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There is No Dana; Only Fool

It's the opening weekend for 300, and the comparisons to Nazi propaganda have already started to trickle out. Ace of Spades tackles a Slate piece by movie critic Liz Penn/Dana Stevens that starts:

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.

Lovely. What sort of deep-thinking intellectual wordsmith can make this allegorical leap?

Here's the author's background:

Liz Penn has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in New York City and writes on television for Slate.com under the name Dana Stevens.

Ph.D. Comparative Literature. Berkeley. Manhattan. Of course. [Yawn] Can't there be any surprises anymore? When Ms. Penn/Stevens was asked in an interview what she would do with 24 hours in NYC if the world were coming to an end, she responded:

Realistically, I'd probably hole up and freak out, or call people and say goodbye. But I assume this question is supposed to be about a nice New York day, not the stark horror of mass impending death. So let's say: a cup of perfect coffee at home, a walk uptown to look at the Rembrandt self-portrait at the Frick, a drink at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, and dinner and a movie downtown, at Anthology or someplace. All with the right people, of course -- you know who you are. And it has to be mid-October.

They're all getting far too predictable. I could have written this response for her...verbatim.