Just Ballet

A ballerina.  What do you think of when you hear the word ballerina?  Maybe you form images of elegance, softness, Sugar Plums? 

Iran went backwards.  Far too many a culture has progressed, only to go backwards.

Azar Nafisi, READING LOLITA IN TEHARN, reveals that she, Nafisi, left Tehran for the last time in 1997.  For over a decade prior, she held her tenuous post as a University of Tehran professor. 

She was controlled by and survived, yet another, new ruling elite.  This new regime increased brute violence, public executions, and other such inhumanities. And as late, or as recently, as the 1980’s, they banned ballerinas.  Ballet, ballerinas.

Putting a ban on ballerinas as recently as the 1980’s, sounds like a sick joke.  Of course I then look at the 1500 to 1600-ish Spanish Golden Age versus the relatively recent, less than 150 years ago, American Civil War.

What should the world have learned?  C’mon, ballet?  Really?