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My Iranian neo-con
Helping a friend overcome his denial of joining
a confederacy of dunces
July 26, 2004
iranian.com
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from a troubled dream,
he found himself changed in his bed to some monstrous kind of vermin. --
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
As the critical U.S presidential election approaches, I recently
received an e-mail from the dearest of all friends. Much to my
surprise, I discovered that my formerly laissez-faire friend had
metamorphosed into a "neo-con". An angry-not-quite-so-white-rather-hairy
Iranian neo-con that is. As puzzling as this metamorphosis was
to me, the rage from posse of our freethinking friends was unrelenting.
 Fox News and a shadowy Iranian trash TV from Los Angeles became
his channels of choice, Rudyard Kipling's The White Man's
Burden became his mantra, a pile of Wall Street Journals began
to decorate the master bathroom, and a map was produced with the
best routes to Tehran highlighted and numerous cities underlined
to be "Liberated", per his suggestion by the Fifth Armored
Division.
Not satisfied by insulting the current regime, he soon began
bad mouthing Mossadegh, calling him a paid disgruntled communist
bus boy and describing the CIA coup in 1953
as a trivial detail in history not worth debating.
Shirin Ebadi
became his latest reincarnation of the devil. "If only she
lived in Paris or Connecticut, and stopped all this nonsense about
Islam and democracy" he wished loudly over some fine Italian
wine few weeks ago. He has been boycotting French wine lately and
has renounced the Nobel Foundation as an Al Qaeda dormant cell
in Sweden.
 "Arabs... they are the ultimate root of all of our wretched
quandary, Iran would have been Germany if not for the Arabs." "Rubbish," we
replied, yet he did not relent in his argument, insisting, "we
would have all been blonds if it were not for the Arabs." Now
that was a rather delightful thought, we all agreed. Soon, to
our dismay, he began forwarding e-mails asking for donations for
building the Israeli Wall and a few extra settlements around Jerusalem.
His e-mail began to collect dust in my inbox. Then, after a few
tearful reviews, I decided that it was time for an intervention.
I urged our common friends to attend a confrontational meeting
intended to help our Iranian neo-con overcome his denial of joining
a confederacy of dunces and begin treatment.
The first step to helping someone with neo-conish symptoms is
to learn as much as possible about the malady. So we all read a
bit
of Foad Adjami and Richard Perle writings, and ordered Freedom
Fries at every occasion. Yet the clue was in his recent manifesto
that he had e-mailed a fortnight ago declaring himself to be a
faithful believer (among his other neo-con symptoms) of the Constitutional
Monarchy in Iran.
 Much to our surprise, after few tasty mojitos at our intervention
meeting, he admitted that he did not care much about neither a
constitution nor a monarchy, and that his greatest wish was to
regain his family's confiscated property outside Mashhad.
This neo-con thing he said "is just to give his claim an ideological
facelift."
Oh but how could we disagree with him? As I watched him the other
day trying doggedly to obtain a ticket to the Republican National
Convention in New York, I realized that we shall miss him dearly
at our posh gatherings and endless benefit cocktail parties in
the Upper East Side.
.................... Say
goodbye to spam!
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