Sorry America, People in Iran Still Fucking Hate You

I like to think of myself as a person who, if not unbiased, is at least aware of his biases. This doesn’t mean that I’m working to overcome them, but at least I know where they are. Part of this system of prejudices is that I generally hate Republicans more than I hate Democrats. This isn’t because I  think that Democrats are necessarily smarter than Republicans – they quite often aren’t, although I suspect averages favor the left wing – but because Democrats are more likely to want the same things I want, and thus less liable to get in my way. I recall being around campus for the presidential “Get out the Vote!” thing this past fall, and couldn’t ever quite decide if the people doing it were disingenuous or terribly naive. I mean, isn’t driving on a national freeway system evidence enough that most people probably shouldn’t be allowed to vote? Dogs chained up in the back of pickups; people eating with one hand and applying makeup with the other; some redneck motherfucker beating his kids and changing the radio at the same time. These people can vote! Why, why, why would you ever want to remind them of that? Maybe it’s the college atmosphere that confuses people – you have to at least be able to write your name and wipe your own ass to go to college (unless you’ve got a jumpshot), so maybe they’ve forgotten that these aren’t the only people voting. Go to a cheap public location some time and listen to the things people are saying. Listen. You wouldn’t let them watch your kid, wash your dog, or remove your tonsils – why the fuck would you let them choose who leads the most powerful country on earth? It’s like all of a sudden, every 4 years, all those people who aren’t expected to know shit about the economy, about healthcare, about international relations get their day. Like “Bring your kids to work!“, except when that day happens, the kids don’t actually get to do anything – they have to fucking sit their quietly and watch. Why? Because they aren’t qualified – they’re children, they have the relative functional intelligence of a monkey. This same analogy applies to democratic voting, except work involves control over enough explosives to turn the planet inside out.

This might be part of why I wasn’t terribly initially excited about this whole Iranian revolution. Now, I like to see civic-sponsored violence as much as the next guy, and I’m not really wild about muslims, so I suppose there’s a certain animalistic pleasure in watching the news coverage. However, a couple things initially turned me off, both on their side and ours, and I’m relatively certain the whole thing isn’t anything like what most Americans think.

First of all – John McCain has all of a sudden got a real fucking boner for getting on Obama’s case about not coming out and supporting “the Iranian people”, whatever that means. This is the same motherfucker who sang “Bomb Iran” to the tune of “Barbara Ann” when asked what his foreign policy towards them was. And now he thinks we should intervene? Which is it, Johnny? Blow them up or save them? A similar attitude seems to be endemic to most Republican commentators, who can’t seem to remember that 2 weeks ago they thought we should invade.

Second, I’m not sure that Americans really understand the Iranian “people” (I use the term under erasure, but this is how pundits and dumb people think, so it’s necessary) as well as they think they do. Most of the latte-sippers who are now all about the revolution here don’t realize that the opposition candidate is only slightly less a controlling fascist than the current one. Iranians aren’t having a revolution for women’s rights, freedom of religion, or capitalism – they already had a revolution, 30 years ago, and they put fucking Khomeini in place – the guy who went into exile and incited riots when the Shah let women vote. They willingly pushed into power the fucking clerics – they made THEIR OWN STATE an Islamic Republic, which as far as I can tell is Arab for no fun at all. Does anyone here really understand the sort of views that Moussavi supports? He approved the taking of hostages, he was responsible for the execution of political prisoners in 1988, and (at least in my book) worst of all, supported the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie. You think the sort of dude who orderered a (brilliant) writer executed and put a price on his head is really about to be a paragon of democracy? Me neither. To even be approved as a candidate for this election, the guy had to be enough of an asshole that Khomeini would let him run in the first place – it’s not an actual democracy, although it would be well served to note that the US did the same thing in Vietnam and the Israelis do the same thing in Palestine.

So yes, they’re rioting in Tehran. Yes, the people have spoken out – and said they want the same damn thing in a different color (namely, green.) Who knows – maybe the system they put into place shooting back at them will remind them that they did a really shitty job the first time and ought to let someone else sort it out the second time.