Holiday parties always seem to bring out the semi-inebriated men who find their way to my corner. There is, as expected, an opening line, which hardly ever leads to a conversation. But if it ever does, and if that conversation shows signs of vitality, even a dim glimmering of erudition, a rhetorical question is sure to follow. They lean into me and murmur: "Did you say you were Persian or Parisian?" They count on the tie, the long-stemmed wine glass, or the exalted titles on their name tags to make flirtation pass as ethnographical inquiry.

THE news of the exhibition of Holocaust cartoons in Tehran took me back to a moment in my childhood. In 1974, his first year at Tehran’s Academy for Visual Arts, my brother mounted an exhibition of his own cartoons. The drawings were a novice’s best attempt at political satire, but they were enough to alarm my law-abiding father into sending my brother away to America. Our family was never whole again.

At long last, some good news from Iran reaches U.S. shores. Akbar Ganji, one of Iran's leading advocates for democratic change, will arrive in the U.S. today. More than his arrival, it is his survival that should count as a small miracle: No one in Iran has so boldly broken political taboos and lived to tell the tale. Mr. Ganji has denounced the country's rulers as members of a fascist regime and, borrowing the famous words that Ayatollah Khomeini used to address the Shah, has said that Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei "must go!" Now, from July 14 to 16, he has called for a three-day hunger strike before the U.N. headquarters in New York City to demand the release of all political prisoners, including the two key figures Mansour Ossanloo and Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoini.

Zealots do not laugh. The closest they come is to grin while they stand in profile staring into the distance. Laughter undermines zealotry. Hitler smiled early on, but rarely after he became Der Führer. Ayatollah Khomeini smiled, but since he never made eye contact with his audience, his sinister smiles alluded to a wisdom too great to be shared with mere disciples. Laughter could unhinge a person, loosening him into defiance against submission. It's no wonder why all things stern -- flags, weapons, uniforms and street marches -- abound in a zealot's universe. He may promote seriousness as prime virtue, but to the perpetuation of his rule it is dire necessity.

The bomb that Tehran's mullahs are allegedly building has already done its damage. For two years now, it has decimated the headlines. In the mushroom cloud of its anticipation, some of the most critical stories in Iran have vanished. "The bomb" is an ingenious design by which to divert any global interest in the country's domestic matters, giving the ruling clerics free rein to devastate opposition with all the brutality they can muster. Among the ruins is an event unprecedented in 27 years: A major strike by the workers of Sherkat-e Vahed, the Union of Workers of the United Bus Company of Tehran.