The Revolution Will Be Twittered
“For where is the wrath of the oppressor? The cowering prisoners will soon be set free; they will not die in their dungeon, nor will they lack bread.”
–Isaiah 51:13-14
I’m not much of a fan of the internet (spoken like a true old geezer). I use it, of course; you can’t help but use it these days. Clients expect the convenience of e-mail; many courts prefer it—the federal system is all digital now. And yes, there is a certain convenience in being able to look something up instantaneously (even though most of the time it’s on Wikipedia and therefore about as reliable as graffiti). But, really, if the internet disappeared tomorrow, I could live on. There are few things I e-mail or instant message that I couldn’t convey just as quickly and usually more accurately on the phone. True, I wouldn’t get all those forwarded gems about the Secret Obama Muslim Conspiracy To Steal Our Guns, but if I want to hear paranoid ravings I can always go to a Republican Party meeting and get it live. Plus, they usually serve snacks. And millions of years ago when I was in law school, we were expected to learn how to do research with actual books, so that wouldn’t be a problem unless a self-appointed citizens committee decides to ban law books “for the children’s sake.” I could definitely live the rest of my days without hearing the mortifyingly puerile e-mail “love notes” of the Governor of South Carolina. Most of the internet is a time sink anyway, from Face Book (which now has more pretend Farmers than actually exist in the entire country) to YouTube (where people unaccountably flock to videos of random doofuses and assorted copyright violations) to MySpace (which seems to exist primarily for idiots to post incriminating evidence about themselves). All that being said, there is one benefit to the internet (and really only one): it is the latest information technology to give tyrants fits. The easier it is for information to be spread from one place to another, the harder it is for dictatorships to keep their population cowed into submission. This is proving especially true in Iran, with its’ young tech-savvy population of bloggers and tweeters. It should come as no shock that most of those protesting the shamelessly stolen presidential election are young enough to have been born after the 1979 Islamic revolution that replaced the brutal, corrupt, incompetent shah with a cadre of brutal, corrupt and incompetent religious fanatics. Armed with cell-phone cameras and internet access that the government has been struggling to cut off, the protestors have successfully beamed images of their rallies and the ayatollahs’ crackdown all across the planet, including the heart-rending footage of Neda Aga-Soltan dying in the street after being shot by the thuggish religious militia. The ongoing crisis has also given the West some insight into a complex country with complex politics. For example, Iran is actually a demographic hodge-podge, with ethnic Persians comprising barely 50% of the population. The largest minority group are the Azeris, who make up 18-24% of the population, including both the defrauded presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There are, in fact, more Azeris in Iran than there are Azeris in Azerbaijan. Likewise, the country’s internal politics are byzantine in their complexity. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seen alternately in the West as a buffoon or a dangerous sociopath, was originally elected as something of a populist in 2005, running mostly on economic issues. He is, by some reports, despised by most of the rest of the government, including Khamenei. Others suggest a behind-the-scenes struggle among the mullahs, with former president Ayatollah Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani (a progressive, at least by Iranian standards) seeking to push out Khamenei. It’s a terribly dangerous situation for this country no matter what happens. President Obama has to walk a tightrope between supporting democracy and avoiding giving any ammunition to the hard-liners to use “foreign interference” as an excuse for more bloodshed. As always in the Middle East, there’s also the issue of oil. While we don’t directly import Iranian oil, most of the rest of the world does. If the supply is disrupted due to civil unrest, the Europeans and Chinese will have to look elsewhere, putting the squeeze on this country. Unrest in Iran would also likely lead to even greater unrest in Iraq, which we were kind enough to transform into an Iranian puppet by overthrowing the implacably anti-Iranian tyrant Saddam Hussein (supported by the US when he was killing Iranians as well as his own people). Many of the Shiite politicians in Iraq, including the feckless Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have more loyalty to Tehran than to the country that liberated them. Naturally, the Right Wing has adhered to its policy of ending politics at the water’s edge by attacking Obama for not shooting his mouth off on Iran like John McCain. Of course, these are the exact same Right Wingers who up until, say, 24 hours before the protests started were loudly demanding that Obama carpet-bomb Iran into oblivion. Consistency is so important, after all, so it’s comforting that we can always count on the Right Wing Howler Monkey Media Chorus to be consistently and totally wrong.
The Local Crank