The International Writers Magazine - Our Tenth Year: Iran

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The Allah Stomp How The Streets Of Iran Are Burning The Fumes of the '79 Revolution The large print giveth and the small print taketh away. - Tom Waits • James Campion If you have children at an age where they have a basic grasp of their place in the grand scheme of human endeavor, you must place them in front of a television or find a spot on the Internet and share with them the incredible events unfolding in Iran.

For it is important that youth be served with uprising. It is even more important they understand what it means to fight to control their environment and to be comfortable in the total and furious rejection of all that has come before; especially when what has come before is a tired and pathetic series of atavistic oppressive nonsense perpetuated by mindless zealot thugs hiding behind laughably formed religious dogma.

You see, the quiet riots engulfing the whole of Tehran currently have less to do with a sham of an election than it does with a "movement". Granted, movements tend to explode from the bowels of cheap political frauds, but they also tend to have a life of their own, a violent birthing complete with a bloody, cacophonous splendor of fury. Movements also don't necessarily need leaders or figureheads or even a singular purpose. But they always seem to regress into a fistful of backlash from the Status Quo, which more times than not see movements as a threat to what is left of their stale hag of desiccating stupidity that has subsisted way beyond any reason to keep functioning save for the greed and self-preservation of its nurtured few.

Thomas Jefferson, one of history's most articulate dreamers, saw uprisings as a kind of spiritual right of passage for the human spirit, a Jesus/Mohammad king-hell joust with tyranny, whether religious, cultural or political. He also believed in the "world revolution" where the desire to steer one's destiny trumps any feign designs on the collective freedom, because one man's freedom is another man's shackles and Jefferson, like all pie-in-the-sky types, knew instinctively that only those who've worn the shackles understand implicitly that things gotta change.

So maybe while you watch a world turn upon itself you can explain to your kids that not everything is shit, but a goodly portion of things are, and strange aberrations of civilization like Theocracies only work for some but not all. And when the majority of the "all" happens to be around the age of 27 and cannot recall with xenophobic blinders the Revolution of 1979, they fully realize the absurdity of their existence; that all about them is religious miasma existing only to expunge any remnants of the evil western-propped governments for a return to the Dark Ages and the headdresses of warring tribes and the muzzling of science and progress and art and social expression.

This is how a society becomes straddled with a bleating little troll like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a twisted gnome of a man whose sole purpose is the wiping away of the terrible nightmare in the mirror -- the sad beady-eyed gargoyle mommy ignored and the neighborhood bullies stomped for kicks -- and replace him with something "special". Ah, but his babbling psychosis was forgiven for too long, this tour-de-force of spectacular dumbness displayed with spastic zeal, simply because the public learned that he'd been stricken from birth with a strange malady called Mesenteric Torsion, which had heretofore only been diagnosed in dogs and other creatures that regularly consume their own feces and countless pounds of diseased meat. It is literally a rotting of the intestines wherein eventually the bile invades the bloodstream and then onto the brain. Dogs usually have the decency to crawl off to die alone, but in the human, MT produces a bloated sense of self-worth and a demented lust for purpose, producing a bent sort of abject megalomania.

Modern civilized societies either quarantine these poor creatures or give them high-profile radio gigs, but in Iran there appears to be a relish for this manner of madness at the state level. But, alas, Ahmadinejad's atavistic showbiz had begun to wear thin, not only abroad but at home, and that is a hard dose to swallow for those living in fantasyland. And it's also how that fantasy might spill into "the process", where campaigns suddenly become pud pulling exercises and votes are more a vague framework than reality.

And despite the fading echo of The Revolution being outnumbered by the new, wide-eyed youth to the tune of almost two-to-one and rising poll numbers for weeks for his opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi Khameneh, and a strong tailwind of debates in which all observers viewed Ahmadinejad's "clock cleaned", the election went the other way by a staggering two-thirds. Weird stories of thousands of hand ballots ignored, a media crackdown and a quickly cobbled victory speech left Iran looking to the rest of the world not as it wished -- a noble nation built of tradition and allegiance to Allah -- but a grotesquely anachronistic embarrassment to modern civilization.

That's when the foreign press were kicked out and international cell phone connections were shut down and the Internet was blockaded. But this, like all revolutions, has new avenues to victory, whether they are the sword and musket or the Twitter and FaceBook.

Images of a vengeful Revolutionary Guard shooting wildly at protesting students and the capitol in flames is not the way a rogue nation wants to hang in this renewed time of diplomacy. The mockery of justice and law and the total abandon of human rights and common decency play regularly on the World Wide Web and it is all a pox on Iran's faith and its way of life. And all the vacillating rambles of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will amount to the proverbial hill of beans if order is not restored.

There are only so many jailhouses and so many bullets and so much upheaval the Status Quo can handle. Eventually the voices overwhelm. If not today or tomorrow, soon. No matter what comes and how our new president or the rest of the curious Middle East will deal with it when it has subsided, it will not be the same.
That is a Movement, brutha.
Give your kids a taste.

© James Campion June 20th 2009
realitycheck@jamescampion.com

Open letter to my Wife: Part 2
James Campion
I send this missive to press on the tenth anniversary of our marriage from a hotel in Barcelona, Spain,

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