The annual Ahmadinejad circus has cleared out of NYC. Like all its predecessors, the 2010 performance was not staged for the sake of Iran’s citizenry, but rather for the downtrodden in the Muslim world whom the Iranian president yearns to enlist — the ones his mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, anointed and ceaselessly serenaded as the “mostazafin” (pronounced mos-taz-AA-FEEN) some thirty years ago.

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Ahmadinejad rarely represents the trends inside his own country, yet he, the avid student of regional miseries and deficiencies, does well at setting new trends, be it by denying the Holocaust or implicating the United States itself in 9/11. A week after he made his 9/11 assertion, the Persian service of Deutsche Welle (Germany’s answer to BBC and VOA) conducted a poll that found 70 percent of listeners agreed with the president’s claim.

I’d have never believed this if a group of highly-educated Iranians, newly-arrived to America and lounging in my own living room, had not told me that they shared the conviction. In a languid after-dinner discussion, half a dozen of Iran’s brightest young minds bombarded me with conspiracy theories thinly disguised as questions:

“Isn’t it true that the American media is manipulated by corporations and therefore one can’t trust anything they report?”

“Hasn’t Uncle Sam done enough dirty things around the world to make it safe to assume that this, too, is his own doing?”

None knew Thomas Paine, or could quote a line from the Gettysburg Address, or thought of the Bill of Rights as anything but another monthly utility charge, but they were full of praise for that fine American thinker named Michael Moore and cited Fahrenheit 9/11 with verve. Despite their advanced training in scientific inquiry, none of them questioned how a democracy could ever become so great, a nation so accomplished, if all of its institutions were plagued by corruption. Nor did they wonder what underlying values made possible the existence of someone like Michael Moore in the first place, or what founding principles had created the stellar educational institutions that lured them into the ever-plotting Uncle Sam country.

Here’s the most astounding fact: Each of the guests, just like the majority of Deutsche Welle’s audience, firmly identified himself as a vehement opponent of Ahmadinejad. Their faces turned crimson with indignation when I, dismissive of their rhetorical stance against the man, accused them of being the products of his ideological universe.

Their need to strike an anti-American position might well be the by-product of their good fortune. After all, they escaped an otherwise dim future by coming to America. To prove themselves loyal to that which they left behind, they hold fast to the Iranian mantel of anti-Americanism. It’s how they camouflage their good fortune by striking the time-honored posture of the mythical Darvish shunning power and the material world.

There is also a tragic and ironic ignorance at work here. Consuming American products — from Nike, to Madonna and Tarantino — and imbibing the readily accessible aspects of Americanism has led them to believe that they have mastered the whole of America — its founding principles, its history and democracy. But where pop culture and Hollywood end, there is a gaping information hole. In this vacuum, the broader tale of who Americans are remains a perfectly unadulterated mystery, which the regime has persistently exploited since 1979. If the majority of Iran’s secular intellectual elite know the flaws of the regime’s narrative, they, wedded to Marxism, prefer to leave them uncorrected. And so Tehran goes on narrating America and spinning its historical aberrations — the CIA’s blunders or the greed of corporations — into the guiding rules of the “Great Satan.”

America may have cut the middle man from the process of giving the world its popular entertainment and culture, but it has left the essential telling of its own story to dubious interpreters.