feminist blogs

July 31st

We took Tehran’s nearly brand new subway into the city to experience the bazaar. (If you want to see a video overview of the bazaar–though the quality is not so great–go here.) The cars are remarkably clean and roomy, especially if you are, as I am, used to the subway in New York City, though the size of the crowd during rush hour seems not so different. Oddly, subway cars are not segregated by sex the way buses are. If you take a bus in Tehran, there are sections reserved for men and women. At least this is what I have heard; we did not actually take a bus within the city. On the buses we took between cities, the sexes were not required to sit separately. In the subway, while there are cars reserved exclusively for women, women are not required to use those cars. The man sitting next to my wife heard us speaking English and asked her where I was from. When she told him New York, he asked her if she thought the stress there was greater than in Iran. I don’t remember what she told him, but he started talking about the tension boiling beneath the surface in Iran, how people move through their lives “normally,” so that on the surface everything appears calm, but that they have no real hope for the future. He was talking specifically, if I remember correctly, about the young people in Iran, though his words did seem to capture something I felt throughout my visit in the mood of the people as a whole, to the degree that one can get anything resembling a sense of the mood of a people on a two week visit.

We entered the bazaar through a mosque, which was very quiet and had a fountain, and as we walked around, I was struck by the way the lighting colored how I looked at the merchandise. It really made me wonder about the quality of what people were selling, even though, in general, I can’t imagine it’s all that bad, given how many people shop there. My wife says the Turks–the ethnic Turks who live in Iran, not Turks from Turkey–have a lock on all the businesses there, though I someone told me that the strength of the bazaar as the central place of commerce in Tehran is waning now that more businesses are being set up outside its purview. It’s crowded and covered–it is the precursor of our shopping malls–and just about anything you can imagine is sold there, from safes and telephones to sledgehammers and bras.

On each street, you might find three or four stores selling the same thing, and whatever that thing is–for example, the shirts in the photo below–you would probably have passed on a different street three or four other stalls selling them as well. In other words, there is lots and lots of duplication, and my guess would be that the same group–probably a family–owns some significant portion of all the stores selling the same merchandise.

Another aspect of the bazaar worth noting is the architecture, though I learned only a very little about it from Sarah, my brother-in-law’s wife, who is herself an architect. Throughout the bazaar, there are points where different passages meet at a central hub, and these hubs became places–if I remember correctly what Sarah told me–where the people responsible for the physical structure of the bazaar itself would show off a little bit, and so they decorated the archways with ornate plasterwork that, according to Sarah, you normally would have seen only in a palace. I forget how many hundreds of years old she told me the example below is.

Walking to the bazaar gave me my first taste of just how profoundly I stood out as a foreigner. As soon as the money-changers saw me, without hearing a word of English from my mouth, they went from calling out in Persian–though I heard one or two hawking in Arabic and another one in what sounded like German–to asking me specifically “Do you have dollars?” It was odd to feel again like I had felt when I first arrived in South Korea in 1988, both the thrill of being the center of attention and the desire not to be noticed, though there is a very clear difference too. I was in Iran with family; and while the country was certainly new to me, to the degree that I have been hanging out with Iranians for the past 15+ years, the culture and much the manner of daily interaction between people was not; so there was a part of me that didn’t feel as much like an outsider as I otherwise would have.

I didn’t find anything in the bazaar that I wanted to buy, though; I hadn’t been there long enough. I did enjoy watching just how comfortable my son was in his mother’s country; he is fluent in Persian and he has been in Iran enough times that he feels at home speaking with people and falls very comfortably into a native-like intonation, though his body language–to my eyes anyway–remains distinctly American. Other interesting things I saw: men pushing or pulling impossibly overladen trolleys along the paths and calling out “Agha bepah,” which translates loosely as, “Sir, watch out!”–though my guess is it’s more like, “Out of the way, you!” I almost got run over the first time because I didn’t realize the guy was talking to me. And motorcycles running back and forth among the people and people getting out of their way as if they were just a different kind of pedestrian. I wish I had been quicker with my camera. One of the guys on a motorcycle had in his lap either a sheep or a goat–I think the former–and the animal was light brown and struggling. Almost certainly, he was taking it to be slaughtered.

When we were ready to leave the bazaar, we walked out onto the streets of Tehran, which were hot and crowded and under construction, and were filled with the smell of car exhaust that we only seemed able to escape at the foot of the mountains in Darakeh, where my brother-in-law lived. Our plan was to go to Golestan Palace, which is supposed to be gorgeous because of the mirror work that appears in it. As we walked, sweating through the heat, to look for this place–for some reason, we thought it was in walking distance from the bazaar; it was not–Sarah stopped at a mosque to ask directions; and as we walked away from the mosque, a short, bald man, with a narrow ring of gray hair lining the edge of his scalp, striding purposefully with a briefcase in his hand, waited till he was a couple of steps past me before calling out “Hello! Welcome to my country!” in a loud, clear, barely accented voice. I turned around, but he did not; he kept on walking as if he had not said a word. This happened several times, and I was struck that none of the people who greeted me, despite the fact that they seemed happy to see me–I don’t know if happy is the precise word, but you could hear enthusiasm in their voices as they called out–seemed interested in doing so to my face. (This was not always the case, but it was my experience on this day.)

Unfortunately, the Golestan Palace was closed for the holiday of Layla tul Mehraj, and it was interesting how very few people knew it was a holiday, which commemorates the journey of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem, his ascension into the seven heavens, and his return in the same night. So we decided to take a taxi to the restaurant where my brother-in-law and his fiance wanted to treat us for lunch, and this, my first taxi ride in Iran, was quite an experience. We found an empty taxi waiting at the curb outside the palace gates, and as soon as we were all seated, and the driver knew where we wanted to go, he backed up–we assumed–to pull into the one-way flow of traffic that would take us to the main drag. Instead of doing so, however, he kept on backing up, not even looking over his shoulder, just glancing into his rearview mirror out of what seemed like the corner of his eye, and he drove this way for about a block, until he reached the intersection he wanted, put the car into drive and took us without further incident to our destination. (Getting a taxi from the restaurant back to the subway was similarly interesting. There were five of us, including my son, which meant that we would occupy the whole taxi; but the driver we hired had someone else to take along as well, and so while I got into the front seat–I was too big to fit in the back with everyone else–this other passenger got into the car with the driver on the driver’s side, and we drove that way, the additional passenger holding a phone to the driver’s ear so he could carry on a conversation about the party he had been to the previous night.)

The restaurant, Sonati Azari, was lovely.

Pictures from Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, (Iran’s national epic) adorned the walls. (There are lots of sites with old translations of Shahnameh on the web; the most recent version is Dick Davis’ Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, which is the only contemporary translation covering the entire poem. There’s a cool comics version of one of the most famous stories in the text that you can check out here. If you would like to read an excerpt from the translation that I am working on, go here. I published this excerpt as part of a special, Iranian literature edition of the online journal ArteNews. It’s worth taking a look at.) I recognized Rostam killing the Deeveh Sefid (White Demon); Rostam and Esfandiyar; Rostam and Sohrab. (One translation of the story of Rostam and Sohrab, which would make very interesting reading next to the story of Oedipus, is here. In the 19th century, Matthew Arnold did a wonderful translation of the story, and Jerome Clinton published a 20th century version of the tale in blank verse as The Tragedy of Sohrab and Rostam. These are all stories, though especially Sohrab and Rostam, that resonate in Iran today; Sohrab and Rostam is perhaps the best-known story of the Shahnameh.) I also saw one illustration of the portion of Shahnameh that I am working on translating, the story of Zahhak, the first truly evil king in the epic, and of Feraydoun, the man whose destiny it is to defeat Zahhak and rule in his place. Zahhak’s villainy comes in part from the fact that he has to feed the serpents growing out of his shoulders human brains every night; so he basically needs to murder two people a day in order to stay alive. The serpents got there because Eblis, the name given in the text to the Zoroastrian version of the devil (who usually goes by Ahriman), tricked Zahhak into allowing himself to be kissed on the shoulders, and when Eblis kissed him there, the serpents appeared. Unfortunately, there is no version of this story on the web, and my own translation is not yet up either.

The food was absolutely delicious. We ate “ab gusht,” a stew that is, for those of you who know, similar to the dish called cholent made by Eastern European Jews. I have eaten ab gusht here in the States–and there is, actually, a funny story about the first time I had it from when my wife and I were first married and I could count on one hand the words in Persian that I understood. Maryam left me the recipe so that I could prepare dinner. It is a simple enough dish to make; more or less, you dump all the ingredients into a slow cooker and let them stew for a long time. So early that afternoon, I read through the ingredients, put them in the slow cooker, turned it on and started to go about the rest of my day. Then it occurred to me that I had not added any water to the pot. So I went back to check the list of ingredients, but water did not appear anywhere on it. It did not make sense to me that there should be no water in the stew, so I added a little, not wanting to not follow the recipe my wife had left me, and then left the food to cook. At this point I should add–for those of you who might be thinking that it should have been common sense for me to add a lot more water than I did; I was making a stew after all–that I am, in fact, a good cook, but I was preparing a dish from another country and my wife at the time had been getting on my case about my habit of preparing food without a recipe; I was, therefore, determined to follow her recipe to the letter so as to avoid any mistakes. Well, when my wife came home and she checked on the food, it was, of course, nothing like a stew. She asked me if I had put any water in, and when I told her “just a little,” she asked me why not. When I told her that water was not in the recipe she left me, she looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “Of course it is! It’s written right there on top of the page, Ab Gusht. Ab! Ab means water!”

Anyway, in Sonati Azari, we had ab gusht prepared the traditional way, which is called dizi. They bring your portion in a very hot clay pot, which you need to pick up with a piece of bread so you can pour the broth into a bowl. Then, with the pestle they have provided, you mash the meat, beans and everything else. You soak pieces of bread in the broth–we had “noon sangak,” bread cooked on a stone–and eat that separately from the mashed meat, which you scoop up with other pieces of bread. Or you can spoon the mash into the broth. However you eat it, it is delicious, and I am sorry I did not take any pictures of it.

After dinner, Sarah asked me what I thought of Iran, if it was different from what I’d expected. In a way, of course, this was an unfair question. I had only been in Iran for two days and had not had the chance to see very much or to talk to anyone other than family; and since I have been hearing about and seeing pictures of Iran for the entire time I have known my wife, it’s not as if my image of the country is limited to what we see here in the mainstream media. So I did not feel the initial shock of foreignness that someone else might have felt, and I was not seeing what I saw entirely within the Western-defined context that someone without my experience of Iranians might have brought with them. Nonetheless, even after two days, there was one thing that had made a very strong impression: women. That women have to cover themselves in the way that they do, that Sarah, my wife, my mother-in-law and all the women in the family, and all the other women whom I met during our first few days of getting ready for Navid and Sarah’s wedding, had to cover themselves if they wanted to walk out the door, even just to put the garbage out; that all the women I saw in the street were covered, some more than others, in ways dictated by the government to hide their hair, their arms more or less above the elbows, their legs more or less above the knees, and their figures–and this covering, of course, becomes culturally a metaphorical covering of so much else, of the life that is lived “behind the veil,” so to speak; indeed, you could argue that the leading of a double life, one public, the other private, is a central component of Iranian culture; but to develop that idea would require a much longer post that I don’t really feel qualified to write. Anyway, the fact that every woman I saw in public wore either a chador (the long black garment that covers them from head to foot) or the combination of head scarf and manteau, which is the raincoat like jacket that Iranian women wear, made a very strong impression on me, though I was surprised at what that initial impression was, because it had less to do with the situation of women in Iran than with how we in the US–and by “we” I mean the general public and the mainstream media–portray and are led to think about that situation.

We have made so much of Iran’s requirement that women wear the hejab and manteau–though the image we usually see in the media is of a woman in a chador–that it has become a symbol of all that we see as evil in Iran’s treatment of women. When I talk to my students about what they think the chador means, they portray it as a symbol of women’s virtual enslavement when, in fact–and let me be clear that I am not defending Iran’s policy in this regard–nothing could be farther from the truth. (At least in Iran; in other Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, and certainly Afghanistan under the Taliban, the situation is very, very different.) For example, more than half of all college students in Iran are women; women are professionals, own their own businesses, hold political office, and even run for president. Not that there are not also tremendous restrictions placed on women’s lives, not that women are not, in many ways, both legally and as a matter of tradition, second class citizens in Iran, but they are not the enslaved people that we in the US often perceive them as being. In other words, we have made the hejab/chador so central to our understanding of women’s status–and correlated it so strongly with a violation of our own values of personal freedom and freedom of choice in all things–that we have allowed ourselves to reduce the women of Iran, in our perception of them, to the more or less blank slate that we think the hejab/chador makes within its own context: powerless, blank slates that can do nothing but accept what the men who run Iran–from the government to their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons–impose on them. In this way, we do to them–through a kind of blind, bleeding heart liberalism–precisely what we so deeply criticize the Islamic Republic for doing.

1.

We arrived in Tehran very early in the morning on July 30th at the nearly brand-spanking new Imam Khomeini Airport, where we stood on line to have our visas checked by a very sour-looking woman, who did a double-take when she saw my son’s name on his passport and asked whether he was, in fact, really a boy. Many of the people we met in Iran responded to my son’s long hair in this way. Bazaar vendors, shop owners, people who stopped to talk to us on the street, almost every taxi driver who chatted with us while he drive–all assumed, until we told them otherwise, that my son was a girl. After a while, this assumption seemed odd to me, because while it was not very common to see young men with hair as long as my son wears his, neither was it such a rarity that it attracted stares–at least as far as I could tell. Not that Iran’s very strict and often violently enforced gender guidelines have somehow been widened to make uncontested room for long hair on men. Pictures posted on the web last year (here, here and here) showed members of the Gasht-e Ershad, Iran’s morality police–the name means, literally, something like “Guide towards Enlightenment”–beating young men up for having long hair and other appearance-related offenses. It just struck me that so many of the people we met, who did not seem to bat an eye at long hair on college-aged or older men, found it so remarkable that my son should wear his hair as long as he does. (Here is a video of someone telling the story of his sister’s arrest by the Gasht-e Ershad when he and his family went back to Iran to visit for the first time in 10 years; it’s not about long hair per se, but it will give you a sense of how the Gasht-e Ershad works. I will write in another post about my wife’s experience having to dress appropriately and about my experience/impression of being in a country where women have to cover themselves the way they do in Iran, because while it may be true that men have to be careful of the way they dress and look, the restrictions placed on women are far more stringent, and the consequences if women cross the line can be far more severe).

Imam Khomeini Airport was also where we had our first, very brief and very minor, and thankfully only, taste of how potentially complicated Iranian bureaucracy can be. When the woman checking our visas ran my wife’s information through the system, it popped up that, the last time she had been in Iran, my wife had not paid the airport tax, also called an exit fee, and she was told she would have to pay it before she would be allowed to enter the country. (The Wikipedia article on Khomeini Airport has an explanation of this tax.) Paying the tax, however, turned out to be more complicated than you would think, since the desk to which my wife was first directed turned out not to be the desk where the fee had to be paid. Instead the officers at that desk told my wife she had to go to a bank window somewhere else in the airport, pay the fee and bring back proof of payment for them to clear her records. In reality, I don’t think it took all that long to resolve this issue, but after nearly 14 hours in transit, it seemed to take forever, and while my son and I waited with our luggage for my wife to return from wherever it was in the airport she had been sent, I could not help but think about the horror stories I had read and heard about how difficult the Iranian government’s bureaucracy can be to navigate, especially when more than one office is involved. Eventually, though, my wife appeared, everything in order, and we put our suitcases onto the scanning machine’s conveyor belt, retrieved them at the other end, and walked out to meet the members of my wife’s family who had come to pick us up.

Now that I think about it, though, my wife’s airport tax was the second administrative bullet we had to deal with. The first, far more serious one, which we dodged, was the question asked of my brother-in-law when he went to do his half of the work that applying for my visa required: Why, despite the fact that my wife and I have been married for fifteen years, have we not yet registered our marriage with the Iranian government? As I understand it, marriage registration in Iran is, at least structurally, not so different from obtaining a marriage license here in the States; it’s something you do as a matter of course when you get married. Unlike obtaining a marriage license in the United States, however, because Iran is a theocracy, Iranian marriage registration is not a purely civil matter. Part of what registering does is certify that your marriage is a religiously valid one. I don’t know what this means in practical terms for Iranian Jews, Christians, or the members of any other faith that is practiced in that country, but I do know a little bit about what it means for Muslims because there could have been real consequences for my wife if the question of her marriage came up while she was traveling in Iran and she could not prove that her marriage was registered. Precisely what those consequences might be, I am not sure–I have heard that the authorities could take away her passport and make difficult, if not impossible, to leave Iran–but let me first explain why, despite the fact that my wife has not lived in Iran for almost twenty years, that we were married here in NY and that my wife is a United States citizen, we even had to worry about registering our marriage with a foreign government in the first place.

To begin with, Iran does not consider it a termination of one’s Iranian citizenship when one becomes a citizen of another country. So, in the eyes of the Iranian government, when someone like my wife is in Iran, the fact that she is also a United States citizen is irrelevant when it comes to her liabilities and obligations under Iranian law. The Iranian government will treat her as if she’d never left Iran. When my sister-in-law’s husband, for example, decided some years ago to go back to Iran for the first time since he’d left as a teenager, he had to buy his way out of the military service the Iranian government could still have drafted him into, despite the fact that he had been a US citizen for some time. (Iran has obligatory military service for all men.) Similarly, when my wife’s nephews reach the age when they would have to enlist were they living in Iran, they will probably have to buy out their service as well; since both their parents are Iranian and therefore Iranian citizens, the Iranian government considers the boys to be citizens as well.

When my wife married me, she violated the Islamic prohibition against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, a prohibition the Iranian government takes into account on the form one has to use to register a marriage between an Iranian woman and a non-Iranian man: the husband in such a marriage must provide “a certificate of declaration of Islamic faith [...] if the woman is a Muslim.” I got a sense of how seriously some Muslims take this prohibition when a friend told me what happened when she told some religious Muslim friends of hers about my marriage. She wanted to make the point, she said, that it is possible for Jews and Muslims to get along. Her friends, however, reacted by insisting quite seriously that my wife should be stoned. Their argument, according to my friend, was not an emotional one rooted in the way that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is often understood as a proxy for some global, essentialized and therefore inescapable mutual hatred between Jews and Muslims, which is where most of the surprise at the religiously mixed nature of my marriage comes from, but rather a religious one, based on their understanding of the marriage restrictions placed on women within Islam. (A Muslim man, on the other hand, is permitted to marry a non-Muslim woman, as long as she is Christian or Jewish. To be fair, as far as the Iranian government is concerned, it does not matter whether it is the husband or wife who is not Muslim; in each case, the couple must present evidence of having been married within Islam, meaning that the non-Muslim spouse converted. I have heard a couple of different explanations for this double standard, including the fact that religious identity in Islam flows from the father and so his marriage to a non-Muslim does not put the religious legitimacy of his children into question, but whatever other explanations might be offered, it’s hard not to see the double standard as, first and foremost, the result of good ol’ patriarchal values that have been given the veneer of religious legitimacy.)

Please note what I am not saying: I am not saying that my friend’s friends were speaking for all of Islam, that their understanding of Muslim law was correct and can therefore be used as an accurate representation of Muslim beliefs or that what my friend’s friends said represented in any way shape or form the beliefs of any Muslims other than themselves. There are, after all, fanatics within all religious groups, and no one should judge any group by its most extreme members. Imagine, though, if someone who did believe what my friend’s friends believed happened to be the Iranian official who asked to see proof that my wife’s marriage had been registered and she had been unable to provide that proof. (I will leave aside, for the moment, the question of when and why anyone would think to ask in the first place.) I doubt very much that my wife would have been sentenced to stoning, but who knows how that official might have chosen to make life difficult for her, and since Iran is a country where, especially if you are Iranian, you want to do as little as possible to call the authorities’ attention to yourself, my wife and I had decided, when she was pregnant with our son, that it would be better to register our marriage than to chance consequences we could not foresee on some future trip she, or we, might take to her country.

I don’t want to give the impression that the government of Iran makes a concerted effort to police the marriage registrations of mixed couples visiting Iran, because, as far as I know, they don’t, but fully to understand why registering our marriage did not become an issue until my wife became pregnant, you need to recognize that, as long as she could pass as a single woman, no one in an official capacity in Iran would even have thought to ask for her marriage registration, and if they asked if she was married, she could simply have answered no. Thus, in the early years of our marriage, when my wife traveled back to Iran to visit her family, we did not give the issue of registering our marriage a second thought. Once she was pregnant, however, and the possibility of a trip to Iran presented itself–we really thought she was going to go–the fact that our marriage was not registered became a much more pressing issue, since my wife’s body would announce itself as one that, in Iran, needed to be properly married in order to be considered law abiding and legitimate. In other words, my wife’s pregnant belly itself would invite questions about her husband, the father of her child, and since, according to Islam, a wife needs her husband’s permission to travel, we decided it would be prudent for her to have all the proper documents ready just in case someone did ask to see them.

Before we could register our marriage, however, we had to obtain a Muslim marriage certificate, which we did; but because my wife ended up not traveling to Iran at that time, we didn’t take the next step of filing the registration documents with the Interests Section of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Washington, DC. My wife did travel to Iran with our son after he was born, but we decided to rely on the Muslim marriage certificate as proof that everything was, so to speak, kosher; and, in fact, we didn’t even think about registering our marriage again until I filed my application for a visa so we could travel to Iran to be at my brother-in-law’s wedding this past August. That application took place in two parts: I submitted forms to the Iranian Interests Section here, and my brother-in-law filed papers for me in the appropriate offices in Tehran. The official who reviewed my application there asked my brother-in-law why, especially given the fact that my wife and I have been married for fifteen years, we never registered our marriage. This question touched off a series of phone calls–from my mother-in-law to my wife, from us to the Iranian Interests Section in DC–trying to figure out whether I would be denied a visa on these grounds. As it turned out, though, my visa arrived without a problem and we flew out of John F Kennedy International Airport on July 28th, arriving in Tehran, as I said at the beginning, early in the morning of July 30th. My brother-in-law and his fiancee, my mother-in-law and one of her sisters were at the airport to greet us. After dealing with my wife’s exit fee, we got into the taxis they hired for us and, in what was one of only two completely traffic-free drives through Tehran–the other was also very early in the morning, when we went back to the airport for our flight home–rode the last leg of our journey to the brand new apartment where my brother-in-law lives in the village of Darakeh.

2.

Darakeh is a small village on the northern outskirts of Tehran, right at the foot of the Alborz Mountains. Parts of the original village were built into the mountainside,

and I could see as we walked up the narrow trail on our first day in Iran–with my brother-in-law and his then wife-to-be as guides–how the mountain itself often served as the back wall of some of the structures that we passed. That first walk became an object lesson in how Iran is, at one and the same time, a country and a culture with a 5,000-some-odd year history and a very modern place, or at least a place struggling to be modern. At the bottom of the hill where we started our climb up the mountain is the apartment complex where my brother-in-law lives, newly built and part of a huge push to develop the area. On the way up, we passed a group of people hanging plastic grocery bags filled with someone’s shopping for the month on either side of a mule’s saddle, and just a very few short minutes later, we were passed by that mule, the bell on its forehead jingling with each step it took as its rider steered it along the trail; and then we passed it again, resting for a bit, its cargo unloaded somewhere else and its rider nowhere to be seen.

More examples of how the old and the new mingle in Iran came in the form of the English-language graffiti that we saw on the trail and in the old village of Darakeh itself. There was one wall that I unfortunately did not get a picture of on which someone had written “Fuck You!” in big black letters, along with people’s names and other slogans–though none provided quite the interest, or contrast, of the two pieces of Persian graffiti we saw on the same wall in Shiraz, one of which said something like, “The hejab [or chador; I don't remember which] is not a limitation; rather, it is [the freedom of] innocence” and the other of which said, “Death to the Islamic Republic.” The most remarkable piece of graffiti we saw on the way into Darakeh, however, was the one which announced “Rap.Shahab.Mehran.Behman” and some version of which we saw in a couple of places. For my son, who is ten, this was particularly remarkable, since he shares a name–though he spells his with an O–with one of the rappers.

There have been a few articles written about rap in Iran, which is deeply political on at least two levels: the words and the music itself. My brother-in-law’s new wife told me that the music at their wedding–about which I will write in another post–was illegal, and couldn’t have gotten us all in trouble, had the morality police come, in two ways: because of the words, which would have been considered obscene, and because of the music itself, which violates the Islamic Republic’s sense of propriety. Here’s an example of Iranian rap. (There are others, but I’ve chosen this one because it has an English translation in the video.)

Aside from being a place where people come to escape the crowded hustle and almost overwhelming air pollution of Tehran, the area where my brother-in-law lives has another claim to fame: Evin Prison. This is the prison where political prisoners have been held, tortured and executed since the Shah’s time. (It is, also, a “regular” prison in that non-political prisoners are held there as well. More on Evin here, here, here, and here.) As we walked up the trail, we could see the prison wall in the distance, and my son took one look at it and, before we knew what it was, said, “Hey, look! The Great Wall of Iran!”

After my brother-in-law told us exactly what was on the other side of that wall, however, we all grew quiet. My wife’s family, like many, many others in Iran, lost a lot of people–friends, relatives, children, spouses–during the revolution in Iran if not to that prison itself, then certainly to the politics driving its use. Ervand Abrahamian’s Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran is an interesting, useful, important and even compelling book about what went on on the other side of the wall we saw during the Shah’s reign and under the Islamic Republic.

The Evin Prison wall was too far away to be a backdrop to what was the most compelling thing to happen on my first day in Iran, but knowing it was there provided a meaningful context. It was getting dark and we were on our way down the mountain when we passed a group of hikers–I think they were all men, but I am not sure–one of whom, a short, stocky guy with a receding hairline, a wide-brimmed cloth hat hanging down his back from the string around his neck and thick, muscular thighs revealed by the shorts he was wearing. The fact that he wasn’t wearing pants did not immediately register with me. had only been in the country some hours at this point; had I passed him by after a week or so (and I will write more about this in another post), the sight of his bare legs would have surprised me the way it surprised my wife and my mother-in-law, one of whom remarked about just how risky a thing he was doing by dressing that way. The man stopped and turned around, and I understood very little of what he said next, since it was in Persian, but it was impossible to miss the incredulity that filled his eyes as he spoke. “They’ve turned Iran,” he said, “into one big prison!” And he turned to the women and urged them to take off their head scarves and to live free, and then he held forth with deep, deep passion–I am summarizing the translation my wife made for me later–about how important it was to resist the government and its religious and other impositions onto and into people’s lives. I wish I’d been able to get a picture of him, but it was dark and our camera had run out of batteries.

I have been married to an Iranian for 15 years now, and while I have not gone out of my way to immerse myself in Iranian culture or history, it has been impossible for me not to learn something–other than what I have read in books–about what Iranian revolution meant to those who went through it, especially those who were on the wrong side of the Islamic Republic. Almost all my wife’s relatives, at least those whom I know–except for her father who was a colonel in the Shah’s personal guard–took part in the revolution against the Shah, and all of them are here in the US because once the revolution was hijacked by Khomeini and company (and whatever you think of the original revolutionary impulse, the mullahs did hijack the revolution itself), they found themselves on the side that the government was killing. My wife remembers living in her own house but being unable to use the electricity or to go out to play–basically they were in hiding in their own home–because they were afraid the kommiteh would come for her father. (They did not; or, rather, they did, but they let him go each time because the men who had served under him spoke so highly of him.) And she remembers how members of the family turned against each other, with those on the side of the revolution informing on, and doing worse to, the people who did not oppose the Shah. And I am thinking about a conversation, an argument really, that I had recently with my father and his wife, who claimed that the people of Iran must be perfectly happy with their government; if they weren’t, why were they not rising up in armed revolution to get the mullahs out of power? I wondered as they spoke, talking about the need to take risks and to be willing to die for your freedom, if they would have said the same thing about the people in the former Soviet Union, or the people of China or Cuba? And I am not here taking a position regarding capitalism vs. communism or any such thing; I am naming those countries simply because they are ones that my father and his wife oppose(d) as strongly as they oppose Iran, and they are countries, especially the Soviet Union, that practiced a particularly harsh kind of repression. Their line of argument was one that I have heard from some voices on the right here in the States, and I wonder just how much people who make it understand, really understand, what it means to live in a country where the government has so been able to insinuate itself into people’s minds, not in the sense of brainwashing, but in the sense of being a constant, feared and profoundly dangerous presence; what it means to come from a generation of people who, not a few of them, watched their entire family murdered by the government. I certainly don’t know what that means, what kind of trauma that sort of experience leaves you, both individually and collectively, to live with, and I would not presume to judge the people who do have to live with it.

But I thought also as my wife and I argued with my father and his wife of the people in Iran who are resisting. There have been student protests that we have heard about, and there have been those we here in the US have not; the blogosphere in Iran is huge. Last I read, Persian is something like the fourth most common language used for blogging worldwide, and being a blogger in Iran carries real risks. Especially if you choose to write about political issues, it can get you jailed, tortured and even killed. A good book to read about this–in the sense of it being informative; it is not always well-written and it is too partisan to be entirely trustworthy–is We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs, by Nasrin Alavi. Mostly, though, as we argued, I thought about this man in shorts and the personal act of resistance they represented, and I thought about how any real revolution needs to start there, with the personal. Not that there aren’t people, inside Iran and out, trying to organize for change–I will not even attempt, because I understand so very little of it, to talk about the politics involved with the different factions that want to bring their own kind of change to Iran. But it’s personal acts like wearing shorts, like wanting, simply, to sit comfortably on a bus, that I think motivate lasting cultural and political change. It’s hard for me to imagine, even though I was only there for two very short weeks, such change not coming to Iran.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.

Here’s the rules:

1. Pick a quote of one or more paragraphs from something you’ve read, in print, over the course of the past week. (It should be something you’ve actually read, and not something that you’ve read a page of just in order to be able to post your favorite quote.)

2. Avoid commentary above and beyond a couple sentences, more as context-setting or a sort of caption for the text than as a discussion.

3. Quoting a passage doesn’t entail endorsement of what’s said in it. You may agree or you may not. Whether you do isn’t really the point of the exercise anyway.

Here’s the quote. These are a couple of passages from the final chapters of Paul Buhle’s book, Taking Care of Business: Sam Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor. They have a lot to say on the logical end-point of establishmentarian unionism and how, within the tripartite planning system of Big Government, Big Business, and Big Labor—particularly after the corporate merger and consolidation known as the AFL-CIO—the top union bosses tacked further and further away from industrial organization towards political organization — in effect, ceasing to be workers’ unions, and instead operating as an enormously wealthy but crumbling and increasingly irrelevant sort of Labor PAC.

The departure of Reuther and the UAW from the AFL-CIO in 1964 not only meant no charismatic personality was left combat meaning but also no block of aggressive unionists to offer significant, concerted resistance to rightward-drifting union leadership and social policies. The executive committee functioned as a glorified rubberstamping agency rather than a representative body. Seen in retrospect, centralization of power was the inner logic of the subsequent institutional consolidation. Neither William Green nor Walter Reuther nor even Samuel Gompers, an expert autocratic manipulator in his day, wielded as much personal control is to Meany and his entourage. One traditional labor historian, admiring the advance of the bureaucracy, put it most politely: labor evidently no longer had any great need for services beyond negotiation and enforcement of existing contracts. Everything else could more safely and efficiently be handled better from above. In December 1977 at the last national convention where Meany played an active role, the only names offered in nomination for president and secretary were Meany and Lane Kirkland. Neither was resistance offered to any of the nominees for the thirty-three vice presidencies. A lone dissident of sorts who did manage to get onto the council, the socialistic machinists’ president, William Winpisinger, was widely regarded as window-dressing for the steady rightward drift. Carefully directing his political views toward the public sphere, Winpisinger restrained his personal criticisms of Meany, much as some socialist craft unionists of the 1910s insisted that Gompers was a symptom and not the cause of labor conservatism, better endured than combated. Meany responded by savaging Winpisinger’s favorite views without mentioning Winpisinger himself.

By the 1970s, Meany grew more candid—or perhaps merely more arrogant. He held his ground proudly against his internal enemies and gleefully watched the mass social movements of the 1960s fade away. Admittedly, he also saw power within the Democratic Party slipped further from his potential grasp and the AFL-CIO fall precipitously by any measurement of size and influence. Asked in 1972 why AFL-CIO membership was thinking as a percentage of the workforce, he responded, I don’t know, I don’t care. When a reporter pressed the issue, Would you prefer to have a larger proportion? Meany snapped, not necessarily. We’ve done quite well without it. Why should we worry about organizing groups of people who do not appear to want to be organized? If they prefer to have others speak for them and make the decisions which affect their lives… that is their right. Asked whether he expected labor’s influence to be reduced, he responded, I used to worry about the… size of the membership…. I stopped worrying because to me it doesn’t make any difference… The organized fellow is the fellow that counts. This is just human nature. Unorganized and lower-paid workers were less-than-irrelevant to Meany; they were unwanted.

Never particularly supportive of strikes except those protecting jurisdictions, Meany became steadily more hostile to walkouts as time went on. (He made one key exception urging political strikes by merit time workers against, of all things, we being loaded onto Russian ships.) In 1970, he observed, where you have a well-established industry and a well-established union, you are getting more and more to the point where strike doesn’t make sense. Rather than strikes and organizing, Meany put his eggs into the basket of electoral campaigns, legislative activity, and involvement in a panoply of government-management-labor commissions and agencies in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. In some circles these activities actually reinforce the myth of the powerful Meany, labor statesmen and public figure. They did demonstrably little for labor. And no amount of them could quite dispel the image of the narrow-minded unabashedly feminist-baiting and gay-baiting labor boss eating at four-star restaurants and puffing a high-priced class of cigars once restricted to capitalists and mobsters.

The AFL-CIO politicked actively for Jimmy Carter in 1976, after its leaders have expressed their real preference for Scoop Jackson. Ironically, the Georgia Democrat’s narrow margin of victory actually made the support of labor, the African-American community, and feminists, among others, the crucial margin between defeat in victory. Once more, given a different approach, it might have been a moment for the labor movement to flex very real muscles and work for legislative assistance and breaking down barriers to organizing the unorganized, just as the women’s movement reached in early apex and as assorted movements among people of color looked to advances within the mainstream. For that kind of enterprise, however, Meany had no stomach whatever.

Once in office, Carter offered symbols instead of substance: a modest assortment of anti-poverty pilot programs amid a generalized retreat from the Great Society promises. Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall would be remembered not for his speeches saluting labor but because he was the last labor secretary who apparently believed the unions were necessary for working people. As so often, labor had rewarded its friends, gaining little in return. Meany soon let it be known that he was giving Carter a C- as president. Did he wish to see anyone else in the race for 1980? Yes, he shot back, Harry Truman. I wish he were here. To be fair, the old strike-breaking Give ‘Em Hell Harry could not likely have accelerated the growth of American weaponry any faster than Carter did after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. He might have bombed Iran into oblivion, and he surely would have sounded tougher. That kind of rhetoric, joined perhaps with robust new liberal-led red-scare against peaceniks, feminists, and radicals at large, would surely have had more appeal to the frustrated, aging bully that Meany had become.

…

The AFL-CIO issued dire warnings before and after the crucial 1980 election. Union activists worked although with less enthusiasm than anxiety for Carter’s re-election. The aftermath of Reagan’s triumph (by a relatively small margin, it should be remembered, and due to the Iran crisis and the economy rather than any great public fondness for the former California Governor) quickly justified the forebodings. As the new president broke the air controllers’ strike and sent a message to the labor movement both Reagan’s rhetoric and policies proved brutal. The Republican administrations appointees to the National Labor Relations Board notoriously slanted against unions, moved quickly to remove restraints upon opposition to unionization and to all but encourage fresh efforts at decertification. Especially for people of color, disproportionately poor and barely-working class, the prospect of factory shutdowns and worsening health care with few resources was aggravated by their being depicted as the ungrateful recipients of various undue privileges and taxpayer largesse. Union membership fell for an assortment of other reasons as well, but heightened employer resistance stood near the head of the pack. And yet, if labor leaders distrusted or even despise Reagan’s allies, many experienced an unanticipated degree of self realization and hating Reagan’s enemies, those feminists, peaceniks, and assorted left-liberals to assistant to become radio host Rush Limbaugh’s favorite targets.

Besides, labor did have an elusive, thoroughly institutional fallback on the national political stage. In 1981, in the wake of Reagan’s victory, a hard-pressed Democratic National Committee granted the AFL-CIO 25 at-large seats and four out of 35 seats on its executive body. Within a diminished party suffering an early bout of Reaganism (and whose congressional delegation would indeed vote for so many of Reagan’s programs), the AFL-CIO became in return the largest single Democratic financial donor, supplying the DNC with more than a third of its annual budget. The defeat of a modest labor reform bill in Congress in 1978 showed that the conservative counteroffensive had begun in earnest with simultaneous Democratic president and Congress for the last time in at least a generation. Wall Street analysts warned that a new era of militant labor leadership might emerge a political defeat.

Instead, defeat bred timidity and an eagerness to shift foreign of rightward to recuperate the Reagan Democrats. As along with an increasingly unrealistic hope for a major change of labor laws, the specter of protectionism—which labor’s top leaders did not themselves particularly desire—offer the only popular fight-back issue imaginable. In the absence of a real internationalist program of protecting working people across borders, the new protectionism mainly added us mean-spiritedness to organized labor’s perennial self-concern. The downward spiral of labor’s claim to special protection within the liberal coalition thereby lead further and further to its isolation.

—Paul Buhle (1999), Taking Care of Business: Sam Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor, pp. 195–198, 219–220.

Ron Paul is perfectly capable of making sharp and incisive moral arguments against the foolishness, and the destructiveness, of U.S. imperialism, whether in the form of the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq or in the form of proposed new slaughters in Iran or North Korea. He has done so many times in the past, both in writing and in speeches, and he deserves praise where he is in the right, as he usually is. But he has also spent quite a bit of time explaining his position in terms of the separation of powers between the President and the Congress, as established in the U.S. Constitution. In response to questions about foreign policy, he has repeatedly argued, first, that current U.S. foreign policy is both foolish and evil, but also, second, that if he became President, he would go to war when, and only when, Congress duly passed a formal declaration of war. See for example the exchange in GT 2007-09-06: Marching orders, and his remarks on attacking North Korea or Iran in his recent interview with Tim Russert.

So here is my open question for Ron Paul, and for the anti-war libertarians who support his candidacy. Suppose that Ron Paul were elected President and publicly declared his intent to put his fundamentalist reading of the Constitution into practice. Suppose also that Congress continues to be what it currently is — a bunch of mad dog world bombers, on the one hand, and a gang of opportunistic doughfaces who go along to get along, on the other. It’s perfectly likely that at some point in the upcoming years, Congress might pass a declaration of war in the name of bogus national interests in order to spread the slaughter into Iran or North Korea. At this point, President Ron Paul has two options:

1. He can fulfill his Constitutionally-enumerated role as commander-in-chief of the military, and prosecute the imperial war that Congress has ordered him to prosecute; or

2. He can refuse to fulfill his Constitutionally-enumerated role, by sitting on his hands and refusing to prosecute the war in any way even though Congress has declared it, on the grounds that there is a higher law than the Constitution, and that under the circumstances, following government law would require him to do something that no honest and decent man can do.

In case (1), Ron Paul would willingly make himself the instrument of death and slaughter in the name of a paper rag whose virtues, if it ever had any, must depend entirely on whatever capacity it has for safeguarding, rather than destroying, the life and liberty of innocent people. In case (2), Ron Paul would be taking a powerful moral stand against aggressive war; but in so doing he would have to give up entirely on his palaver about declared wars and strict construction of the Constitution. Which would he be willing to do? I am genuinely unsure myself, based on his statements and actions thus far, and I wonder what others think.

(Interview link courtesy of Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-12-24.)

As the parrotsphere's drooling loons continue to pivot around free speech and its limits --a fairly complex dance given their ridiculous demands that the whole of the free world reprint the Danish cartoons-- they fail to see the impact Ahmadinejad's silliness at Columbia may have back in Iran:

Because Iran is a dictatorship of fundamentalist Muslim clerics, it is easy to forget that its president is elected by popular vote (not that the will of the Iranian people counts for much with the Koran thumpers who rule that nation).

And despite Ahmadinejad’s ability to generate international controversy with his noxious and foolish statements (the Holocaust is “a myth,” Israel should be “wiped off the map,” Iranian women are free, there are no gays in Iran, and the country is not building nuclear weapons), his political standing within his nation is shaky.

Thanks to Ahmadinejad’s incendiary talk and Iran’s reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons, the nation’s economy is a mess. And for a politician who was elected to put Iran back on a path to prosperity, as he was, that is bad news. Experts who follow local politics in Iran say that Ahmadinejad’s political party will likely lose ground in the March 2008 round of parliamentary elections that precede Iran’s 2009 presidential election.

One would think that those who support regime change in Iran would see the benefit of giving Ahmadinejad and his party every opportunity to accelerate self-destruction. But I suppose helping them implode deprives said loons of their chest-thumping and war porn. And we can't have that, can we?

Here’s the New York Times’s report on Hordak’s latest battle-cry:

BRUSSELS, May 11 — Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 150 miles off Iran’s coast as the backdrop today to warn the country that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting off oil routes or gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.

… Mr. Cheney’s sharp warnings appeared to be part of a two-track administration campaign to push back at Iran, while leaving the door open to negotiations. It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States offered to negotiate with Iran as long as it first agreed to halt enriching uranium, a decision in which Mr. Cheney, participants said, was not a major player. Similarly, the speech today was not circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, a senior American diplomat said. He kind of runs by his own rules, the official said.

… With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike, he said. We’ll keep the sea lanes open. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We’ll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We’ll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.

… I want you to know that the American people will not support a policy of retreat, Mr. Cheney said. We want to complete the mission, we want to get it done right, and then we want to return home with honor.

—David E. Sanger, New York Times (2006-05-11): On Carrier in Gulf, Cheney Warns Iran

According to the story, after Dick Cheney completes his Middle East mission of sending clear messages, he will return home, sometime next week. No word yet on when American soldiers will complete their mission of opposing, disrupting, relieving, delivering military justice, occupying, keeping the sea lanes open, etc., or when he and his buddies will allow them to return home. Nor is there any word yet on when he and his buddies will stop forcing the American people, i.e. the rest of us, to foot the bill for his plans against our will.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-12-21: In ten words or fewer (personal pronouns edition): George W. Bush on the next year of the Iraq War
• GT 2004-02-08: What you mean We?

Jon Stewart called it "Iranian Hostage Crisis: The Next Generation" (with the requisite cool cable-news-like graphics), but now Iranian dissidents are saying it really is like old times: The Iranian government planned to take British soldiers hostage.

Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary
Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the
kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who handles foreign affairs for the council,
said in a statement that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
had ordered the detention of the Britons in the hope of pressuring the
British government over a threat to toughen U.N. sanctions.

"You can see that the clerical regime had in a premeditated act
arrested British sailors in order to win concessions from the
international community and divert attention from its nuclear project,"
Abedini said. "Claims that the sailors were arrested in Iranian
territorial waters are baseless."

They just hate to be left out of all the war-making fun.

Jon Stewart called it "Iranian Hostage Crisis: The Next Generation" (with the requisite cool cable-news-like graphics), but now Iranian dissidents are saying it really is like old times: The Iranian government planned to take British soldiers hostage.

Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary
Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the
kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who handles foreign affairs for the council,
said in a statement that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
had ordered the detention of the Britons in the hope of pressuring the
British government over a threat to toughen U.N. sanctions.

"You can see that the clerical regime had in a premeditated act
arrested British sailors in order to win concessions from the
international community and divert attention from its nuclear project,"
Abedini said. "Claims that the sailors were arrested in Iranian
territorial waters are baseless."

They just hate to be left out of all the war-making fun.

These are images of Tehran, Iran you don't see every day…

(Link thanks to Austro-Athenian Empire 2007-02-01 and out of step 2007-01-29.)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday a North Korean nuclear test would be a very provocative act and the United States would have to assess its options should it be carried out.

Rice’s warning, at a news conference in Cairo, reflected widespread concern within the Bush administration. She stressed, however, that a North Korean test was an issue for the neighborhood and not just for the United States.

It would be a very provocative act, she said. Still, she said, they have not yet done it.

Rice did not elaborate on the options she said the United States would consider if North Korea followed through on it threat.

—Ann Gearan, Forbes.com (2006-10-03): U.S.: N. Korea Nuclear Test Unacceptable

Now, I reject, root and branch, the whole terror-empire geopolitics that are so proudly endorsed by both the ruling Right and the Cold War liberals who dominate the Loyal Opposition. But suppose that you take those ideas on their own terms for a second. The strategic question that Rice’s blustering raises is this. Even granting the legitimacy of the enterprise, given the way the United States is hopelessly mired in ever-worsening civil wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention whatever the endgame for the increasingly bellicose diplomatic confrontation with Iran may be, just what options does the United States realistically have left at this point?

Everything has limits, even global superpowers. The War Party, especially in its more bellicose factions, fantasizes that the United States has the muscle, resources, know-how, and will to sustain itself as the head of a geopolitical power structure which amounts to world empire in everything but name; and it is precisely these people who are most fond of passing themselves off as hard-nosed policy realists against the saccharine dreams of hippies, pacifist zealots, moonbats, the terminally clueless, and countless other denizens of whatever La-La Land they imagine you have to be from to possibly have doubts about the latest march to war. But they are wrong, dead wrong, and their pose is growing more evidently absurd every day. Unfortunately, we, not they, will be forced to deal with the human consequences of the collosal disasters they are pulling us into.