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Show Acting Alone Page 24 his facile, standard-form, aging pinko defense of Iran's position. Sam remembered that he'd gotten some of Idi Amin's tortures mixed up with the Shah's, in particular the cutting off of that lady's arms and sewing them on again backwards and making her kids watch. The Shah didn't do that, therefore the taking of the United States embassy had been a lawless act: Sam was prepared to sputter that retraction out if Shannon mentioned those pro-Khomeni lectures to Sgt. Spikey. One of the gleaming farmboys, Sam recalled, had at one point gotten self-righteously angry, raised his hand, and said, "If you love Iranians so much, why don't you sign up and go live there with the illustrious professor from our sister institution?" Now, with the election of Ronald Reagan, Sam had suffered a marked increase in disrespect from his students; it was open season on pinkoes. The new Reaganite students plagiarized a lot more, too, and were more likely to report Sam to the Dean of Students for bizarre behavior, bad language, lax teaching methodologies and elitist attitude. Over the course of a single bleak November, all the eighteen-year-olds in Kanorado had turned into little neo-McCarthyite pricks, including this gleaming farmboy. Sam feared people this young who'd already developed the politics of jaded old men. He had wilted under the gleaming farmboy's bright eyes, and had resorted to some defensively sarcastic reply like, "Go to Iran? Me? I'm not getting my arms cut off by a bunch of camel jocks!" But he actually had considered sneaking over there and getting himself captured. Think of the fucking book he could've written! Also, there'd been many indiscretions that had passed Sam's full lips |