300(the movie) Hidden Message?

[ls317]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/movies/05spartans.html?ei=5065&en=e322dab702dce873&ex=1173762000&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

Three weeks ago a handful of reporters at an international press junket here for the Warner Brothers movie “300,” about the battle of Thermopylae some 2,500 years ago, cornered the director Zack Snyder with an unanticipated question.

“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” one of them asked.

The questioner, by Mr. Snyder’s recollection, insisted that Mr. Bush was Xerxes, the Persian emperor who led his force against Greek’s city states in 480 B.C., unleashing an army on a small country guarded by fanatical guerilla fighters so he could finish a job his father had left undone. More likely, another reporter chimed in, Mr. Bush was Leonidas, the Spartan king who would defend freedom at any cost.

[hippiechick]

1. Caligula gets my vote.

How anyone with more than 2 active brain cells can even pretend that Bush is a defender of anything other than his own warped little ego is beyond me.


:shrug:

[nashville_brook]

2. i've read recently that frank miller is known to be quite conservative

[Hosnon]

3. I find it hard to believe that a Spartan would be very concerned with freedom.

My selection would be Xerxes simply be elimination.

[shain from kane]

4. Bush is a Trojan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_%28condoms%29

[Rockholm]

6. A used one at that.

[EstimatedProphet]

7. Bush's father should have worn a Trojan.

[Uncle Joe]

10. Do you mean like the condoms? n/t

[shain from kane]

14. Conservative + dumb = condom. It fits.

[sofa king]

5. He's neither one. Those guys were responsible, competent leaders.

Leonidas and Xerxes actually fought instead of going AWOL. They shared the risks of their men in battle instead of sending them to die from far away. They adequately supplied and cared for their soldiers.

They all do have one thing in common: Leonidas, Xerxes, and George W. Bush all detested democracies and considered the voice of the common people a threat to their own power. All subjects of the Persian empire were effectively considered servants to the satraps and the Emperor. The Spartans enslaved four-fifths of their population, the helots, and one reason why the Spartans could muster only 300 Spartiates to defend "freedom for the Greeks," as their hypocritical slogan went, was because of the constant fear of a helot uprising.

And then there's George W. Bush's America of the 21st Century, run by a bunch of Greek scholars who are trying to treat their people like helots while destroying their empire like the Athenians--the worst of all worlds.

[cgrindley]

8. Frank Miller's work is too incoherent and dumb

to contain much of a recognizably cogent political message. EG Sin City.

[unpossibles]

9. they're both morons

the comic started in 1998 and was inspired by a movie from the 1960's.

[michreject]

11. Means one thing.

ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ

[Marie26]

12. More like Ricky Bobby.

Did anyone else think "Talledega Nights" was a deep metaphor for the Bush Administration? Just me? OK then. I think comparing Bush to either Xerxes or Leonidas gives him waaaay too much credit.

[orestes]

13. 300

I'm not quite sure I get this. Leonidas isnt Bush, nor is Xerxes. Leonidas is Leonidas and Xerxes is Xerxes.

Were the Spartans concerned with freedom? Yes. Not in the sense that they wanted to preserve democracy (and Im sure Athens wouldnt have appreciated their patronization), but in the sense that they, and the rest of the mainland greeks, didnt want to become just another far flung province of the Persian Empire, like what happened to their Anatolian kin.

As for the rest of that article, what can you say? Frank Miller didn't put "Molon labe" into the Spartans mouths, Herodotus did, and I'm not sure how one could make the case that a greek historian who has been dead for 2500 years is a stooge for neoconservatives. Nor did Miller or the movies Director invent the idea that Spartan women spurred their men on to war. It was a common thing for the women to say to the men as they left for battle, "Come home with this shield, or upon it."

[UTUSN]

15. "Leonidas isnt Bush, nor is Xerxes. Leonidas is Leonidas and Xerxes is Xerxes."

Thank you for that. Tweety and other Shrubaholics have been pimping historical comparisons like, "Shrub is CHURCHILL, Shrub is TRUMAN" forever. Shrub is just pathetic-little-Shrub.

For a true NeoCon, there's Victor Davis HANSON, a Classics professor, whom CHEENEE paraded around for reporters as his "guru" in the run-up to the Iraq Attack. HANSON provided historical examples for what the CHEENEE NeoCons wanted to do anyway, and he pushed the theme of "perpetual war to keep the State perpetually rejuvenated".

The Classics Departments have long been the home for falsely mysterious types: NIETZSCHE, Leo STRAUSS, PAGLIA, and this dude HANSON. They are regarded as strange, original, wacky mavericks, but when you strip away the mystery, they immersed themselves in the ancient mind and pre-Xtian values.

Here're links you are probably already familiar with, and welcome to DU:

Here's HANSON giving marching orders for the Iraq attack:

********QUOTE*******

Full HANSON archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

Nat'l Cathedral: (History or Hysteria?) http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson032803.asp
.... In disgust at the hysteria, I took a drive to Washington to the National Cathedral on Sunday. Big mistake. All except one of the entrances were closed due to security concerns. I walked in under the wonderful sculptures of Frederick Hart, an authentic American genius who almost single-handedly restored classical realism to American sculpture. A small statue of a kneeling Lincoln, who sent thousands into battle to eradicate slavery, was in the corner. A plaque of quotations from Churchill, about the need for sacrifice in war, was on the wall. So I was feeling somewhat good again — until I heard the pious sermon on “shock and awe.” In pompous tones the minister was deprecating the war effort, calling down calumnies upon the administration, and alleging the immoral nature of our nation at war.

Such a strange man at such a strange time, I thought. His entire congregation, by its own admission, is in danger from foreign terrorists (why else bar the gates?). His church is itself a monument to the utility of force for moral purposes. His own existence as a free-speaking, freely worshiping man of God is possible only thanks to the United States military — whose present mission he was openly deriding at the country’s national shrine. ....



Mexifornia: http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html
Thousands arrive illegally from Mexico into California each year—and the state is now home to fully 40 percent of America’s immigrants, legal and illegal. They come in such numbers because a tacit alliance of Right and Left has created an open-borders policy, aimed at keeping wage labor cheap and social problems ever fresh, so that the ministrations of Chicano studies professors, La Raza activists, and all the other self-appointed defenders of group causes will never be unneeded. ....

And while the Democrats think the illegals will eventually turn into liberal voters, the actual Hispanic vote so far remains just a small fraction of the eligible Mexican-American pool: of the 14,173 residents of the central California town of Hanford who identified themselves as Latino (34 percent of the town’s population), for example, only 770 are registered to vote.

My sleepy hometown of Selma, California, is in the dead center of all this. ....It is a schizophrenic existence, living at illegal immigration’s intersection. Each week I pick up trash, dirty diapers, even sofas and old beds dumped in our orchard by illegal aliens—only to call a Mexican-American sheriff who empathizes when I show him the evidence of Spanish names and addresses on bills and letters scattered among the trash. ....

Yet I also walk through vineyards at 7 AM in the fog and see whole families from Mexico, hard at work in the cold—while the native-born unemployed of all races will not—and cannot—prune a single vine. By natural selection, we are getting some of the most intelligent and industrious people in the world, people who have the courage to cross the border, the tenacity to stay—and, if not assimilated, the potential to cost the state far, far more than they can contribute. ....

Our elites do not understand just how rare consensual government is in the history of civilization, and therefore they wrongly think that they can instill confidence by praising the other, less successful, cultures that aliens are escaping from rather than explaining the dynamism and morality of the civilization that they have voted for with their feet. ....

********UNQUOTE*********


Here's a whimsical, but prescient, capturing of what goes on with the Classics types:

******QUOTE*****

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Music: Stephen Sondheim Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim Book: Larry Gelbart + Burt Shevelove Film: 1966

"Bring Me My Bride" (I, Miles Gloriosus)
http://libretto.musicals.ru/text.php?textid=5&language=1

....Let haste be made,
I cannot be delayed!
There are lands to conquer,
Cities to loot
And people to degrade!

SOLDIERS
Look at those arms!
Look at that chest!
Look at them!

MILES
Not to mention the rest!
Even I am impressed. ....

SOLDIERS
Look at that foot!
Look at that heel!
Mark the magnificent muscles of steel!

MILES
I am my ideal! ....

MILES
COURTESANS
I, Miles Gloriosus,
I, Paragon of virtues,
Him, Miles Gloriosus
Him, Paragon of virtues,

SOLDIERS
A man among men!
With sword and with pen!

MILES
I, in war the most admired,
In wit the most inspired,
In love the most desired,
In dress the best displayed,
I am a parade! ....

*****UNQUOTE****