Tendentious

In the movie Black Widow, there is a scene where a geologist character tries to impress Debra Winger by taking her to the top of an active volcano and showing off his expertise. "This," he says of the lava flow leaking out in rivulets and puddling in the rocks beneath them, "Is the newest place on earth."

I thought of that line this week looking at the uprisings in Iran that the networks are working so hard to ignore. After several days Reuters assured us that things, thank goodness, were calming down, and the students were finally coming to their senses and going back to hating America as they rightfully should. However, the Iranian demonstrators have disagreed with this particular spin and continue to misbehave.

Intellectually, Iran is the newest place on earth.

It's the first place in the world where we can see what post-fundamentalism looks like. Iran has experienced life under jihadism and is in the process of vomiting it up. The implications of the ongoing revolution in Iran on other non-Arab Islamic countries like Pakistan and Indonesia are going to be interesting to watch. The Arab world, I think, will continue to be a basket case for a long time in any case--many of the militiamen engaged in beating the Iranian students are volunteers from Saudi Arabia and Palestine--but the non-Arab Muslim word may have a chance to forestall the marching morons of Islamic fundamentalism.