Iran

[Reprinted from a letter dated 6.15.2009]

I am sure you have seen the news.

There is such a disconnection between what actually happens in the world and what we see on TV. I suppose with the creation of the internet and the rise of “social media” that gap begins to close, but I still feel that even though I have been reading about the civil disorder in Iran for days; I know nothing. I have seen pictures, and that helps. But some of them seem selected for publication (as we know they are) and contain pictures of beautiful people in western clothing fighting against the dehumanized police forces, nameless behind their polarized helmets. It’s not that I think the photos are staged or some such nonsense, it is just that all information that we get is filtered through some content middle manager somewhere (whether a blog, or traditional print media) who obviously selects the most palatable pictures. I think some of the grittiness is lost, the fear, and with those a touch of reality.

The videos that are shot from cell phone cameras and merely uploaded to you-tube probably offer the best chance to understand the severity of the situation. One of the videos show a series of motorcycle cops charging into a crowd. As the video starts, there is only a widescreen shot of a street that is packed with people. Then, as if by magic, the crowd begins to part, people find space where once was none. A series of motorcycles in a v formation cut into the crowd, each loaded with two officers one driving and the other hitting people with a baton. The video ends there, but eventually through a series of pictures one can see a motorbike on fire and a captured police man pulled to safety by members in the crowd.

I talked to C R about this. I wondered about the amount of courage needed by both sides: first the crowd to stand up to a rather despotic government and second the officers to charge a seemingly solid wall of people. She noted that some governments have been noted to give soldiers or riot control troops drugs to make them more effective. According to her it happened in China during the Tiananmen Square protest. Normally, I am skeptical to such notions, but it did remind me of a conversation I had with someone who had survived the Yugoslav war.

I remember, when I was so much younger, during the Balkan conflict most of what I heard was very clean and censored. Some people were causing genocide and war and NATO forces were eventually dispatched to the region to retain some modicum of stability in the area.

I had a friend who had lived through the crisis, and she looked like she was 45 even though she was only twenty or so. One day I had asked her what had happened. What she said through broken English was literally incomprehensible. Murder. Rape. Crazy soldiers on drugs. The lack of understanding didn’t come from a language barrier, but came from the way that she strung together such a series of brutal words that, even though I could understand the grammatical structure and the individual definition of each word, I could not possibly comprehend what had happened.

I did what any normal seventeen year-old would do when confronted with something that he doesn’t understand. I dismissed the whole thing.

I suppose that the most chilling thing about this is discovering how brutal people can be, and how unbelievable it is to people who spend their lives is very comfortable, uninteresting times.