Yeah, let’s let these nutbags have nukes:
Close allies of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have been accused of using supernatural powers to further his policies amid an increasingly bitter power struggle between him and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Several people said to be close to the president and his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, have been arrested in recent days and charged with being “magicians” and invoking djinns (spirits).
Ahmadinejad may be a short timer, but it’s unlikely he’ll be replaced by anyone sane.
This points up why I think Arthur Miller missed his mark with “The Crucible,” a play with the Salem Witch trials as an allegory about nuclear paranoia and communist conspiracy. Instead of talking all around his point, why didn’t he have the characters building nuclear weapons to kill suspected witches, or even better, have the townsfolk who were building the nuclear weapons tried for practicing witchcraft and associating with demons? It would’ve made much more sense (cheap sex with a succubus is nothing compared to building nukes for Satan) and stood as a precient portrayal of modern Iranian power-politics and nuclear research.
Er, Mr. Turner, I’m not a fan of that particular play, but I do know the meanings of the words “metaphor” and “analogy.” A play featuring 17th century colonists building nuclear weapons would have been incoherent.
On the other hand, I suppose an absurdist playwright like Samuel Beckett could have made something like that — well, “work” isn’t the best verb, but it will have to do. But Miller was hardly an absurdist playwright.
Ohh we should just surrender right now. How we gonna defeat the magic carpet cavalry? And they might have a few rubs left in that magic lamp and they can just wish us out of existence.
Well Andrea, how about having it set in modern day Iran, although a play about a nuclear weapons program run by a bunch of crazed religious nuts who believe in magic and witchcraft and think their madhi is still stuck in a well would probably be incoherent as well.
Where’s Christine O’Donnell when we need her? Or Barbara Eden?
I still think the closest parallel to “The Crucible” is modern frivolous lawsuits.
Arthur Miller wrote that play when Iran was still “Persia” and had a Shah. I mean, maybe someone could rewrite it to set it in modern day Iran but I don’t think replacing all the female characters with chador-clad lumps will be very successful.
Forgot to add: I mean, for all their faults, at least the witch hunters of Salem actually took the testimony of women seriously. Too seriously, as it turned out, at least in the case of those crazy girls. But what would you replace the girls with in a play about modern Iran? The play is nothing without the ladies.
How about replacing the ladies with gay Iranians, who of course don’t actually exist, unlike demon-summoning Iranian witches in the highest levels of government, who are very real.
There’s a big problem adapting Arthur Miller with Iran – in Salem the grassroots (specifically, the accusers) held a significant role in stoking the villainy, whereas the Iranian villainy comes primarily from the top.
How about a Blackadder-styled satire of the mullahs?