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As a flakey researcher in a particularly lackluster laboratory, I often find myself walking forehead first smack into the brick wall of reality, as what I believed to be true is suddenly and harshly refuted by plain and painful facts. Now it’s happening in my softer studies.

The bulk of my classroom endeavors over the last year (having completed my engineering courses and now just fleshing out my International Affairs minor) has focused on studying Iranian history, politics, military forces, culture, and language for professional and personal reasons. Professionally, I figure by the time I graduate the current administration will have turned much of the Arabic world into a FUBAR morass of bloodshed and denial, and will have its sights set squarely on the next brownest [sic] member of the Axis of Evil, so that’ll be a hot job market for the arms control oriented. Personally, I just can’t help but notice that Iran is chock-full of ridiculously hot women, and any diplomatic efforts that will enable greater fraternization with the locals, so to speak, should be at the top of the policy list.

Throughout the course of these studies, I’ve come to understand Iran as a nation with a beautiful history, a proud heritage, some rather colorful but not entirely insane political structures, and surprisingly enough a rather conservative strategic perspective, in spite of their rhetoric and regional support of terrorist activities. (For instance, for all their talk in the past about annihilating Israel, they haven’t had the kind of go at it that they really could have, unlike some of their dumber Arabic neighbors. They could, at the drop of a hat, equip Hizballah with enough nerve gas to empty Tel Aviv, but it hasn’t come to pass.) A good part of the last decade saw some promising social and political developments, and in so many ways, this most hated of our adversaries, with whom we have hardly spoken in a quarter of a century, looked a lot more amicable than some of the Islamic nations we call allies in the War on Terror. Surely there’s a way to buy them out of their nuclear program if we just play nice, isn’t there? At the same time, it seemed pretty clear that nationalism was a stronger ethos than reform among the growing youth majority, and while all things American are quite popular among their “baby boomers,” many of those currently singing our praises might take up arms to fight back if we were to try to “democratize” them George W’s way, and a wonderful opportunity would just blow up in our face.

But then I see crap like this. And I have to wonder, When did I drink the Kool-Aid? What the flock was I thinking? Send in the gunships.

Two gay teenagers were publicly executed in Iran on 19 July 2005 for the ‘crime’ of homosexuality. The youths were hanged in Edalat (Justice) Square in the city of Mashhad, in north east Iran. Prior to their execution, the teenagers were held in prison for 14 months and severely beaten with 228 lashes. Their length of detention suggests that they committed the so-called offences more than a year earlier, when they were possibly around the age of 16. Under the Iranian penal code, girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 can be hanged.

I’m starting not even to feel sorry for those who want better. Twenty-five years ago, they threw the most powerful nation on earth out, deposing the United States’ puppet and gutting the Shah’s army. They held us by the short hairs for 444 days. This is a country that knows a thing or two about revolution. So what happened to your damn balls, Iran? Pull them out of your purse, if you have such a problem with your clerical dictators, and drag the bastards out of power by their beards. No? Rather just boycott an election because you don’t like your choice in candidates? Fine. Be that way.

But then again, I’m quite convinced my Constitution is being stolen out from under me and that I’m being lied to, and I’m not grabbin’ anyone’s beard, either, so who am I to throw stones?

Sometimes the world just makes me so sad. And by sometimes, I mean all the time.