Historical Entertainment

Band of Brothers is on today. I very sorely want to watch that series, but I can't today.

First, I'm sick. Second, it's got commercials, since it's on the History Channel. And third, every five minutes I want to scream "How can rightists think we're in this kind of war?!"

I'm not going to go into all the ways that World War Two can't be reduced into some kind of model for the "War on Terror." I'm just going to grumble because, as a history geek, I'm sick of people trying to make the past fit their modern assumptions. Of course, this is bad when we project feminism and civil rights consciousness into the past, but when VD Hanson and the armchair historians of half-remembered times want to make Ancient Greece or the Roman Empire or the greatest conflict of human history into nothing more than justifications for their failed policies, it's all fair, right?