More 300 Tom Smith

I sneaked away with my 15 year old son to see 300 and both of us, like Professor Rappaport, enjoyed it quite a bit.  Of course, there were large elements of fantasy.  I doubt the Persians had trained, mutant, giants in chains or supersized war elephants or rhinos in their ranks.  But the battle scenes were stirring, and you can’t beat the last stand at the hot gates for drama.

I find it highly amusing that the usual critics hate the movie so much.  That much more reason to like it, as far as I’m concerned.  If Xerxes had been made to look like Dick Cheney, that no doubt would have redeemed the effort.  The critics are much more predictable even than a battle long since fought and memorialized.

It’s probably too much to hope, but I wonder if the popularity of 300 is not a sign of the times, of a kind of emergence of an articulate, self-conscious counter-counter-culture.  Naive patriotism has suffered through defeat in Vietnam, Carter and Clinton, and now the mess in Iraq, to come out, maybe, as a kind of wised up patriotism.  Anti-war street theater no longer looks daring, intelligent and subversive, but just stoned and stupid.  A Marine in uniform inspires one to think courage, not baby killer.  I’m guessing, but I bet your average internet user in some deep red pocket of a red state could on average hold his own in a discussion of the actual history of the Persian invasion of Greece, with the average reader of the New Yorker, who simply abhors, abhors I tell you, war and that dreadful man Bush.  That darn web, it’s somthin.  The problem for these people is not really the second amendment, but the first.