An American Lion

I always chuckle when I see hits from Iran on my blog. Rarely is it because of anything I’ve said. No, the hits I get from Iran or from the Middle East are usually for Rachel Ray’s Magnificent Ass or for Louise Glover or for Silvia Saint.

And that’s fine—it’s why I put up pictures of hotties. It’s to broaden our horizons here and do something other than complain all day. Even I get tired of me, from time to time. Peej won’t blog, and Miranda’s not speaking to me since I put up pictures of her tormenting a dog in a cage. Babs is going to start blogging, but I don’t hold out much hope for her to do any heavy lifting around here on political matters. I asked Babs to write something about President Obama, and she came back with “who???”

Iran is a country poised to come apart at the seams. The young people there don’t want fundamentalist Islamic rule. I think they embrace their religion, just not the part of it that makes every day life a pain in the ass. I think that we tend to forget that the people who live in what we call the Islamic world are pretty much like us. They want some money in their pocket, they want to have occasional sex with someone who wants to have occasional sex with them, and they want to be left alone to do cool shit with their friends, like play soccer and jump scooters, and listen to hip hop. They want social media, they want Twitter, and they want to be able to know what everyone else knows at roughly the same time by being connected to the things that matter in their culture.

In a nutshell, that’s what America still lets you do, only no one has a job that pays enough right now, and, brother, that Verizon bill is a killer. Europe and especially Great Britain, not so much. They’re being surveilled to death throughout what used to be the bastion of democratic ideals. Everyone wants a phone that will dazzle. People in Iran just want to have a modicum of cultural freedom, and they’d love to do it while maintaining a cultural link to Islam—don’t believe the hype when people say that religion doesn’t matter in that part of the world. It does. It just wraps itself in a veil of fundamentalism, and even we get tired of that here.

So, tonight, as Iran continues the slow walk to revolution, consider this:

For weeks after the disputed June presidential election, demonstrations triggered by claims of massive fraud in the vote brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, but the relentless crackdown that followed has taken a heavy toll.

Seeking to deny the protesters a chance to reassert their voice, authorities slowed Internet connections to a crawl in the capital, Tehran. For some periods on Sunday, Web access was completely shut down — a tactic that was also used before last month’s demonstration.

The government has not publicly acknowledged it is behind the outages, but Iran’s Internet service providers say the problem is not on their end and is not a technical glitch.

Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has been a powerful voice of dissent from within the ranks of the clerical leadership, accused Iran’s hard-line rulers of silencing any constructive criticism.

“The situation in the country is such that constructive criticism is not tolerated,” Rafsanjani was quoted by several news agencies as saying in reports on Sunday.

I don’t admire this Rafsanjani character at all. I don’t think much of the Iranian opposition. These are virulently anti-American factions within Iran that are just out of power and out of favor, and we cannot rally to them so much as we can rally to the idea of a revolution in Iran that sweeps out fundamentalist rule.

Slowing down the Internet, though? If that isn’t a sign that their grasp on things is slipping, I don’t know what is. Arresting mothers? That’s another sign of desperation. Craven, pathetic, desperation in action from a regime that knows it has a finite amount of time left.