When coincidences start coming fast, it means you’re near the hub.

An Eastern religion major once told me that, crediting me with tacitly understanding what he meant by “hub.” Something to do with truth, I guessed, nodding sagely.

I reflected on that the other day while leaving a Marriott motel in Emporia, Va., heading home to Long Island. It was 3:30 a.m. on April Fool’s Day. I’d snapped awake 15 minutes earlier because my body for some reason thinks I need to witness that time almost every morning. Sometimes I can work my way back to sleep, but that morning I figured, what the hell, get a really early start and maybe you’ll beat the D.C. rush hour.

Part of being near the hub, I was told by that long-ago Eastern religion major, is being attuned to signs and omens whirling around you. Ever since then, I sometimes find myself scrutinizing billboards and snippets of overheard conversations for messages, like a spy on a pretty humdrum mission.

That morning in Emporia my receptors were turned on, and as I walked through the lobby I received a message loud and clear. It came from Elton John, cleverly delivered through the Muzak system. “And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time,” he sang to me.

Uh oh.

Two hours later I learned that D.C.’s arteries are actually in full thrombosis by 5:30 a.m.

At that point another stray bit of Eastern wisdom drifted through my head. It was Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, whispering, “I can think, fast and wait.” It clearly being a day for such things, I decided to follow his lead. It helped that I had no choice, being stuck in a giant river of Western traffic without breakfast.

The point of all this preamble is that I was completely receptive to the book on CD that was accompanying me on the long, long drive home. It was “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” by Azar Nafisi.

Good books need friction to get traction with readers, and this one has plenty. Imagine trying to teach English literature in Tehran while Iran was going through its 1978-1981 revolution, perfecting its hatred of all things Western and therefore decadent. Imagine teaching, for instance, “The Great Gatsby” in that climate -- a perfect cultural flashpoint.

Nafisi’s memoir debuted six years ago, but still generates a lot of heat. Much comes from scholars who feel that it’s a piece of anti-Iranian, anti-Islam, pro-Western propaganda. Of course we only know what we read, but we do read a lot about torture and execution of those accused of deviating from Iran’s revolutionary lockstep. Many of them were children. Many were students. Some were Nafisi’s. That part, at least, seems beyond propaganda.

The core of the book, I felt, was the time her class conducted a mock trial. The case: Islam v. “The Great Gatsby.” To me it neatly summed up the struggle between our two cultures as follows:

Western culture contains many ills, such as avarice, adultery, murder. Those ills exist because we are free to make those choices. We are also free to critique them in our books and movies. If you want to prevent such choices, you could start a totalitarian regime that requires all to uphold an ideal. In the Iranian revolution, that meant, for instance, not allowing a wisp of hair to slip into view from beneath a burqa, because it would constitute sexual provocation. Punishment for such a transgression could be, ironically, rape, as well as torture and murder.

So it comes down a choice. People, being human, can either be free to commit their mistakes and crimes or the people who run the state can be free to commit crimes in order to prevent them. Either way, people sometimes end up hurt or dead.

Which one is preferable? That’s the friction that makes East vs. West so flammable.

By that point I’d made it through the D.C. mess and was cruising toward Baltimore. But first, breakfast. I pulled off and found a McDonald’s. You can’t get more Western than that.

Everyone in the crowded place was black except for one elderly couple just ahead of me in line. Something about them suggested bigotry to me. I don’t know what it was; some peevishness in their expressions, maybe. Anyway, halfway through my breakfast I detected a lively conversation (see signs and omens overheard, above) and looked up. It was the elderly white couple arguing with a young black man, a McDonald’s employee. But wait, it turned out to be a mock argument. It was actually good-natured ribbing. In a second all three of them were smiling and laughing.

Then the woman suddenly pointed to the young man’s chest and said, “Oh, too bad! You ripped your shirt.”

He looked down, startled and upset.

“April Fool’s!” shouted the woman.

This completely broke them up, all three of them, and everyone in the tables nearby.

It was a nice moment in America.

I decided to exact vengeance. I wrote the magic words on a small pad I had with me and approached their table on my way to the men’s room.

Striking a waiter’s pose, I leaned over and asked, “Will there be anything else?”

They looked up, confused.

“Uh, no,” said the woman. The man simply glowered.

I ripped the sheet of paper off and slapped it down on their table. “Thanks,” I said.

A full fifteen seconds later, through the bathroom door, I heard their howls of laughter.

Back in the car, Nafisi’s students were now struggling with “Pride and Prejudice,” in addition to the ayatollah’s morality squads. Needing a break from it all, I turned off the CD for a while. News came on the radio. More wrangling over the AIG bonuses. A possible “controlled bankruptcy” for General Motors. More deaths in Iraq. Lots of grist for anti-Westerners.

My mind wandered to some other recent news items in the same vein. California’s bid to bail itself out by legalizing marijuana. Suffolk County’s probable move to do the same by changing course and supporting a tribal casino. Once upon a time, officials argued against these moves on moral grounds.

I wondered what Nafisi’s conservative students would say, most notably the one who served as prosecutor in Islam v. “The Great Gatsby.” No doubt he would have righteously lambasted it as more evidence of the West’s conveniently flexible morality, especially when money is involved.

He’d be tougher to beat this time, I think. “The Great Gatsby” is starting to look pretty mild compared to The Great Recession.