Suboptimist

There is no peace at the end of this.

So, now that Emily has been accepted to vet school, Dan got the position of editor of his school’s newspaper, and Noah is engaged, the rest of the active membership of The Central Node needs to get cracking at achieving something awesome.

I saw 300 this weekend. The film was enjoyable enough. The photography was brilliant, and the battle scenes were other-worldly. However, I found myself partly laughing and partly crying at the backward depictions of the Spartans and the Persians. The Spartans were anything but enlightened lovers of freedom, and the Persians were not barbaric hordes. The Persians under Cyrus the Great, after all, made the first declaration of human rights in the world’s history (see the Charter of Cyrus). Nevertheless, I had fun watching it.

This evening I watched Steven Spielberg’s Munich. The movie, which was rather controversial in the US, spends little time talking about the Munich massacres of 1972, and more time discussing Operation Wrath of God and its aftermath. David Edelstein summed up the film perfectly:

The Israeli government and many conservative and pro-Israeli commentators have lambasted the film for naiveté, for implying that governments should never retaliate. But an expression of uncertainty and disgust is not the same as one of outright denunciation. What Munich does say — and what I find irrefutable — is that this shortsighted tit-for-tat can produce a kind of insanity, both individual and collective.

At the end of the film, I felt conflicted. Part of me felt more embittered, given my own anti-Zionist tendencies, while the other was compelled to empathize with Israel. The ability to make a viewer feel so conflicted a trait of an excellent filmmaker. I’ll leave you with my favorite line from the film, which happened after the teams first successful assassination:

“That old Pesach story. The angels are rejoicing because the Egyptians have just drowned in the Red Sea… and God said to the angels, ‘Why are you rejoicing? I just killed a multitude of my children.’…”