Back in the mid-1970s, the most high-profile protesters on the SIU Carbondale campus were students who hailed from Iran.
The Shah was still in power and most Iranians feared SAVAK, his secret police apparatus. So even in America, Iranian protesters donned masks to cloak their identity.
The masks were more than a parenting model for Michael Jackson (one of the references promised in the headline). SAVAK did have a long reach. I once answered a phone call to the Daily Egyptian office after one of the protesters appeared in an issue. The caller, who refused to identify himself, asked for the protester’s identity. He tried his best to be threatening, but that tact rarely works when you are not forthcoming about your own name or employer.
Papers also protect sources and, hey, none of us knew what fundamentalist jackasses the children of the Iranian revolution would become after they assumed power.
A problem with criticizing a figure as controversial as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is that it appears you are condoning those nutcase comments you do not address. For a blanket catchall, I will concede that everything after “Have a nice day” has the credibility of a Penthouse Forum letter.
With all of the deflection logic of America’s own Rush Fuehrer Limbaugh, Ahmadinejad has been attempting to depict the current protests in Iran as an orchestration by the Great Satan, aka deathtoamerica.
“Have a nice day. President of the United States of America Barack Obama is meddling in the Iranian electoral process.”
The democratic tradition in Iran is not one that most of the world recognizes. Michael Jackson’s recording career (MJ reference No. 2) is more long-standing than the concept of popular representation in Iran. Ahmadinejad’s democratic model appears to be Chicago, circa 1968. The Iranian government has mastered vote fraud and demonstrator-head cracking. All that’s missing is a deep-dish pizza.
Ahmadinejad’s charge of American meddling in Iran’s political process does come from a point of knowledge. After all, few countries ever stuck their faces deeper into our own leap year tradition than Iran did in 1980.
Even more than the economy, the dominant event during the 1980 election was the Iranian hostage crisis. Jimmy Carter’s presidency evaporated as the hostage crisis played out.
“What’s flat, sandy and glows in the dark?
“Iran 10 minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration.”
The crisis assured Reagan’s election. The hostages were even released on the day of his inauguration, so those two historic events shared space in that day’s pre-Internet news cycle.
Iranians are the experts when it comes to meddling in another country’s electoral process.
They have also fine-tuned that masked protester thing. Wearing a mask is no longer a necessity when the country shuts down media coverage of the event. Even SAVAK would admire Iran’s current leadership initiative.
Mike Springston is a graduate student in the Masters in the Art of Teaching program. He was a reporter for the Daily Egyptian in 1975-76.
