Iran doesn't like "300"

Iran is angry. Yeah, I know, "Iran?? Angry??? Are... are you sure?" Who'd a thunk, eh?

Now, "angry" is pretty much the default operating system for Iran, yes. Moreso lately than usual. They're angry that they don't control more of the Middle East. They're angry that there's a war in Iraq that they aren't benefitting from as much as they might otherwise be. They're angry that various world powers are uniting under the theme of NOT letting them obtain a nuclear weapon. And, as always, they're angry that neither they nor their ideological allies in Palestine have succeeded in wiping the Jews out of existance.

You'd think that'd be enough to be angry about for a nation of 70 Million people. But, apparently, no. Apparently with a major war looming right next door and their own President essentially begging to be attacked, Iran has still found time to work itself into a hysterical lather the type of which the Muslim World typically reserves only for newspaper cartoons and a women with a visible nose-bridge over the movie "300." So says a Time magazine corespondent in Tehran: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1598886,00.html?cnn=yes

Iran's problem? Well, the film's snarling villians are Persians, and what's left of the once-mighty Persian Empire and it's once-proud Persian People we now call Iran. Ironically, more Americans now know this BECAUSE Iran brought it up than probably ever knew it while going to see "300."

This was bound to happen, and wouldn't really be something I'd call newsworthy (again: Iranian anger is not news, in the same way that a wet fish is not news) save for the kind of special hilarity it provides with quotes like these:

"Everywhere else I went, from the dentist to the flower shop, Iranians buzzed with resentment at the film's depictions of Persians, adamant that the movie was secretly funded by the U.S. government to prepare Americans for going to war against Iran. "Otherwise why now, if not to turn their people against us?"

I wonder if it's even worth trying to explain to Iran that that isn't the way things actually work here. Or, even better, that what they're imagining is unfathomable in the current political climate: "Hollywood" and the regime that currently occupies the White House and Pentagon tend to view one-another in terms of lions-vs.-hyenas: natural born enemies. Of course, it doesn't HELP that the expected wacko-contingent of the political "right" has been jumping up and down aiming to claim the film as "theirs" since before it came out, while the wacko-contingent of the "left" is slinging around their favorite insta-slams of "racism" and "imperialism."

On the scale of such things, this isn't quite as tragically-amusing as when Britian got angry about looking bad in "The Patriot," if only because there was never the chance that Britian would fire off a missile or two over it. Still... you have to wonder if this can safely be called a case of a nation having it's priorities obscenely out of alignment, and I mean even for Iran.