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life based on freedom, justice, honor. Yet, practicing eugenics the way the Spartans do makes them much more akin to the Nazis than 21st Century America. We don't kill our young because they're deformed or sick, the Nazis, they believed in that stuff. The Spartans we see in "300" seem to be heroic and sympathetic because they're so like us and they believe in so many things we believe in but, at the same time, they're really scary people. Or, are they?

We Americans seem to put a high value on beauty. Edgar Allen Poe once said that the greatest tragedy was the death of a beautiful woman. We Americans got all besides ourselves with Anna Nicole Smith's recent passing, as if to prove his point. Women are murdered all the time in America but many of the murder cases that become big news stories revolve around women who are photogenic. Laci Peterson comes to mind. Hot, pregnant, dead. Or, how about Nicole Brown Simposon (what is it with the name Nicole?!) for another example. Terri Schiavo was a very fetching, attractive woman before she wound up in a permanent vegetative state, for a third example. Beauty, in American, matters. If you're beautiful, you are worth more than someone who's not. It's sad to say, but, it's true. The statistics don't lie. Billions of dollars are spent every year by Americans to make themselves look more attractive. Studies show that attractive people make more money than unattractive people do. And, in "300", if you're hot, you're a good person. If you're ugly, you're not.

One possible exception is, of course, Xerxes, the huge 'god-king' of the Persians. He's got a great physique, I'll give him that, but, he's portrayed as being freakishly big which tends to detract from his attractiveness. Ephialtes, while not attractive at all, is just a treacherous, lumbering deformed monstrosity that, it seems, would have been better off being killed as a baby like other deformed Spartans than having been allowed to live. After all, look at what he does with his life? He betrays the good guys, goes over the bad guys and causes the beautiful good Spartans to be slaughtered.

The movie "300" raises a lot of questions about America in the year 2007. It appears by watching it, that America is still a very "white" place to be, a place that is not comfortable at all with overt homosexuality in any form and a place where being beautiful is really what matters and being ugly is a really bad thing. Thinking about the county we live in today, I have to think that each country gets the movies it deserves. For today's America, "300" is that kind of movie.

Learn more about this author, M.R. Caffery.
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