You Can't Make Mistakes.

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This article appears in this month’s Erudition, edited by Sally Cervenak. You can view the original article here: http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/article.php?id=935

Egyptian citizens are celebrating after nearly three weeks of continuous demonstrations in Cairo, Alexandria, and elsewhere in Egypt; and right they should. Their tenacity and dedication should be lauded; it will surely be remembered. To have navigated such an uncertain situation with a sense of responsibility, suppressed until only a few weeks ago should elicit respect from around the globe.

What has happened in Egypt these past few weeks certainly came as a surprise to many. After three delusional speeches from the now-ousted President Hosni Mubarak, in which he patronized Egyptians-referring to them as his children, himself as their father-Vice President Omar Suleiman’s announcement could not have come as more of a shock. But this was not the first instance of surprise this year; the very occurrence of such insistent and dedicated protests astounded many, Egyptian and foreign. I myself have come to know Egyptians as patriotic and good-spirited, but not-so-secretly demoralized by the unrelenting oppression of a state fearful of criticism. With slander and libel considered felonious defamation under the thirty-year-old Emergency Law, people have become quite fearful of criticizing the government beyond the accepted generalities of: “It’s Egypt, nothing works” or “fi-l-mishmish” (which is loosely idiomatic for “when pigs fly”).* Cab drivers in Cairo who decried the abuses of the government on an outward journey, were just as likely to praise Mubarak on their return

This well-founded fear of reprisal is what has kept all but the most daring or foolhardy Egyptians from mounting protests in the past. And who wouldn’t be afraid after witnessing the imprisonment of Ayman Nour, after he made comments about the ability of the aging Mubarak to handle the presidency during the 2005 elections? Anyone who vocally criticized the police or the Interior Ministry were just as likely to be falsely charged with a trumped-up offense and thrown in the clink. For years, Egyptians have lived in fear of the Mukhabirat–the intelligence officers of Egypt’s heavy-handed Interior Ministry. Theirs was a dominion of Orwellian surveillance, torture, and imprisonment without accountability. It was terrifying.

This time was different though and it was clear from day two, when the demonstrators began shouting for Mubarak’s ouster. Just one month ago in Egypt, rhetoric like that was likely to get you tried for treason. Indeed quite a few protesters were arrested in those first few days and threatened with charges of treason and sedition. Only once the cries went up, the game changed. After Mubarak made his first historically delusional speech, it was evident that this struggle would not come to an end until he relinquished power. No amount of threating arrest, nor curfews, could put this cry down.

Those who stood defiant put aside their fears of a totalitarian state and made their demands known in the face of what would have been terrible and painful reprisal had they lost. Perhaps even more impressive than this bravery, was the initiative taken by Egyptians in the face of uncertainty and potential chaos. When the police were ordered by the Interior Ministry to disappear from the streets after three days of solid protest, Egyptians banded together to protect their neighbourhoods and their property. As it was realised that the protests would not stop until the demands of demonstrators were met, citizens began dealing with essential services. Every morning in Tahrir Square, groups of protesters went out and picked up rubbish. Some say that the square never looked so clean as it has done during these last few weeks.

When violence erupted – very likely at the hands of secret police and hired thugs – people worked to set up makeshift hospitals in downtown mosques. They ensured that protesters were fed and had access to water and medicine. Mobile phone charging stations were set up at point throughout Tahrir Square so that people could stay in contact once the communications networks came back online. Even during the communications blackout, Egyptians did what they do remarkably well and communicated and disseminated information via an informal network of people on the ground. One blogger commented that this revolution only worked because Egyptians are the original social networkers, with or without an internet.

Of course, I am focusing on what occurred in Cairo. Similar things happened in Alexandria and elsewhere. My friends in Alexandria guarded their neighbourhoods just as we saw in our usually quiet suburban neighbourhood south of Cairo. Roadblocks were stationed up and down the streets and at every intersection. Men and boys were armed with lengths of pipe and sticks (and in some cases swords, golf clubs and bike helmets). Protesters in Tahrir Square began checking their fellow Egyptians for weapons and identification in an attempt to keep away those who would have undermined the protests by turning them into violent street riots.

This revolution, and that is what it is, did not occur without casualties. Three hundred were killed, most from head injuries caused by rocks or other blunt objects. Over a thousand were injured. Property was destroyed, shops were looted, cars and trucks burned. The Egyptian economy was damaged severely. Tourism will take some time to recover to its previous levels.

With any luck, once the celebrations have settled a little (though not the celebratory spirit), Egypt will be able to rebuild their country with the same sense of community and initiative exemplified throughout the last several weeks. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has made it very clear that it cannot be a substitute for a democratically elected government of the people of Egypt. Egyptians are in the unique position of having forced a corrupt, illegitimate dictator and his cronies out of power not by force, but by making their demands known and holding their ground until those demands were met. The role of the military in what occurred is still a bit unclear, but it would appear that the Supreme Council had grown tired of the machinations of a dying regime and decided to end it.

On Thursday, Minister of Defence Mohamed Tantawi was actually out in the city talking to demonstrators. Representatives of the military made statements that the demonstrators would “have all their demands met”. All the more reason for protesters’ anger, sadness, and confusion when Mubarak stood up to make his final deluded address to the Egyptian people that night in which he asserted that he would not be stepping down until the next election. The scene was almost surreal. But then when Suleiman made the abdication announcement the next day on behalf of Mubarak, the pendulum of emotion swung the other way. The strength of emotion then released evinced what had fuelled the public for the duration of the eighteen day protest. It can only be hoped that this emotion will continue to fuel Egypt, for the next few months and years of reform and reconstruction.

The coming phase of Egypt’s revolution will be an interesting and difficult one. The most visible part was completed with the ousting of the totalitarian regime, but the people will need now to monitor that the existing entrenched bureaucracy and the military do not exercise undue influence over the process of arranging and conducting fair and open elections. Egypt has a bright future ahead and has demonstrated, like Tunisia before it, that real revolution is possible in the Middle East. Let us hope that those international powers with an interest in the region do not interfere with genuine democracy, as they have done in the past. Barring this threat, there appear blissfully few barricades across the road of Egypt’s future, something which anyone who has ever driven in Cairo would gladly welcome.

*’Fi-l-mishmish’ is an abbreviation of ‘bokra fi-l-mishmish’ (‘Apricots tomorrow’). It is an expression generally used to demonstrate disbelief that something will occur, not unlike ‘when pigs fly’.

This piece appears in this month’s issues of Erudition. You can find it here: http://www.eruditiononline.co.uk/article.php?id=909

When I was invited to write a piece about the future of technology, I assumed that I was being asked to predict which gadgetry we would have next year, how medical science will progress, and the new and terrifying surveillance methods our governments will employ. So, here are those predictions:

You will have more and smaller (and sometimes bigger) gadgets. They will thrill and delight you. Then you will tire of them and throw them away and buy different gadgets. Apple® will love you. Your smartphone will begin—if it already hasn’t begun—to be a little creepy. It will, of its own (programmed) volition, gather data about your friends and contacts in such a way that every time you pull someone up in your contacts list, you will be presented with more information than the last time you looked them up.* Medical science will find increasingly bizarre ways to not cure cancer, but to look at cancer. Cattle and chickens will be replaced by grasshoppers and ants as sources of protein as the human population outgrows its ability to produce food supply. Your government will place tiny microchips in your toilet paper to monitor your bowel movements.

Now, with that boring, run-of-the-mill assessment out of the way, let us actually have a look at what the future of technology will be for us as people.

Firstly, you will not notice the proliferation of technology in the world around you. It will just be there. Everywhere. You will not see it. It is this type of technology which I will address presently. Secondly, due to proliferation, there will be two kinds of people in the world: those who know what they are looking at and how it works and those who do not. The latter group will comprise the majority of people.

This is, of course, already happening. Ask anyone with an iPhone to describe the manner in which it connects to other such devices and you will get a range of bizarre answers of varying levels of complexity and detail. An example: a friend explained to me his theory that the reason that he had to turn off his iPod on take-off and landing was because it was communicating with satellites. He believed that the device was communicating with satellites because it would magically change its time when he went from the United States to Egypt or Egypt to Thailand. He had overlooked the fact that the time had only changed once the device had been plugged into a laptop.

Explanations like this abound when your average end user picks up a device or opens a web browser and then tries to contemplate how and why these things work the way that they do. This is not really a problem most of the time. Users of technology do not need to understand how something works or in some cases even how to use it. Some things just work without ever requiring human intervention. When they stop working, however, this is a problem.

What do you do when your mobile phone, iPod, computer, router, or other devices stop working? You call someone and then they tell you to either take or send it somewhere to have it looked at by a technician. We are becoming increasingly reliant upon technicians and technology experts. There will come a time, very soon indeed, that there will be no user-serviceable devices in the market at all. Apple has done a good job of doing away with external artifacts that betray that your device can be opened up and looked inside. This is the way of the future.

Personal computing could already be considered esoteric, but this is only the beginning. As mentioned above, we are going to see—or, more importantly, not see—tiny computing devices embedded in all manner of objects and products. Everything will become “smart”. Users, on the other hand, will become less smart about how these things work. Those who do know and who can repair and change the manner in which the devices function will become tantamount to clergymen or magicians. They will be the keepers of the esoteric knowledge of the future.

Think of it like this: if you told someone in the fifteenth century that you could look into a device and see someone looking into a similar device on the other side of the world, they would either turn away in utter disbelief or they would call you a witch and burn you at the stake. Yet we do this all the time with Skype and other internet video phone and video chat appliances and applications. Magicians, astrologers, priests, and mystics in antiquity were revered—or reviled—for their knowledge of the unseen world and familiarity with the methods used in manipulating it.

Magic, science, and religion have never really been all that different, if even at all separable. Each comprise on one hand a set of theoretical models which are required for understanding and explaining the world. On the other hand, they each have a set of protocols for interacting with that which is not directly visible or tangible. The practitioners of each have deep knowledge about both the theory and protocol associated with their chosen discipline. This knowledge allows them to interact with the world in a manner very different from those around them.

Place technological advancements in computing in this context. There is already a clergy associated with computing. System administrators (sysadmins) require a huge amount of knowledge in order to do their jobs and to make systems and networks function properly. Dabblers often miss things and with disastrous consequences. End users neither need nor want to have the kind of knowledge that sysadmins have , but they know that they are different. Every office has a set of people who are considered “technological wizards.” These are often the same people who are employed to keep the servers and networks in good operating condition.

There are also those who will use their vast knowledge for evil. The recent Stuxnet infection of computers in Iranian nuclear power plants comes to mind. Black-hat hackers and virus engineers will hold dominion over the black magic of the future and we will have reason to fear them. The less end users know about the devices that they use, there will be a greater chance that those devices can be used against them. This may manifest in actual life-threatening situations—think “smart” cars, onboard navigation systems, autopilot—or they will be used to monitor their users surreptitiously—tracking the whereabouts of users using the GPS devices in their mobile phones, monitoring email and text messages, tapping calls.

This is not a warning, this is a prediction. The path has already been set. End users have neither the desire nor the the need at present to know how or why their devices function. This trend will continue to the point that they will barely even know how to use them. They will simply know that they are there. Those who possess the esoteric knowledge will be increasingly considered to be wizards and magicians to the point that they will come under scrutiny if not members of the orthodox clergy. This already happens to some extent. In governmental background checks, technological knowledge of those being investigated is of great concern to weed out any potential “hackers” who might be or have been involved in any illegal activities.

The average lay person will both marvel at and fear the knowledge of the sorcerer. The clergy will work to maintain their position of dominance as the keepers of the knowledge, though they will mostly be charlatans, possessing only partial or partially-falsified knowledge; the real knowledge being locked away in vaults somewhere; the keys held by few, if any.

——————

*This has already happened. My phone freaks me out all the time with things like this. It should learn to mind its own damned business

First Annual.

Tomorrow, or more accurately, tonight is my birthday. I usually let these things pass me by. The last few years have found me on planes or by myself in a strange city or somewhere. This year, my friends in Cairo have quietly insisted on a party, and I am going to indulge them.

I don’t like birthday parties, particularly for people who are in their late twenties and early thirties. These events tend toward the externally happy/internally maudlin, and who has time for that? I don’t lament getting older, though I recognize that it is happening more rapidly than any of us is comfortable with. I like it. I typically like to “celebrate” this aspect of life with a quiet drink in a dark bar and a good long self-reflection followed by fitful sleep. This, however, does not exactly make a good environment for whatever is the opposite of depression. On thinking about it this morning as I washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen floor waiting for my coffee to kick in, I realized that this might be another aspect of a childhood loathing that I carry with me even until today.

I hate kids. Hate them. I have since I was a kid, probably even moreso then. When I was a child, other children were mean, stupid, intentionally and willfully ignorant. They pretended not to know things and they were never interested in anything other than whatever everyone else was interested in. I didn’t get this. I don’t get it now. The kids I like are weird, peculiar little people. They say adult words in a tiny human voice. They ask questions that perplex the adults around them. They are also surrounded by adults, and tend to like it that way.

I wish I had known these kids when I was a kid. Alas, they tended not to be very visible, preferring adults. They hid away. They did not invite other weirdos around very often, and neither did I. What I never realized was that the others—the kids who didn’t spend all their time in their own heads—were actually interested in knowing me. I just didn’t let them for some reason.

When I was a child, I would have much rather spent time with my grandparents or my aunts and uncles than with other children. I even preferred to spend time with my parents, especially my parents, though I never let them know that. They all had stories, interesting stories. They had lived in places, jumped out of airplanes, gone to college, not gone to college, worked, built whole houses with their hands, cultivated plants, sewn clothing for their children, made bread, played softball, gotten in fights, swam in the south Pacific, flown on planes that had carried nuclear bombs, had cancer, and so many other things that my brain staggers to try to think of all the stories that they have told me.

Kids don’t have any stories, at least not those that I had to choose from as a kid. They liked video games, they liked playing soccer. I hated those things, and I hated them. I didn’t give them a fair chance. I didn’t realize that they probably found me as strange and upsetting—or as exotic and fascinating—as I found them.

As I got older, I think I realized this. I did things with people my own age. It took a while, but by that point we were becoming adults, whether we liked it or not. I could finally almost relate to my peer group. They read books now, and some of them even wanted to talk about it.

And then there were the shared experiences that we all thought our parents didn’t have any experience of. Suddenly we were inventors. We invented smoking that first cigarette on a cold Michigan day. We invented sex. We invented drugs and going to concerts. We invented reading books banned by our grandparents’ generation. Our parents stood by and let us go on about our business. They were worried. They still are. They wouldn’t be parents if they didn’t. I think that maybe they also realized that they had done stupid and brilliant stuff that they thought their parents didn’t know anything about.

I knew better. My grandparents told me stories from their youth, from their partying days. They were wild. They drank whiskey, got into bar fights, played cards, smoked cigars and went to weird places in strange cities. They saved the best for when I was older. They were rebels, and they didn’t even know it. They made us look like prudes, like amateurs.

So, now here we are: adults. We make the stories now. We get lost down back alleys and drink from unmarked bottles, smoke cigarettes sometimes and hang out with weirdos. We have power, we no longer require supervision. Sometimes we are the supervisors of those in need of it. I wonder what skewed view this next generation of children—and the one after that—will take of us? Will they think that we were strange, reclusive loners with nothing but idle time on our hands before they were born? I don’t know. Probably, if that is what we let them believe.

In the mean time, I am going to a party, ostensibly in my honor, and hang out with the rest of the weirdos. And to all of those with whom I did not spend your birthdays or who were not celebrating with me either, maybe you can tell me your stories someday. I’m dying to hear them sometime, now that we’re all old enough to know better.

“A series of pipes.”

My dad has been hosting his origami site at Geocities for the past several years. I spoke to him yesterday about acquiring a domain name and self hosting the site as Geocities—presently owned and operated by Yahoo—will close its electronic doors very soon. He will move from there to a self-hosted site with its own independent address, which is inherently better because of greater control over the back-end of things. He rightly said that this was a good thing anyway, because this is how we keep these things—websites, the Internet—alive. This started me thinking about the Internet and how different a place it is from when I first started using it over a decade ago.

Thinking about Geocities in particular made me a bit reminiscent about all of the one-off, special interest sites that sprang up in the late 1990s. Usenet aside, you could find almost any information—be it quality or not—in single column pages with colored text and often over a bright—sometimes obnoxious—background. In those days, the big Internet companies had sites that were complex, multi-column affairs with boxes and ads, but the real Internet was the domain of the people writing whatever they wanted in center-aligned pages.

It was a great time to be a conspiracy theorist. Or really into Wicca.

Searching the Internet in the 90s was fantastic and weird. Democracy at its finest. All things change with time, some for worse some for better. There are reasonable arguments in either direction for the changes evident in the Internet over the last decade and a half. For some applications, the Internet has made life easier, obviously. Communication is fantastic. I live in Egypt and communicate with friends readily all over the world in an inexpensive and effective way. This is due to greater ubiquity of broadband Internet coverage in Egypt and elsewhere.

Websites have also become easier to create and maintain. I use WordPress to generate this site and have been for several years. The first version of the site, however, was written in PHP by yours truly. It was an exercise in basics which has made working with and customizing WordPress much easier for me in subsequent years. That said, it is really easy now to have a site that looks more or less professional, and everyone does. The downside is that now everything on the Internet seems to be a blog and sites grow stagnant as soon as the writer gets a book deal—which seems inevitable for many upstart bloggers these days.

The information which used to be so readily available on the Internet is now relegated to the All Thing¹ of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a great tool as a first-reference: it democratizes basic reference, particularly for those who already have experience with traditional encyclopedias. It also contains vastly more information on a much wider variety of topics than do traditional encyclopedias. That said, it is still only a first reference, and the “peer-review” to which the information is subjected to is conducted by experts and non-experts alike.

My brother and I grew up with a set—two actually—of encyclopedia in the house. It was a great first- or quick-reference for almost anything that we wondered about or were writing about for school. As I got older and learned more about doing research, the references and bibliography proved perfect guides to more and deeper information on a given topic. That was how it was done.

The Internet changed all that. I cannot count the times that I heard college professors tell students that they had to use books and journal articles rather than online references. I was always confused. Did college students really not know how to use a library? It turns out that, no, they did—and do—not. Library usage seems to be, more and more, a thing of the past. The library at my present University is not expanding its collection very rapidly because they are exploring electronic alternatives—none of which work very well.

We used to go to the library with my mom almost every weekend. We had library cards by the time we were six or seven years old. I was—and am still—an avid reader because of this level of access to books. I am like a ship without a rudder—or more aptly, a ship without water—when I have no access to a library. This is not to say that I do not now primarily access academic journals via the Internet while conducting research. I do. It is easier, and saves me the time of sifting through stacks of journals in the basement in order to photocopy endless pages from them. This is an improvement.

Additionally, Google Books and the Internet Archive are becoming ever more useful resources for finding out-of-print and public-domain works written before the current copyright cutoff. They do not, however, replace the public or research library. Instances of false information being reported elsewhere in the media based on a Wikipedia article as an authoritative source are a good argument for returning to more rigorous forms of research on the part of journalists and academics alike.

Also, the above-mentioned one-off specialist sites seem to be going by the wayside as the Internet evolves into an archive of photoshopped pictures of cats and funny/stupid things. It used to be the case that the top of the search engine output would be a number of websites with a vast amount of—potentially questionable—data on almost any topic.

Now, on the other hand, Wikipedia is at the top of the list for almost anything that you can search for. That is unless you are accustomed to advance searching and particularly adept at using keywords. Most of the students who I help at the reference desk are not. They typically begin their research by going to Google and typing their topic or a full sentence (e.g. – “Mongolia” or “why is there domestic violence in the middle east?.” These are two recent examples of searches which students were having trouble with). To get to much of the real information that is available on the Internet these days you have to sift through hundreds of entries in blogs or advertisements. Monetizing the Internet proves to be primarily a tool for obfuscating it rather than improving user-as-content-generator experience.

This is one of the primary reasons that I am an advocate of net-neutrality and online rights—including, but not limited to, file-sharing, digitized books, and un-filtered/un-traffic-shaped Internet service, not to mention open-source/open-licensing. The Internet has the potential to be a tool for posterity, and indeed it is already serving us in this manner to some degree. It has the potential to be so much more. The moment that corporate interests became more important than the needs of Internet users, the system broke. It will limp though, but it will not recover fully and become the repository of information that it should be until corporate money-making interests are set aside.

This will not happen anytime soon, and indeed, Yahoo’s decision to discontinue Geocities in order to promote their new web-hosting platform—which is pay to play—is a step in the wrong direction. The Internet is not about closing things down in order that they might not be in conflict with business interests: it is about information being freely and readily available the world over and even beyond. This used to be a purpose of libraries as well.

It seems, however, that we have lost sight of this, lulled into contented complacence by cute pictures of talking cats and repositories of awkward family photos. This does not bode well at all. It will eventually change, though. Economies and finance online are not, and never have been stable. The one thing that is stable at this stage is the ability of one computer to connect to another. As long as we have that, when the corporate hegemony Internet collapses, we will simply start over, one node at a time.

Until then, if anyone needs me I’ll be reading online comics and looking at pictures of sandwiches.

———
¹ A reference to the progeny of the blogosphere presented in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and Endymion.

Here’s to your inevitable political downfall!

I read this article about the respective public spectacles over Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin and it got me thinking about the spectacle that became Sarah Palin last autumn during the American presidential elections and her present attention-grabbing efforts. Her untimely resignation from the Alaska gubernatorial seat should be another nail in her political coffin, but apparently she is up in the polls with republicans. This does nothing to inspire confidence in her ability to lead—particularly considering that she has just stepped out of such a position in a fit of overly-self-confident irresponsibility. The GOP has backed some horrifying failures of late and continues in its ability to conflate “conservatism” with bigotry and fiscal liberality.

Perhaps this is the strangled choking death rattle of the GOP at last.

Somehow I doubt it, but it would be nice to think so.

This maneuver on Palin’s part is little more than her present attempt to get herself back in the spotlight of national political fame—and scrutiny. It turns out that the old marketing folk-wisdom approach—that both praise and criticism have equal value, as long as they turn heads—works as a strategy for political advancement in the United States now. Last autumn, Palin was roasted over and over again by critics, political rivals and comedians. Rather than taking any criticism seriously—and, though dismissive, it was serious—she soldiered on bravely, in the eyes of her supporters. The rest of thought that she did so foolishly. I often felt pity for her. She was placed in the public eye by the GOP essentially unprepared and then made a spectacle of. At the time, it seemed as though this was something that was being inflicted upon her. Now, however, her spectacular displays of incompetence and lack of judgment have proven to be self-motivated.

It is unfortunate for conservatives, particularly for women, to have to even give any thought to this rambling, silly woman as a viable candidate for anything, let alone the Presidency. It is also remarkable that the conservatives who support her, just as they supported President Bush, seem to do so uncritically, praising when she says something they agree with, ignoring the malapropisms and blaming her critics for their “meanness.” I say that it is remarkable because it demonstrates precisely the way that the American political machine has come to operate. Substance and form no longer matter, having been replaced by sentimentality and dogged devotion—probably driven by a desire not to be seen as backing a failure, fool, or asshole.

Perhaps this does represent the death rattle of the GOP after all. The Republicans would do well to leave some of their failures and garbage along the side of the road. If they don’t, they are likely looking at a series of very disappointing years before they figure out a way to turn the apathy and indecision of the Democrats against them again. So, here is to you Sarah, may you be taken out with the rest of the political celebrity trash. God help you until then. You’re going to need it.

Update:
10. July 2009 14:48

In case you needed another argument why we should let her go quietly into the night: here it is.

Liberation Theology for the 21st Century

I caught this article from the Christian Science monitor this morning on the trepidation of Arab states over reacting to the current situation in Iran. They cited the “voice of a disenfranchised [Iranian] people” as the mechanism for the current political and social unrest and that this is the biggest political crisis facing Iran since the 1979 revolution.*

I have been reading a great deal of late about the 1979 Iranian revolution and have begun to understand that the socially and economically disenfranchised in 1970s Iran were not actually active participants in the revolution, nor did they derive any particular benefit from it. Neither the poor nor the merchant class were particularly involved in the rise of the Khomeini movement. It was a revolution apparently driven by an increasingly religiously motivated middle-class and the urban intellectual class which drove the development of an opposition to the Shah. That there was little involvement on the part of the rural poor is quite surprising considering that the themes employed in the revolutionary rhetoric on the part of Khomeini and his supporters was seemingly socialism wrapped up in Islamic topoi or terminology.

In other words, the revolutionaries of 1970s Iran employed a specifically crafted rhetorical framework based on sort of liberation theology in order to galvanize certain parts of the population and pulled support from the most unlikely sectors of Iranian society, all the while setting the stage for continuing the disenfranchisement of the already disenfranchised. Many of the secular intellectual socialists and Marxists went up against the wall when Khomeini’s revolutionaries seized control, many succumbed to the pressure being exerted around them and conformed to the newly political and religiously-mapped social environment around them.

It would seem that all of the seeds of disenfranchisement sewn by the 1979 revolution are now coming to fruition. The intellectual class is no longer happy to be subjugated, the poor are fighting back, not in line with the religious elite who are waiving the liberation-theology around—still, and again—but against them. In 1979 it was that same—then very young—urban middle class who were becoming more religious who built the revolutionary movement. They made Kohmeini into a a figurehead, and he tacitly accepted the role allowing them to drive the revolution forward.

The funny—or maybe “horrifying” is a better word—thing about revolutions, and revolutionaries, is that they cease to function as a revolution the moment they are no longer the opposition. That is unless there is a political mechanism established at the same time for limiting the authority of the revolutionary leaders. This was never the case in Iran. Indeed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had to die before his position as the leader of the revolution—and therefore the Iranian government after the revolution—would be questioned. After his death he was replaced by another revolutionary leader who had become entrenched in the “new” political system in Iran in the 1980s.

Now that “revolution” is being called into question, mostly because it is no longer a revolution. Just as Castro’s revolution lost its meaning the moment that he took power in Cuba and Che Guevarra—the real revolutionary—went on his way, as is the preferred role of the true revolutionary. How to ensure then that the revolutionaries live up to the ideals of the revolution and not their own desires for power? How to keep the bitterness of their previous disenfranchisement from their policy and administration and marginalizing those that they once sought to free from disenfranchisement?

I am loathe to cite the American political system as a standard for post-revolutionary political development—and indeed it has its problems, not least of which is the unabashed power-squabbles of our present party-system—but it worked. When the first Americans called for the revolutionary leaders to retain their power, they stepped aside and had an election. The established a set of rules, the interpretation of which has changed over time, but which are still the rules, nonetheless. Those rules, for better or for worse, continue to keep the political system as fair as we can make it. There is still power-grabbing.

There is still lying, cheating, and stealing. Indeed, more than a few of us have been concerned that the administrative regime of President Bush and his cronies would have a deep effect on the way business was done after they left office. It seems, though, that this is not the case. We shall see, but it seems that we are moving back to normal after years of opacity and circumvention of the Constitution to protect the interests of the few at all possible costs.

Perhaps another revolution in Iran is what is called for. Perhaps not. Perhaps the present regime is learning something from the political strife that is now boiling throughout Iran. Likely not. If there is another revolution, it cannot continue as normal. It has to live up to the ideals which galvanize and excite it in the first place rather than simply serving the interests of those who do the exciting.

Khomeini’s liberation theology still applies in Iran, possibly now more than it did before. The present regime had better hope that the people never get their hands on copies of his book, Islamic Government as they would find themselves out the door in very short order. The principles which are outlined therein are a far sight more fair and reasonable than those under which the present regime operates.

For more information about the Iranian political system and the 1979 revolution, I suggest the following:

• Islam and Revolution: Writing and Declarations of Imam Khomeini by Hamid Algar.
• Khomenism: Essays on the Islamic Republic by Evrand Abrahamian.
• The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran by Said Amir Ajromand.
• Persepolis: the Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Or for the more visually inclined, the film version.

———

* In solidarity with that voice, the background of this blog is now a picture of Naqsh-e Jahan Square in breathtaking Isfahan.

Sometimes things still surprise even me.

I was sitting on the balcony the other morning with Stacey having our tea, and suddenly she jumped up and screamed at the sound of a crash in the street. I stood up and looked on with her and saw that a mint green car had hit two guys on a scooter. They had jumped/fallen/been knocked clear of any injury, and were standing up, checking themselves to make sure that nothing was broken, rubbing bruised knees and elbows. The young woman in the car did not move but just raised her hands in exasperation and glared at them. They started shouting at her as another man stopped to help them extract the scooter from under her front bumper.

She got out of the car at this point, shouting at the two men that it was their fault and what did they think they were doing? They shouted back that she was crazy and needed to be careful what she was doing. The scooter’s seat had fallen completely off and there was a puddle of gas and oil leaking out of some newly disconnected hose or damaged casing. They pulled the scooter off to the side of the road as a police officer walked up from a nearby street-corner. She was already back in the car. Just as they had finished getting the scooter clear of the car, she tried to pull around them, honking her horn. The guy who had been driving the scooter shouted in anger and pounded the hood of her car with his fist shouting that she had to wait and take care of this.

Rather than doing that she honked her horn at him and when he and the other man refused to move she just drove forward a little as if to threaten. This had one of the guys incensed, and he raised his hands shouting at her. The police officer lit a cigarette and watched. By this time she was in the next “lane” over as she had been trying to squeeze over to get around them, refusing to take any responsibility for the accident at all. When the man further refused to budge, she just gunned the engine and hit him, sending him up onto her hood. He somehow managed to roll off to the side like a portly, middle-aged ninja and remained astonishingly uninjured as she sped away down the street at the full speed of her late-model luxury Citroen. The police officer threw his cigarette butt down with no regard for the puddle of gasoline in the street and sauntered away to his corner without a word.

The two guys managed to get most of the pieces of the scooter and limped it down the street while a bawwab on the street picked up a piece of the scooter which someone pointed out that they had missed. He looked down the street as if in an attempt to ascertain their distance so that he might run after them, then shrugged and chucked it over onto the sidewalk and shuffled back to his perch in the middle of the road.

We were both naïvely astonished, which quickly wore away. This is not the first time I have seen someone from the lower class here grossly mistreated by someone of the obviously privileged class, but it was such a perfect visual metaphor for the state of things here: a young girl in a new car runs over a man while an officer of the law looks on disinterested. The privileged exploit and abuse the disenfranchised while the state looks the other way. That is the reality of daily life here, and sometimes it seems like the winds of change are forecast a long way off.

To the losers.

Hot on the heels of my last post, Tim Krieder, cartoonist and the brains behind “The Pain” comic series, posted this piece, which reflected my very strange dream quite a bit. The comic itself is not the important part of that link, however. Please make sure that you continue on a read the article below it.

This guy, Krieder, is an obvious cynic, and with any likelihood a total asshole—I don’t mean that as an insult, some of my best friends are assholes—but sometimes he writes things that touch me in a way that I am not expecting. I got a little choked up and teary reading this article, for instance. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a total sap. I cry while reading sci-fi, I give money to street kids and widows, I talk about love and friendship in a non-ironic way. Usually though, I am typically a realist—read: pessimist—with regard to government/political/social stuff. It seems now with all that has happened, I have fallen into the camp of sad, sappy, suckers—as I might have previously viewed them—who believe that everything is going to get better.

On this point particularly, I think that Krieder is spot-on when he says:

“that the last eight wretched years had occupied so large a chunk of our adulthoods that we’d forgotten that nothing lasts forever, we’d thought that this was just how the world was: mean-spirited shitheads would always win and we would always lose. It was hard to believe it was really over.” [Krieder, link]

It is hard to believe that it is over. It is hard to shift gears into thinking that things might work out. I’m not so naïve as to believe that everything will change overnight, or that President Obama will change the world single-handedly, but I do feel like I am rubbing the sleep out of my eyes after a really terrible dream. Not a nightmare, per se, but just a really bad dream where nothing works and nothing makes any sense.

Maybe that is what is happening. It does feel like everyone woke up all at once, not a little pissed-off, and took action. If that is so, then I raise a glass and a still-angry fist in toast and say again, “Here’s to you, and here’s to me, best of friends we’ll ever be. But, should we ever disagree…”

Well, you know the rest.

And now the real work begins.

Well America, as a collective, we chose well. We were faced with the most important set of decisions that we have made in a long time and we made the right ones. I, for one, am thrilled. I actually cried out of relief this morning.

While President Elect Obama is positioned to be able to effect change in a significant way, what with being backed by a Congress which will support the directives of the new administration, there are a few things which didn’t go so well.

Michigan passed the stem cell research and medical marijuana ballot initiatives, both of which are positive things for people who suffer debilitating and painful diseases, and their respective ratifications are a step away from maligned points of view that these things stand in moral opposition to goodness and rightness. They will hopefully help many people.

I said above that we chose well and we did, for the most part. However, in this time of celebrating immanent changes for the better and positive steps forward, it is important to point out our failings, lest we forget ourselves. I would like to point out, for instance, that—at the time of writing—in Florida and Arizona have decisively banned gay marriage, and Arkansas has decisively banned adoption for gay people. California is still uncertain at this time—with only 20% of the polls reporting results from their ballot initiative—though it doesn’t look good there either, which saddens me.

Update 21:51 EET: With 95% of the precincts reporting, California has passed the gay marriage amendment ban. 52% Yes, 48% No.

Why are these things important? First, they indicate that even in seemingly liberal or progressive places, conservative/bigoted rhetoric is still very powerful in convincing people to make decisions about social issues. Second, at a time when things are looking up and we have a new golden-boy—who actually speaks in a positive way about gay people in his rhetoric—we obviously still have some work to do.

What do I mean by this? I mean that we have reached a new echelon of civil rights issues. We now will have a President who is part of a formerly legally disenfranchised—currently practically disenfranchised, in many ways—section of the American populace. This being the case, we now have an even greater chance to chip away at the bigotry which still lives in our law code. This was less possible over the past 8 years during a time when the dominant political thread was busy pandering to the very people who support that bigotry in their daily lives.

We have a chance now to rectify the mistakes that were made in the past 8 years, and in some cases 16 years—let us not forget that it was President Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage act into law. The current President Elect is quite a bit more progressive than President Clinton was, but it won’t mean a hill of beans if we don’t actually progress. We can only hope that in the coming years, we will be able to overturn these bigoted state constitutional amendments and have a new kind of civil rights revolution in which people are treated equally again under the eyes of the law.