Thursday, January 24, 2008

An open letter to the people of Iran

To the good people of Iran,

It seems that we find ourselves in a similar predicament. Somehow, both the people of Iran and the people of America have ended up with religious zealots who have co-opted the governments of our respective countries to meet their own ends.

You see while your government invalidated the candidacy of many of your best and brightest running for office leaving only candidates who fell in lock-step with their status quo... Our opposition party presented us with a candidate that was so unappealing to our masses that we opted to give our crackpot zealot another four years to run our country even further into the ground. The choice we were given was no real choice at all.

So here we find ourselves, in a similar predicament with leaders so bull-headed and stubborn that they'd rather risk nuclear war than actually listen to what the masses have to say. And it is rather unfortunate that our respective political processes have done us the great disservice of essentially silencing us.

At any rate, I just wanted to let you know, in the words of one of our former presidents, we "feel your pain." Unfortunately, as long as the crazies are running the asylum, I daresay that we're all well on our way up shit creek without a paddle (at times like these I do wish I knew a witty enough equivalent in Farsi to show greater respect to your great language and nation). I do wish you the best of luck in regaining control of your asylum... And come this November, we'll do our best to regain some semblance of control over ours... But I do want to warn you, with the alternative leaders we're being presented right now-- I don't know how likely we are to succeed.

Best of luck and warmest regards,
Perplexio

5 comments:

dantallion said...

The parallel you draw is absolutely brilliant - and very correct. One wonders which of the two is actually more dangerous to world stability.

Brice said...

Yikes. Well said, but yikes...

Jeff said...

By any chance have you seen the documentary "Jesus Camp"? I though it was fantastic and very powerful and quite frightening. I don't understand how candidates like Huckabee can get by making outrageous comments like changing the Constitution to have it reflect the bible a bit more...

Perplexio said...

dantallion: I think Ahmadinejad is more dangerous given that Bush is a "lame duck" and Congress is controlled by the Democrats which essentially blocks most damage he's capable of doing.

Brice: It is a bit scary, but I was more trying to put perspective on the fact that the leaders of a given nation generally create the perception of what a nation is like. And given Bush's lack of popularity, I don't believe the perception he creates of Americans is an accurate one... It got me to wondering, Ahmadinejad has created a negative perception of Iranians-- but if Bush isn't an accurate benchmark for what Americans are like-- isn't possible that Ahmadinejad really isn't representative of the feelings and sentiments of the Iranian people?

Jeff: I haven't seen Jesus Camp yet but I'd like to. As for Huckabee-- I doubt he'll get the nomination. On the Republican side I'm leaning more and more towards Mitt Romney. He may be a Mormon but he's really made it a point to try to keep his religion and his politics separate... Whereas Huckabee has made it a point to bring his religion into his politics. Heck on the Democratic side both Hillary and Obama have campaigned in churches! With Romney, he was governor of Massachusetts-- one of the more liberal states in this country... If a state THAT liberal is willing to elect him as governor-- can he really be THAT bad... Something tells me he'd do a much better job of keeping his religion and politics separate from each other than Bush has done.

Susan as Herself said...

I saw Jesus Camp. It was terrifying. I could not believe some of the stuff I saw in that film. If you aren't already nervous about this country, you will be after seeing that movie.