Sparta

I've been on hiatus, trying to carve out a real life. So lets jump back in with two great tastes that taste, well, like sawdust together.
I like comic books, I like classical history. I found 300 to be luke-warm in my estimation. Yeah, the visuals were pretty awesome, but the corny dialog wasn't comic-corn, it was just corny. But let's get to the meat of the problem: the history. I don't want to nit pick the accuracy of whether or not rhinoceros or elephant platoons made up much of the Persian army (though it was off-putting that Xerxes wasn't bearded) or any of that malarkey; it's a movie, live with it. I want to point out that Sparta is not all that. One gets a lot of right-wing bull crap lately drawing parallels between Sparta and Persia and the U.S. and Iran, and I'm sick of it. Sparta was the North Korea of it's day. All the freedom and democracy and reason that those Spartans were fighting for? Yeah that would be the freedom to not be aloud to leave Sparta except on military expeditions. The Spartan democracy was so wonderful that the massive helot (pretty much slaves) population had to be culled in ritual slaughter to prevent them from destroying the precarious oligarchy of the "citizens" at the top. And the Greek love of reason and logic didn't make it very far into Sparta where citizens were not given any education in arts or literature and were forbidden from any occupation but war (the society was maintained by the aforementioned helot slaves and subject peoples in surrounding towns called perioeci who weren't slaughtered so long as they remained useful). So, war-porn enthusiasts who want to get off on how noble and Spartan we are in America compared to our degenerate middle-eastern foes, I suggest you shut the fuck up, because America isn't Sparta (thank god). America is America where we are fat and lazy and sassy and make movies about Sparta. And if that disappoints you and you really want a Spartan lifestyle of virtue and ass-kicking, the line to join the Marines starts to the left.

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