Brilliant post, but may I say this about the contrast of crowds in Iran protesting election results with those in the USA waiting for an iPhone: it's worse than that. The equivalent in the USA is a crowd supporting Barack Obama (rather than Kucinich or Nader, etc) because they think *he* is the pragmatist who is going to achieve universal healthcare, wage equality, gay rights, so on. Not those chaps who are so "out there" in the "far left" that their platform actually explicitly calls for these things.
--ravi, will now STFU for a while, if I can.