> On Aug 3, 2010, at 9:45 PM, Peter Ward wrote:
> > That's it: time to send in the bombers.
>
> Are you an asshole, or do you just do a good imitation of one?
I'm with Comrade Ward here, asshole or not.
One suspects very strongly that this is a factoid, to put it mildly. It seems highly unlikely that Khamenei really wants to do away with all music altogether. A detached quotelet via Hamid Dabashi -- well. One will wait for fuller information.
Snippets of Khamenei's remarks seen elsewhere on the web suggest that he thinks music is kosher -- erm, halal -- but thinks young people would be better off studying other things. This actually makes him sound a lot like Oliver Cromwell. For that matter, one wonders what Lenin would have said to a young man who wanted to take up the violin in oh, say, 1920. (I feel sure that somebody on the list will know by heart a Lenin quote on this very topic from that very year, and I look forward to reading it.)
There's something sourly humorous about the spectacle of us American leftists -- who, sad to say, have no influence at all on what our own murderous government does -- taking sides in the Kulturkampf of a country which only recently extricated itself from our deadly embrace.
Let the Iranians sort it out, without any unsolicited umpiring from our cozy armchairs. As somebody once said, we have much to be modest about.
This topic has already set off a global orgy of carpet-chewing in the official media. Do we really want to echo those squalid creatures?
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com http://cars-suck.org