The Weekly Screed (#944)

Siberia for naughty boys

by David Benjamin

“I had a doctor that gave me a letter — a very strong letter on the heels.” 

— Donald John Trump

MADISON, Wis. — If, around 1960, I’d been a kid in the Soviet Union, it would have been my own private Siberia.

If I’d been a kid in France, Devil’s Island. 

In India, the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Growing up in a Wisconsin hamlet, the most dread exile with which my exasperated mother could threaten me was “military school.” No more mustached octogenarian nuns, no more kindly Father Mulligan at St. Mary’s School. Instead, screaming drill sergeants who look like Jack Webb. Crawling through obstacle-course muck seeded with broken glass beneath barbed wire and live-ammo gunfire. Sleepless nights of terror interrupted only by the occasional visit from a horny upperclassman for a few minutes of casual sodomy. 

Military school was every pissed-off parent’s Plan B. There was barely a boy in America who hadn’t been told that his latest outrage was — finally — the Last Straw, that he was incorrigible and that the only faint hope that he could be rescued from a life of crime, over which he teetered like a drunk on a window-ledge, was incarceration in uniform, with reveille at 5 a.m., with curfews and bed-checks and marching marching marching, at a military academy, preferably in some skeeter-infested pre-industrial hellhole like Valdosta, or Mississippi.

Whenever I misbehaved with a certain measure of defiance against a mother who was barely holding herself together — much less three children who had never conceded our autonomy to her authority — Mom dredged up the old military-school ultimatum. My response, after the 20th or 30th empty threat, was sarcasm. I dug up my latest copy of Boys Life and pointed out ads for the penitentiaries where I’d like to be sentenced. 

“Mom, mom, look at this one! The Attila Academy. ‘Turn your barbarian into a conqueror!’ That’s where I wanna go. Wait, wait. This is even better, Mom. The Heinrich Himmler Command School! It’s in Paraguay. Mom, can I go to Paraguay? Can I, huh, huh?”

In those days, every kid I ever knew had been threatened with military school. But none of us actually went. Some of us committed crimes later in life, assault, rape, mayhem, murder. Some of us went to prison. But none of us were bad enough— mean, bloodthirsty, sadistic, sociopathic — to end up in military school. A kid who went to military school had to have committed offenses that normal bad kids couldn’t imagine, sins that made you lose faith in Jesus, like stuffing a lit firecracker down Fluffy the cat’s throat and giggling while the fur flew, or setting the garage on fire while blowtorching the little Negro girl from down the block. 

So, the question hangs over all of us, over a whole aging generation of mischievous but redeemable boys: Why? 

Why did so many of us vote for one of those monsters who got sent off to military school. 

Donald J. Trump, New York Military Academy, 1959-64. 

Consider the context. His old man was a racist slumlord, a loyal member of the Ku Klux Klan, a serial evicter of destitute mothers and starving infants, a man in whom the milk of human kindness would have triggered anaphylactic shock. And yet, this rent-sucking vampire found little Donald so insufferable that he sentenced the kid to five years in the barracks and bowels of Kid Alcatraz.

Now, of course, there are some kids, raised in military families, captivated by the martial romance of war movies like The Sands of Iwo Jimaand They Died with Their Boots On, or addicted to Call of Duty, who actually want to dress up in in brass buttons and epaulets, and salute their math teacher. But this is abnormal. Most kids want to be  free. Besides, judging from his own flirtation with the Vietnam draft, “Cadet Bone Spurs” doesn’t fit the gung-ho Citadel profile. 

(I mean, really? Bone spurs? Diagnosed by a storefront podiatrist in Queens? Ridiculous. If you’re gonna dodge the draft with any kind of dignity, why not claim color blindness, or diverticulitis, or nice case of epilepsy? Seizures are easy to fake! Even better, why not just tell Selective Service what’s really wrong? After all, who wants to share a foxhole in the A Shau Valley with a malignant narcissist?)

So, we know. Trump got banished from regular school because nobody there could stand him, and his parents, as flawed as they obviously were, didn’t mind him disappearing from home for five entire formative years. This was a message which, inexplicably, few people have heeded in the years since 1964. It was a red flag that flew right over the red MAGA caps of 62,984,828 voters in 2016.

I’ve seen the crowds at the guy’s rallies. There are lots of men in that screaming throng — I can tell, because I’ve been there, done that — who were more than once in their childhood threatened by desperate moms with military school. These guys know what they did to deserve that threat and how they had to behave to prevent their deportation from home and hearth to naughty-boy Siberia.

Shouldn’t some of these guys, if only to honor the worst moments of their misspent youth, say to themselves: “Jeez, I know what I did. What the hell did hedo?”

It had to worse.

Why did a kid — who reminds us regularly (although the records have been sealed) that he was the best student, best athlete and highest IQ in all five boroughs, with great flowing gobs of gorgeous hair and erections that made thoroughbred stallions envious and debutantes swoon — get sent to military school? What despicable outrage drove Donny’s mom and criminal dad to flush the bad seed straight from their lives and into durance vile?

And then, if he was that rotten as a kid, rotten enough to get bundled off to military school, and rotten enough to blackmail Dr. Braunstein into trumping up a phony medical deferment to keep him out of the real military, and subsequently rotten enough to slander an actual military hero disabled by five years of torture (John McCain) in the war he skipped, rotten enough to declare that his Pentagon generals are “dopes” and “losers,” and even so rotten as to slur a gold-star mother whose son (Capt. Humayun Khan) was killed while protecting his fellow soldiers from suicide attackers in Iraq, why would anyone with any reverence for America’s GIs, sailors, fliers and Marines — and all those honored dead who lie “between the crosses, row on row” — dress up in polyester camouflage, wave a flag and cheer for this kid? 

Much less vote for him?

And why twice?