O, Brother, Why Art Thou?
VANITY FAIR article, July 2005
This arrived in my email box this morning. Love him or hate him, he sure can write.
“Iran today exists in a state of dual power and split personality. The huge billboards and murals proclaim it an Islamic republic, under the eternal guidance of the immortal memory of Ayatollah Khomeini. A large force of Revolutionary Guards and a pervasive religious police stand ready to make good on this grim pledge. But directly underneath these forbidding posters and right under the noses of the morals enforcers, Iranians are buying and selling videos, making and consuming alcohol, tuning in to satellite TV stations, producing subversive films and plays and books, and defying the dress code. All women are supposed to cover all their hair at all times, and to wear a long jacket, or manteau, that covers them from neck to knee. But it’s amazing how enticing the compulsory scarf can be when worn practically on the back of the head and held in place only by hair spray.
“As for the obligatory manteau, any woman with any fashion sense can cut it to mold an enviable silhouette. I found a bootlegger on my arrival at Tehran’s airport and was offered alcohol on principle in every home I entered Khomeini’s excepted — even by people who did not drink. Almost every Iranian has a relative overseas and is in regular touch with foreign news and trends. The country is an ‘as if’ society. People live as if they were free, as if they were in the West, as if they had the right to an opinion, or a private life. And they don’t do too badly at it. I have now visited all three of the states that make up the so-called axis of evil. Rough as their regime can certainly be, the citizens of Iran live on a different planet from the wretched, frightened serfs of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il.
“Tehran is in fact more or less uncontrollable by anybody. It’s the Mexico City or Calcutta of the region: a vast, unplanned, overpopulated nightmare of all-day traffic jams and eye-wringing pollution, tissue-paper building codes, and an earthquake coming like Christmas. It’s also the original uptown-downtown city, built on the steep slopes of the snowy Elburz Mountains, which, on a good day, one can sometimes actually see. In the northern quarter, there are the discreet villas where the members of the upper crust keep their heads down and their wealth unostentatious.”
Vanity Fair, lol.
hidden amongst ten thousand slick ads. Their recent covers have featured scantily-clad, very thin women.
Mostly anti-bush articles and several great reports. Since many of their articles are on-line, I’m cancelling my subscription. Shhhh
Yeah, I’ll check them out. I just thought it was sort of comical that when Hitchen’s was debating the war in Iraq his credentials were that he wrote for Vanity Fair.
As he would say, “hurrmmph, why don’t you check out my blog?”
http://www.hitchensweb.com/
I don’t eat meat, even chicken but now I think I will have
to give up animal products completely. I love eggs and
cream in my coffee for breakfast. Haven’t eaten ice cream
for years. But I hate what mega farming is doing to
animals.
Twice this year I have heard experts recommend the
mediterranean diet as the healthiest, so I’m heading
in that direction.
Is that your site you linked to? Excellent.
I am currently a vegetarian. I think of my diet as not perfect, but sort of view it as a mix of Nietzsche and Bentham. Bottom line is that I agree that the suffering caused to animals is inhume and unnecessary, however, being a vegetarian in a suburb outside MA doesn’t provide me with a wide array of vegan or even great vegetarian options. So hopefully one day I’ll move more into vegan territory.
A large portion of my heritage is from the Mediterranean (I’m a mutt genetically). And yes the diet is very healthy, often times meat is a small portion of the diet.
If you check out my diary here, I did an interview with Josh Balk of the Humane Society of the United States, great guy. I also did one on the dkos, same username.
That website isn’t mine. Just thought it did a good job of responding to some knee-jerk reasons why some people claim they oppose vegetarianism, (although I am still thinking about the concept of animal rights versus say animal welfare or protection).
*outside Boston.
I live beside farm country: many heritage farms which are
organic. So I can get free range organic eggs. A prize really,
when you consider how dozens of New Yorkers were lining up
in last winter’s big storm to obtain them.
Visited a show case farm once where 6 little black/pink
pigslets were running amok in and out of the pumpkin
patch. They were being herded by a sheep dog. The farmer
explained that they were his ‘free range pigs’. I never
eat pork.
There’s an article in our Globe & Mail by Pamela Anderson
exposing the horrors of mega chicken farming.
You are in hot company!
Well, thank goodness. You can’t have the man going into the DTs when he’s doing this kind of business travel. Perhaps that was the principle upon which these Muslims, who will not take fermented beverages themselves, offered it to their guest. Manners, or the desire not to watch him shake and sweat all over their furniture? It’s a cunning, baffling, powerful disease, folks. But, yeah he can still write. His brilliant mind is still relatively intact, despite the loss of so many of his marbles.
so one can only imagine how smart he was before. I’m thinking of Chris and Sean Penn bumping into each other in Iran.
“Fireworks ensue, cursing, followed by body blows.
Iranians are shocked at the violent behaviour of two
American celebrity journalists who had arrived in Iran
to document the violence.”
Chris left Iran long before Sean Penn arrived.
(Check my updated diary on Penn, I think while he is annoying to Americans there, the Iranian protesters like him.)
I have thought about that many times, in regards to Hitchens. What on earth could he have been, had he never started dancing madly in his red shoes? (Image taken from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves.)
Hitchens never says the words, “I was wrong.” Neither does Chomsky, for that matter. It’s their tragic flaw.
As much as I disliked Clinton, he actually did apologize for something, didn’t he? (Not for dropping a cruise missile on Al Shifa, but he at least said he was sorry…)
Absolutely. I’m waiting, waiting for his apology over war pimping for the invasion of Iraq.
Well I am not sure if Chomsky says, “I was wrong,” but he has embraced views of history that he initally opposed.
Moreover, Chomsky doesn’t get enough credit for what he did predict. He gets so much attention for being wrong on a few things (while writing for what like 40 years). In Peace in the Middle East written in 1969, heh predicted that Western Powers would invade the Middle East to control oil resources..
That expression, “if I had it to do over again, I would do
exactly the same things” always struck me as so arrogant.
People change, the times we live in change. I would expect
Chomsky to change some positions over 40 years. Chris
Hitchens however changes every 6 months or so. lol AND he
should recant his war pimping.
would you please recommend my diary?
I agree about your comment regarding Chomsky’s CORRECT predictions.
The Berlin Wall fell, and there was much rejoicing here. Chomsky wrote that the USSR would become a third world area with nukes.
Yesterday a former co-worker of mine, who is Ukrainian, wrote that in some ways life was better before Gorby. Now there is poverty and desperation… a new kind of suffering has replaced the old.
I read that the average life expectancy for a Russian man is 59 years. Few here except Chomsky dared uttered such predictions. And he was RIGHT about that one.
he sounds like he’s writing a sort of “look at how cool theses opressed guys are, we really ought to go and liberate them prelude to invasion piece”… but, I could be wrong…