300

I saw 300 Saturday night - great flick. The whole "graphic novel" concept didn't really appeal too much to me at first, but the movie was actually pretty amazing. Yes, it was exceptionally gory, and I would not recommend it to some people, especially many of the fairer sex, but it was fantastic. The battle scenes were terrific, and there was actually some meat to the story. The king's wife was a great character. She just reminded me that not only are we attempting to emasculate men these days, but women, too!

Along these lines, I was reminded of a favorite C.S. Lewis quote: "From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling how our softness, worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God." I also read a quote recently from a soldier who is or was serving in Iraq: "It's a war. People are going to die, and the American public needs to get over that. They need to get over that and let us do our job." I'm not arguing for or against the campaign in Iraq, but we really do seem to be becoming a soft, timid culture. At least soldiers have experienced pieces of the real world, with its wide array of problems, many horrible and quite terrifying. I'm thinking Darfur, or Iraq, or North Korea, among many others. We (the royal persuasion) live in our world of iPods, bottled water, and HDTV and forget or worse, never realize, how brutish the world really is.