it urgently payable, including the rent. Between borrowed funds and my business receipts, I was finally able to purchase a (very) used car after nearly three months. The effrontery of declaring this car to be a community asset is outrageous. In general, assets and debts of either party acquired after legal separation are not regarded as community property or debts, and my wife's attorney is attempting to grandfather that car, not so my wife can take possession of _another_ car paid for entirely by me, but so she can take the _value_ of that car in other community assets paid for entirely by me. I was the sole source of income for our family, and essentially I still am. I busted my butt to produce as much money as I could for our family, and it never seemed to be enough. I was unable to do the work I love to do, and it seemed as if my wife was always pressuring me to produce more, more, more. She stayed home in those years, taking care of our home and our children. She came into our marriage approximately $40,000 in debt, and over the years, we managed to retire most of that debt out of my income. In other words, it was my income that paid for every scrap of our marital assets, and it was my income that paid for the vast majority of her pre-marital assets. You could say, "Greg, you were an idiot," and I could hardly contest that evaluation. I was doing what I thought was the decent thing, and I did not foresee that my decency would not only _not_ redound to my credit, but would actually be used against me. And, again, reasonable people can differ, but arguably the decent thing to do in these circumstances is to forego all claims to marital assets. Certainly, I would gladly give up everything I own in exchange for six years at home with my children. My wife's attorney is attempting to argue that such of our marital debts as my wife is willing to assume responsibility for should be paid proportionate to our incomes--from each according to his ability, to each according to her needs, as it were. Arguably, then, property should also be divided according to the same proportions. The last argument that one might make is that marital assets should be split 50-50, even-steven, right down the middle. Certainly, no one could argue that my wife is entitled to more than half of the marital assets. No one, that is, except the devotees of the Mercenary Hypothesis (see Appendix B). In Arizona divorce courts, there are three categories of property: pre-marital assets, community assets and personal effects. Personal effects are items that are "uniquely yours," such as your clothes, jewelry and toiletries. My wife's attorney asked herself, "Is there something I could pretend to know less clearly?," and created a new category of property, "sole and separate property." "Sole and separate property" consists of items purchased with my income in the course of our marriage which are not personal effects, and yet which are not community assets. They are items of property which are to be given to my wife, free and clear, for no reason whatever. In basketball, they say, "No whistle, no foul." In divorce court, evidently, theft is not theft if you get away with it. And this is not the half of it. In email to her paramour transmitted on December 31, 1994, my wife can be seen actively planning to steal and sell community property of the marriage in anticipation of abducting my children: Oh, that reminds me - I do have a washer/dryer set, plus a fair amount of backyard equipment for the kids. I could sell it all, maybe pick up a few hundred dollars, or bring it/store it. In real life, this is called looting, stealing and selling things which you have no right to sell. And there is still more. In the December 27 document, my wife's attorney says, "Further, Ann should be confirmed a one-half (1/2) share in all future income attributable to any software or other works written by Greg at any time whatsoever during the parties' marriage." I shall repeat John Galt's oath, in case you're forgotten it: "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." My wife is claiming a right to future proceeds of the fruits of my mind because she _didn't_ husband the trees that bear those fruits. She is demanding that she be paid in perpetuity for what she _did not_ accomplish. Fine. It's common enough in divorce proceedings, although I can't imagine that anyone could reconcile it with Objectivism. The core of this sort of claim is this: "I made it possible for him to produce these economic values by bearing a disproportionate share of other loads." No one would attempt to make this claim in a commercial context--that the custodians at Microsoft are entitled to software royalties because they bore the load of the custodial duties, thus permitting the software engineers to write code. Both the custodians and my wife were appropriately compensated for their efforts, compensated at the true value of those efforts, and it's absurd to argue one way in one circumstance and the opposite way in the other. In fact, my wife made it impossible for me to write commercial-quality prose during the course of our lives together, and she was adamantly opposed to my efforts at creating software; from her email: "I was continually freaked out because he was choosing to spend a *lot* of time on projects with no remunerative value (I told you he was out of the house as much as 90 hrs. a week, at times), at times when we couldn't afford for him to do that". And yet, the laws of marriage are absurd, as I discovered too late. But let's induce the absurdity for a moment and see what falls out. First, I paid for the completion of my wife's undergraduate degree, and I paid for her (uncompleted) graduate school education. I took care of the children while she was at classes or studying. I paid (and by court mandate continue to pay) my wife's pre-marital tuition arrears and student loans, and my wife's attorney makes a point of complaining that I am not paying _all_ of my wife's pre-marital student loans. And yet my wife's attorney does not offer to pay me one-half of my wife's future earnings. I don't want her to, but, surely, the decent thing to do, if one is demanding one-half of the value of the products of my mind, is to reciprocally offer one-half of the value of my wife's education, which I paid for and made possible. But there is more: note the words "at any time whatsoever during the parties' marriage". As I said, in general, the courts don't regard assets and debts acquired after legal separation as community assets or debts. They can, but they don't. A year ago today, my wife abandoned me in my cripplitude and abducted my children, driving away in a car with bad brakes through the earthquakes and mudslides of California, off to gloomy, drizzly, Seattle, to pursue her idyllic romance. We have been separated for one year, and there is no custodian's claim that can be made with respect to the values of the mind I have produced in that year. If there is _any_ justice to claiming that she made it possible for me to produce economic values while we were living together, there can be _no_ justice to any claim to economic values produced after we stopped living together. If cooking and cleaning and running errands is what made it possible for me to conceive of things unforeseen (an absurd claim on its face), then how can she argue that she made it possible for me to do the work of my mind after she had _stopped_ cooking and cleaning and running errands in my behalf? This is naked grasping, nothing else. And yet there is still more. For the claim to a share in the proceeds of the work of my mind is, tacitly, an admission that I am my daughter's father. Do you see why? I did not contribute the _sine qua non_ causes of her being, neither the sperm nor the egg. But by my efforts, my consistent, dedicated, unimpeachable efforts, I made her life possible. If my wife has "rights" to my software and my prose because she _did not_ supply the essential effort that resulted in their production, but _did_ supply ancillary efforts, then, in the same way, I must be accorded "rights" to my daughter. I did not supply either of the components that joined to form a life, where before there was no life. But I _did_ supply half or more than half of every other effort that resulted in the growth and beauty and perfection of that life, and the so-called "biological father" supplied _none_ of this effort, and seeks even now to escape the consequences of his past neglect. The reasoning that applies to the one must apply to the other, and if "making it possible" earns "rights", then I have more than earned every right to be regarded as my daughter's father. "I don't care about one individual! What matters to me is our goals, our purposes, our plans!" "Marion, what you care about is winning this election." "That's right!" "Not winning, really. Beating your opponents..." "What's the difference?" "A subtle one," Nelson replied. "When you win, your concern is the goal. When you beat others, your concern is those others. If you win your value, you've gotten something you wanted. If you beat the others, you've gotten nothing you wanted. You wanted nothing. All you've done is to deny to them what _they_ wanted. If winning is your motive, then your life and values are your standard of the good. What is your standard of the good when your goal is to beat people...?" The quotation is from "Mantrap", a book I wrote nearly 10 years ago. There is no excuse for lying and cheating and stealing, but the fact is, we hear these vices excused every day. People can become very competitive in a self-destructive way, and in business, in sports, even in recreation, they can jettison scruples, honor, decency in pursuit of victory, victory at any price. It's inexcusable, and yet we constantly hear it excused. We hear it excused even in contested divorces. Yes, she lied and got more out of him than she really deserved, people say, but she put up with that bastard for fifteen years. Yes, he deferred his bonus payments for two years, but he just wanted to keep her grubby little hands off of his money. We like to be loyal to our friends, after all, and what's a little matter of honor among friends? This is a question one does not ask oneself aloud, alas. And in a custody battle, the stakes are a little higher. The children are being contested in the first place, which can't be a very pleasant place for them to be. And if one or both parties to the divorce elects to lie, to cheat, to steal--so very much the worse for the children. This is a matter of conjecture, but the preponderance of evidence puts it far beyond doubt: my wife's goal in this custody battle is to make it impossible for me to ever see my children again. She has used the absurd laws of Arizona to deny my fatherhood of my daughter, and, if the present court rulings stand, she can withhold my daughter from me entirely, forever. She is using this usurpation of custodial rights to my daughter to attempt to have herself awarded sole custody of my son. We have been assigned a custody evaluator, an immensely competent psychologist, but the goal of my wife's legal posturing is to have me denied custody of _both_ of my children without the court ever taking notice of the custody evaluator's report. In principle, the court is obliged to decide custody on the basis of "the best interests of the children". In reality, my wife seeks to have my custody denied without the best interests of my children ever being considered. She hopes to move my children 2,000 miles away from our home in Arizona. As is discussed above, and as can be documented in enormous detail, she seeks to dispossess me of the vast majority of our marital assets while saddling me with as much as possible of our marital debt and her pre-marital debt. Finally, she seeks to be awarded as much as she possibly can of my income as child support. If she gets her way, I will be accorded as much long-distance visitation as I can afford while bearing three or more years' worth of my after-tax income in debts. What's worse, while there is a national mania for collecting child support across state lines, there is almost no remedy for the (almost invariably) fathers who are denied their court-mandated long-distance visitation. Unless I can win my appeal or unless the law is changed, I have no doubt that I will never see my children again, or not at least until they begin to act act out in their teen years the horrible crimes that have been committed against them. What, you may ask, did I do to deserve such an horrendous penalty? Did I exploit my children by pimping them to the makers of soft drink commercials? Did I make them hold the booty as we smuggled pre-Columbian fish collars across international borders? Did I teach them to light fire-crackers and stuff them up the snouts of neighborhood goats? No. My wife hasn't bothered to make _any_ claims about the quality of my parenting, and her email is quite lavish in her praise of my fatherly virtues. I have been an ideal father, and we're just getting to the good parts. I am to be robbed of my children, and my children are to be forevermore robbed of _me,_ and the question that no one dares answer out loud is this one: Why? What makes this right? What could possibly justify robbing two innocent children of the only father they've ever known? And no one dares answer these questions, because the answers are hideous. _Nothing_ makes this right. It is not right. It is wholly wrong. Whatever objections my wife has toward me, or claims to have toward me (and I go to some pains to list them in "No secrets, no lies"), there is nothing that she or anyone can point to and say, "_This_ is why he deserves to be denied the right raise his children, and this is why his children must not be raised by him." And thus the _next_ question is, why would anyone do this, then? And we know the answer to that question, don't we? The answer is: spite. It's conjectural, but when you've heard enough of these stories, conjecture rapidly approaches certainty. My children are to be deprived of their lifelong relationship with an ideal father because my wife has come to despise me and wishes to hurt me by whatever means she can. This has nothing whatever to do with the best interests of the children. It is clearly contrary to the obvious interests of the children. The sole purpose is to wreak vengeance for past slights, real or imagined, to slash and rip and tear at me with the only weapons in her possession that can injure me, my children. For my own part, while I would prefer to have sole custody of both of my children, I have never sought to deprive my wife of contact with them, and I have been very forthcoming from the very beginning with offers that I think are very generous with respect to visitation, property, debt, etc. I think my wife is a pretty poor specimen of humanity: she is a liar and an adulteress who abandoned her children in pursuit of her own gratification; she lied egregiously to usurp temporary custody; she later abducted the children--leaving me in a hopelessly crippled state to whatever fate might befall me--holding them incommunicado and preventing me from seeing them for months; later still she brought this horrid paternity suit for the sole purpose of usurping custody of both of my children _without_ having to submit to inquiries as to the best interests of the children. As I have demonstrated here, and as I can demonstrate voluminously with vast amounts of documentation, my wife is an habitual liar who will stoop to literally _anything_ to "beat" me in this dispute. This is important. My wife and her attorney have gone to enormous lengths to slime me in court documents. Many of these charges are discussed in "No Secrets, no lies," but there are other, more nebulous charges that are not. For example, in the December 27 document, my wife's lawyer writes that my wife has testified that I "previously told Ann that he does not recognize the State of Arizona's authority to order him to do anything, and that he would quit working rather than be compelled by the State to provide support." Not Greg said, but Ann said Greg said, which is rather a different thing. But what's more significant is that the claims are entirely subjunctive. I am to be held accountable for what my wife's lawyer says my wife says I am supposed to have said that I _might_ do. I am to be penalized _for what I have not done._ My wife claims that she was justified in abducting my children because I _did not_ physically abuse her, _did not_ withhold a single penny from her. She left _me_ penniless--and helpless--but that's acceptable, even commendable conduct, because it was an act of pre-emptive retaliation for crimes she says I _would have_ committed, but didn't. My wife and her lawyer can name precisely one wrong thing that I actually did do: I picked my wife up and put her outside our house. She makes a vast horde of claims about things I allegedly _said,_ and, surprisingly enough, not one of these horrible things was said in front of a witness. And the remainder of her claims consist of demands that I be held accountable for things that I _have not_ done. Why is this important? Because every complaint I have against my wife consists of things she _did_ do. She did lie to me and to our children while committing long-distance adultery for months. She did lie to me about where she would be over the Columbus Day weekend in 1994. She did steal airline tickets from my father by using them for fraudulent purposes. She did abandon her children by hiding from them, intentionally making herself completely unavailable to them. She did swear out a spurious Order of Protection complaint, inventing the outrageous fiction that I am a survivalist in order to usurp custody of our children. She did abduct our children, holding them incommunicado and withholding them from me for months. She did abandon me in a horribly crippled state with no way to feed or care for myself, with no transportation, with no money, and with immense, urgently overdue debts. She did lie about my income, and continued to lie when confronted with indisputable facts. She did falsify documents presented to the courts and to the custody evaluator. She did instruct her lawyer to lie about the level of paternal interest betrayed over the years by her paramour. She _did_ shamelessly and brutally pull the rug of emotional security out from under my daughter Meredith for no better reason than to usurp a vile advantage in our custody dispute. What did I do? I put my wife out of the house, and since then there is not one action of mine that my wife's attorney can grasp onto to slime me with. Therefore, she slimes me relentlessly, with comic vehemence, for things I _have not_ done. What did my wife do? The list is long and vile. And therefore her attorney dares draw no attention to it, speaking instead of my wife's plans, motives and intentions. Speaking, that is, of what she _has not_ done. I am to be penalized for the bad things I _have not_ done, but not rewarded for many good things I _have_ done. My wife is to be rewarded for the good things she _has not_ done, but not penalized for the many bad things she _has_ done. Thus do the halls of justice become the house of mirrors. My wife lied, then lied to cover her lies, then lied to try to make up for the horrible consequences of the past lies, then lied to try to escape the new horrible consequences of the old horrible consequences. Then lied to try to stick _me_ with the consquences. Then lied to cover the exigencies resulting from _those_ lies. Then raced around frantically from lie to lie to lie, trying desperately to butress an enormous sand-castle of lies crumbling in the heat of the afternoon sun. In "Janio at a Point," I said of liars, "They know the true frenzy of exigent futility as they race around trying to brace their illusions, cover their deceits, portray their misrepresentations and hide from their doubts..." This is not the moral climate in which I want my children raised. But whatever I may think about her, the children love her dearly. There is no interest of theirs that would be served by preventing them from seeing her, and I have bent over backwards to make offers that are not very pallateable to me, but which would give the children regular, frequent contact with their mother, and which would settle this horrible dispute so their lives do not continue to be held in purgatory--the threshold of hell. As can be seen in my email, my wife has done everything she can to avoid negotiation, to avoid doing the decent thing. Her final ploy was to declare that direct negotiation with me is impossible, and that negotiations can only be carried on between our attorneys. Complying with this demand literally, my lawyer made an offer according to my instructions to him, quoted below: Therefore, I propose that we present this as an opening offer. We have made many offers, both through you and privately in email, and none of them has had more than cursory acknowledgement. My duty as a parent commands that I continue to make these offers, in the hope that one of them will bring Ann and Ms. Fromm to the table. I have made this offer (and the temporary custody offer transmitted earlier) in email to Ann, but she has insisted that any negotiations must be carried out through you and Ms. Fromm. Here is the substance of the offer. A. Ann and Wright pull the Schneider ruling. In a 10,000 word mail bomb Ann sent to me on Friday, she insists that this is legally impossible. Both you and Mr. Rose insist that it is not only possible but trivial. B. Ann cooperates with me in my legal adoption of Meredith. I did everything for Meredith but the one thing that matters most, it turns out, and I will regret it for life. I want the chance to correct that error to the extent that I can. Moreover, it is clear that Meredith's relationship to both Ann and I as her parents will not be secure as long as my legal status as her father is denied. C. Ann and I sign a settlement agreement in the form of joint legal and joint physical custody of both children. In her mail bomb, Ann insists that the enmity between us forbids us to cooperate, and that this failure to cooperate would cause a court to deny a joint custody ruling. My surmise is that Ann has been attempting to scavenge for difficulties in order to lay groundwork for an inability to cooperate when, in fact, our ability to cooperate has been steadily improving. In any case, since we are discussing a negotiated settlement, what a court might do is not terribly germane. The question before us is, how can each parent have confidence that the other will not use a legal advantage to deny access to the other? And the obvious answer is for both parents to have the exact same status in law with respect to both children. D. The proportions of time that the children spend with each parent are to be set by Dr. Joy, with the timetable to review or change those proportions also set by Dr. Joy. I am unwilling to accept Ann as a fair judge of what is right for the children, and I am willing to concede that I may not be a fair judge of what is right for the children. I have believed from the first that Dr. Joy is immensely competent, and so I am willing to submit to her prescriptions. E. Everything else is on the table. I have no objective in this divorce _other_ than my parental objective, so I am inclined to be flexible about matters of debt, finances, property, etc. This offer--much more than I would _want_ to relinquish, but clearly equitable by any reckoning--was not accepted. It was not rejected. No alternative offer was made in return. This offer was not acknowledged in any way at all. From this simple datum, there can be no doubt as to who is presenting the insurmountable barrier to negotiation. Make me prove everything I say. --Ayn Rand Someday, I'll write a book about what fathers do. I think about it a lot, watching myself as I work through life with my children. I do a lot of mechanical, caretaker-like stuff for them--feeding them and doing their laundry and leaning on them to pick up their toys and brush their teeth--but this is not what I view as my job as a father. The important thing I do for my children is teaching them things. I don't mean instructing them in academic topics or helping them to master skills. We do a lot of that, and I enjoy it immensely. But my job as a father is to teach my children the principles by which I live. If you read my essays and my fiction, you can see me talking about this stuff all the time. Teaching my children how to live happy lives upholding inflexible principles of morality is my job as a father, and I like to think I'm pretty good at it. We read all the time about the crisis of fatherlessness, and _this_ is the real crisis. Surely the children who are bastardized by indifference or bastardized by the welfare state or bastardized by the divorce courts could profit from a father's income, could benefit by a father's caretaking. But what the children of America are starving for is the fatherhood that I practice, that fatherhood that teaches children how to live without betraying the very principles that human life requires. The crisis of fatherlessness that ultimately erupts in gunfire in the midnight streets is not a crisis of cash, not a crisis of caretaking. It's a crisis of morality, whole generations of American youth who have cash and caretaking in sufficient quantities, but who are deprived of what I am old-fashioned enough to call upbringing. We have engineered our society such that many, many children are never brought up, and, lord!, aren't they tearing us down! For many decades now, our culture has made war on men, on what men stand for, on what men believe. But I stand here proudly and firmly for the principles I learned from the men in my life. I believe in doing the right thing, the decent thing, even when the expedient course might work more to my advantage. I believe in telling the truth, and in challenging my listeners to check up on me, even when I might be more profited by deceit. I believe in rectitude, first, last, ever, and I don't believe that any good of mine can ever be served by betraying principles I know to be just. This is how I live. This is what I strive to impart to my children. And this is how I've conducted myself throughout this awful divorce. In her 88-page letter to our custody evaluator, my wife complains that the details of the abduction of my children revealed in "Whoredom, boredom, love, lust and a great big tree" might come back to haunt my daughter, that someone at her school might say to her, "Your mother abducted you and left your father in an awful fix." It's true enough that this might happen, although it seems unlikely. It's also true that this _is_ what happened, and it's not news at all to my daughter. The claim is that it would somehow damage Meredith to have the facts of her history revealed to her. If we stipulate that claim, what falls out? Would the damage result from the revelation, or was the damage done by the abduction? One of the rules for living that I was taught as a boy is this: never do anything you wouldn't want your parents to see. It's a rule of thumb, and that's all it is, but it's stood me in good stead. An even better rule for my life, now that I'm a parent myself, is this: never do anything you wouldn't want your children to find out about. I'm sorry that my wife has done all the awful things that she's done. I'm sorry that she is so spiteful that, even now--when the damage she has caused is indisputable--she cannot overcome her spitefulness and do the decent thing. I am especially sorry that I am left with no way to fight for my daughter's interests but to mount a public campaign to change the awful law with which her interests were betrayed. But surely the alternative--surrendering her to the vilest sort of injustice--is worse. I teach my children not just by precept but by example. Something that I heard a lot as a child, and that I refuse to say to my children, is, "Do as I say, not as I do." I teach my children the principles I live by, and I live by the principles I teach. I can't ask my children to stand up for what they believe in and then run and hide at the first sign of a challenge. I can't demand that they strive relentlessly and then give up when the going gets a little tough. I can't expect them to learn to conquer their fears, to triumph over adversity, to look naked evil right in the eye--while I am cowering in a corner somewhere with my head tucked between my knees. I am fighting for my daughter's life, for her history, and for the right of both of my children to be raised by their father. I am sorry that I am left with no other way to fight for her rights, but I am glad there is _some_ way left to me, and I don't have the smallest doubt that _failing_ to fight for her rights would be the worst thing I could do. I am doing the right thing, the decent thing. And I am setting a good example. That's what fathers do. I live in Splendor, the pleasant glade I have built for myself inside my mind. I have written about this, but not enough, and surely not clearly enough. I hope someday to be able to teach my children how to live in Splendor, but I don't know that I am competent to teach that lesson yet. A necessary but not sufficient condition of entry is this: one must always do the right thing, the decent thing, and one must never take an action one knows in advance to be wrong. It is common to observe that liars and cheaters and thieves sometimes "get away with it"--escape punishment for their crimes. I argue that this common observation is untrue, that nobody ever gets away with anything. That, while a liar might escape discovery and a thief might enjoy the use of a value he did not have to produce, in the long run the mental processes necessary to rationalize deceit or trickery or theft will destroy the mind of the person who commits these acts. Will, at a minimum, make it impossible for that person to know Splendor, and will, if the thought processes go unchallenged, ultimately destroy every treasure in that person's life. So very far from "getting away with it," the liars and cheaters and thieves will give up every good thing in life and get nothing but heartache and despair and babbling madness in return. And this, I know, is the justice that will not fail me. My father and I were talking about what might happen as a result of my having made this custody dispute so glaringly public. We have a pair of hearings before the divorce judge on Friday, and I anticipate that my wife's attorney will use those hearings as an opportunity to slime me unceasingly for publishing undisputed, uncontested, completely non-controversial facts. This is still the United States, where we are accorded the right to speak and to publish freely, where we are permitted to petition the legislature and the courts with grievances, and where we are suffered to persuade others to join us in our petitioning. But either the divorce courts are located outside the United States, or, possibly, the Bill of Rights no longer applies to persons with testicles. In any case, my father and I were laughing from the gardens of Splendor. I am the most profoundly moral individual my wife has ever had the misfortune to know, and so she pays her lawyer to slime me incessantly, viciously, in the most ridiculous terms. But what can they do to me now? Take my children away? Take all my money? I _know_ I am arguing from the purity of righteousness, because I have nothing left to bargain for or protect. I will stand firmly, proudly, unashamedly for what I think is right, and the consequences may be politely _damned!_ And _this_ is why I've won this fight already, and why my wife and her paramour have already lost. At the end of this, my wife and her craven paramour will be what they have made of themselves, liars, cheaters, thieves, and they have not even begun to foresee the horrors of the exquisite hell they have crafted for themselves. Whether my children are with me forever, or whether they are forevermore withheld from me, at the end of all this I will still be me, still the man of rectitude I have always loved to imagine. There is nothing I could wish for that is worth my integrity as its price, and there is no prize that my wife and her paramour will ever obtain that will be worth half as much as what they have destroyed in their own souls. People can be fooled and the courts can be fooled and even one's own conscience can be fooled for a while. But nature is just, and if you fail to do the right thing, the decent thing, you may escape detection, and you may escape the law, but you will never escape justice... Greg Swann 1/3/96 Appendix A--STATEMENT OF INCOME FOR GREG SWANN, 1/1/95-12/31/95 Following is a breakdown of my gross receipts for 1995 broken out by month. The numbers are a reflection of my gross receipts before any business expenses. While the court uses average monthly figures, my monthly receipts varied by more than $8,500. In 1995, my gross receipts were substantially reduced by three significant factors: 1. My second-largest and most profitable client left me when I was ordered by the courts to move out of our Chandler home. While I landed two new publishing accounts this year, neither has generated significant volume thus far. 2. Because the court-mandated payments exceeded my total gross adjusted income, I was unable to make the hardware and software investment necessary to maintain the value of my commercial software offerings. Orders for these products waned substantially as the year progressed. 3. My most important client had a cash-flow crisis at the end of the year, resulting in a severe cash-flow crisis for me, as can be seen in the figures for November and December. January 1936.50 February 5279.50 March 8727.25 April 6568.50 May 4740.75 June 3097.50 July 4702.42 August 4513.50 September 4762.00 October 8730.25 November 1091.50 December 345.00 ======== 54494.67 The total above represents my gross receipts for the year, prior to any business expenses. As my business expenses will come to approximately $23,900, my adjusted gross income for 1995 will be approximately $30,600. My wife's attorney has affected to misunderstand the numbers that have been provided to her. When I originally filled out the income affidavit, in January of 1994, I stated my gross receipts (prior to business expenses) as though it were my adjusted gross income (after business expenses). This is the source of the erroneous $5,500 per month figure. At the time that we asked to have my figures reviewed, we supplied my 1994 income tax return, which demonstrated that my adjusted gross income for 1994 was $3,331 per month; Ms. Fromm has a copy of this tax return. The seven-month breakdown shown below, to which Ms. Fromm refers, shows my adjusted gross income for the first seven months of 1995 as $3,325. In fact, this breakdown also contains an accounting error; the gross income figure of $39,910.92 includes both funds received _and_ receiveables. My actual gross receipts through July 31, 1995, were $35052.42, with the result that my adjusted gross income for the first seven months of 1995 was $2631. I estimate that my adjusted gross income for the twelve months of 1995 will be $2,550, and that estimate is deliberately overstated. My tax return will be prepared on January 16, and I will know my actual 1995 figures soon thereafter. Thus, my court-mandated payments amounted to 110% of my 1994 gross adjusted income, 139% of my adjusted gross income for the first seven months of 1995, and at least 143% of my adjusted gross income for the twelve months of 1995. All of these percentages reflect the amounts the court has obliged me to pay _prior to_ any of my living expenses. In other words, I am held accountable for 143% of my entire earnings, plus my living expenses, and it is demanded that I be punished for failing to do the impossible. Both my wife an her attorney have been aware at least since April that I cannot possibly make the payments demanded of me, and while they have not volunteered to adjust my figures to refelct my actual income, they have been very forthcoming with complaints that are disingenouous if they are not entirely mendacious. For example, Ms.Fromm said in a filing to which Ann attested on May 25: "During the time the parties were residing together, Ann merely logged the jobs as they were billed, recorded deposits as invoices were paid, and recorded checks written on the business account." Contrast that with this from Ann's email to her paramour: >MaRandolph: You started to talk about finances, how do you do it? >JDanvers: I handle the whole package. >MaRandolph: You do? I could sure use that kind of help! >JDanvers: I even do the books for G's business. As the month-by-month breakdown of my receipts makes plain, assessing me payments that exceed my actual income does not provide for my children, it imperils them, since preventing me from accumulating a cash reserve when I have a good month, as I did in March and October, makes it impossible for me to make payments to anyone in poor months, such as December. Moreover, leaving me impoverished for months at a time makes it very likely that some service essential to my business--electricty, phone service, office space, courier services--will be cut off, with the result that I will be out of business and my children will have no source of support at all. FINANCIAL ANALYSIS OF GREG SWANN, 1/1/95-7/31/95 Income YEAR-TO-DATE MONTHLY AVG. 1. Retail software sales $ 4,195 2. Publishing/consultation 34,274 3. Pass-through expenses 1,444.92 ---------- --------- Gross income 39,910.92[Ý] 5,701.56[Ý] Expenses 1. Postage $ 595.10 2. Office supplies 1,217.43 3. Service bureau charges 467.78 4. Bank charges/fees 629.81 5. Automobile expenses 3,121.63 6. Telephone charges 2,620.53 7. Electricty charges 161.32 8. Water charges (Chandler) 71.40 9. Courier charges (FedEx) 1,986.75 10. Rent 1,348.77 11. Uninsured medical expense 815.80 12. Dues/Subscriptions 715.14 13. Hardware/Software 370.99 14. Pagers (discontinued) 54.23 15. Health insurance (Greg) 211.42 16. Accounting services 304.56 17. Miscellaneous 112.50 18. Self-employment tax (pro rated) 1,829.33 ---------- --------- Gross expenses 16,634.48 2,376.35 ========== ========= Adjusted gross income $23,276.44 $3,325.21 COMPARING MONTHLY INCOME WITH COURT-MANDATED PAYMENTS Some figures have changed since the last time I worked these numbers, notably the $230/month reduction in the support figure as of 8/7/95 (this will vanish as soon as the Schneider ruling is set aside) and the retirement of the '94 IRS arrears (effected with borrowed funds). To date, I have borrowed $11,149.83 in 1995, to service current payables (especially in January), to replace my automobile and effect the court-mandated move, and, since April, to make court-mandated payments and sustain my life on negative cash-flow. Court-mandated payments 1. Ann Swann $1,980.00 2. CCCS 374.00 3. IRS (arrears) 205.00 4. State of Arizona (arrears) 100.00 5. IRS (current taxes, pro rated monthly) 806.67 6. State of Arizona (current taxes, pro rated monthly) 68.08 7. Health insurance 120.81 ========= $3,654.56 That is to say, court-mandated payments consume $1.10[ÝÝ] for every dollar I earn _prior_ to any of my living expenses. [ÝReflects the error discussed above. The actual figures are $35052.42 and $5.007.49. ÝÝThe actual figure is $1.39.] Appendix B--PROPERTY STATEMENT Ms. Fromm's representation of the state of our community property is mendacious. Ann has possession of by far the majority of community assets. She has the automobile, the washer and dryer, the bedroom furniture suite, the children's furniture and accoutrements, and $500 worth of backyard equipment, all this on top of a vast array of miscellaneous chattels. Ms. Fromm speaks of books, CDs, a CD player, a computer desk and chair, and a word processor and refers to them as "Ann's sole and separate property." In fact, these chattels are community property of the marriage, purchased entirely from my income. I was the sole source of income for our family, and Ann did not produce any income from December 1988 on. Ann retains all of her pre-marital property, although it is worth noting that I serviced (and by court mandate continue to service) all of Ann's $40,000 in pre-marital debt, so, in essence, her pre-marital chattels were _also_ paid for out of my income. In the same way, I paid for the completion of Ann's undergraduate degree, and I paid for her (uncompleted) graduate school education. I took care of the children while she was at classes or studying. I paid (and by court mandate continue to pay) Ann's pre-marital tuition arrears and student loans, and Ms. Fromm makes a point of complaining that I am not paying _all_ of Ann's pre-marital student loans. Ms. Fromm does not offer to pay me one-half of Ann's future earnings, and I don't want her to. She does, though, demand one-half of the royalty income from projects Ann did everything in her power to obstruct (e.g., from Ann's email: "I was continually freaked out because he was choosing to spend a *lot* of time on projects with no remunerative value (I told you he was out of the house as much as 90 hrs. a week, at times), at times when we couldn't afford for him to do that"). "[T]he automobile in [Greg's] posession" was purchased in March, almost three months after Ann abducted my children, abandoning me in a hopelessly cripped state with no food, no money and no transportation. At the time that she abandoned me, she left with with $6,000 in accounts payable, $2,500 of it urgently payable, including the rent. Between borrowed funds and my business receipts, I was finally able to purchase a (very) used car after nearly three months. The effrontery of declaring this car to be a community asset is outrageous. Would Ms. Fromm would like to regard all property and debt acquired by either party after Ann's abduction of the children as community property and community debt? Contrary to Ms. Fromm's claim, I told Ann I would be happy to provide her with an inventory of all community property in my possession, and I would ask that she do the same. Finally, Ms. Fromm misrepresents what I told Ann about the balance of the community property, most of which was in storage. In email to her paramour transmitted on December 31, 1994, Ann can be seen actively planning to steal and sell community property of the marriage in anticipation of abducting my children: Oh, that reminds me - I do have a washer/dryer set, plus a fair amount of backyard equipment for the kids. I could sell it all, maybe pick up a few hundred dollars, or bring it/store it.