CSotD: Drawing it in two-dimensions but living it in three
Skip to comments
Can't give you an artist's name on this one, but here's the site it came from, the Iranian Students' News Agency. Parts of that site are in English but I don't think you need a translator for this.
Question, rather, is if you need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows? Because, to stay within the writer but leap to another lyric, something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Uncle Sam?
I'm not waiting for Western cartoonists to chime in on the story because most of them won't and some who do will simply mock the elections as a sham because, well, Iran is full of crazy bad guys in turbans and so there you go. (Okay, so prove me wrong!)
Obviously, I wouldn't do this every day if I didn't like cartoons, and I do. And, according to this VOA news report, so do the Iranians:
I particularly like the quote, "You have freedom of speech. You don't have freedom after speech," because it captures the tricky balancing act endemic to Iranian commentary, and it also shows a type of resignation to limits that does not mean a resignation to making an effort.
And it shows, too, that Iranians are, themselves, not cartoons, but people who do what they can with what they have, and who are, to a great extent, modern, well-informed people.
And I say "to a great extent" because the extreme conservatives do have support in the back country, which more resembles what Americans think of when they think of that region: Dusty places with donkeys and women in burkhas and medieval technology.
But when you hear people who have been to Tehran talk of the city, they are rapturous about its beauty and fairly matter-of-fact about the modernity of the Iranian people as a whole.
If you truly like cartoons, you may have seen Iran through the eyes of Marjane Satrapi, in her brilliant modern classic, Persepolis. She does not portray the country as perfect, but she does portray it as real. And I'm more inclined to trust "real" than "perfect" any day.
If, on the other hand, you think of cartoons in the sense of being one-dimensional captures of political prejudices, you may have more in common with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who posted this on his (I'm not making this up) Facebook page:
Silly conspiracy theory aside, the leader of the Guardian Council has a point. Sort of.
He's delusional about the strength of Israel's lobby in how it all works, but he's quite correct that we end up choosing between two major brand-name candidates. I hope he knows how often that factor comes up for discussion here, but maybe he doesn't.
Certainly, few Americans seem aware — even after the well-publicized demonstrations and brutality that followed the last elections there — of the fact that most Iranians are deeply aware of the interference of the Guardian Council in their democracy and question not so much their freedom to vote as the freedom of access to the ballot itself for candidates who fail to toe the line.
This is not a theoretical skepticism. They watched it happen in 2004. (Click for close-up)
I was producing a weekly news-for-kids feature back then and noted this major issue in the elections that subsequently forced the moderates from power.
There was, at the time, not so much a good-cop/bad-cop game going on between the moderates and the hardliners as a division like that in a household with one abusive parent and the other trying to protect the kids without sparking a brawl.
Example: Shortly after that putsch forced moderates off the ballot, but before the subsequent elections had taken effect, a group of British marines were taking a small craft up the Shatt-al-Arab, a relatively narrow waterway between Iraq and Iran, and they strayed into the Iranian half or what the Iranians felt was their half.
The Iranian navy often harassed Western forces there and in the Gulf itself, and it was serious but mostly in the sense that a stupid ship's captain with a hair trigger could set off something very nasty and so everyone had to be cool like little Fonzies.
Unfortunately, the marines didn't get run off by the official, government-controlled "You Kids Stay Off Of My Waters" Iranian Navy but the Iranian Coast Guard, which was under the Guardian Council's much more hard-line command, whereupon they were taken into custody and there followed several days not so much of international diplomacy as internal discussion of how much Iran wanted to upset the infidels.
And the moderates apparently won, because the Brits made their apologies and the Iranians did a little chest-beating and all was well.
This was, as I said, after the moderates were forced from ballots and just as the chest-beaters were winning control of the government.
But it was a year after our own version of the Guardian Council had invaded Iraq on the pretence that there were weapons of mass destruction and a grand conspiracy making them invisible.
We all have our own karmic burdens to bear.
What happened in Iran this past week is that a moderate came up for election and won so handily that the conservatives didn't even try to deny the numbers like they did the last time. (Shh!)
And, just as Barack Obama didn't have all our troops home and all the prisoners at Guantanamo repatriated within two weeks of his inauguration, Hassan Rouhani isn't going to wave a magic wand and fix all of Iran's problems.
Even the ones that the Iranians themselves see as problems.
And brace yourself for the fact that they may not see everything we think of as a problem as a problem. Having a free election doesn't turn you into an American. They're still Iranians.
And Iran isn't a cartoon. It's an actual three-dimensional, living nation full of actual three-dimensional living people.
Who just did something pretty cool and, if it wasn't everything we wanted, well, it probably wasn't everything they wanted, either.
And that's okay, because they aren't cartoons, but they do have cartoonists.
Comments
Comments are closed.