Surreal theatre

Perhaps this is all there is. An ugly world inhabitant by ugly people satisfied with nothing short of ugliness!

And as the antics and the theatrics continue to spiral out of control, becoming more deadly by day, small protests in Iran turned violent in front of the Danish Embassy and that of Austria of all places! Oddly, those in a country whose reigning imbecility can’t even stand watching workers engage in activism as the perpetually covetous merchants continue to hoard and trade all the while lamenting ceaselessly the corruption in others.

Unbelievably human!

Like our esteemed members of the global community gathered in the EU so indignantly launching a protest at a trade boycott even as they prepare to impose a regime of sanctions of their own.

Am I missing something, or is it that our good neighbors are getting sillier everyday? Or is it somewhere carved in stone that all the decisions of the world have to be initiated in particular geographical boundaries?

Talk about obnoxiously entitled.

Not all the antipathy in the world for the murderous Mullahs and the fanatical Islamists could distract away from the odium of the assumptions

So war it is then. No escaping the logic, I am thinking. The problem, of course, for me, is that the particular trajectory we are on and, naturally, all the requisite rhetoric I find an existential threat—literally.

And it’s not merely about dying. We all die at some point or another and from something, always.

Look, we keep paying lip service to it but, for whatever reason, persist in our unwillingness to dot the i’s.

Whether any of us like it or not, the world is diverse. Perhaps we should have all stayed in that small village, neighborhood or the city we were born in. And not traveled at all. Nor ever to have bothered meeting anyone who looked different, believed in ideas other than our own or spoke a different language or the same language with a different accent. Nor to have bothered falling in love to marry any one of “them.”

But that isn’t our way. And by this I mean here quite a large segment of humanity’s.

So regardless of what you actually might think of diversity, there is diversity and my family is diverse. In Iran, for instance, their appearances range in a spectrum from a luscious darkness you’d normally encounter among some Caribbeans all the way to pale, freckled and auburn haired with unusually stunning “eastern” green eyes. And from many different ethnicities.

Another branch has been on its way out of Iran since mid fifties. There was recently a family reunion I couldn’t attend. But as I looked at the pictures and tallied the intermarriages and the number of second or third generation “hybrids”, that family now, whether you like it or not, represent some of the major Western European countries, and some Eastern ones and North Americans.

And some of the major religious faiths are present as well. And unbelievers. The circle of friends I care about is even wider and spreads across four of the continents.

So, which members of the family would you have me watch subsidize or get involved in the vilification and butchery of which other? Which slur or caricature would you have me support aimed at which group?

Suppose some of you--the ones untiringly peddling this notion of clash of cultures, religions and civilizations--get your way. Segregation, it is then, and religious passions and “us” and “them” and ethnic cleansings and loathing and perpetual battles and meanness!

How do you propose we draw the line then?

So you could imagine how obnoxious it sounds to me whenever I hear someone throw around this silly, silly notion of moral equivalency. It is pure miasma, both theoretically and practically. Our “neocons” and their counterparts in Iran are operating from an almost identical set of assumptions. And they promise an almost identical outcome to us.

Because if the powers that be were truly as omniscient and on top of things as they seem to think they are, then they couldn’t have missed what is hard to overlook about this group that is now in power in Iran. So why do they keep mum?

Why all the disinformation?

And if they had an ounce of decency left, they would cough up the truth and exhibit the audacity it takes to face the rest of us naked in public instead of feeding us all their usual nonsense about the militarism that threatens all of us.

And regardless of where you stand or whatever high minded empyrean self-definition some of you might want to entertain about yourselves as you peddle your miasma, this conflict promises to make it terribly difficult to sustain a way of life I’ve come to cherish most. And it is a tender way of life, mostly civil and open. Harmless in the grand scheme of things.

All things must end, though. And all ends are a new beginning.

But not without a fight!