Too busy to ask

My readers that is. They're too busy to ask questions or, most days, to read the blog. So what questions would they ask? [Is that a rhetorical question creeping in there? No, it is not; and here's the proof.] They would ask the following about 'Lawrence of Arabia':

Firstly, what about the gay subtext? Where was that it your review? [I am watching these questions sonny.] Well, I'd like to think that I am as sensitive and metrosexual as the next man, but I couldn't see it. The only person that Lawrence is in love with throughout the film is himself. And Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali spends the entire time looking at Lawrence as if the Englishman is completely nuts. And one can readily understand why.

Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently to the espoused subject of this blog (which is wargaming by the way) they would ask whether having rewatched the film makes me want to rush out and start a new period. (For any non-wargamers who have stumbled across this in the belief they were likely to learn something about Stoic philosophy can I just explain that 'starting a new period' is a curse under which all wargamers suffer. The details are not important, but please have sympathy for the afflicted.)

Anyway, no. The film is, I would suggest, resolutely anti-war; one of a number of British films with that message made at around the same time. War in the desert is not portrayed as glorious, but as squalid, nasty, inhuman and, ultimately futile. Many deaths and much suffering happen in what is 'a sideshow of a sideshow' and ultimately everyone involved is sold out by the politicians.

Others may differ, or reasonably ask what sets this apart from every other war in every other place and time. “It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”- Herman Hesse