Beneath the Planet of the Iranians

Dancers perform as they hold capsules of uranium hexaflouride, or UF6 gas during a ceremony in Mashhad, Iran’s holiest city.

In many respects, Iran is a great place. Really. It has beautiful landscapes, incredible architecture, ancient monuments and desert cities built with ingenious cooling systems and water carriers, a refined cuisine that's simultaneously earthy and ethereal, languages that are aesthetically pleasing and linguistically intriguing.

And then there are things like the nuclear bomb cult, evidenced in the photograph above from the Jerusalem Post. Iran is not the first country to pursue The Bomb, nor will it be the last. But the glorification, feverish dictatorial rhetoric, religious associations, and utter confusion of good and evil (note the backdrop of doves) surely put this nation in a class by itself. Or maybe not?


This picture is from the visionary film Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the first and the worst of four bad sequels to Planet of the Apes. In it, a man on a rescue mission arrives on the earth two thousand years in the future, and finds a mutant race of deformed humans, survivors of a nuclear war, living underground where New York City once lay. And what do these people do when not abusing our protagonists and warring with talking apes? They sing to and worship ... a nuclear bomb. You can guess what happens by the end of the movie. Now look at the picture up top again.

I don't see much difference. Do you?

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