Happy Birthday, Mr. Conservative
Tomorrow is my nephew’s 22nd birthday. They grow up so fast. It seems like only yesterday my brother sat in the local McDonald’s having breakfast with me and our mother, while my ex-sister-in-law did all the hard work.
After that, the hard work was teaching him manners. He has very good manners now but it took a lot of badgering and nagging before we convinced him to use his utensils to eat his food. He was generally obedient otherwise; if he didn’t obey, he would have faced the wrath of his father. But by the time he reached high school, he was finally house-broken.
He’s always been an excellent student and shows some aptitude for art, which combined with his abilities in math and science put him on the path to a degree in engineering. Now in his senior year at a prestigious technical university, he’s contemplating his next step. We have no worries; he’s very intelligent. He was born intelligent. My brother, bullying his way into the delivery room, he took a picture of his newborn son, who turned to look at him with an almost unsettling, clear-eyed interest and comprehension.
The Nephew came under my tutelage at about the age of one, when his career-oriented mother returned to work. His grandmothers taught him to talk, his grandfather (the maternal one) taught him to build things, his parents taught him to swear, and I taught him to walk and to throw a football with a perfect spin. Alas, a talent that went unrealized, as his overprotective mother refused to allow him to participate in any contact sports. He doesn’t even know how to ride a bicycle.
I also taught him to be a Conservative. As I ferried him back and forth between my brother’s house and my mother’s house, and various other destinations, I tuned into Rush Limbaugh. Rush had gone national just a few months earlier. Experts claim infants and babies can’t understand words, that in the pre-lingual stage they’re unaware of words. Well then how in the world do they learn? What nonsense. I’m here to attest that your babies understand every word you say by about 9 or 10 months, if not earlier. At that age, I understood words perfectly. I just couldn’t say “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Brother” and “Brownie” (our dog).
We foolishly thought the baby couldn’t understand anything, either. But all that time, The Nephew was soaking up the wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. When he was old enough to read and comprehend politics, I gave him a gift subscription to The Limbaugh Letter. To this day, he’s still getting, and the past two years or so, since I began subscribing to it, I’ve been passing on my copies of the National Review to him. When he graduates in the spring, I’ll probably give him his own subscription to NR. Then I think I’ll re-subscribe to Scientific American, pass those copies onto him, and when he finishes graduate school that will be his next gift. What am I doing? He has a subscription to this blog. Oh well. He’s so busy studying, I don’t think he’s had time to read it. By the time he does graduate, he’ll have gotten to this post and he’ll already have the subscription.
I don’t know whether we’re going to drive up to visit him. I missed the last visit to do the flu, and they said he was disappointed I hadn’t come; he wanted someone to talk politics with. I was disappointed, too: I wanted to talk to him about getting a college Tea Party started.
That’s the next step: getting the young people involved. Young Conservatives need to be brave, like Harry Potter. In print, the Boy Wizard was born in 1980 (a year before my co-worker). By the time the novels came out in 1997, his age was comparable to my nephew (1986, two years older than my nephew). By the time the film came out, the movie character’s was two years younger than my nephew. The actor who played Harry is only six months younger than my nephew. For that particular generation of kids, Harry was a same-age hero. Harry grew up with both my co-worker and my nephew.
Due to a lapse in the publication of the books and production of the movies, Harry’s and The Nephew’s official educational adventures will end at about the same time. By the end of each, they will have reached the true threshold of adulthood.
Our muggle world and the Wizarding World face similar dangers. Both worlds face smug, arrogant, and dangerous villains, drunken with their own corruption. It’s all about power. Both rely on magic as a means to justify an end. The Magical World at least relies on gold, which is more realistic than our own world, where we print increasingly worthless paper money and buy and sell on magical credit, where even paper money ceases to change hands.
Harry will face mortal danger this Spring. I don’t know whether my nephew will (I certainly hope not). But many young men and women his age will face life and death. The Harry Potter generation will be fighting a potentially apocalyptic battle generations and generations in the making. But this time, the liberty of Home Front, Hometown Americans is not vouchsafed. Terrorists have already breached our security, illegal immigrants pouring over our borders, and anarchists have control of our government.
Still, like Harry, young people like my nephew have something the terrorists, illegal immigrants, and anarchists don’t; something to live for, and the means to bring those dreams about. When my nephew is finished with his education, he will be a trained engineer, capable of designing and building skyscrapers, tunnels, and bridges. The terrorists and anarchists only know how to blow them up.
Happy 22nd Birthday, Nephew!! We’re proud of you!
After that, the hard work was teaching him manners. He has very good manners now but it took a lot of badgering and nagging before we convinced him to use his utensils to eat his food. He was generally obedient otherwise; if he didn’t obey, he would have faced the wrath of his father. But by the time he reached high school, he was finally house-broken.
He’s always been an excellent student and shows some aptitude for art, which combined with his abilities in math and science put him on the path to a degree in engineering. Now in his senior year at a prestigious technical university, he’s contemplating his next step. We have no worries; he’s very intelligent. He was born intelligent. My brother, bullying his way into the delivery room, he took a picture of his newborn son, who turned to look at him with an almost unsettling, clear-eyed interest and comprehension.
The Nephew came under my tutelage at about the age of one, when his career-oriented mother returned to work. His grandmothers taught him to talk, his grandfather (the maternal one) taught him to build things, his parents taught him to swear, and I taught him to walk and to throw a football with a perfect spin. Alas, a talent that went unrealized, as his overprotective mother refused to allow him to participate in any contact sports. He doesn’t even know how to ride a bicycle.
I also taught him to be a Conservative. As I ferried him back and forth between my brother’s house and my mother’s house, and various other destinations, I tuned into Rush Limbaugh. Rush had gone national just a few months earlier. Experts claim infants and babies can’t understand words, that in the pre-lingual stage they’re unaware of words. Well then how in the world do they learn? What nonsense. I’m here to attest that your babies understand every word you say by about 9 or 10 months, if not earlier. At that age, I understood words perfectly. I just couldn’t say “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Brother” and “Brownie” (our dog).
We foolishly thought the baby couldn’t understand anything, either. But all that time, The Nephew was soaking up the wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. When he was old enough to read and comprehend politics, I gave him a gift subscription to The Limbaugh Letter. To this day, he’s still getting, and the past two years or so, since I began subscribing to it, I’ve been passing on my copies of the National Review to him. When he graduates in the spring, I’ll probably give him his own subscription to NR. Then I think I’ll re-subscribe to Scientific American, pass those copies onto him, and when he finishes graduate school that will be his next gift. What am I doing? He has a subscription to this blog. Oh well. He’s so busy studying, I don’t think he’s had time to read it. By the time he does graduate, he’ll have gotten to this post and he’ll already have the subscription.
I don’t know whether we’re going to drive up to visit him. I missed the last visit to do the flu, and they said he was disappointed I hadn’t come; he wanted someone to talk politics with. I was disappointed, too: I wanted to talk to him about getting a college Tea Party started.
That’s the next step: getting the young people involved. Young Conservatives need to be brave, like Harry Potter. In print, the Boy Wizard was born in 1980 (a year before my co-worker). By the time the novels came out in 1997, his age was comparable to my nephew (1986, two years older than my nephew). By the time the film came out, the movie character’s was two years younger than my nephew. The actor who played Harry is only six months younger than my nephew. For that particular generation of kids, Harry was a same-age hero. Harry grew up with both my co-worker and my nephew.
Due to a lapse in the publication of the books and production of the movies, Harry’s and The Nephew’s official educational adventures will end at about the same time. By the end of each, they will have reached the true threshold of adulthood.
Our muggle world and the Wizarding World face similar dangers. Both worlds face smug, arrogant, and dangerous villains, drunken with their own corruption. It’s all about power. Both rely on magic as a means to justify an end. The Magical World at least relies on gold, which is more realistic than our own world, where we print increasingly worthless paper money and buy and sell on magical credit, where even paper money ceases to change hands.
Harry will face mortal danger this Spring. I don’t know whether my nephew will (I certainly hope not). But many young men and women his age will face life and death. The Harry Potter generation will be fighting a potentially apocalyptic battle generations and generations in the making. But this time, the liberty of Home Front, Hometown Americans is not vouchsafed. Terrorists have already breached our security, illegal immigrants pouring over our borders, and anarchists have control of our government.
Still, like Harry, young people like my nephew have something the terrorists, illegal immigrants, and anarchists don’t; something to live for, and the means to bring those dreams about. When my nephew is finished with his education, he will be a trained engineer, capable of designing and building skyscrapers, tunnels, and bridges. The terrorists and anarchists only know how to blow them up.
Happy 22nd Birthday, Nephew!! We’re proud of you!
posted by Belle | 8:13 PM
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