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The Insanity on and in Iran
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vokradio.com, Los Angeles, CA, USA
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The Insanity on and in Iran
By David Brooks and Gail Collins
Left,
Alex Wong/Getty Images; right, Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters Left,
President Obama at a news conference on June 23. Right, Iran's
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a sermon during Friday prayers at
Tehran University, four days earlier.
David Brooks: Gail, many of us were born into the wrong era. You - and I'm just guessing here - would have been happy as William Henry Harrison's Rahm Emmanuel
in 1841. You would have told him to wear galoshes on Inauguration Day
and used his long presidency to advance the cause of Ohioan Cultural
Hegemony - to make Ohio the cultural, financial and psychological
center of the nation and the world, to the betterment of all.
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As for me, I missed my own natural era - the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would have been happy discussing Big Ideas with Hannah Arendt, Jane Jacobs, Philip Rahv, Digby Baltzell and the like, while quietly drinking myself into a stupor with Delmore Schwartz.
My affinity for this era does have its advantages though. These people thought a lot about revolution and dictatorship. They had a supple feel for the revolutionary moment and for the psychoses of men in power in autocratic regimes.
More : Original Article at : http://theconversation.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/the-insanity-on-and-in-iran/?pagemode=print
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