I watched a dismal film last night. I am not sure what it was called: the box said it was called Anzio, but the opening title said The Battle for Anzio.

Starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Falk, it purported to be a dramatization of the American army's landing at Anzio, Italy in 1944, and its missed opportunity to drive straight to Rome. The box spoke of "30,000 casualties" being sustained in a four-month campaign, though the film itself did not portray action on this scale, as it really only told the story of a couple of days' worth of behind-enemy-lines action by a group of six men, one of whom compulsively sings to prostitutes.

What I found most indigestible was the attitude and posturing of the Mitchum character, a "war correspondent" who, pushing himself into the very front lines of battle, is a better strategist and has better intelligence on German positions than any of the US generals do. God-like, he passes fearsome judgment upon all the decisions of the top brass, and he writes fearsome newspaper articles about their follies. By the way, he refuses to carry a weapon, though near the end he machine-guns a German sharpshooter (apparently without any crisis in his principles or transformative effect upon his character.)

At the conclusion of the film, as triumphant American troops parade through liberated Rome, to the unbridled joy of the Romani, he offers the following bit of "wisdom": Just look at history...Wars never solve anything, and they never will. Why do we fight? We fight because we like it!

This is claptrap of a low order. "Wars never solve anything" is childish, 1968 pacifism, but the Mitchum character's smugly exuberant "We fight because we like it!" could be a kind of debonair, tough-guy existentialism, also appropriate for 1968, though already being swallowed up by radical left-wing activism in the popular culture. The idea goes something like this: humans love killing each other, and any 'reasons' they give for a war are just rationalizations; no wars have any purpose other than giving men an excuse to kill and take pleasure in killing. But I am enlightened enough to see through humanity's love of violence, am therefore liberated from it, and my rare, cosmopolitan insights place me far above the fray.

(This could also be half-baked pop-Freudianism, which would also be appropriate for 1968.)

Was 1968 so far removed from 1945 that serious people could write such a line, and act it with conviction, and thinking audiences around the world, watching it delivered on the silver screen, would nod in the dark, saying to themselves, "By golly, he's right: wars really don't solve anything!" Was historical memory so fogged in 1968 that no one remembered DeGaulle entering Paris in 1944, the liberation of Auschwitz, or the trials of German war criminals? How could anyone recall the recent destruction of the Nazi empire and seriously claim that wars never solve anything?

This is just terrible stuff. It reminds one of Spielberg's most odious line from Saving Private Ryan, where the Hanks character asserts that "saving Private Ryan may be the only decent thing we manage to pull out of this whole, godawful mess". Right. "Rescuing" the Matt Damon character from a duty he was willing and able to perform without one self-pitying thought about the deaths of his brothers trumps the destruction of Hitlerism.

The fact is that there are some problems that can only be solved by wars. This is not to say that wars do not create problems. Nor is it to say that all wars solve the problems they set out to solve. But the only possible solution to Hitler's "New Order" was a war.

You must of course grant that the New Order was a "problem" that admitted a solution. To call it an absolute evil, and then to call a war against it an absolute evil as well is a deeper despair than I can imagine.

Local Prep School Overhauls Science Curriculum
Back to the classics, say teachers, headmaster

Big changes are underway at Phoenix's Classical Preparatory Academy, a charter school opened in 2003. Students already accustomed to reading ancient Greek epics and studying Latin will at last get a science curriculum that is drawn "from the heart of the liberal arts", in the words of their headmaster, Dr. Andrew Dits.

"There are some really cutting-edge publications out there that are changing the way we have traditionally thought about science as a part of the prep school curriculum," says Dr. Dits. "Music of the Spheres, Aether, and Earth-Shaking Poseidon aren't afraid to present truths about nature that left-wing university types are either blind to or wilfully covering up."

According to Ms. Elaine Reed, chair of the science department, the overhaul of the curriculum will be based upon some of the most important thinkers of the Western tradition, such as Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen. "Western scientific thinking drove off the road into a ditch about four or five hundred years ago," she says, "by the insidious influence of Copernicus, and the subsequent self-centered 'philosophizing' of Rene Descartes."

Ms. Reed reports that the content of current courses will be overhauled on a basic level.

"Take eighth grade Earth Science, for example. We are going to totally redo the astronomy unit, taking Ptolemy's Almagest as our basic textbook. Our students will spend months learning how to calculate the epicycles and equants that make the circular geocentric universe a plausible alternative to modern models of the solar system."

What about the planets of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, invisible to the naked eye and thus not an original part of the Ptolemaic theory? "Basically, we can forget about those. If we can't see them, they must not be there. Or at least not that important."

Ms. Reed also reports that ninth grade biology will be recast as a "Bileology" class, with students studying the balance of the humours (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, choler, and blood) as the basis of human physiology. The 2-year physics curriculum will be, in her words, "Aristotelianized".

"For example, every 5-year old knows that heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects. Newton and his disciples have succeded in establishing the opposite opinion as dogma, citing something about 'universal gravitation'. Hokum. Aristotle teaches us that a greater presence of Earth in a body will make it seek the ground more rapidly. And 'inertia'--we can take that apart like a Lego castle. It is displaced Air that rushes in to push forward a ball that is thrown horizontally. "

When asked to respond to the charge that any of the claims of these nearly-universally rejected and derided theories could be refuted by the most basic of experiments, Headmaster Dits is unfazed.

"We actually plan to phase all forms of empirical observation out of the curriculum," he says. "The kind of positivist epistemology that gave us the experimental method is also responsible for such cultural degradation as filtered cigarettes, diet soda, and poll-driven politics. That's hardly what I would call progress."

Ms. Reed is quick to point out that hands-on lab work will not disappear entirely from the school. Twelfth grade Alchemy students will spend much of the coming year working in class to extract gold from everyday substances. "There's going to be a lot of learning going on around here next year," she concludes.