Excuse me for being like the guy that won’t get in step with Ali v Clay or Caitland v Bruce or Istanbul v Constantinople, but I remain a Persia-phile through and through.  Why would a lover of Dick and Jane, The Sun Also Rises, The Prophet or even Fifty Shades of Somethingorother embrace the oil-driven, US-backed dictatorship of the Pahlevi era or the totalitarian, mind-numbing suppressive dogma of the Ayatolas, both of which have sought to obliterate the natural progression of the literary epicenter of enlightened man?  The creative Persian imagination passed and written down in storytelling and poetry from the early sixth century BC and holding fast, (for a while), even following the Islamic conquests of the seventh century AD, provided a blueprint for all the written arts that have followed.  Yet politics and bias and oil and stupid, stupid, stupid religion have all but damned the flow from that once fertile, cascading fountain.  Iranian writers and filmmakers and free-thinkers of all kinds have been stifled both by an oppressive regime and an intellectual distancing from ideas perceived as being filtered through the scrutiny of an evil empire.

Graphic novels are fun, but most of us, (not Donald, of course), can probably agree without being snooty, that they are literature-lite.  And, that Fifty Shades lady, proud to proclaim that she’s “not a writer”, may have found the tabloidal G spot of millions of sexually frustrated women, but her success does not bode well for the healthy future of those who are able to stir our emotions, expand our imaginations and provide a font of verbal memories that make up our intellectual foundation.  So, let’s do our part to stem the backsliding of literary excellence.  Read or re-read some deliciously classic gem.  Seek out a compelling contemporary narrator or poet and tell a friend.  And let’s keep talking to Iran and just maybe reignite their muse while we’re convincing them not to blow up the planet.