Iran has elections? Something along the nature of class president and student council? -- where "4" is a preposition and giddy earnestness vies in inverse proportion with the efficacy of the office? Hand picked candidates, whose decisions and policies can be dismissed by the Supreme Leader without explanation or recourse. If we allow this to be called an election, then the conspiracy Gallai may well be correct in their mutilated ecstasies. It's all a sham, starting with us.
Saddam was elected, and Castro, and Hitler and so on. It must be in the religious sense that the word is meant. The Elect are elected. Point is, who are we to quibble with some other country's religiousish parades and processionals? That they're a strange perversion of our own institutions is none of our concern, is it? Something like pagan deities transmogrified by bishops into Catholic saints. So what? Those same deities were themselves corruptions of something earlier, that was true. Angels can fall, after all. Sort of gets things in perspective. It's all so relative.
But, no. Iran is having its bit of turmoil, then. A stolen sort-of election. One relislamist president holds on to office longer than most of the people prefer. The students riot, some get shot, internet gets shut down. But in some cities, the gutters are designed for blood as well as rainfall. Iran isn't really mostly desert, right? That's just a misconception, right? Americans are so bad at geography. So gutters have to have been built for a reason. Assuming they were built. Another misconception perhaps, that they have paved roads. The world is a complex place -- we can't just trust what we see on TV.
What does it possibly matter, first that they are rioting, second, who actually gets the office? The presidency is symbolic -- held by the guy who makes the speeches, the public face. What a face. Christopher Hitchens informs us that Iran "and its citizens are considered by the Shiite theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui. Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of the black-robed state." I did not know that. I'm surprised there aren't more mullahs. Sweet gig. The politicians, then, are butlers and maids and footmen. The citizens are chattel.
That is far more severe than anything Hitler managed. Stalin acted like a mullah, owning the country, but that was just him, the wacky guy, without any actual scripture to back him up. Or is my Marx rusty? No matter. Any culture that defines any human being as property is capable of every atrocity. Ours included. It's enough to make you weep. But that's why the ocean is salt. Why bother anymore? The point must have been made and perceived by now. Futility is a law of physics.
Oh, I see Hitchens says the same thing, re hypocrisy, vice and virtue. He continues, "'The miraculous hand of God,' announced Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, had been present in the polling places and had announced a result before many people had even finished voting. He says that sort of thing all the time." You know what this means, don't you. Mohammad was not the Final Prophet. There is fresh revelation. Pass out the snakes, boys, cuz they're getting all Pentecostal over there in Musselmanlandistan.
It's all cliches. It's all just variations on a pretty simple theme. Aspiration, power, corruption, death. Am I a bit dark? Let me brighten things up. Hitchens speaks of "what I saw with my own eyes at a recent Hezbollah rally in south Beirut, Lebanon. In a large hall that featured the official attendance of a delegation from the Iranian Embassy, the most luridly displayed poster of the pro-Iranian party was a nuclear mushroom cloud! Underneath this telling symbol was a caption warning the 'Zionists' of what lay in store."
Bright enough? Looks like prophets are popping up all over the place. Because we know the future. If North Korea can cobble together a successful nuclear bomb or seven out of the bones and leather of its shriveled population, financed by counterfeit American 20 dollar bills, well, we do know the future. The ovens are getting bigger, is all. And Israel will not stand for it. It has had after all some dealings in the past with fascism, and a much calmer and more rational one, at that.
What of us? We don't even pay tribute to hypocrisy. Just to the hypocrites. By "we" I mean "you". Cuz what are you doing about it? I write a blog, fer crying out loud. A blog, can't you understand the importance of what I'm saying? What more could possibly be done?
Yep. So that must be my point. Peace at all costs.J
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