Word: greekness
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...Miller’s “Sin City,” I entered the theater with lofty expectations for high-caliber action and visceral visuals. It is my sad duty to report that what could have been an achievement of epic proportions winds up as a Greek tragedy. Loosely based on the historical battle of Thermopylae, “300” starts with an intriguing premise: A paltry band of Spartan soldiers take on the biggest army the world has ever known, led by the Persian tyrant Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro). Faced with an enemy determined to conquer...
...also not forget that in 1982 there was a good reason Congress overwhelmingly passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was intended to prevent anyone from systematically exposing operatives as part of a campaign to harm national security. In 1975, the Greek terrorist group November 17 assassinated the CIA chief in Athens, not long after he was exposed in the press. In the '70s a former CIA officer, Philip Agee, was systematically exposing CIA personnel overseas, probably at the behest of Cuba. If Agee's campaign had been picked up by the rest of the press, the CIA would have...
...should all hope to die well. By that, I don't mean in the classic Greek sense of dying heroically, as in battle. I'm suggesting a much lower standard: just not dying badly. At a minimum, not dying comically-death by banana peel or pratfall or (my favorite, I confess) onstage, like the actor Harold Norman, killed in 1947 during an especially energetic sword fight in the last scene of Macbeth...
Something very real did happen 25 centuries ago in a narrow pass on Greece's northern coast called Thermopylae--the name means "the hot gates." In August of 480 B.C., a force of about 7,000 Greek soldiers assembled there, including 300 Spartans under the leadership of their king, Leonidas. The Spartans were sick, scary fighters, brutally trained from childhood, the ancient equivalent of special forces. They were there to meet an army of more than 250,000 Persians under the command of King Xerxes...
...odds were ludicrously bad, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Most of the Greeks retreated, but the 300 Spartans, the hard core of the Greek army, chose to fight on, using the natural strategic advantage of the pass. They lasted three days--beyond all hope, beyond what should have been militarily possible--and then they died. Their refusal to surrender their freedom to the Persians inspired the rest of the Greeks, who ultimately rose up as a nation and beat back the invaders...