Persepolis & The Last Shah

Q: Judging from your writings. You have always had a sort of fascination with tragic figures. Delorean was definitely one of that sort and in a sense so was the Shah of Iran. Could you elaborate further on this?

A: I think the last Shah of Iran was not only a highly misunderstood person. But he was also a fundamentally decent person who simply didn’t grasp the manipulative and devious and cunning nature of power and politics. Here was a man who went into the pit without really knowing what he was getting into. He assumed that his friends would stand by him, they sold him off at the drop of a hat. He ssumed that those who he gave too generously would be eternally grateful. Instead they turned away in disgust at his very sight. He believe those who he trusted shared his vision, but they couldn’t. As they were all parvenus and superficial hanger ons who were really just there to enjoy the free flow of food and drinks. To me. The tragedy was all he really wanted was to lift up his country to stand as tall and mighty as he had always depicted his reign to be…but it was doomed from the very beginning. Like I said, the last Shah of Iran was a fundamentally decent man and that ironically was the only reason for his downfall. Because one can be so decent that it kills you. This goes to show that to live well one needs to come to terms with the geography and texture of evil and malevolence. I am not saying one should go out to seek and embrace evil, but unless you have steeled yourself sufficiently to look into the depths of darkness that even angels fear to thread and after seeing what you have seen, you develop the strength of character and will to walk away from it. Not in disgust or the vapidness that comes from judging something that you hardly know simply because you can’t admit to yourself and others, you don’t nearly have the intellectual muscle or curiosity to know more about it. But if you can’t walk away from evil after understanding it completely and absolutely…how then can you say you’re good. That was the problem with the Shah, he did not understand entire hemisphere of evil for what it really was. To him it was just an abstraction. It’s just like most men don’t fuck around not because theyre good husbands, because no attractive woman in her right frame of mind would ever want to snuggle up close to them. So they stay with their fat and ugly wives. To me that doesn’t make you a ma who venerates the institution of marriage any more than living in a cave makes you a geologist, it just means no one wants to fuck you. But if you’re someone who women find attractive and desirable every other day you get propositioned by beautiful ladies and you yet you have the character and will to say no to that forbidden fruit, then I say you’re loyal, it’s the same with evil and malevolence. Most people simply do not know what theyre actually capable of under a given set of conditions. They dont, if they did the holocaust wouldn’t have happened, that’s why I feel sorry for people who wear their goodness like some well polished badge of honour. To me they are The are naive, stupid and since they have hardly lived. They know no, no better and these goody good doers, they are the ones who are capable of the most vile, deplorable and base actions and thoughts against their fellow men. Because even when they seemingly inflict pain and suffering on others. They actually believe, they’re good. But the quiet man who shys away from the question – are you good? Who looks pleadingly at the godless sky as if he yearns to be swallowed whole by it like a whale…a man who is even comes across as a wreck of uncertainty before such a question. You better believe me when I say, he’s good right down to his toes.