This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 13 episode of Boardwalk Empire.

In a decidedly dour season, Louise’s arrival, via an altercation with an Atlantic City matrons and a pack of “beach lizards,” is something of a delight. Angela’s been looking for an actual kindred spirit all season long, and while Richard’s too melancholic and too damaged to truly lift her up, Louise, who uses the fake names of one of the characters in her novels as an alias, and hollers, “Let ‘em gawk. They’re called knees, fellows!” at her pack of admirers on the beach, appears to be exactly who Angela is looking for. It’s nice to see Angela lit up a bit, galvanized both by overhearing Jimmy’s inept scheming, and by the kiss she shares with Louise at a joyfully bohemian party. And her conversation with Jimmy is bruising. When he asks her why she married him (after evading a question about whether he really loves her), she’s blunt: “Because we have a child together. It’s what society expected from me. Because you kept pushing it.”

And that’s sort of the key to Jimmy’s problems, isn’t it? He’s not a complicated man, and he’s not very good at seeing complexity in other people, or in assessing what people expect of him, particularly his mother. He’ll toss a fellow off a balcony for upsetting his party, incapable of thinking through what it might mean for a long game. In fact, Jimmy doesn’t particularly seem capable of seeing that there is a long game, that his moment of triumph is really Nucky’s victory. Inspired by a lecture from Arnold Rothstein, who tells him that “Some days I make 20 bets. Some days, I make none…so I wait, plan, marshal my resources. And when I finally see an opportunity and there is a bet to make, I bet it all,” Nucky rolls big. He quits his treasurer’s job, retires to private life, and prepares to unleash absolute hell on Atlantic City. “You sure this what you want?” Chalky asks when Nucky tells him to call a general strike and that Nucky will back him. “In about 30 minutes, it won’t be my problem,” Nucky says, relishing the thought of complicating everyone else’s life for a change — and planning a trip to Ireland to enlist Sinn Fein in his campaign.
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David Brin takes on Frank Miller’s anti-Occupy Wall Street rant and 300, arguing that the Athenians — and by extension the Occupy movement Miller seems convince is going to undermine our fight against Islamic terrorism — are vastly more bad-ass and effective than Miller gives them credit for:

The first invasion by Persia, ten years earlier—under Xerxes’s father—had been defeated by just such a militia army… from Athens… made up of farmers, clerks, tradesmen, artists and mathematicians. A rabble of ill-disciplined “brawlers” who, after waiting in vain for promised help from Sparta, finally decided to handle the problem alone. On that fateful day that citizen militia leveled their spears and their thin blue line attacked a professional Persian force many times their number, slaughtering them to the last man on the legendary beach of Marathon…Think about that for a moment. Can you picture it? Damn. Please pause here and Wiki “Marathon.” Even better, watch it computer dramatized. Prepare to be amazed there were once such men. Go on… I’ll wait!…

That Athenian triumph deserves a movie! And believe me, it weighed heavily on the real life Leonidas, ten years later. “300″ author Frank Miller portrays the Spartans’ preening arrogance in the best possible light, as a kind of endearing tribal machismo. Miller never hints at the underlying reason for Leonidas’s rant, a deep current of smoldering shame over how Sparta sat out Marathon, leaving it to Athenian amateurs, like the playwright Aeschelus, to save all of Greece. The “shopkeepers” whom Leonidas outrageously and ungratefully despises in the film.

To a certain extent, it seems silly to keep pointing out how warped Miller’s world-view is. There are no questions that there are problems with safety at Occupy encampment, and I’ve been particularly troubled by the early trouble the movement seemed to have dealing with the risk of sexual assault and women’s concerns. But that’s not really what Miller’s screed is about. It’s just another way for him to assert that he’s doing more than anyone else is to combat terrorism inspired by extreme interpretations of Islam, to sneer “Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.”

And if Miller was an isolated crank with totally implausible beliefs, I’d probably just ignore him. But his conviction that the folks who don’t have jobs could have work if they wanted it in a time of persistently high unemployment is similar to the views University of Pennsylvania students who responded to Occupy protestors by telling them to join the same tax bracket those students expected to enter. The creepy idea that a New York mosque is a cover for a nest of terrorists, an animating fantasy of his execrable Holy Terror, is the one that’s entangled the development of a community center in the real world. Miller’s views are self-aggrandizing, uniformed junk, but it’s junk that has a foothold in American society.