This is smart. Rudy is trying to raise his profile abroad—or, at least, to present himself to the folks across the Pond. The Telegraph is buying (so far):

Whereas his rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney are engaged in attempts to disavow previous statements and recast themselves as social conservatives, Mr Giuliani’s pitch is that “for most it’s never about one issue” and consistency is preferable to pandering.

“I believe you’ve got to run based on what you are, who you really are,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “I find if you do it that way even people who disagree with you sometimes respect you.”

It is really smart for Giuliani to start doing “international” interviews, because he knows that he has to prove himself to many different audiences—and of course because the next president will most certainly be deeply involved in foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, the New York Times scoffs at the easy venues Giuliani chooses and the softballs being thrown his way. 

Instead of the sometimes barbed give-and-take endured by the other candidates, Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, fielded a few questions from the firefighters and police officers who gathered to hear him here. The questions, which began with comments like, “Being in your presence here is just unbelievable,” stuck almost entirely to issues on which Mr. Giuliani is most comfortable, like airport security and border control.

More than the other major presidential candidates, Mr. Giuliani has limited himself to events with narrowly defined, friendly audiences, avoiding the kind of uncomfortable interrogations his rivals have occasionally faced. Aside from a couple of brief swings through diners, including one yesterday in Delray Beach, Fla., he has done little of the politicking that exposes candidates to random sets of people — at shopping malls or train stations — who might be of any political stripe, and can raise any issue.

I agree that Giuliani has gotten a really easy ride so far. I also think there’s no doubt that he knows what’s coming his way.

Iran’s mullahs may be trying to go nuclear, but Iran’s women are going mad for rhinoplasty. The “Persian nose” is no longer in vogue, it seems.***

Perhaps you’d like the “Michelangelo of Tehran” to be your surgeon? Head right over to the Islamic Republic of Iran, aka “the nose job capital of the world.”

Rhinoplasty rates have been rising dramatically in the Islamic republic.

There is no stigma. In fact, many women openly wear “bandages of honor” on their noses to show they’ve had the operation.

In Iran, women’s bodies and hair are largely kept covered by a hijab, or head scarf, and in some cases, a chador, a large shawl to cover the body.

Instead of clothing and cosmetics, Iranian women spend their money on tweaking what people can see.

“They have become more fashion conscious because they are deprived of it,” said Azar Nafisi, the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran.”

Fascinating. And also a perfect example of something the brilliant Charles Paul Freund wrote about in his illuminating March 2002 essay “In Praise of Vulgarity: How Commercial Culture Liberates Islam—and the West.”

Freund describes a remarkable subculture that arose in the Soviet Union during the dark days of Stalinism:

Some extraordinary and totally unexpected figures appeared on the streets of Moscow in 1949 and in other major cities of the Soviet Bloc soon afterward. They wore jackets with huge, padded shoulders and pants with narrow legs. They were clean-shaven, but they let their hair grow long, covered it with grease, and flipped it up at the back. They sported unusually colorful ties, which they let hang well below their belts. What their fellow Muscovites most noticed about them, for some reason, were their shoes, which were oversized, with thick soles. There were some women in the movement as well, notable for their short, tight skirts and very heavy lipstick.

Although they were Russians, they called each other by such names as “Bob” and “Joe.” In Moscow, they referred to their hangout, Gorki Prospekt, as “Broadway.” They chewed gum, they affected an odd walk that involved stretching their necks as they went down the street, and they loved to listen to American jazz.

These young men were to become known in Russian as stilyagi, a term that is usually translated as “style hunters”; their story has been told by a number of authors, including Artemy Troitsky, Timothy W. Ryback, and S. Frederick Starr. The stilyagi constitute one of the most remarkable movements in the rich history of oppositional subcultures. What they had turned themselves into were walking cultural protests against Stalinism in one of its most paranoid periods. All that Stalin had melted into air, the stilyagi made flesh. [e.a.]

Having lived under the totalitarian regime of the Islamic Republic, Nafisi sees the Iranian fascination with nose jobs as characteristic of the behavior of oppressed people who rebel:

 Nafisi suggests the rhinoplasty trend is not such a bad thing.

“The battle that we attribute to Iranian women is so central to freedom of expression and freedom in the whole country. That is why it is so exciting to be a woman in Iran,” she said.

—————

*** It looks like the Persian nose is yet another victim of the global media, in that they showcase different (or, at least, new) standards of beauty to cultures that haven’t been exposed to them before. I wrote about this as it relates to Brazil and a wave of anorexia that seems to have taken hold there.