Iran, therefore I blog

Check out the blog of Iranian ex-pat journalist Hossein Derakhshan. One of my hopes post-9/11 was that relations between Iran and the U.S., or at least between Iran and the West in general, would improve. This is not an entirely unrealistic hope, partly because of Iran's access of e-mail. I still think that day is coming, but the Ayatollah Assaholla(s) who run the judiciary and the statist religious institutions need to die off first. That, and for the intellectuals to keep reading Nabokov and the masses to keep watching Baywatch reruns. Note Mike Wallace's questions to (now-ex-)President Rafsanjani on that topic.

So, here's hoping for timely, non-martyrdom, Darwin-Awardesque deaths for the members of the Guardian Council, and maybe a 2007 Baywatch reunion movie to stir popular Iranian sentiment. Also, if Shirley Temple could be the U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Ghana, why couldn't whatshername be the first U.S. diplomat to return to Tehran?

Madame Ambassador.