Headlines: U.S. Tells Iran to "Suck it"

I just finished finals, so I'm not really in any mood to rant about this, but I'm going to give it a try. Recently, Iran's President, an archconservative who, arguably, was elected in response to our asshole foreign policy, wrote a letter to President Bush. This if the first correspondence between the U.S.-Iranian Presidencies in twenty-seven years. An unofficial translation may be obtained here. How would our President respond? True to form, his administration dismissed the letter as irrelevant. However, Bush still claims to support a diplomatic solution to Iran's continued pursuit of a nuclear program. Basically, he's saying he'll listen to Iran when Iran says what he wants to hear. Or, as Iranians are coming to understand it, Bush's concept of diplomacy involves Iran unconditionally surrendering to the demands of the West, specifically, the demands of America.

Granted, the letter is quite possibly nothing more than a political maneuver intended to paint the U.S. as the bad guy in this tense situation. However, it seems to me that the only way it could do that is if we rejected it outright. Which we did. Because we're morons.

What would we have lost by responding to this letter? What prevented us from using this as an opportunity to open a direct dialogue with the Iranian President about the nuclear program, besides our President's inability to pronounce the word correctly? And for that matter, why not take the opportunity to answer some of those questions, to address the people of Iran directly? I guess he figures since he doesn't have to answer to the American people anymore, he certainly doesn't have to answer to the people of Iran. I can only imagine that he's equating President Ahmadinejad with Saddam Hussein, which is a terrible mistake. In so many ways.

Anyway, enough for right now. I'm curious about Iran, and thankfully, Yahoo links to a series of articles by a guy who travelled to Iran looking for just the kind of information I most want to know. Kevin Sites in the Hotzone is a series of articles straight out of the conflict zones in the news today: not only Iran, but Haiti, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and so on. His articles on Iran are dated from January of this year, and give you some perspective on life in Iran. The difficulty facing an Irani metal band in a country that bans Western music, for instance, or the steps being taken to combat drug abuse and HIV, which so often go hand in hand. There are some disturbing similarities between our country and Iran when it comes to dealing with HIV. While these articles may or may not shed some light on the current situation or on the President's letter, I found them very interesting. I wish there were more of them.

I guess there's no reason the President should listen to what a hardline religious zealot has to say, but by that reasoning, why should anyone in the world listen to President Bush?

Oh, right. We already have nukes.

It's Moments Like These

Improv Everywhere infiltrates Best Buy

Extremely excellent. Glorious. Makes me proud to be an American, where national paranoia and uncontrolled consumption of high dollar electronics make events like this possible.

I have some suspicion that my friend Trouble won't like this as much as I do, because she's a conservative, and conservatives don't like people who don't follow the rules, who shake things up for the sake of shaking them up...unless those people are President Bush. Ha! Or, you know, soldiers or cops or whatever. Rumsfeld. People with guns? Seriously though, skip over her politics and read about her personal life. When she goes digging into her past, she comes up with some truly beautiful things, tells some excellent stories, and shows what a remarkable person she really is.

Anyway, that's all I have tonight. I ran out of poetry and my brain is offkilter, scattered and weird. I thought about quoting some of the things I said to people, ideas that were haunting me, divorced from their cerebral context. I decided that I prefered them as they were, free floating, living or dying according to their importance to the listener. Things are more beautiful when they can die. There's a thought for art, religion and relationships.

Goodnight.