In a development that would seem only to presage the coming heat death of the universe, Twitter has been helpful for two consecutive weeks now. For several days, thousands of Iranian citizens have been tweeting the latest developments from the streets of Tehran, keeping a brief one-liner live-blog record of the hijacking of democracy and the trammeling of civil rights. It's been engrossing and informative.
Well, assuming you could read it. I couldn't. Every time I went to the #iranelection or #tehran feeds, what signal emanated from that nation or capital city was drowned out by adolescent amateur pundits from Teaneck just retweeting any link they could find in that age-old internet tradition of "firsties" — i.e., first to post, first to find something, first to share the link gets the cred. It doesn't matter if you've actually read the link; you just have to be the one that found it. Hence people (dozens!) retweeting my story that a gorilla at the Tehran zoo killed someone in the midst of all the turmoil and linking to a Youtube of highlights from Donkey Kong. The fact that they hadn't seen my link before not only didn't bother them; that was the very point.
The moral here, apart from the fact that I guess I'm sort of a jerk, is that misinformation spread with as much zeal, rapidity and uncritical parroting as the authentic information emerging from real Iranians in the city itself. Any doubt I had about the overall trustworthiness of the process was removed not by getting away with passing off Donkey Kong as news but by being accused of being a counterintelligence operative for the Iranian secret police (no, I'm not kidding) and having people try to e-tar-and-feather me.
Okay, so maybe Twitter wasn't that useful. Still, it provided a compelling window into a country that we in the United States tend to apprehend only from a top-down perspective. What you could see there, far from the unanimity of focus and purpose that American "tweeters" wanted to assign it was an interesting mixed bag of concerns. There were the radical students one would expect and hope to see, calling for an end to the mullahs and the establishment of a fully secularized democracy. But just as apt to be tweeting their hearts out were citizens concerned with the breakdown of public order and civil rights, irrespective of any ultimate overarching political goal.
Such a weird confluence of motives finds perfect expression in the candidacy of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi himself, a former prime minister of the Islamic Republic and disciple of the 1979 revolution who even now probably unwittingly controls the very forces capable of destroying it. The motives for his embarking on his candidacy remain a little mysterious: whether he was encouraged by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to serve as a check against the excesses of current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; whether he was offered as a block against the tepid reformist policies of former president Mohammad Khatami; whether he entered the race timidly in expectation the reformist candidacy was Khatami's to demand; or whether none of these things happened, and most of this stuff is just the kind of involuted Persian intrigue and coincidence that has typified the nation going back millennia.
Despite strong calls for women's rights and a scaling back of the moral police during the campaign, the stridently reformist Moussavi didn't seem to come out of his shell until the end of it. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, his timing was perfect. His outrage increased pace just before the culminating outrage of an extremely suspect election. Thus Moussavi and millions of angry voters find themselves joined fittingly in anger but with a strange diversity of aims toward which they might put that anger to use.
This set of circumstances immediately reminded me of a passage from a book we read some months back in Current Events, Hooman Majd's
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.
It struck me as a wonderfully apt observation for recent days. Though some undoubtedly took to the streets for democracy, still others did so for public order, accountability or just in disgust that one of the few enshrined and official rights was so casually tossed away. In a society where the government's power to suspend your liberty, one where your liberties themselves are a negotiation, better to not establish them in writing but to concede or defend them as necessary and on contingency. Thus you get seas of protesters agitating for multifarious reasons and under the banner of a candidate who himself seems to be asserting his presence and platform in a responsive but ad hoc manner; but if you asked any of them what they were agitating for, the answer might well be unanimous, "My rights."
Majd is not the only commentator on Iran by a long shot. He's not even the most popular. I recall some current events members excoriating him, reading into his praise a complicity with existing government power and international interests in the country. I never saw anything quite so sinister, because the praise to me read like so many expatriate volumes: the nostalgic celebration for a culture that the author can't fix but whose beautiful elements he can exalt and defend in spite of the overriding errors of the current regime.
What some might read as Majd attempting to legitimize cooperation or submission to a flawed regime seems, instead, like a tempered cry of solidarity with people who have to make a resilient but tough bargain to get by with their privacy and prosperity preserved. But, as Majd points out, there's ultimately a limit to that bargain. Day to day, it ends at the doorstep, in the privacy of the home. On a national level, perhaps, it ends at the voting precinct.
However the individual Iranians in the streets define their idea of haq, it seems a given that they believe it's been trampled. Ahmadinejad may have finally miscalculated just how pliable the people's toleration for invasiveness is. Meanwhile, as an aggregated countervailing force, Moussavi may be leading millions to political and national ends at which he and they can only guess.
Well, assuming you could read it. I couldn't. Every time I went to the #iranelection or #tehran feeds, what signal emanated from that nation or capital city was drowned out by adolescent amateur pundits from Teaneck just retweeting any link they could find in that age-old internet tradition of "firsties" — i.e., first to post, first to find something, first to share the link gets the cred. It doesn't matter if you've actually read the link; you just have to be the one that found it. Hence people (dozens!) retweeting my story that a gorilla at the Tehran zoo killed someone in the midst of all the turmoil and linking to a Youtube of highlights from Donkey Kong. The fact that they hadn't seen my link before not only didn't bother them; that was the very point.
The moral here, apart from the fact that I guess I'm sort of a jerk, is that misinformation spread with as much zeal, rapidity and uncritical parroting as the authentic information emerging from real Iranians in the city itself. Any doubt I had about the overall trustworthiness of the process was removed not by getting away with passing off Donkey Kong as news but by being accused of being a counterintelligence operative for the Iranian secret police (no, I'm not kidding) and having people try to e-tar-and-feather me.
Okay, so maybe Twitter wasn't that useful. Still, it provided a compelling window into a country that we in the United States tend to apprehend only from a top-down perspective. What you could see there, far from the unanimity of focus and purpose that American "tweeters" wanted to assign it was an interesting mixed bag of concerns. There were the radical students one would expect and hope to see, calling for an end to the mullahs and the establishment of a fully secularized democracy. But just as apt to be tweeting their hearts out were citizens concerned with the breakdown of public order and civil rights, irrespective of any ultimate overarching political goal.
Such a weird confluence of motives finds perfect expression in the candidacy of opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi himself, a former prime minister of the Islamic Republic and disciple of the 1979 revolution who even now probably unwittingly controls the very forces capable of destroying it. The motives for his embarking on his candidacy remain a little mysterious: whether he was encouraged by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to serve as a check against the excesses of current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; whether he was offered as a block against the tepid reformist policies of former president Mohammad Khatami; whether he entered the race timidly in expectation the reformist candidacy was Khatami's to demand; or whether none of these things happened, and most of this stuff is just the kind of involuted Persian intrigue and coincidence that has typified the nation going back millennia.
Despite strong calls for women's rights and a scaling back of the moral police during the campaign, the stridently reformist Moussavi didn't seem to come out of his shell until the end of it. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, his timing was perfect. His outrage increased pace just before the culminating outrage of an extremely suspect election. Thus Moussavi and millions of angry voters find themselves joined fittingly in anger but with a strange diversity of aims toward which they might put that anger to use.
This set of circumstances immediately reminded me of a passage from a book we read some months back in Current Events, Hooman Majd's
Iranians, like all other people, have differing ideas of what their rights are, what constitutes haq [a kind of informal understanding of rights or justice], but they do generally agree on the most basic. Thomas Jefferson might have declared that our rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the French Revolution may have given France the motto "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," but the Iranian motto, if there were one, might simply be "Don't trample on my rights," without defining what those rights are. (119)
It struck me as a wonderfully apt observation for recent days. Though some undoubtedly took to the streets for democracy, still others did so for public order, accountability or just in disgust that one of the few enshrined and official rights was so casually tossed away. In a society where the government's power to suspend your liberty, one where your liberties themselves are a negotiation, better to not establish them in writing but to concede or defend them as necessary and on contingency. Thus you get seas of protesters agitating for multifarious reasons and under the banner of a candidate who himself seems to be asserting his presence and platform in a responsive but ad hoc manner; but if you asked any of them what they were agitating for, the answer might well be unanimous, "My rights."
Majd is not the only commentator on Iran by a long shot. He's not even the most popular. I recall some current events members excoriating him, reading into his praise a complicity with existing government power and international interests in the country. I never saw anything quite so sinister, because the praise to me read like so many expatriate volumes: the nostalgic celebration for a culture that the author can't fix but whose beautiful elements he can exalt and defend in spite of the overriding errors of the current regime.
What some might read as Majd attempting to legitimize cooperation or submission to a flawed regime seems, instead, like a tempered cry of solidarity with people who have to make a resilient but tough bargain to get by with their privacy and prosperity preserved. But, as Majd points out, there's ultimately a limit to that bargain. Day to day, it ends at the doorstep, in the privacy of the home. On a national level, perhaps, it ends at the voting precinct.
However the individual Iranians in the streets define their idea of haq, it seems a given that they believe it's been trampled. Ahmadinejad may have finally miscalculated just how pliable the people's toleration for invasiveness is. Meanwhile, as an aggregated countervailing force, Moussavi may be leading millions to political and national ends at which he and they can only guess.
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