We Are Spartacus

A while back, I wrote a poem called "We Are Spartacus". It wasn't much at the time, just a little ditty I cooked up over tea and toast, but for millions of idiots it came to mean so much more than mere ink on parchment. It was sort of like how 1's and 0's can combine to make a game like Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties, except the binary was letters, and the game was life.

If you've never seen Spartacus, it stars Kirk Douglas, Michael Keaton's dad (Michael Keaton played Jack Frost in "Jack Frost", FYI), as Spartacus, a rebel slave without a cause. Except here's the thing - he did have a cause. Spartacus wants to be a professional gladiator so bad, but his coaches all say he's too small. That doesn't stop Spartacus. He tries out for his college gladiatorial team but Vince Vaughn is on it and he's a jerk I think. Or maybe he's the nice one. Anyways, it turns out that Spartacus really is too small and he might have kind of a thing for Frodo, so they don't let him on the team. In his rage, he rampages across Italy with a band of rejects, stealing from the poor and keeping it all for himself. Spartacus becomes drunk with power, but Crassus has even more money than Spartacus does balls. Pretty soon, Spartacus is backed into a corner. But that's exactly where you don't want him to be, because he's like a lion, and lions don't like that.

With the sea at his back and Crassus' team before him, Spartacus looks up into the crowd and sees his dad and his brother there. They're chanting something, but he can't quite make it out. He cups his hand to his ear in order to hear better, and he discerns a faint, "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!" The fact that his own family doesn't even cheer for him at his final battle demoralizes Spartacus so much that he decides to surrender. Crassus comes over and asks "Which of you is Spartacus?" so that he knows which one to crucify. Spartacus stands up and he says, "I'm Spartacus," but then, to the utter amazement of everyone in the classroom I saw it in, all of his friends stand up and say that they're Spartacus, too!

In the end, Crassus decides to crucify everyone and put them along the Via Appia, the road back to Rome. Giant wooden crosses with bloodied, beaten bodies stretched out over them expand as far as the eye can see. This causes me to pause, and I think there's a lesson here that Spartacus wanted us to learn.

That lesson is: if you're too small, give up. You'll just end up getting all your friends tortured to death.

Yours in Christ,
Mike