Band of Brothers, Part 2

Ok, so it's been quite some time since my last blog. I can chalk that up to general laziness, but also a good bit of busy-ness regarding school reading and, of course, my precept paper. "Justice in the Oresteia;" I imagine it's not a gripping read.

Anyway, I decided to get back into it this weekend, seeing as I'm at home and have a nice, convenient way to write and upload. I really should be reading my Tocqueville, but I'm a bit too rowdy for that.

As promised, I am now returning to Band of Brothers. Last time I wrote about Soble as a guy who tried but didn't really make the cut. This time I think I'll write about Nixon as a guy who makes the cut but doesn't really try.

Note: I realize that most of the character issues I'm going to bring up here actually don't happen until near the end of the series, so if you haven't seen them all, dad , you might not want to read all of this just yet.

Nixon is an interesting character because he's a rich boy in the army, and as such he demonstrates an certain facet of the personal characteristics that go hand-in-hand with being well-off.

One gets the sense that Nixon is of a different sort of man than Winters from the very beginning. Winters seems disciplined and duty-bound; the sort of man who leads from the front for the simple reason that it can't be done effectively from the rear, the first in and the last out. Nixon seems like the kind of guy who would rather shrug off actual combat and lead from a bunker behind friendly lines; he seems like the kind of officer who would rather discuss the merits of any specific strategy than actually implement it. From the first few episodes, perhaps most notably in his reaction toward Soble, Nixon seems to be much more aware of the army systems and their functionality than Winters. Nixon seems to constantly question and complain about his particular situation, with what seems to be a partial attitude of "I could do a better job than whoever's calling the shots," and he's far more likely to bend the rules to suit his own desires. He's the kind of man who follows only the parts of the rule set that he understands; those rules he does not like, or simply thinks are silly, he does not heed.

For example, he's one of the few characters who is ever seen drinking with any amount of regularity. Sure, the enlisted men would never pass up alcohol if they could manage to get some, but Nixon goes out of his way to get it, to the point where he ends up embarrassing himself more than once. He's likely to sleep in late and roll into his meetings unshaven, with a wrinkled uniform, because he's an officer and he can afford to. And later, he gets demoted for his lackluster war-performance, but he doesn't care much because his wife decided to divorce him (Sidenote: any woman who would divorce her husband while he's actually out on the battlefield, defending the lives of innocent people, is an absolute bitch).

This last illustration is the most interesting to me: in the middle of a war, in which he could conceivable be killed at any moment, he's preoccupied with the fact that his wife is leaving him and is taking his dog with her. This seems completely absurd to me, that a man who is daily thrown into numerous life-threatening situations is more worried about being alone than of staying alive.

I wonder how much this sentiment is actually held by people, and specifically by men. One could easily make the case that if Nixon is fighting for his home and his country, then if his home is destroyed by his wife's departure he no longer has any personal reason to fight. I can see how this demoralization would negatively affect his attitude. At the same time, he's fighting a war that needs to be fought and won, regardless of his current personal issues.

I wonder if we as Christians often make the same mistake; we let our desires and performance be regulated by our circumstances. We say "oh, God can't possibly expect me to witness to my friends because my girlfriend just dumped me," or something along those lines. So often, I think that my own personal suffering justifies my actions to make other people's lives worse, and that they should "understand" and not be upset because my foot hurts or my dog died or my car needs a new muffler. And as offensive as this is toward people, I think I end up doing it most often to God, who is the one person who can claim both that He fully understands my pain, and that He will never treat me the way I treat Him in return. It's pretty selfish, when you come right down to it.

The other interesting idea I get from Nixon is the issue of education. As I wrote earlier, Nixon seems to be the type of person who is more interested in the theory of warfare than in the actual practice of it. I think this is a snare of education, and it is especially dangerous to Christians who pursue the intellectual route. People get so caught up in reading and contemplating (and writing, ), that they forget that there's actually a war going on between Good and Evil. I know it is certainly a tendency for me to get caught up in theory to the degree that my practice suffers greatly. Rather than deal with envy or anger or lust, I can spend endless hours devising excellent plans to deal with them, all of which involve "starting tomorrow." There's an air of cowardice in this tendency, that I would rather create the plan than carry it out. At the end of the day, the man who works steadily gets the job done, while the theory jock gets fat and bald but some how manages to still feel superior to the other.

Christian men, like Nixon, need to be willing to get their hands dirty, even if it means getting shot at and bloodied in the process.

I have no idea when my next post will be, but hopefully after school's out my ability (and interest) in writing will pick up again.