One of the more interesting conversations I ever had...

Nov 19, 2019, 7:03 PM

...was one almost 30 years ago (I was doing some mental figuring, and I believe it was 27 years ago, actually) with a woman named Shohreh Aghdashloo at Magnum Opus Con, which is a long-defunct gaming convention (like the far bigger DragonCon down in Atlanta) that used to be held in Greenville.

Shohreh was an actress, fairly new to America at the time, though she was right around 40. (She's 67 now and still working; she's got a key role on The Expanse, and the character she plays is very much like I remember her in real life.) She was still, I also remember well, one of the most astounding gorgeous women I have ever personally met in my life, this sultry-eyed Persian beauty, and was incredibly intimidating on top of that because she was...different, than anyone I'd ever met in my then-still-very-young life as well: worldly, sophisticated, cold-eyed, intelligent, with this dry and cutting wit that was unlike anything I'd ever seen before (or, really, since!) She was hanging outside one of the conference rooms in between appearances and signings, bored out of her mind, and I guess that's why she deigned to talk to me.

Whatever, I talked to her a good forty-five minutes, and she chain-smoked her Virginia Slims and told me her life story.

She was Iranian royalty. Some of you are probably old enough to still remember the Iranian Revolution in 1978, in which the Shah of Iran and his family got run out of the country by Islamic revolutionaries, and shortly after that, the Iranian hostage crisis when that group of "student militants" stormed the American Embassy and held our staff hostage for a year. Whatever, royals were getting hunted down and vanished into torture rooms by the Ayatollah's new regime, and those sultry Sultan's-harem types who favored the long flowing belly-dancer type outfits (like Shohreh!) were getting especially unpopular with the Islamic hard-liners, so she split for England and eventually America.

What stuck out, though, was her social commentary. She didn't like the Ayatollah much. Or at all. Actually what she said was, in regards to the Shah and the royal families: "Yeah, we were cruel, we loved our intrigue, we were corrupt...but god@$%^it, we had style. And then it all got knocked over by a bunch of illiterate #$%#ing peasants with towels on their heads." (This was around 1991, I believe, when she was telling me this, so it was obviously reasonably fresh for her, whatever.)

The even more interesting thing was the why. "The ironic thing," she told me (and blowing perfect smoke rings, which I'm confident she knew perfectly well was suggestive as all), "was that we'd always been cruel, we'd always loved our intrigue, we'd always been corrupt...and nobody ever cared. But God Forbid, the King goes and tries to drag the peasants into the twentieth century, and the @$%%ing revolution breaks out." (She also swears, by the way. A lot.)

Like I said, colorful; our culture just doesn't produce creatures like Shohreh, who I suspect was fashioned by privilege and palace intrigue and knives in the dark. And that conversation has lingered on.

I do remember asking her why the twentieth century and the West was so scary, and while I don't remember her exact response, it was basically along the lines of: change is scary, and the West was a world that brought change to a Middle East that hadn't changed since the 1400's...and very much wanted to keep it that why. Whatever, whereas Shohreh and the more urbane and educated royals peered to the West and saw a fascinating new future, the reactionaries saw a complicated and bewildering world...and collectively lost their minds. I do remember her saying that the Revolution was far less about religion than it was about change. She did say Persians historically didn't like Islam much - again, they liked their palace intrigue and belly dancers too much! - which is why it was so insane to her that a religious dictatorship took hold of Iran.

But change was scary. The future was scary. The complicated world the West represented was scary. And so the reactionaries flipped out and tried to wind back the clock.

I also remember thinking it could never happen here, and how lucky I was to live in America. Her problems seemed like something that could only happen very far away.

Ironic.

Like somebody said here, history doesn't repeat, but it certainly does rhyme.

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profuscious said:

you nailed her character in the show to a T. It's funny, my dad was on the streets of Tehran in 1979 while a small minority of Iranians were yelling Death to America. He was a journalist sent there by a small market news group. We failed bigly on the world stage back in the late 70's, but especially in the middle east, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Iranian people in general get a bad rap. The elitist attitudes unfortunately led to the perverse theocratic outcome. They got caught by "dem Belters".

I dunno what things are like now in the modern era, but I do know at one point the kids on the streets there in Tehran were wearing Bruce Springsteen shirts and blue jeans as a form of rebellion.

They had always heard about the Great Satan, of course, but that was from a regime they didn't like, too. I do know they still don't like the regime, and burning their own banks has gotten to be en vogue the last couple months because of particularly unpopular economic measures the Ayatollah's gang imposed.

My sense from what I've read and gathered over the years is that Iran is actually a lot like Cuba...a really cool, historic place with a unique culture that sort of got frozen in time, and there's a really cool country underneath waiting to come out whenever the regime running it finally crumbles and the country rejoins the world.

One of the more interesting conversations I ever had...

tldr nice post.***

I watch Expanse, this story is legit

Re: I watch Expanse, this story is legit

quozzel doesn't have conversations,

Re: quozzel doesn't have conversations,

Re: quozzel doesn't have conversations,

Re: One of the more interesting conversations I ever had...

Re: One of the more interesting conversations I ever had...

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