You know, I guess it’s too much to expect that a guy who left his wife and seven kids might participate in raising the eighth that he’s just fathered with his young Russian-model girlfriend. Even if he’s a movie star. Even if he’s an exceedingly paleo-Catholic (yet divorced), evidently megalomaniacal, plausibly anti-Semitic, apparently out-of-his-mind movie star.

Mel Gibson, notes People magazine, leaves all that messy life stuff to the kid’s mom, and just plugs his ears and goes to sleep. Mr. I Can Handle a Post-Apocalyptic Future With Nothing But a Bowie Knife and My Wits can’t, or won’t, handle a dirty diaper. Schmuck.

But at least he says he’s quit smoking. So the gal and their kid have that going for them, which is nice.

And, anyway, he’ll get his. Ill-raised celebrity children have a way of becoming the world’s most entitled and awful and generally nightmarish adults. If Mel’s the dad he says he is, some of those kids are going to grow up and make the Kardashian sisters look like St. Francis of Assisi.

Now, I’m not the world’s greatest expert on the works of J.D. Salinger. I’m probably the only guy who read “The Catcher in the Rye” only once (it seems you either never read it—or read it 40 times), and the descriptions I saw of his insufferable Glass family just about guaranteed I’d never pick up “Franny & Zooey” or “Nine Stories.”

But I did find myself fascinated with J.D. Salinger the man—a recluse, a rejecter of fame, and, up till his death on Wednesday at the age of 91, a classic Bad Dad, the kind we at Dadwagon love to love.

The evidence (all of it second- or thirdhand, of course) is overwhelming: As a young man stationed in Europe after World War II, he had a brief marriage to a German doctor—about which almost nothing is known. His second marriage, to Claire Douglas, ended in divorce, with Douglas claiming “a continuation of the marriage would seriously injure her health and endanger her reason.” Within a few years, he started dating much younger women, like Yale freshman Joyce Maynard and, a decade or so later, Colleen O’Neill, whom the New York Times calls “considerably younger” than him.

None of which pleased his daughter, Margaret, very much. She wound up writing a memoir in which she portrayed him as narcissistic, abusive and enamored of, as the  Times puts it, “exotic enthusiasms” ranging from Zen Buddhism to Scientology. Also, he drank his own urine. It probably didn’t help family harmony that Margaret’s brother, Matthew, later described her as having “a troubled mind.” J.D., that’s one family you messed up, big time!

(Not to mention, of course, how you devastated the Lennons by writing a book that another crazy person would use as justification for murder. How awful!)

But you know what? I have a weird kind of respect for Salinger’s poor parenting. The guy was honest enough with himself to know that he shouldn’t be around other people. He dumped Joyce Maynard when she wanted kids and he didn’t. He retreated from the world because he couldn’t stand the attention of fans and the press—which is exactly the kind of absolute, uncritical attention that young children pay to their parents. If you’d told Salinger he was a bad dad, he’d probably say, “So what?” Your love didn’t matter to him, and the more you tried, the faster he’d probably turn you away.

In other words, it was likely no fun to be his children—to demand engagement and normalcy from a singular, if insular, genius—but for him to play the proud papa, well, he would’ve seemed like a phony.

She does all the talking

Attention all masochists! Please check out this post at Babble explaining why mothers must break the bad news about sex to their children. Here’s the setup:

On a car trip a couple years ago, my six-year-old son, Eli, asked randomly, between bites of his granola bar, “How do babies get here?” I looked over at my husband, who was quickly turning from red to green in the driver’s seat.

“Well,” I began, “they come from mommies’ bellies. You know, after the seed gets planted?” My fingers were crossed in my lap. Hopefully the lame explanation would work, again. It didn’t.

“No, I mean how does the seed get planted?” he asked, forcing an impromptu hushed-tone conference in the front seat.

“Tell him you can’t tell him, that he’s too young!” my husband hissed, begging, as if for his life. Fear shone in his eyes.

I laughed. “We can’t tell him that we can’t tell him — that’s terrible. He wants to know.” I said, patting his arm.

First off, the only version of “The Conversation” I ever had was with my father. I was thirteen, he gave me a box of unlubricated Trojans (not kidding) and told me, yes, sexually transmitted diseases could happen to me. Prior to that, I learned everything I needed to know about sex by swiping my father’s copy of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask). And Skinemax, after all authority figures were asleep.

I mean, really. Is there anyone out there who learned about sex from their mother? Is that possible? I doubt it.

Know what else I doubt? The dialogue in that section. Has the sweet tang of revisionist history to it. I love how the dad is shown as this freaked out prude, totally incapable of communicating with his child (“tell him that I said to tell you to tell him that he’s too young”), while mom (whose name, in case you’re keeping score at home, is “Steph”) just tut-tuts him on the arm, instructs Eli as if she were a 50s PSA (planting a seed?), and goes merrily about destroying her child’s innocence. I’m calling shenanigans on the whole thing.

Of course, because Babble is a “professional” blog (hah!), there has to be a call-to-science-type thing that justifies this ridiculous and unlikely claim (without such stuff, wouldn’t Babble just be a blog of unmerited complaints about parenting? Nah. That’s what we do). Example:

Elizabeth Berger, M.D., a child psychiatrist and author of Raising Kids with Character, says that “talking about things in general is not the strong point of our puritanical culture, but, for Dads especially, there is horrible embarrassment, shame and avoidance talking about any intimate feelings — feelings about sex, grief, hope, really any emotion — with anyone, but especially with their own children.” The result, she says, is that when the tough topics arise, “Mom is always left holding the bag.”

Ah, good old mom with her bag of sex tales. Frankly, I don’t care if Dr. Berger performed cold fusion with a pair of tweezers. Bottom line: most sons (at least) learn about sex from their fathers.

All right, lady readers of Dadwagon. Correct me if I’m wrong. Did Mom break it down for you? Or any of you? Did anyone in the world learn about sex from their mother? The mere idea of it freaks me out.

It’s pretty easy to get worked up about the whole natural vs. drug-addledaided childbirth debate—or so I heard recently somewhere. But it’s also a subject that makes for potent video humor.

Up first is a familiar question: “Are Birth Classes Worth It for Dads?,” from the brilliant, highly professional dudes at DadLabs.com. (And I’m not just praising them because they wrote on Twitter that they liked us.) It’s amusing stuff, particularly the interviews with dads not-so-fondly recalling their birth-class experiences.

Next comes “We’re Having a Baby,” written and directed by my old college buddy Chris Boone. This short film takes the opposite tack, showing what happens when some dads take the whole birth-preparation thing too far.

Okay, enough chuckles. Now that you’ve had your mood lightened, it’s back to the Tantrum you go!