In his weekly column for Slate, part-time literary critic, part-time muckraker, and part-time dime-a-dozen political pundit Christopher Hitchens shares his two cents about the crisis in Iran, and draws a particular focus on Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent paranoid invocation of the “evil” British government. Hitchens points out that while America-hating is commonplace in Iran, it’s a youthful phenomenon next to the decades of anti-British rhetoric. Hitchens then calls our attention to the great book that lampooned Iranian Anglophobia:

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat

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form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself.

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Hitchens goes on to recommend that we all get our own copy of My Uncle Napoleon, to which Open Letters can only agree. Recently, Bryn Haworth reviewed the book with an eye to the pre-election-crisis troubles in Iran, and found much to admire on both artistic and political levels:

The beauty of My Uncle Napoleon is that it is blissfully funny. Though it has the slapstick mayhem of many Egyptian comedies, it is more than pure farce. And although it has debts to European literature – My Uncle

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is very much like Don Quixote, or Sterne’s Uncle Toby Madhouse movie full (he even has his own Corporal Trim) – it is not a plagiarizing tribute to the classic comic novel. This is a book that manages to create memorable and believable characters while shamelessly sending them up, loading them with catchphrases and putting them in bizarre situations. Behind all its tomfoolery lie the serious issues of love, sexuality and, most importantly, paranoia on a grand scale.

Go here to read the rest of Haworth’s examination of a book given such abrupt and urgent relevance—and then, by all means, get a copy for yourself!

Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator, Arlen Specter, defected to the Democrats this week. Slate’s David Greenberg has a good article on the implications:

Historically, Specter’s move is best understood as the signal event in the next stage of what the journalist Ronald Brownstein has called “The Great Sorting Out”—a gradual but massive sorting of voters and elected officials that has brought their partisan affiliation into close alignment with their ideology. In The Second Civil War (2007), Brownstein showed how over the last four decades “conservatives” have increasingly become Republicans and “liberals” increasingly Democratic—turning these once-motley coalitions into relatively uniform ideological vehicles.

I reviewed Brownstein’s book a while ago, and it’s excellent background reading for the “sorting out” taking place today. The Democrats, despite increasing party discipline, have maintained much of their “big tent” inclusiveness. But Republicans have become almost monolithic, and they’re hemorrhaging moderates, from losses in the 2008 elections and the internecine battle for control of the party that followed. Specter is just the latest. Greenberg thinks that “the GOP cannot afford to lose more wheel horses like Arlen Specter, lest it become the fringe party, confined to the Deep South and interior West.”

I’m not so sure. If Al Franken is confirmed as Minnesota’s second Senator (and this seems likely), the Democrats will have a filibuster-proof majority to push their agenda through the Senate. From there, much will depend on events. If the economy improves and the “war on terror” goes well, the GOP will be forced to liberalize or wither away. But if things go badly, the Democrats will be held responsible and the American electorate may veer towards their alternative. And that will be the far-right, ultra-religious rump of the Republican Party.

-Greg Waldmann