>On Jun 26, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Michael Smith wrote:
>
>>Quaint, huh? This may be partly due to the fact that Iran doesn't have
>>an enlightened, modern Electoral College.
>
>Man, I never thought I'd find myself defending the U.S. electoral
>system, but at least we don't have a bunch of clerics vetting
>candidates for office. Yeah, I know there are all kinds of informal
>vetting mechanisms - money, restrictive ballot laws, ideology, media
>idiocy, etc. - but at least in theory anyone here can run for office.
>So this sort of sneer is really preposterous.
>
>Doug
one of the things I found interesting in Moaveni's analysis was that the alienation, malaise, decline of civic culture, decline of tradition -- in short, all the things we attribute to the capitalism -- are the result of repression.
She talks about this rich life of family and community, and a public, civic culture where cafes and coffee shops bustle with people discussing politics, all existing among Iranians of all walks of life. All of this is happily alive and well during the early 2000s. The upper middle class with their "frippicino" at 3 p.m. siesta drinking ways, with their love of fashionable attire, their consumerism, their Friends and Ally McBeal watching ways, etc. -- they do not suffer any loss of community and family for all their attempts to enrich themselves, climb social ladders, etc. (The u.s. sitcom, Friends, was so popular at this time that Iranian TV produced "Friends in Veils" which pretty much totally lifted the plots from the original.)
All this flourishes, in spite of a market economy. But when it unravels, when people become innured to the niceties, when platonic friendship between men and women deteriorate, when they pop prozac and sleeping pills, when they become depressives encasing themselves in the cocoons of privacy, tethered to their living rooms, withdrawing for the once common dinner party/cocktail party circuit where politics was once discussed animatedly and in its place people obsess about the things that u.s.ers would focus on -- all things associated with the ills of the market -- these are things she connects to the tyranny of the state, the corruption, the loss of personal freedom, and the lying forced by having to maintain one set of behaviors and ethics at home while pretending to adhere to another set in public:
She tells the story of a male friend who finally gave up on reformist movement one day:
"The shift in thinking, from a specific hope vested in recognizable figures, to the distant, abstract conviction that things would change because they must, occurred differently for everyone. It came for Siamek the week he stepped out onto a busy street with his baby niece and toddler nephew, and a car actually sped up."
He ranted: "It doesn't make a difference who takes over," he said. "It doesn't matter whether Khatami is cloned or granted three more terms,. It doesn't matter who comes, because fixing the culture created by the system is now the problem. I used to take such pride, Azi, in my Iranian identity. I don't see that culture I was proud of, that respect for elders and children. These are the effects of lawlesness. If you do business and don't take bribes, you're considered strange, behaving outside the norms. Being corrupt is normal. The country's ethical code has gone mad. it's going to take so much more than politicians to fix that, this culture of lying, deception, and corruption." (p. 130, Lipstick Jihad)
I found this interesting, a challenge to a conventional materialist analysis. You can't connect this to an economy per se. It is not the upper middle class's shopping and consumerism, their love of money, drinking cocktails or sipping latte that's the problem, as so many culturalist lefties will say here, in the u.s. Community and family do not decline just because of that. The resentful dejection, the withdrawal from close ties, community, family in the face of its destruction under a culture of what Siamek sees as a culture of incivility is about government tyranny.
I was trying to think of a way to make this a more leftist, materialist analysis and I really couldn't, though this may be from lack of imagination.
I am, of course, not opposed to this analysis -- I didn't study the frankfurters for nuttin -- but still....
shag
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