The Sins of the Father

This fellow is one scary dude (or "dread lord").  Kenneth Branagh's portrayal of Henry V resonated with me - a mixture of a romantic view of war through the soliloquies ("a touch of Harry in the night"), and the bloody gory hopelessly tragic detail of the film sequences at Harfleur and Agincourt.  He bankrupted the treasury for his son, and only postponed the reckoning of the central Lancastrian moral problem- that they stood on the shoulders of a murdered Richard II.

I often think of the parallels to today - how the Bush administration has all but bankrupted our national treasury for a war whose premise is even more flimsy as Henry V's reason for war.  I don't see a way out - and hope it doesn't turn out like the Hundred Years War, with an empire dwindling back to the original size, and seemingly irreparable loss of credibility in the world.