COLUMN: Maury Povich — the bazooka of birth control
It’s the classic love story: Boy meets girl, boy likes girl, girl likes boy, boy and girl have a baby, boy denies he is the baby’s father, boy and girl scream at each other on the Maury Povich show, boy holds baby awkwardly after a paternity test confirms he is the father, girl screams one inch from the boy’s face that he will pay every penny of child support until the child is 18 years old.
Heartwarming, isn’t it? What? That’s not how your parents met?
In the window of life, I caught my first glimpse of the birds and the bees at the age of 9. I’m not sure why, but before my fourth grade class watched the movie “My Mom’s Having a Baby,” the question of where babies come from had never even crossed my small mind.
However, Mr. Walters, my fourth grade teacher who wore skin-tight O.P. shorts, told us that making babies wasn’t something to take lightly. We could not take part in this reproductive process with the first short skirt that walked by. At that point, I for one, did not need any convincing.
Then puberty came.
At that stage, all of the motivational speakers, the statistics and “My Mom’s Having a Baby” filmstrips go out the window. If I were teaching a high school class, or a Sunday School lesson about avoiding teenage pregnancy, I would pull out the big guns.
In other words, Maury Povich, “The bazooka of birth control.”
That’s right. If President Bush named me as the Secretary of Stopping Kids from Having Babies, I would ignore all of the traditional birth control methods, and go straight to Connie Chung’s husband.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, or if you spend your lunches doing more productive things, let me explain.
About five years ago, talk shows stumbled upon a gem – paternity tests. Besides the occasional show where transvestites and beauty queens walk the runway and people guess whether it’s a boy or girl, paternity tests are the only thing Maury Povich will talk about.
Here’s the sequence: Mary Jane explains she is 100 percent sure Billy Bob backstage is her baby’s father. Then we have to listen as this brainiac points out all of the similar characteristics on a side-by-side picture of Billy Bob and little Timmy. She thinks that because the baby has eyes, ears and a nose, he must be Billy Bob’s son (since Billy Bob also has eyes, ears and a nose).
Then they’ll show a video where Billy Bob spits out sentence fragments interspersed with bleeps about what a tramp Mary Jane is and that he’s 100 percent sure he’s not the father. Maybe it’s just because my math teacher, Jim Cangelosi, has taught me a lot about mathematical language, but I find it interesting how two people can be 100 percent sure about opposite things.
So now out comes Billy Bob, greeted by a chorus of boos, and he walks over to the same side-by-side picture and now we get to see brainiac number two point out all of the differences in the same photo. He thinks that because the baby is not a “mini me” of himself, there is no way he can be the father.
Regardless of what the results are, there are about three minutes of taunting, screaming and crying. If the results are positive, Maury will then try to commit the father to paying child support. I suppose this is making the best of an already bad situation, but the real problem came nine months before the child was born.
An emotional wreck mother, a deadbeat father and a six-month-old baby who hasn’t yet become aware of how bad his “parents” have messed up his life, that’s what it’s all about.
Now that’s birth control.
Clark Jessop is a senior majoring in broadcast journalism. Comments can be sent to clarkjessop@cc.usu.edu.