Ho! Cliopatriarchs, We Are Found Out! ...
The film goes on for nearly three hours, but we hear nothing of what either supporters or detractors of Alexander, both ancient and modern, have agreed were the central issues of his life. Did he really believe in a unity of mankind, and were his mass mixed marriages, Persian dress, and kowtowing cynical, sincere, or delusions of megalomania? We see nothing of the siege of Tyre, Gaza, much less Thebes or even the burning of Persepolis. Other than the talking head Ptolemy, none of his generals have much of a character. There is nothing really in detail about the page purging other than a single reference; Stone, I would have thought, could have had a field day with Alexander's introduction of both crucifixion and decimation.Has a serious critic said anything positive about Stone's"Alexander"? Surely, it's dead at the starting gate. Wretchard at Belmont Club follows Hanson's lead. Brian Ulrich at Brian's Study Breaks passed up"Alexander" for"National Treasure." In doing so, he discovered and exposes the Cliopatriarchal designs on empire. Damn, just when we reached an alliance with Instapundimania, but I suppose it was only a matter of time before we were found out.
My colleagues, nonetheless, carry on with their noble purposes:
*Hala Fattah, the Cliopatriarch of Jordan, is featured at Baghdad Skies 2.
*Tim Burke continues his discussion with P. Z. Myers and Brandon Watson about the public relations of evolutionary science at Foreign Dispatches, Pharyngula (and here) and Siris. In the meantime, a commentator at Cliopatria weighs in to assert the credentials in the sciences of some spokesmen for Intelligent Design. Arghh!
*On a lighter note, Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes (scroll down to 24 November) set off the discussion about"invented traditions," which carried on here, at Manan Ahmed's Chapati Mystery and Nathanael Robinson's Rhine River.
*Our colleague, KC Johnson has written many times at Cliopatria about the necessity of intellectual diversity in academic communities. He gets a challenge, I think, from our colleague, Miriam Burstein, about why the discussions almost inevitably exclude religious colleges and universities from consideration. If intellectual diversity is a good thing, in and of itself, why is it not expected of them? It's an important question, I think, and a sub-set of a more broad-ranging question about the valuing of diversity. That is, must we, in the name of diversity, require it of all our colleges and universities? If we do, does that do damage to the particularities in the larger picture. Here's a secular example. Some years ago, when I was teaching in northwestern Pennsylvania, there was another school nearby, Alliance College. It had been founded early in the 20th century by the Polish National Alliance as a primary center of secular Polish identity in the United States. Its library had the second largest collection of Polish archival and book collections in the United States. My question is: what is the point of obliging an Alliance College to become representative of a larger national or inter-national diversity, whether cultural, ethnic, gender, or religious, if in the process you destroy its reason for being? Ultimately, doesn't doing so damage rather than foster the larger vitality of our diversity? Of course, institutions define their reasons for being in answer to such questions, but shouldn't they be allowed to make their own decisions?
One final note: these three- and four-way conversations are great. Keeping up with them is a chore! May have to assert my authority as the first among equals around here. Centralize authority and all that.