I have had in my life only one flash of commercial inspiration. Just one.</p><p>It came to me while we were vacationing with friends at a ski resort in Colorado. Events of recent days in Iran brought the memory fresh again.</p><p>The time was February or March of 1980. The previous November, a mob of radical Islamic students in Tehran had occupied the U.S. Embassy and taken 66 Americans hostage.</p><p> Thirteen were released after a fortnight, and one other because of illness a month later. But the remaining 52 were held captive for 444 days &mdash; a year and nearly three months.</p><p> The hostage-takers&rsquo; devotion was to the supreme religious figure, Ruhollah Khomeini, who had returned from exile to lead Iran after the abdication of the Western-oriented shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.</p><p> Khomeini declared the U.S. to be the &ldquo;Great Satan,&rdquo; and took unconcealed relish in the inability of the world&rsquo;s most powerful nation to rescue its citizens.</p><p> The pictures that came out of Iran in those troubled days were mostly of militants rampaging through the streets, mouths agape, bawling: &ldquo;<em>Death to America</em>.&rdquo;</p><p> For mobs in that part of the world, death to someone or something seems to be the preferred remedy for any aggravation.</p><p> The seizure of our embassy violated every standard of international behavior, and we Americans were frustrated and humiliated by our limited capacity to respond.</p><p> For my own part, I was not advocating death to Khomeini. That&rsquo;s not my style, and it would have been beyond my capacity in any case. No, what came to my mind was a more sophisticated &mdash; or at any rate a more subtle &mdash; rebuke.</p><p> It occurred to me that what this aggrieved country of ours needed in that moment of anger and resentment was an <em>Ayatollah Khomeini TOILET SEAT</em>, transforming the call of nature into a patriotic impulse.</p><p> It would, I believe, have caught the national mood of the moment, taken the marketplace by storm and resulted in more fame and fortune than has ever come to me through writing.</p><p> Regrettably, however, my slender talents are not entrepreneurial. I thought about the idea. Then thought about it some more. And in January of the next year, before I finished thinking, the hostages were released and my chance was lost.</p><p> But what goes around comes around.</p><p> In this last week, crowds have taken to the streets of Tehran again. The largest demonstrations &mdash; hundreds of thousands of participants &mdash; are by moderates who want their nation to abandon its pariah ways and cultivate bridges to the modern world.</p><p> They are protesting what they think was a stolen election, and for the most part they&rsquo;ve been peaceful. But when occasionally a shout of &ldquo;Kill the dictator&rdquo; is heard, it&rsquo;s the one who they believe stole it &mdash; Iran&rsquo;s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad &mdash; who is referred to.</p><p> Reports suggest that the people in these immense gatherings are of all ages and classes, although younger ones, impatient for reform, are said to have played a leading part.</p><p> What&rsquo;s clear is that the Iran of today is not the Iran of Khomeini. The ruling regime still has the army, the police and the support of the senior clergy. But the social dynamic has changed, and neither we nor the ayatollahs can know where that change might lead.