The Americanization Of Sahel Kazemi

All the news accounts seem to lament poor Steve McNair. . .they quote friends and family saying what a great guy he was, and they look at his football record as if it has some bearing on his character. He played a game, for crying out loud. He wasn’t a minister or a teacher or a therapist working with troubled individuals. He was, in essence, a circus performer, someone to amuse the masses.

He wanted a piece of strange. Well, that’s not unusual. And he had the means to get it. Steve McNair was just another guy who cheated on his wife, who disgraced himself in the eyes of his children. It happens over and over again. McNair was no better or no worse than most of us. The idea that because he was a slightly-better-than-average NFL quarterback he was *special* is without foundation.

In the end, his own fortune was his undoing. He had enough money to believe he could live two lives, one with his boring family, and another with his exciting young piece of strange. McNair thought he could buy an alternate reality, but, presumably, Sahel Kazemi had a differing vision of their relationship. Had McNair been some paycheck-to-paycheck slob, he could not have created the illusion he was building a life with his piece of strange. McNair was probably stupid enough to believe he could keep stalling the day of reckoning by showering more and more gifts on his piece of strange, but she believed the illusion. . .that they were going to be together. . .and when she kept pushing, and he finally had to admit he had no intention of leaving his family, the naïve piece of strange was devastated. She finally discovered the truth: she’d been fucked over. She’d been tricked into her spreading her legs and whatever other business they were doing. Listen, women and children in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been killed for less.

It’s got to be tough to be one of McNair’s kids right now. Finding out football hero dad was banging a teenage Iranian waitress (Kazemi was 19 when McNair started on her). And then it all ends in tabloid spectacle: a blood-spattered love nest. What are those kids going to think, when they see the pictures of their old man parasailing (whatever the Hell that is) with a girl not much older than his oldest son?

As for Sahel Kazemi, the tragedy is how quickly she became Americanized.

From one newspaper article, we get the following:

Kazemi and her family moved to the U.S. in 2002, fleeing Iran to Turkey before settling in Florida. As members of the Baha'i Faith, they were in danger in Iran. They quickly got acclimated in the U.S. Kazemi worked hard and liked earning her own money, the family said. Her greatest dream, Salmani said, was to be famous. "I think she is now," Salmani said. "She is everywhere."

The truth is, she would have been better off in Iran. The kind of corruption that doomed her is much more prevalent in the West. This kind of ugly adultery is not so easy to fall into in the *backward* Iran Americans love to look down their noses at. Americans ought to take a long hard look at this pretty Iranian girl. . . it’s our poison in her corpse. . .can we see the fruit of our *relaxed* sexual morality?