Watched the Ben Affleck melodocudrama Argo the other day and just thinking about it makes me want a cigarette.
The movie is based loosely on the thrilling, absurd 1979 CIA operation to spirit six Americans out of the Canadian embassy in Tehran during the height of the Iran Hostage Crisis. That means it was based at a time when smoking wasn`t considered the social equivalent of spreading syphillis. The six, driven into hiding after the U.S. embassy was stormed by revolutionaries, spent three-odd months in Canadian care with nothing to do but worry, eat, smoke and drink.
Affleck deserves a nod because what could have been a self-indulgent glorified social studies project is an unbelievably tense film that somehow shuts off the part of the brain that knows they all get out and Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor is declared a hero for his part. It`s like watching the Diary of Anne Frank and fretting one of the Nazis is going to prematurely think, ``Hmmm... maybe I`ll check the attic.``
I haven`t touched a cigarette for two years and my fiancee smokes du Mauriers but this was crisis - I wanted to reach into her purse and inhale one of her coffin nails in one long drag of solidarity with the Americans right there in the theatre. And I`ve got $20 that if I had, half the theatre would have ended up lighting up, because the only thing the movie lacked was live nicotine.
It was a meta moment in a film that is essentially one long meta exercise - a very good movie about the fabrication of a very bad movie, which is then used as a cover story to spirit the Americans out of Iran. When I shared this fairly pedestrian insight with my fiancee, a woman dressed in burka walked into the theatre and sat a few rows down. ``Speaking of meta...,`` my fiancee inhaled.
My third thought was isn`t this a lovely commentary on the multicultural, open nature of this great country of ours. My first thought was my god, she`s wearing a suicide vest.
My second thought was, oh good, she brought her kids so she`s probably not going to send a chestful of explosive-propelled ball bearings scything across the theatre.
I`ve worked in newspapers for a decade or so, which means I have a reasonably vapid knowledge of world affairs. It also gave me the tools to assemble a B-movie, low-rack airport novel plot in a nanosecond. Like a right-wing Rorschach test, I went from burka to recent Iranian-Canadian diplomatic tensions to highly politicized movie to cross-Canada campaign of bombings perpetrated by Iranian terror proxies in reprisal for both this country`s role in the 1979 and its continued intrasigence toward the ayatollahs now. It happened as I put a piece of popcorn in my mouth.
I can blame movies, video games, 9/11, terror colour alert warnings, W, John Baird and KFC's Double Down (they hate our freedom and our fried chicken) but even a liberal pinko punk like myself can feel a spasm of Islamophobia.
It was instinctual, just like that. And it's one of the reasons there's decent chance Israel and perhaps the United States is going start another war in the Middle East in a year or so over Iran's insistence on pursuing a nuclear program. Whether it's oil, nuclear weapons, Israel or American citizens, just can't help holding the world hostage.
My Islamophobia had arisen earlier, but I hadn't realized it. I was watching TV during days off and there was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drawing a red line in felt near the top of a cartoon drawing of a bomb while addressing the general assembly of the United Nations. The line was just below the mark, also outlined on the cartoon, in which Netanyahu explained Iran would have sufficient weapons-grade material to build a nuclear bomb.
He said the UN needed to give Iran a clear signal it couldn't cross his felt line, which he believed would come sometime in the spring or summer of 2013. At that point, he hinted some kind of military action would not be able to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power; as result, as he's suggested in the past, Israel would have to strike at targets in Iran to set their nuclear program back, perhaps with help from the U.S.
At the time I thought it was all very reasonable. But now, it seems a little absurd, in the presentation at least - a head of state told one of the foremost bodies of peace that he was going to bomb another sovereign nation and he did so with a cartoon and felt marker. It was Rocky and Bullwinkle diplomacy.
And the underlying tone was: the only things these ignorant savages understand are cartoon ultimatums and force.
There's no doubt Israel and Netanyahu think the threat is real and a nuclearized Iran is terrifying. But this sort of playground posturing and recess rhetoric eliminates any sort of adult option. Republican candidate Mitt Romney loves it, using it to shore up his own superficial foreign policy credentials and show how tough he is; it's evidenced in his absurd notion, peddled in an op-ed piece, that the ayatollahs were so scared of Republican president Ronald Reagan they ended the hostage crisis Argo is partly based on.
It doesn't take much to fan the flames on both sides. In Argo, there are scenes of American demonstrators beating up Iranians outside of their embassy. Today, according to an NBC/WSJ poll, 58 per cent of Americans think the U.S. should use military action to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program.
The problem is such a thing likely won't work. There's not a great chance a series of airstrikes will destroy Iranian nuclear facilities and, even if they did, the Iranians would probably be rebuild them - with even greater determination to obtain the bomb. The strikes would definitely embolden the hardliners in Iran, legimitizing their claims the U.S. wants to take over the country, perhaps unraveling the work sanctions have been doing to undermine the current regime.
And the region would burn as country after country - Iraq, Saudi Arabia - would be pulled into the conflict.
This is the response that will probably be used against Iran - and it's just as kneejerk, ideological, reckless, stubborn and irrational as anything perpetrated by the ayatollahs.
One of the reasons Argo works is that the absurd is the only reasonable option anyone in movie has - from the CIA, to the hostages, to Canada, to those who supported the revolutionaries because the alternative was the murderous, depraved, decadent Shah who ruled before.
And when it comes to Iran and that region, the absurd is where everyone goes, time after time after time again.
