The announcement by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of an Iranian surprise that will “punch” the rest of the world and leave them “stunned” was met with an exaggerated yawn this week from a Western media enervated by vague threats from heavily bearded men.
The cat-and-mouse game Iran has been playing with its super-double-secret nuclear program would be much more compelling if any new U.N. sanctions stipulated that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had to stop referring to himself on Facebook as “the Persian Tom Selleck.”
It has been speculated that this stunning punch of an announcement, set for a big reveal today, involves a series of burning flags and pictures as well as some scary-sounding Arabic chants. My own network of confidential sources, who I am now fairly certain are either Chinese hackers or a committed group of wildly talented, Web-savvy wombats, are suggesting that today’s surprise is something much more awesome than some lame nukes.
The Iranian government has figured out the ending of “Lost.”
It is no surprise that Iran is totally in love with the ABC series, and a Time magazine article from last week by Shervin Malekzadeh went so far as to state that “the U.S. TV series has dominated the underground DVD market in Tehran; almost nowhere in the world is the sixth and final season of ‘Lost’ anticipated more than in Iran.” Obviously my wombats know of what they squeak.
Unknown to everyone not named Ayatollah, the secret Iranian nuclear program is in fact simply a clever ruse staged to keep prying eyes off the real secret Iranian program — a complete, fully operational reproduction of the various research stations built by the Dharma Initiative on the island.
The crazy machines on the island have somehow used electromagnetism and time travel to create a television show so convoluted and cluttered it makes quantum physics seem like a color-by-numbers preschool session. Iran, through faithful dedication to the intricacies of the show and a couple hundred million dollars in oil money, has managed to reenact the first five seasons of the show in the last fifteen months. The announcement this week will let the world know that the project is humming along and Iran should break the code of the final few episodes in the next day or so.
Many in the international community are sure to be up in arms over this shocking news and will certainly call for Israel to bomb the secret Iranian underground research stations. If the Jews really do run Hollywood, expect a dozen or so F-16I fighter jets scrambled together immediately, as the final (and extremely profitable) season of the show would be totally one-upped by the Persian version.
George W. Bush, for all his shortcomings, was no friend of Weapons of Mass Confusion and seemed genuinely puzzled when his intelligence told him the Arab “Lost” project was actually in Iraq. While presidents are the favored punching bags of pretty much everyone, who among us can say that watching “Lost” has never prompted them to make a face only Barbara Bush could love?
Tommy Maple is in international communications graduate student. His column appears on Thursdays.
