I must say living with a couple Turks has put my criticisms about the behavior of American expats into perspective. My roommates do nothing but whine about how much better Turkey is than Iranian and how primitive and dirty Iranians are, and show no interest whatsoever in meeting anyone who doesn’t speak their language (their speaks much English). The Iranians they do interact with are all Azeri Turks, and they complain about how bad their Turkish is (they don’t except that Azeri is a different dialect that’s correct in its own way). They particularly enjoy digressing on the inferiority of Iranian cuisine, and the other day recounted the story (expecting my empathy) of how when they first came to Tabriz, their hosts had offered them breakfast but they’d refused it, saying “That’s not breakfast, that’s tea and bread and cheese,” and then forced their hosts to bring them to a restaurant where they could have eggs and cucumbers like civilized people.
The younger of the two (~30) is actually not so bad, and at least is trying now to make kh and gh sounds, having at first dismissed them as ugly “eastern” intonations. But the older (mid-40s?) is a complete idiot, and when she isn’t complaining about Persian culture she’s napping for hours on end or playing computer solitaire or backgammon instead of doing here homework for language class. When people don’t respond well to her incoherent, slow, and usually impolite Persian she takes it as a sign that all Iranians are assholes.
People here are lazy and don’t pay any attention to you. It’s as if they don’t want to sell anything, she said of booksellers after returning from a solo trip (I have no problem letting her go off on her own; maybe I should be keeping a better eye out for her, but she’s really annoying and has no sense of humor whatsoever) to Enghelab for book shopping (book in what language I don’t know). She was in fact (she says) I Persian TEACHER at a high school back in Turkey, but is incapable of stringing together a sentence with more grammatical complexity than Are you good? or I want tea. I can only feel sorry for her students.
Catharsis complete, I’ll move on to a hotter topic.
I’ve been nothing but amazed at how different young people are from last summer. People who a year ago were capable of talking about little beyond the hot new Nokia smartphone and latest Hollywood trash movies now immediately launch into political argument and speculation at the first opportunity. The generational aspirations a year back (this is just my anecdotal experience) were basically limited to 1) get out—escape to America or Europe 2) get so rich the rules no longer apply to me. I saw little sense among Iranians in their 20s—as opposed, for example, to young people in Turkey—of investing in their country or maybe going abroad for education but always with the intent to return and use that education to better society. But it’s precisely these people who now brag to me about getting beaten at protests and make very well-informed commentary on day-to-day political developments.
Such was the case with Shaya, a female Iranian underground rapper I met up with yesterday evening. The plan was to meet with a larger group but we ended up the only two dumb enough to try to navigate the protests. When I walked through Vanak on my way up, the traffic was slowed to a halt and there were I’d guess thousands of onlookers, but those actually actively demonstrating seemed outnumbered by police/Basijis. I’d never talked politics with her before but the first thing she asked me was if I’d been following what was happening these days. Like almost everybody, she seems fairly optimistic. She also seemed to be of the Velvet Coup school of thought, saying that Khamenei is under the control of Ahmedinejad and the Revolutionary Guards, rather than vice versa.
I asked her if Ahmedinejad had lost lots of supporters since the election. It was perhaps a stupid question, but my impression had been that, very generally speaking, most people who supported Ahmedinejad before were either hardliners anyway who wouldn't particularly care about protesters being shot etc, or were in rural areas where bread-and-butter issues took priority and they got their information mainly from the state media. But she said that everyone she knew who'd supported/voted for Ahmedinejad had now turned against him. She even knew people who were Basijis, but in this last bout of violence and parted ways with the militia. NB I wouldn’t say she’s the most reliable resource for impartial info
Everybody’s a Basiji. I’m a Basiji too, she replied when I asked if she knew how many actual members the Basij had. In high school especially lots of people joined, mostly because you got to go on free tourism trips in Iran and got various discounts/special opportunities. She still had her Basij Militia membership card in a drawer somewhere, which she promised to show me next time we meet. When we talk about Basijis we mean just this small core group that are active in bothered and beating people, not all official members of the Basij, she said.
Shaya confirmed my theory about the lack of Gasht-e Ershad presence on thoroughfares and squares and in parks these days. Still the only times I’ve seen dark-green uniformed morality police have been with hundred of Basijis and police as backup, never just two men and two women standing in front of a van/paddy wagon as last summer.
They’re afraid. If they tried to arrest a girl or even just bother her, people would tear them apart, she said. So what are you complaining about? You’re benefiting from Ahmedinejad’s reelection, I told her. Ha ha, she said. She was wearing as a hijab a smallish square of flannel, the edges of which she’d snipped into ragged streamers. She would wait maybe a minute before readjusting when it fell down, which was often. I liked the hijab but must say I was quite disappointed to see that she’d changed her look from no-makeup, bullet bandolier-necklace Anti-Establishment to dyed orangey-blonde, cherry-red lipped, baby blue nail-polished North Tehrani Standard.
After big rallies the nightly (2200-2230 without fail) rooftop chants are always louder. A week ago Death to the Dictator was as far as they went; now they're chanting Death to Khamenei.
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