_Pollux writes_:
When Iran exploded into two halves in late June, the world was caught off guard.
Was it revolution? It certainly looked like one. And it was called one: the “Green Revolution” involved and continues to involve “a wide cross-section of Iranian society”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/29/090629fa_fact, who have flooded the streets of Teheran and other cities, chanting slogans and waving green flags and bandannas.
The world soon started taking sides. Venezuela, Russia, and Brazil welcomed the results, wiring their congratulations to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Great Britain, the United States, France, and Germany expressed their concerns over possible fraud.
Amidst the lobbed canisters of tear gas and blows of the Basiji’s boots and truncheons, Twitter’s protest-related hash tags, such as _#iran_ and _#iranelection_, pullulated a thousand times over. Peaceful demonstrations turned into bloody battles; casualties began to be reported as well as stories of militia firing into crowds or raiding students’ dorms.
The “death of Michael Jackson”:http://emdashes.com/2009/06/michael-jackson-1958-2009.php was a tragedy in more ways than one: it “shifted attention away”:http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-06-26/will-michael-jackson-doom-iran/ from the smoldering streets of Teheran and focused it on the dragon wagon kiddie rides of Neverland.
It certainly looked like revolution in Iran, but in the end, no government has fallen, no Iranian equivalent of the Bastille has been stormed and destroyed. There was no collapse -only the temporary collapse of Google’s servers.
With the whiff of possible revolution gone, the stench of voting fraud remains, despite the government’s assertion that no irregularities occurred. It’s an all-too-common odor. We’ve smelled it before, in Zimbabwe with Mugabe’s election, and in Florida in 2000.
Ah, November-December 2000: the memories! The images! The frustrations and fears! We prayed to St. Chad, the patron saint of disputed elections, a patronage that turned out to be “apocryphal.”:http://www.snopes.com/religion/chad.asp We didn’t just have hanging chads (chads attached to the ballot at only one corner), we had swinging chads, tri-chads, dimpled chads, and pregnant chads.
Every dramatic event has an image that we associate with it. For many, it was the “image of Judge Robert Rosenberg”:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshowpics/3678208.cms examining a dimpled punchcard, his wide, intense eyes bulging with worry, his glasses raised on his forehead.
“Barry Blitt’s”:http://www.cartoonbank.com/search_results.asp?sitetype=1&advanced=1&section=all&artist=Barry+Blitt take on this iconic image, for the June 29, 2009 cover of _The New Yorker_, transforms Rosenberg into an Iranian woman. Her glasses are raised in the same manner, and she bears the same expression of intense concentration, mixed in with confusion, concern, and fear. The cover is called “Hanging Chador,” a reference to the cloak worn by Iranian women in public and by many of the protesters.
Blitt’s illustration, done in his trademark style of ink slashes and somewhat messy watercolor splotches, forever links Bush vs. Gore with Ahmadinejad vs. Mousavi. It is a common cartoonist’s trick to link two seemingly unrelated themes or images to produce one joke or illustration; however, in this case, the leap from Tallahassee to Teherean was an easy one to make, at least for anyone with residual, bitter memories of what happened in 2000.
On June 29, Iran’s Guardian Council reaffirmed Ahmadinejad’s victory. New protests erupted, graffiti was angrily scrawled on Teheran’s walls.
The world seems uncertain on what course of action to take. What is the United States to do? Does it simply watch and return to the business of burying its celebrities and making sense of the subarctic hebetudinosity that is Sarah Palin?
As for the protestors in Iran, Benjamin Franklin’s quote comes to mind: they must all hang together, or assuredly they shall all hang separately.