My nephew and the half-full glass

I’ve noticed the last batch of posts have all been about personal items, whereas prior to that, this was mostly a political blog.

It’s not that I don’t care about politics anymore, it’s just that this damned “Bataan Death March” (ala ‘The Daily Show’) that Hillary is putting the Democratic party through is taking its toll on me. God, if it’s crushing my spirits, imagine what it’s doing to Obama. Probably the only real message of hope that he’s clinging to these days is that some well-meaning Kansas girl, like his mom, will drop a house on his distinguished colleague from New York sometime between now and the convention. Preferably sooner than later.

Like my friend The Nutty Professor, I’ve even stopped watching TV politics shows because it’s no fun watching your guy getting pummeled into the ropes by everyone from the cable-channel punditry to his Sunday preacher. Tonight was a good night, and I just wanted to mention that in passing. I remain convinced that my ardor for a candidate – any candidate – is the kiss of death, and previous elections have borne this out. I’ve even tried to make myself love Hillary for that very reason, but I can’t do it. For better or worse, I’m still putting all my money on black to win and am ready to be the last man standing on the prow as the good ship Obama goes sinking into that good night, torpedoed on all sides by former friends and allies.

Plus, there’s been a lot of personal shit to get off my chest, mostly involving sick family members, so as the political scene has become too painful to watch, the home life has been too painful to pull my attention away from.

And now the two converge.

My nephew, with whom I was close when he was a kid, just joined the Marines this week. In the middle of a godawful clusterfuck of a foreign occupation that he’s told me he doesn’t even believe in, he’s gonna put on a uniform and go place himself in harm’s way just the same.

Not that I have anything against military service. The photo of my Dad that I keep in my office is his official Army photo, and when I was a kid, I took some tests at the recruiter’s myself to see if they had a place for me. (Turns out they did – they wanted me to go to their cryptography school and learn how to break codes, but for reasons I no longer understand, I decided at the time McDonalds still had more use for my talents than my country did.)

But my nephew isn’t John Wayne storming the beach at Normandy. My nephew is the complicated result of growing up the smartest person in a wildly dysfunctional household (I can’t even tell you or my sister who knows about this blog would kill me; she may anyhow). He’s had nothing but bad adult role models his whole life and wasn’t brought up in an environment that rewarded introspective thought or independent thinking with anything less than a good old-fashioned ass-kicking. Now he’s headed off to the military, the only place less accommodating of introspection and personal independence than his current situation.

According to family sources, he’s just plain run out of options and sees the service as something to transition him from the dead-end life he was looking at in his (and my) old home town to something better down the road. After he serves his hitch, as they used to call it. And I can’t argue with that. At his age, I was looking at the same bleak options, but I was lucky enough to have somebody in a position to reach out and throw me a lifeline. He doesn’t. We can’t really piss on his parade if we don’t have any better options to offer him, and we don’t.

But I wonder what even a safe tour of duty will do to this young man. He’s a tall, lanky kid and he’s got charisma to spare, and he’s let that charisma be his meal ticket for years now. Worse, he treats women like’s they’re props in his comedy act, which he performs for his own personal retinue of losers and hangers-on (at least one of whom, predictably, signed up when he did). He’s a smart kid, and sensitive too, but he also has his mom’s sense of “I don’t give a fuck” that runs a mile wide and from here to the horizon line.

Plus, he wants to be a military police. A Marine M.P. Now as I understand it, that’s not only being both a cop and a Marine, but a cop of his fellow Marines, too. Frankly, I worry we might have our own budding Anakin Skywalker on our hands. Give the wrong person a badge, guns and some “nobodies” to push around and you won’t get The Lone Ranger, you’ll get Galactus, Devourer of Worlds (inset).

The kid was always the quiet, intense loner type till he became the quiet, intense alpha-male type in high school. Frankly, he’s not the kind of guy I want carrying a gun and a chip on his shoulder.

I know I have to call, and ought to before I post this. But what can I say? I’ve already heard his case argued at least as eloquently as he could ever hope to, but as I told my nephew’s advocate, my glass is always half full. Of Hemlock.

I know that in a perfect world, my nephew will go in a boy and come out a man. He’ll have his head screwed on straight and the military will come through on their promise to find him a job in civilian law enforcement and mom’s apple pies will cool on the windowsill in the sweet spring air.

But he’s never lived in that perfect world. He didn’t come from it and he’s not going directly to it. First, he’s got to do six years in hell, at best only eyewitnessing the worst imhumanities man has to practice upon itself.

God only knows what will emerge.