Italian solution/Logical solution

I might be a bit late covering the news, but I found this caricature about the recent  controversy regarding the president's of Iran's visit to Italy, where nude statues were covered so as not to offend him. I love Italy, but sometimes find this country infuriating, especially when it panders to religious puritanism. This is not only a stupid gesture, it is a cowardly one. So when I saw this caricature by Walter Leoni, I did not only laugh, I roared, with a good dash of anger. Italy can be infuriating, but so many Italians remain admirable in their criticism and mockery of stupidity.

About wallpapers, the Bayeux Tapestry and Iran (among other things)

A Facebook friend (I will not mention who, not unless she allows it, she is a celebrity) invited her Facebook friends today to come and tear down the wallpapers of her home. She lives in London, so the invitations was for Londoners or people living nearby, who could go to her place on a Monday. I could not show up of course, but I answered this:

"Sadly I do not live in London and I work on Monday. I hate wallpapers (they haven't made decent ones since the Bayeux Tapestry), stripping them down too, but it is a necessary evil, and I'd do this for tea and cakes. And since you have Iranian blood, you must know how to serve tea properly."

In three sentences, I mention London, wallpapers, I make one terrible, awful, trivial comparison with the Bayeux Tapestry, to the Iranian origins of my FB friend, their tea drinking tradition and I think because of this amount of topics, it deserves to be a great unknown line.

Persepolis

I am reading Persepolis by Marjana Satrapi at the moment, it's a really great autobiographical graphic novel. It is also a reflexion on history. Persepolis tells the story of a girl growing up in Iran during the Islamist revolution. But through her eyes, it is the story of a people who cannot free itself from tyranny (the monarchy, then the ayatollahs) and ultimately cannot find peace. It is also about the corrosive nature of ideologies, as they turn people into unloving, violent zealots. Reading it, I am thinking the regimes in Iran (either monarchy or Islamist republic) look a lot like the one of Oceania in Orwell's 1984. Like Ingsoc, the regimes in Persepolis use double thinking, patriotism and religion to try to control every aspect of individual life, including sexuality and love. Unlike Ingsoc (so far anyway), it does not as far as penetrating the consciousness of the citizens. Not all of them anyway, as many people do criticize the regime, even revolt, sometimes openly. That said, to see that a country that was not short of free thinkers and smart, open-minded people got opressed so easily is shivering in itself. And it makes me think that we Westerners are not out of danger in that regard. I mentioned on this blog in the past our own brand of fundamentalism and they are also more than eager to control us, to impose their system of beliefs on us. We should show vigilance, but when I see nowadays that Big Brother is for the young generation a vulgar, trashy game show, I wonder if there is really hope. If the real Big Brother shows up, who will oppose any kind of resistance?