The Red Skull Scares Me

Confession time: Captain America has never been my favorite superhero. I'm a Marvel boy, tried and true, and even though the X-Men have my heart and most perfectly embody my geekiness, the Avengers, the team that banded together around Captain America and have him as their leader (more or less), are probably my favorite superhero team.

So, as you might imagine, I'm watching the news and the previews of Captain America: The First Avenger pretty intensely.

I don't know if you caught the Super Bowl (I didn't) or the TV commercials (I've been trying to), but there was a spot for Captain America, and it's online. It starts as standard superhero fare -- there's this kind of wimpy soldier who gets put through the ringer, an explosion or two, he get stuck into a tube and comes out all steroidy and pumped up...

And then this guy whips on screen.



The Red Skull scares me. No, more than that: He freaks the hell out of me. It's bad enough that most supervillains have names like Doctor Doom or Darkseid and can blast nuclear endorphins out of their palms, but this guy is an actual Nazi. He shows up in comics wearing a swastika armband. He peppers his speech with references to "the annihilation" and "the future Reich." In a few of the more noiry comics, his I'll-get-you speeches include personal reminisces of him and Hitler.

And this is what I was reading as a ten-year-old.

The Red Skull has always been a serious character. His "skull" used to be a mask, but at some point it became his skull. More recently, he was shown (in Ultimate Avengers) giving a superhero's wife a choice between stabbing him to death with a fork or throwing their infant child out the window. (She chose the latter. He did the former anyway.) He's dabbled in genetic manipulation, social manipulation (he's been elected president and been one of the richest businessmen in the United States) and mind control. He rarely just takes a gun or a bomb and blows up Fort Knox. Instead, he just messes with our heads, which is worse, or quietly plots genocides. He's not just evil. He's creepy.

What do you think -- is the Red Skull just pushing our buttons? Or is he pushing the boundaries of what's socially acceptable?

Last-Minute Preschool

You probably already knew about this -- so, you know, feel free to scoff at my misfortune -- but if you (a) have kids and (b) they’re old enough to go to school, you sort of have to apply to schools before they’re allowed to go there. I don’t know what I was thinking (maybe that we just drive up and drop the kid on the doorstep, like the proverbial stork, but with a 3-year-old?), but apparently I wasn’t thinking very much at all.

So right now, we’re going through the radical first step in sending our toddler to preschool. Which is to decide which preschool to send them to.

I was raised going to public school, but since then, a few things changed. I became Orthodox. Then I married into a pretty hardcore Hasidic family–and by “hardcore,” I mean that I now have relatives I’ve never directly spoken to, because they are women and I am not. For someone like me, who’s always been committed to public education and whose parents and sister work in public schools, it’s a big leap to send my kids, not just to a private nursery school, but to 12 years of a rigorous religious education, followed (probably) by seminary and yeshiva and some sort of religious-indoctrination camp.

But: We are, indeed, Hasidic Jews. And public schools don’t exactly have classes with titles like Intermediate Yiddish and Medieval Commentators to Jewish Scripture. If you’re committed to a lifestyle, you gotta go all the way.

My wife -- who, it should be noted, is both more comfortable with these things, and smarter than me -- told me to chill out. (She says that a lot.) In the time from my first IM (from work, of course, which went roughly: Matthue: School deadliens R like 3 wks ago!?! what do we do???) until I got home, she’d called up a dozen relatives and half a dozen schools, established that we were in hot water, but not entirely washed up, and that many schools were understanding of first-time parents and had flexible acceptance schedules.

In the meantime, since learning that we still had a choice, we’ve been trying to prepare ourselves for that eventual choice. We’re scheduled for a bunch of interviews, and we’re still  scheduling a few more. We’ve both made lists of the top three things we want in a school. (Well, my wife has. I’m still working on it.)

Here are hers:

1. The school shouldn’t care about surface Orthodox stuff (like asking “Do you wear stockings all the time?” or “Do you own a TV?,” even though we don’t) above basic things, like teaching the rudiments of kashrut, or having caring and involved teachers.
2. It doesn’t have to be a Lubavitch school, but it should have some sort of Lubavitch influence (She and her family are Lubavitch Hasidim).
3. It should be a place where people are warm and friendly (which seems like a given, but it never is).

I haven’t figured out mine yet, except that I’m really determined to find a school with a good secular studies program. Not like those scary Jewish day schools that start from first grade in grooming and prepping their kids to get into an Ivy (not like I even necessarily want my kids to attend an Ivy–we’ve seen what happens when Orthodox Jews show up in those schools), but one where English classes read real books and science is more than just “rain makes the flowers grow.”