600
Okay, one more word about the movie 300 (making an even 600). I did finally see it and stand by my earlier remarks. Not surprisingly, I find no fault with my own work. Neat trick.
What I found particularly offensive was the depiction of the Athenians. There is a scene where the Athenian commander says to the Spartans "I thought you were going to bring more soldiers." Leonidas asks the Athenian soldiers "what is your trade?" They answer "potter" etc. The Spartans do the same thing and they all answer "soldier," so Leonidas says "see - I did bring more soldiers than you did."
And that's fine, if the point of the exercise was a study in ironic quasi-humour in non-historical depictions of famous battles. Actually, the Pythons did a more accurate history of the Battle of Pearl Harbor in one of their early episodes.
But Americans have always been the citizen soldiers. From the inception of this great nation, our farmers and fishermen were the volunteer force tat defeated King George's mercenary Hessians. We were the people like the fictional officer Tom Hanks portrays in Saving Private Ryan - what did he do before the war? Does it matter? And the non-fictional men like Dick Winters we see in Band of Brothers. A real American hero, Winters wasn't a full-time soldier before or after the war.
It's the way democracies fight - and win - wars. When our mechanics and schoolteachers fight, they commit completely. And they win.
It's only the fascistically anti-democratic NeoConvicts who desire a permanent warrior class to keep invading other countries indefinitely.
But this is not just about bad history. It's also a bad lesson in current events. We're supposed to understand that the 300 gave up their lives to sound the alarm, bringing the rest of Sparta and Greece together to oppose Xerxes. Which is supposed to also tell us the the grand and glorious NeoConvicts are right to sound the alarm about Islamofascists. Someday, like all those Johnny-come-lately Greeks, we will see that our own Georgie Leonidas tried to help us see how much we needed to fight like, the whole Middle East but we were all pussified and didn't.
Right.
First, the NeoConvicts are about the last people you'll ever see on an actual battlefield. They've taken the art of chickenhawkery to a whole new level. It's Epic Legendary Chickenhawkery. Fron Chicanery who "had priorities" while his generation was spilling blood in Vietnam, to the current crop of College Republicans who think nations are served and saved from places like their mom's basement, the rightists of this Junta aren't about to show the world their waxed six-packs in any battle - hopeless or otherwise.
And second, where does Frank Miller et.al. get off suggesting that the world's most powerful military is the 300 Spartans? How outrageous is that? If they'd wanted to properly distort history to show contemporary events, they'd have shown Rummynidas and Cheneynidas scheming with Georgienidas to lie Sparta into a war of aggression.
Then, Rummynidas would have thrown out allt he Spartan general's plans and only sent 300 to do the work of 30,000. Then, when the 300 were hopelessly embroiled in a fight without end, Georgienidas would have called the rest of Sparta a bunch of Defeatinidases and just kept the 300 in the pass forever.
Look: Spartan history, while instructive, could not have less bearing on current events. The 800 pound gorilla sitting in the middle of this room is Vietnam. The junta spin machine has succeeded in pushing the "this is not Vietnam" meme into the tiny minds of the national media, and that alone should tell us how instructive it really is.
We could use the 'Soviet Union in Afghanistan' but, well, we really are the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and frankly it's more than a little embarrassing.
What I found particularly offensive was the depiction of the Athenians. There is a scene where the Athenian commander says to the Spartans "I thought you were going to bring more soldiers." Leonidas asks the Athenian soldiers "what is your trade?" They answer "potter" etc. The Spartans do the same thing and they all answer "soldier," so Leonidas says "see - I did bring more soldiers than you did."
And that's fine, if the point of the exercise was a study in ironic quasi-humour in non-historical depictions of famous battles. Actually, the Pythons did a more accurate history of the Battle of Pearl Harbor in one of their early episodes.
But Americans have always been the citizen soldiers. From the inception of this great nation, our farmers and fishermen were the volunteer force tat defeated King George's mercenary Hessians. We were the people like the fictional officer Tom Hanks portrays in Saving Private Ryan - what did he do before the war? Does it matter? And the non-fictional men like Dick Winters we see in Band of Brothers. A real American hero, Winters wasn't a full-time soldier before or after the war.
It's the way democracies fight - and win - wars. When our mechanics and schoolteachers fight, they commit completely. And they win.
It's only the fascistically anti-democratic NeoConvicts who desire a permanent warrior class to keep invading other countries indefinitely.
But this is not just about bad history. It's also a bad lesson in current events. We're supposed to understand that the 300 gave up their lives to sound the alarm, bringing the rest of Sparta and Greece together to oppose Xerxes. Which is supposed to also tell us the the grand and glorious NeoConvicts are right to sound the alarm about Islamofascists. Someday, like all those Johnny-come-lately Greeks, we will see that our own Georgie Leonidas tried to help us see how much we needed to fight like, the whole Middle East but we were all pussified and didn't.
Right.
First, the NeoConvicts are about the last people you'll ever see on an actual battlefield. They've taken the art of chickenhawkery to a whole new level. It's Epic Legendary Chickenhawkery. Fron Chicanery who "had priorities" while his generation was spilling blood in Vietnam, to the current crop of College Republicans who think nations are served and saved from places like their mom's basement, the rightists of this Junta aren't about to show the world their waxed six-packs in any battle - hopeless or otherwise.
And second, where does Frank Miller et.al. get off suggesting that the world's most powerful military is the 300 Spartans? How outrageous is that? If they'd wanted to properly distort history to show contemporary events, they'd have shown Rummynidas and Cheneynidas scheming with Georgienidas to lie Sparta into a war of aggression.
Then, Rummynidas would have thrown out allt he Spartan general's plans and only sent 300 to do the work of 30,000. Then, when the 300 were hopelessly embroiled in a fight without end, Georgienidas would have called the rest of Sparta a bunch of Defeatinidases and just kept the 300 in the pass forever.
Look: Spartan history, while instructive, could not have less bearing on current events. The 800 pound gorilla sitting in the middle of this room is Vietnam. The junta spin machine has succeeded in pushing the "this is not Vietnam" meme into the tiny minds of the national media, and that alone should tell us how instructive it really is.
We could use the 'Soviet Union in Afghanistan' but, well, we really are the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and frankly it's more than a little embarrassing.
posted by fiduciary at 1:13 PM
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