When the banana company arrived, however, the local functionaries were replaced by dictatorial foreigners whom Mr. Brown brought to live in the electrified chicken yard so that they could enjoy, as he explained it, the dignity that their status warranted and so that they would not suffer from the heat and the mosquitoes and the countless discomforts and privations of the town. The old policemen were replaced by hired assassins with machetes. During that time a brother of the forgotten Colonel Magnifico Visbal was taking his seven-year-old grandson to get a soft drink at one of the pushcarts on the square and because the child accidentally bumped into a corporal of police and spilled the drink on his uniform, the barbarian cut him to pieces with his machete, and with one stroke he cut off the head of the grandfather as he tried to stop him. The whole town saw the decapitated man pass by as a group of men carried him to his house, with a woman dragging the head along by it's hair, and the bloody sack with the pieces of the child.

This is only the first of several atrocities committed by "the banana company" in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The banana company, I suspect, is a thinly disguised version of United Fruit, which ran Guatemala for many years. But there's no shortage of American-owned companies causing havoc in Latin America over the past hundred years, and Maquez is probably writing about all of them.

America's actions in Latin America, from Woodrow Wilson on, are a blight on our history. We first sent troops to Argentina in 1890. We put down a black workers revolt on Hati in 1891. We sized Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898; we still blockade one and hold the other. Truman University has compiled a history of our interventions, and it's chalk full of words rebellions surprised, elected leaders overthrown, dictators propped up, and civilians massacred. In the last century, the list of years when we did _not_ invade one country or another is shorter than the list of years we did. The was not a single year when we did not have troops engaged in operations somewhere on that continent.

Of course, our first and most effective invasion of a Central American nation was the 1846 Mexican War. President Polk's land grab...

Sorry. History lesson mode _off_. I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on how much our actions do affect other people in the world.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Faced with public ire over racy language, explicit scenes and skin-baring outfits, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed on Tuesday to fine radio and television broadcasters and personalities as much as $3 million a day for airing indecent entertainment.

In the 99-1 vote, only Sen. John Breaux [D-LA] pointed out, "[the bill] deals with communications and media issues and should not have been attached to a national security and defense bill."

Anyone remember a few months ago, when congress was trying to kill the new FCC regulations allowing media conglomerates to swallow up more local staions and papers? Y'know, the only good communications legislation of the millenium? Well, it's included in the measure, but will probably get lost in the confrence committee.

Hickville Dispach©

So I says to myself, "You've got only a few minutes, but you need to get some more InappropriateContent up there. Where can I go for guaranteed idiocy?" Why, our Hickville Dispach© standard-bearer, Salt Lake City's second-best newspaper (after this) the Salt Lake Tribune.

And, sure enough, the front page of the June 21 has an article on Hillcrest High School that seems a mite familiar.

From left, Ryan Cheek, Cody McCook, Samantha Harman,
Alivia Huffman, Jessica Hunter and Michael Kaneko
show off T-shirt messages that have landed
some students at the Midvale school in hot water.
(Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Sure enough, this is the exact same high school and the exact same tee-shirt from the last Dispach© covered more than a month ago. Seems Hillcrest administration, previously noted for banning "Queers Kick Ash" tee shirts has been taking swipes at anti-war tees for over a year:

The crackdown also extended to anti-war T-shirts with slogans such as "Drop Doughnuts, Not Bombs" and "No Blood for Oil." School officials concede that they discouraged students from wearing anti-war T-shirts -- especially immediately after U.S. troops invaded Iraq.

I'll not comment, except for one more excerpt:

Tom Hutton, an attorney for the Virginia-based National School Boards Association, says judges consider two avenues of legal thought when it comes to "T-shirt jurisprudence."

I know what avenuse of thought I'd be considering if I ever had to consider "T-shirt jurisprudence," and none of them are legal.

Books, Books, Books

I don't know who Julia Ruben is, but I don't like her. Her name, scratched out, is on the title page of my copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's' One Hundred Years of Solitude——a cheap paperback I got from the professor-turned-librarian at the one room library in Fleischmanns, NY, in exchange for that weeks issue of The Nation, which in turn was purchased in Philly for the long bus ride up, during which there was a layover in New York City's Port Authority bus terminal, where I ate my first New York street vendor hot dog, a rite of passage for those of us whose only knowledge of the city on the Hudson comes from Woody Allen movies and Law & Order. (The former better than the latter, but new installments of both arriving with the same clockwork regularity.) I have since discovered that the real way to lay claim to New York is to go to Central Park early in the morning and drink coffee, eat an orange, cup of yogurt, and read that days New York Times at a leisurely pace.

I have also developed the aforementioned grudge against Ms. Julia Ruben. In addition to her name on the title page, she has gone over Marquez's text (or, to be perfectly accurate, Gregory Rabassa's translation thereof) and circled, underlined or highlighted various sentences, seeming at random. One some pages, the margins are interrupted by incomprehensible scribbles. ("blue shirt"--whose? Certainly no one in the novel wears one.) Meanwhile, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is highlight-free and mediocre at best. Well, not that bad, really; but it is about perhaps the most dramatized period in American literature and film and New York is certainly the most dramatized city; and it's a thinly-disguised auto-biography to boot. Solitude, by contrast, is endlessly inventive and rather far from the familiar Latin world of Graham Greene and movies staring Gael Garcia Bernal (I wonder if he was named for Marquez).

So I have obviously been doing a lot of reading. Having actually read Burroughs and Kerouac, I find they're not my favorite authors. Must read Ginsburg, but am afraid I will become disillusioned with the Beats entirely. Or is Vonennegut one? (Here I have deleted the rest of a substantial reading list. For a country with no Great Novel, the number of Great American Novelists I haven't read is staggeringly long. Instead of College Educated, I shall become Well Read. Both are useless distinctions anyway.)

I will never read a Bad Novel again. I made this vow on page ten of Richard Preston's The Cobra Event. It is now clear to me that if you have read one novel about a genetically engineered virus being unleashed by terrorists, you have read them all, and it's a subject better addressed by Star Trek at that.

Flipping through Cobra Event, some unintended humor:

It looked no different to Hopkins than any other string of genetic code. The human mind can't read the text of life as easily as it can read Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is meant to be performed, and those who claim to read him "easily" are usually missing the point. But flipping to the back of his book, I discover that Richard Preston is a contributor to The New Yorker. I should, as they say, have known.

So the novels of this century——Capote to Vidal——have squeezed out my Blogging time, which George Pacher has pointed out is worthless anyway. And it's just been too depressing recently. Apparently Bush has some schysters come up with a legal case excusing torture. At least Nixon only broke people's stuff, not their kneecaps! No more of this poison, not now: back to books.

My roomie is taking a high school level American Literature course. Test question #163:

The subject of Whitman's poems was:

a)modern technology
b)every aspect of life
c)transcendentalism
d)love

I grab my copy of Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, which has several excerpts from Leaves of Grass, and read from "I Sing the Body Electric." Then I inform anyone in the general vicinity that "'every aspect of life' is High School English code for "queers and prostitutes.'"

It is very important to remember that Whitman was also a poet of:

a)rural New England life
b)the self
c)order and reason
d)great intellect"

My first reaction is panic——all those high school freshman, America's Youth, under the impression that oneself, reason and intellect are mutually exclusive. A sudden, urgent longing to live in a shack in Montanta, write a manifesto, mail-bomb Mailer. But then I relax. As no one has explained to America's Youth why it is "very important" to remember anything at all about Whitman, they won't, and thus their education will leave few lasting disabilities. The right conclusion for the wrong reasons: a peculiarly American talent, and something, I suspect, that Ms. Julia Rubin would be quite good at.

Darwin's Revenge

Reagan's viewing attracted tens of thousands of mourners. Traffic was so bad it scared even L.A. drivers.

In Crown of Slaves, an novel by David Weber and Eric Flint, the professor Web Du Havel speculates that nations require traditions; something to rally around; a unifying force. These can be a revered constitution or a monarchy, it doesn't really matter. It strikes me that these traditions are even more arbitrary than Weber would have it, and that they also need to be occasionally renewed. These traditions have a shelf-life. They eventually either become so overwhelming as to be meaningless, as seems to be happening to the founding fathers (James W. Lowen, a former professor of race relations at U. Vermont, spent eight years writing a book on this) or fade into obscurity.

A note: the more arbitrary these traditions are, the longer they seem to last. The Tower of London's ravens are older than our constitution now, and still have more meaning. Far more people visit the Liberty Bell than Constitution Hall, and the buildings are mere blocks apart. They're also more localized. Who in Mississippi cares if the battleship New Jersey fights in the next war? Who in New Jersey cares about The Days of '47.

So, to remain unified, countries must occasionally add new traditions, revise their national character. The Civil War added a unity that wasn't present before to our national tradition. The second world war a sense of righteousness. We've also added smaller traditions, like the aforementioned New Jersey.

Weber and Flint's absent-minded professor of political theory calls himself a conservative "only in the ancient sense ... that societies are organisms, not machines, and political change is like a surgery, not like replacing a broken part." This social evolution is present in America, like anywhere else, and a function of the same process that have remade our national culture as something unrecognizable to the Founding Fathers.

Like all change, this process can only be bad if we do not understand it.

Greener Grass

The first in what will hopefully be a tradition of guest editorials from people you have never heard of.

Ever.

The U.S. recently issued a stop-loss order for many of our forces in Iraq, one that affects a lot of the Guard and Reserve troops stationed there. One of the proposed solutions is the creation of a new division of regulars, and I'd like to post Julie Cochrane's views on the stop-loss order, the new division proposal, and the world as a chess board:

While it is completely true that there aren't the divisions sitting around at home to send, and that that *is* part of the reason for stop loss, remedying those problems is not an intuitively obvious endeavor.

Others have noted it takes 3 years to run up a new division.

One of the reasons, as I understand it, the administration has been saying, "We'll tell you when we need more troops, thanks," is *NOT* that they're trying to pretend things are hunky dory at the risk of military lives.

The reason is that they think they can redistribute the troops they've got, not immediately, but faster than they can run up a new division.

They'd need stop loss right now *even if* they decided we needed a bigger military. The reason is the lag time if you run up new troops.

But it looks like they're looking at some of our deployments around the world and reevaluating whether we need to keep troops there, and figuring that when they shift around the bodies they've already got, they're covered.

But there's lag time for both options.

It's been pointed out that the administration, before 9/11, was planning more cuts----well, it matters a lot *which* cuts and *where* your troops are and how much teeth you've got versus tail.

One of the things Bush ran on, which makes the pre-9/11 cuts he wanted make sense in context, was that the military was deployed in places it didn't need to be anymore, that certain kinds of missions were not serving the vital interests of the US.

Bush's problem with nation-building is not that it was an inherently bad thing, but that it was code for taking such missions willy-nilly without a strategic reason.

Look at the world like a big chess board, although the rules work differently and there are more than two players. There are a lot of hostile pieces you want to take out, but you have to worry about where all your pieces are, and what's covering your pieces, and what they're covering, and what's covering the hostile pieces.

Stick an airliner fused with a bomb on the board in Afghanistan, a whirling atom fused with a bomb on the board in Iran, an airliner fused with a bomb on the board in Saudi, a whirling atom fused with a missile on the board in North Korea, a bomb on Syria, a bomb on Libya, a bomb on Palestine, a bomb fused with an atom on Pakistan, a pack of whirling atoms fused with missiles on the board in China, chem/bio hazard logo fused with a bomb on Iraq, and a pack of whirling atoms fused with missiles in Russia and Ukraine, stick a whip fused with a pair of shackles on Sudan.

There's the major hostile pieces, as of 9/11.

Now, stick a king on Taiwan, a king on South Korea, a king on Western Europe, a king on Japan, a king on Israel, a pack of kings on CONUS, a pack of kings in the Oceans, and a king under an oil well on Saudi. Those are the major friendly strategic interests/major honor obligations.

Now, we go to what's covering what in the game.

First, stuff protecting the hostile pieces from us:

Afghanistan is covered by no major pieces.

Saudi is covered by the (neutral, can be pushed either way, but vital) oil well piece. China is covered by the same missile/atom pieces that sit as hostiles, and endangers the king on Taiwan. North Korea is covered by it's threat to the king in South Korea and by the missile/atom pieces in China---only to a tiny extent by its threat to the kings on CONUS. Iraq and Iran are covered by no major pieces. Russia/Ukraine's missile/atom pieces are mostly not in play at this time--not threatening nor threatened, but could potentially be activated by a really dumb move on our side.

Palestine, Syria, Sudan, and Libya are covered by no major pieces, but also pose minimal threats to any of the kings *but* Israel.

Now, to what friendlies are covering the hostiles:

Put a big ship piece in each ocean, and a huge pack of missile/atom pieces in CONUS. Put a dollar sign covering Russia/Ukraine, China, Israel, Pakistan, and Saudi. Put a rising sun covering Japan, and a star of David covering Israel. Put a euro and a euroGI covering Europe, and a SKGI covering South Korea. Taiwan is covered, thinly, by the ship pieces and missile/atoms in CONUS. Iran is covered by a small icon of a mob with rocks. Europe, Japan, and South Korea are also covered by USGIs. There are some "free" USGI counters in CONUS.

Saudi is covered by USGIs, but only threatened by Iraq, as is Kuwait, which has about half a king and a tiny oil well.

Pakistan is covered by a USGI counter combined with an icon for a road pointing at Afghanistan.

The USGIs in Europe, Japan, South Korea are largely redundant compared to the threat level.

The only cost to wiping out the airliner/bomb piece on Afghanistan is the cost of moving a USGI counter there.

The only cost to wiping out the bomb/atom counter in Iran is the cost of moving a USGI counter there, *BUT* it might waste a counter as the mob icon may spontaneously take the hostile piece out of play.

The costs of wiping out the hostile counters on China are huge, or even of reinforcing the king on Taiwan---the pieces there, hostile and friendly, are mostly forced stagnant by each other right now.

Wiping out the hostile counter on North Korea would require sacrificing the king in South Korea. Possibly a good move at some point, but not without significant cost.

Wiping out the hostile piece on Saudi would kill the king under the oil well piece, sacrifice the USGI pieces covering Kuwait, and undermine all the King pieces on CONUS and the ship pieces all over the board and the USGI pieces all over the board, ultimately.

Wiping out the hostile piece on Iraq renders the USGI pieces in Saudi redundant, removes the hostile piece from play, and stabilized the king pieces on Saudi and the half-king and tiny oil well counter on Kuwait. Surrounding Iraq are tiny road counters in Turkey, Saudi, Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf. All but the gulf take *at least* dollar counters to activate---Kuwait takes the smallest dollar counter.

Keep in mind that *any* hostile pieces can, left in play, expand and upgrade. The particular hostile piece in Iraq is in danger of upgrading, as are the hostiles in China, Libya, North Korea, and Iran.

After taking the Afghanistan hostiles out of play, Iraq is the next best hostile to take out in a risks/benefits analysis. It's not the *only* next possible play, but it's the best one even if it is a relatively small hostile piece.

Making the play also doesn't rule out taking other hostile pieces out of play at a later date----it's just the move that the friendly side chose *this* turn.

-----------------

Anyway, after all that long description of the state of the board at 9/11 and the next two friendly moves, the question at hand is why the friendly side isn't activating more "free" USGI counters in CONUS.

The answer is that not only would it take dollar counters out of play, it would also take longer than moving rather redundant and superfluous USGI counters around from other places on the board.

We've got USGI counters in places where they're not really required to effectively cover those kings. Playing a good game means we don't just leave them there and forget them. If they're not needed to cover where they are, and they can be used to take out a hostile piece, *if* you decide to start taking out hostile pieces, you use them.

BTW---prior to 9/11 the US counters were distributed, but largely out of play except by movement of dollar counters. 9/11 activated *all* the US counters, and most of the hostile ones *except* for the temporary stalemate between US and Chinese counters while each side jockeys for an opening or other ways to resolve the strategic opposition.

In "peace" the dollar counters are played, and the other counters are repositioned, jockeying for advantage, but other counters are not toppled or played.

In "war" all the counters are activated between warring parties and active allies (even unofficial ones)--other counters than dollars are additionally played and/or toppled.

Any player with an active counter can move the game from "peace" phase to "war" phase. Moving the game back to "peace" phase requires agreement of both sides to move back to mostly exclusive dollar and positioning play of counters or toppling of all of one side's active counters.

Usually, during "peace" phase, there is some small-scale war phase activity on both sides, perhaps analagous to the occasional stolen base in baseball.

The debate on the friendly side is *not* whether to use fresh USGI counters to rotate out the ones being played in Iraq.

There are *two* debates. One, whether there need to be more USGI counters there or not. Two, whether replacement or additional counters should come from dollar counters converted to new "free" USGI counters in CONUS or should come from repositioning existing counters on the board.

The non-administration side, on debate one, seems to be forgetting that putting more counters in could make the whole set of counters *less* effective because of the increased logistics needed to supply all counters over very narrow routes in through Kuwait and the Persian Gulf.

The non-administration side, on debate two, seems to be A) considering dollar counters expendable and B) forgetting how much longer it takes to make new "free" USGI counters than it does to move existing ones----by the time new "free" counters could be made, the counters already in Iraq will, by administration play plan, be mostly withdrawn with the hostile piece firmly eliminated and that spot on the board mostly stabilized as neutral--no major hostile or friendly pieces on it.

The non-administration side would have a much stronger position if they would convincingly address those three points regarding the two debates instead of giving the impression of neither noticing nor comprehending them.

R.I.P.

My own brief eulogy to Reagan:

I disagreed with his politics, and I disapproved of his actions. But he was a fellow in the brotherhood of man. Salue.

Is It Good for a Peace-Time Nation?

Sullivan, on Bush's Colorado speech:

The president appeared yet again divorced from anything vaguely representing reality. That is not a good thing for a nation at war.

Actually, Andy is having a bad day:

Here's a revealing sentence from National Review's profile of Roger Simon, ex-lefty blogger: "[When] it comes to social policy, he continues to lean hard to the left. 'I'm very liberal on social issues: pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, separation of church and state,' he says. 'I think racism and sexism are the greatest evils in the world.'" So allowing women to choose to seek an abortion is now a "hard left" position? And encouraging gay couples to have stable relationships is "hard left"? And being deeply concerned about racism and sexism is "hard left"? I won't even touch "separation of church and state." But I will notice that this assertion comes at a time when Karl Rove is deliberately trying to involve church congregations directly in Bush's re-election effort. Disturbing.

Can't say I blame him. Balanced budgets are "hard left" now, too. So's putting things in "quotation marks." He continunes, bashing Stanley Kurtz (something I did sooner, if less viciously, and with fewer Robin Williams refrences):

You can, in fact, draw a direct connection between the liberalization of marriage laws in Liechtenstein and this collapse in marriage in Japan. And the turning point came at exactly the moment that Richard Hatch won "Survivor," putting another nail in the coffin of heterosexual marriage. Secular humanist skeptics will no doubt quibble that there is no such thing as gay marriage in Japan, that Japan is, in fact, a deeply homophobic society. But can they prove no connection with Holland's slide toward Gommorrah? Hasn't greater Western tolerance of homosexuals seeped through in Japan? Didn't the "Bird Cage" do pretty well over there? You have been warned. Unless you amend the American constitution, the Yellow-Lavender Peril will be here before you know it.

I think I now officially quallify as Andrew Sullivan's bitch—— er, schill. But most bloggers are.

:::spasms, disconnects:::

Last Time in America

Here's a blast from the past: an article from the June 6th issue of Look magazine, written by Rear Admiral Ellis M. Zacharias, who was deputy director of the Office of Naval Intelligence during the war.

The first sentence of this article is, "The way was open to get Japan to surrender at least six months before VJ-Day."

The idea that we had no choice but to drop A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is preached as, if not gospel truth, than at least something from the old testament; it's an ingrained reflex for anyone who's been through high-school history courses. But Admiral Zacharias doesn't seem to think so.

In 1944, elements of the Japanese government were putting out peace feelers via the Vatican and the Russians. (Copies of Japans cables to the Soviets are in the Library of Congress.) Zacharais writes, "In May 1944, [Naval Intelligence] received word that the Supreme War Guidance Council, Japan's highest authority, had accepted a resolution to seek ways and means to end the war." ONI had four separate plans to pursue peace, from the well-thought-out (using Japan's ambassador to Nazi Germany) to the to the not-so-much (sending an envoy to Japan via a secret submarine mission). These plans were all shot down at the highest levels.

Of course we had reasons for using nukes: it was a way to intimidate the Russians. Plus, Truman was publicly committed to Roosevelt's unconditional surrender ultimatums. ONI struggled to get Truman to authorize a statement reading "unconditional surrender does not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people." In fact, Truman wrote in his diary that "Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic."

In the same diary entry, Truman pledges "to use [the atom bomb] so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children." He also displays ignorance of the long-term consequences of nuclear weapons: "Anyway we 'think' we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexico desert was startling. Thirteen pounds of the explosive ... created a crater 6 feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower 1/2 mile away and knocked men down 10,000 yards away. The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more." He gives no indication that he is aware what radiation poisoning does.

But, in the end, did we have a choice? In 1950 Zacharias concluded, "it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.

"I contend that the A-bombing of Japan is now known to have been a mistake and that we should admit it if we are to regain our traditional position as a leader among humanitarian nations. "

Just something that you don't usually get in high school.

W&I©

Negro children need neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. What they need is an education

W.E.B. DuBois
1935

Debra J. Dickerson has a different look at Brown v. Board of Education and it’s 50th Birthday; she’s reviewing recent books by a pair of aging civil rights crusaders, Derrick Bell and Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. The books are "eulogies for the dying dreams of integration ... for two generations of black children used as pawns and tossed aside, uneducated."

Something like three-quarters of the students on this campus are veterans of the inner-city schools in North Philly and southeast D.C.; I get to hear war stories of high schools that are still teaching basic addition; one girl recently told me that the teachers at her old school didn't have to deal with large class sizes, because while there were usually thirty students on the roll, only half would show up.

So the good students get by. But as Charlie Cleveland, a social studies teacher at Hillsboro High in Hillsboro Oregon, puts it, "The good students are going to survive, and the students at the other end are going to get special help—we have programs mandated by law for them. It's the big group in the middle that are just jammed together. Some of them will make it ... but I see a lot that don't."

That's not even a poor school, it's Hillsboro High, an upper-middle-class suburb in Oregon. (I'm not sure what city it's a suburb of; I don't think suburbs have to be suburbs of somewhere anymore—like some B-movie mind-control parasite, they've evolved to the point where they can function on their own.)

Just a couple of snippets from the June 2004 issue of Mother Jones. The issue theme is "Who's Better Off? A special report on the State of the Union" and the content is universally depressing. Arthur Allen describes the fate of Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital. MCP is a century-old hospital in North Philadelphia, founded by one of the America's first female medical schools, the school that graduated our nation's first black female doctor. The managed-care company that owns MCP has been nabbed committing outlier fraud and, bankrupt, may now be forced to close MCP.

Even the upbeat articles are secretly ironic. In a profile, New Jersey State Senator Shirley K. Turner and her noble efforts read like Don Quixote; then we get an interview with the liberal Rush Limbaugh. And, finally, George Packer ably explains the fatal problems of blogs like this one.

Read it, preferably when your already in a bad mood.

Film School

I just saw Troy, a film with so much of Brad Pitt's ass they gave it top billing.

Wolfgang Petersen's version of The Illiad is very good. His Achilles has the unabashed glory-hogging of a Major Movie Star, and so is played by the preeminent Major Movie Star of our times, who wisely chooses to keep the acting to a minimum and mug for the camera the way Paul Newman used to. Achilles' scenes usually begin with him in bed with a naked broad, only to be dragged out so he can not care about other people. Petersen also emphasizes his characters by giving most of them contrasting counter parts: Achilles' is Odysseus, the Common Man, honorable and quietly intelligent. These are the heroes.

There are also princes and kings. Greece's King Agamemnon is Brian Cox, chewing scenery with no regard for it's high carb count. He contrasts Troy's Priam, Peter O'Toole with the quiet dignity reserved only for true religious fanatics. Priam's religious faith is used as a justification for the Trojan's seeming massive stupidity: we can't see them accepting a tribute from the Greeks, but a man of faith would surely bring a tribute to Posiedon to the appropriate temple. Agamemnon's ambition is also a justification: wars don't start because a king's wife runs off with a foreign prince, but as an excuse for invading a country you dislike for other reasons, it's right up there with "nuclear weapon related programs."

Orlando Bloom is the prince with whom said wife runs off. He appears at first to be acting the part of an airhead who doesn't realize that his dalliances will bring his country to war. But later, when the script calls for Paris to realize what he's done, we begin to suspect that Orlando Bloom may in fact really be an airhead. (Or as Johnny Depp said the last time Orlando Bloom sucked up an otherwise excellent movie, which seems to be his thing, "if you were looking for the opportune moment, that was it.") He's certainly outclassed by O'Toole and even the aggressively competent Eric Bana as older Prince Hector.

Unfortunately, the editing is terrible. For example, Petersen filmed a tight, intense fight between Hector and Achilles at the city gates; then he insists on cutting away every five seconds to O'Toole and Bloom looking down from a tower above, the former with deep concern, the other with what appears to be an irritable bowel. When the music should be subtle, it is loud; when there should be silence, the music is very, very loud.

Minor points, really: the acting is fun, the battles are cool, and the movie is worth the price of admission.

Troy: Directed by Wolfgang Petersen, starring Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, and Brad Pitt's Ass.