300 + 24 -- Perfect Number For A Perfect World Part 1

The modern conservative movement is a sad and sorry thing to watch. First off, most of their operatives and deep thinkers absolutely loathe their presumed Presidential candidate, John McCain. I'm sure it pisses them off to no small end that they're either going to have to say and write either veiled racist or veiled sexist remarks and then, when they get called on it, have to try to spin what they said into something that wasn't at all racist or sexist in order to get a guy that they think is a douchebag into the White House. And this is just the latest outrage for them. By now, Iraq was supposed to be the 51st state and we should have been in the process of making Iran the 52nd. Gasoline was supposed to be so cheap that Citgo would give away 5 gallons free with the purchase of a Slurpee. Ted Kennedy should have been the only Democrat left in Congress and that was only so that they could throw stuff at him and heckle him with imitations of his accent whenever he made speeches on the Senate floor. Instead of having to pretend that they are in thrall of the awesomeness that is John McCain, they saw themselves having done away with the 22nd Amendment and now preparing to celebrate George Bush's third term.

Instead, right wingers now live in what, for them at least, is an increasingly nightmarish scenario in which all their theories fail to work out and all their carefully laid plans fail to make the Rapture happen. Thus, they increasingly turn to fiction for validation of their worldview. Movies like Juno and Knocked Up are embraced as signs of the Conservative Ascendancy because the women in those chose not to have abortions. they failed to notice that the main reason that no abortions took place was because, if they had, both movies would have been 20 minutes long. I think my favorite example of taking something apolitical, digesting it and crapping out something conservative was the way they embraced Transformers. Somehow they felt that Optimus Prime was supposed to represent George W. Bush and, I guess, the character played by actress Megan Fox made them think of Dick Cheney.

Now, though, I'm going to comment on the movie 300 and the TV show 24. These are the ones they talk about the most, the ones that not only captured their imaginations but lovingly waterboarded those imaginations until they had been completely broken down.

300, released in theaters last spring, is beloved by conservatives because it involves one of their favorite things: telling a true story while leaving out the stuff that makes them feel uncomfortable so that they can then revel in the bubble created by a new, soothing reality. The movie tells of the famous Battle of Thermopylae in which 300 soldiers of the Greek city-state Sparta teamed up with the armies of other city-states to successfully hold off (for a little while) an attempt by the Persian army to conquer Athens and, eventually, the rest of Greece. One of the reasons this movie was so embraced by the right is that it came out at a time when the Bush administration was pushing hard to be able to wage war against the modern-day Persians in Iran so they hailed it as a piece of propaganda. We all then got to see the hilarious sight of rightwing warbloggers like this guy , people who don't even consider the idea that they should actually enlist in the military and go to Iraq to fight in the war that they support, trying to sound as if they could have been ancient Spartans.

Anyway, as I said, 300 is not reality but rather a movie's cleaned up version of reality. In reality, Spartans were the following things:

1. Gay. Yes folks, Spartan soldiers were encouraged to engage in homosexual relationships with their fellow soldiers.
2. Baby killers. This is mentioned in the movie but was ignored by everyone who felt that this was a movie on which to base your life. When a baby was born, they would check it for birth defects and other imperfections. If they found any they'd chuck the poor little tyke into a ditch.
3. Slave owners. Yes, right wingers, the Spartans you all saw making melodramatic speeches about the importance of defending freedom had slaves that did most of the work that did not involve war or, for the women, making little Spartans.
4. Warmongers. Again, the whole, "We Loves Us Our Freedom," thing that the movie Spartans were always doing was a load of crap. Had they not been fighting with the Athenians against Persia, they would almost certainly have been trying to invade or conquer Athens or some other nearby country. Hell, that's pretty much all the Spartans ever did.

This is getting kind of long so I think I'll break it off here and continue later on in another post later today or tomorrow. Hate to leave you on this nail-biting cliffhanger (Will he or won't he now talk about 24?) but you knew the risks.

Part 2 can be viewed here.