The stereotyping on Fox News and CNN is laughable, the former portrays all Iranians as goat herders and CNN shows them as closet liberals who want to move to Manhattan and work in an art gallery. I’ve known and dealt with quite a few Iranians and know they are a proud people with an ancient culture the west knows little about. The ones I have dealt with are more concerned with how to improve their business. One guy I got to know very well in my advertising days used to tell me many things about his country and how he ended up in the US. He was lower middle class in Iran, but got a scholarship to study civil engineering. The year he got his degree was when the embassy was taken so he had to change plans and become an Oriental Rug dealer. He didn’t have a pity party he readjusted. He had a great sense of humor and told me the biggest mistake he ever made was hiring a blonde haired blue eyed guy as a salesman in his store. The poor guy never made a sale. He chalked it up to a weird kind of bigotry, when westerners go into an Oriental Rug store, they expect the Lawrence of Arabia experience, not some salesman who looks like a California surfer.
I miss ole Si, he gave me a referral a few years ago, a friend of his in the business needed a warehouse to lease for a few years and he told him to call me, he wanted to make sure his infidel pal could get a commission for the lease if possible.
The real world is so much different than what the politicians and talking heads on TV say it is.
