MacGuffinism

$ [subject-barred] has a great post on the fictitious dubyaemdee in the latest sequel of the thriller spectacle of history, and other thoughts regarding Iran:

"Well, then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?"

- President George W Bush, September 2003

Watch any film by world-renowned Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and you see a filmmaker railing against an oppressive, fundamentalist theocracy, its inherent subjugation of women, the dehumanizing effect of the hatreds it foments and the futilities of a patriarchal system mired in its own rhetoric and hypocrisy. No wonder the Bush administration wants to keep him out of the country [Kiarostami
was refused a US visa in 2002 to attend the New York Film Festival].

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Interesting that, of all the countries in the world, Iran is today the cyberspace capital of blogging; whereas Iraq has a mere few dozen bloggers reporting on the US invasion, Iran has a few hundred thousand bloggers, the otherwise repressive Iranian regime covertly permitting virtual freedom to the country's vast population of educated youth (60 per cent of Iran's university places are occupied by women, while less than 2 per cent of Iran's population regularly attends a Mosque ...).