Kieran Healy Is a Prophet

"I just watched the trailer for 300... My feeling is that the likes of Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson are already drafting the flinty Op-Ed pieces they’ll publish the week the film comes out. They can add themselves to the wide variety of people who have been inspired by the story of Thermopylae. It’s all about juggling the analogy to make sure that you get to be one of the lonely 300, and not the vast invading foreign army."

-- Kieran Healy, October 5, 2006

"I went to the Hollywood Premier of the "300" last night... Why—beside the blood-spattering violence and often one-dimensional characterizations—will some critics not like this, despite the above caveats? Ultimately the film takes a moral stance, Herodotean in nature: there is a difference, an unapologetic difference between free citizens who fight for eleutheria and imperial subjects who give obeisance. We are not left with the usual postmodern quandary 'who are the good guys' in a battle in which the lust for violence plagues both sides. In the end, the defending Spartans are better, not perfect, just better than the invading Persians, and that proves good enough in the end. And to suggest that ambiguously these days has perhaps become a revolutionary thing in itself."

-- Victor Davis Hanson, March 6, 2007 (via)