Thread by @KrisAtLarge

I've been talking about how Western culture tends to loathe its children, and how a large subset of the West thinks that the best way to raise children is by hurling abuse and threats at them, military boot-camp style.

that reminds me of this poor guy: Todd Marinovich.

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he's one of those sad sacks who ends up on "NFL's Greatest Bust" lists. his pro football career followed a rather familiar trajectory: he'd been schooled into a star football player, seemed really impressive (if erratic) in college, and then bombed on the national stage.

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and then decades later people laugh over amusing #sports #journalism pieces about what a massive flop he was, and maybe search YouTube for some amusing clips of old games in which Marinovich threw an interception, or whatever. (I didn't find any myself.)

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why did he flop? that's actually really easy to explain: it was his father's fault.

Marv Marinovich, burning with shame over his own lackluster #NFL career, hired a bunch of coaches and studied "Eastern bloc" training methods (@mtaibbi and @roddreher are in good company!)

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and Marv drilled his kid again and again, controlling his diet even, trying to beat and hammer his child into a perfect athletic instrument.

"Some guys think the most important thing in life is their jobs, the stock market, whatever. To me, it was my kids," said Marv.

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"The question I asked myself was, How well could a kid develop if you provided him with the perfect environment?"[1]

that's from the enlightening Wikipedia entry on Todd Marinovich: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Mari…

Marv's parenting method is @MattWalshBlog's or @dalepartridges's.

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in general this is the right-wing daydream about how kids should be raised: through *force*. all those #Christian "boot camps" exist for this reason; all those special private academies and military schools, where rich parents send their kids, operate on this same premise.

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Todd Marinovich was raised that way, through nonstop abuse—and the moment he was totally on his own, outside the relatively forgiving culture of USC, he crumbled to pieces.

Todd had learned only to *hate* the "discipline". it was *punishment* administered by a tyrant.

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and clearly, once Todd Marinovich realized that he was actually desperately unhappy with how his dad had tried to *traumatize* him into a star football player, it was a downhill slide into self-medication with drink and weed, and the disintegration of his NFL career.

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I wonder if Marv Marinovich ever realized he'd blown it. probably not—it's usual for abusive parents to duck moral responsibility for all their blunders. it would all have been Todd's fault.

"he was weak. he was *always* weak. I knew he was weak when he was a toddler."

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I have no idea if Marv ever said anything exactly like that, but...it's common enough. it's a feature of abusive parenting: they write off their own children as born broken (cf. #Autism parents) and therefore worthy of being bullied and betrayed and everything.

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just think: that's probably how Errol raised @elonmusk.

~Chara of Pnictogen