Living la vida na levo in Tehran

OP-ED: "Iranian Moolah," by Farouz Farzami, Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2006, p. A18.

Sorry, but had to zone out a bit after China. Caught up to my reading last night, thanks to the extra hour (God, I wish that were every weekend!).

This description reminds me so much of the summer I lived in Leningrad in 1985 (the summer of the great crackdown on vodka, which never bugged me, because I liked chatting up Russians while standing in line) and spent every night I could with the blackmarketer "Big Al" and his constant stream of customers. My big impression from all those nights: the populace had so effectively opted out of political life and simply made their own "house-arrest" style economic life na levo ("on the side," or literally, "on the left" in Russian) that it was like they lived in their own little universe of close friends, treasured objects, and media content from the West (everyone in Leningrad seemed to live on American VHS tapes dubbed by a screaming Finnish guy who did every voice the same--it was mesmerizingly bad!). Of course, the most treasured objects were forbidden books, which I brought in numbers with fake dust jackets.

The author of this piece is--natch!--a journalist who is "forbidden to publish in Iran" (Sound familiar? Everyone I knew in the Russian ex-pat community in the 1980s was a forbidden author. It was a modest accomplishment, which is what made it so sad.).

Great story. He talks of coming upon a special stand of imported American books (authorized by the mullahs, no doubt) in Tehran and notices one about cocktails. Then he launches in:

I live in a country where alcohol is officially banned, but where the art of home-made spirits has reached new heights. Sharing my astonishment about the cocktail book with some friends with better connections to the Islamist regime, they explained the government had a silent pact with the educated and affluent in Iran's big cities, who render politics unto Caesar, provided that Caesar keeps his nose out of their liquor cabinets.

In other words, the well-to-do Iranian drinks and reads and watches what he wishes. He does as he pleases behind the walls of his private mansions and villas. In return for his private comforts, the affluent Iranian is happy to sacrifice freedom of speech, most of his civil rights, and his freedom of association. The upper-middle class has been bought off by this pact, which makes a virtue of hypocrisy.

The accommodation runs both ways. A friend who had made a small fortune in the pharmaceutical business told me that recently the enforcers of Islamist law appeared on the roof of his condominium in the northwest Tehran suburb of Sharak-e-Qarb to seize all the satellite dishes. Every household received an order to attend a hearing of the revolutionary court, where the magistrate--typically a mullah--will levy fines. The fines help feed the friends of the courts, while for my wealthy pharmacist friend, erecting another satellite dish is as easy as refueling his car--and even the inconvenience of replacing the dish will not be necessary for long. Technology is more than up to the challenge posed by the morals police. "I have heard there is a state-of-the-art dish made of invisible fiberglass that I can install on the window pane of my apartment," my friend told me. "I'm going for it."

Many Iranians believe the occasional crackdowns are being organized by corrupt officials who secretly own interests in the new generation of satellite dishes. The confiscations just create markets for new products.

Sound unbelievable? It isn't. It's exactly what you found in Moscow and Leningrad back in the 1980s: a huge social network of hypocritical enforcers and two-faced citizens, and everybody exchanged money in the process. It's just that no wealth is truly generated, and the people get stupider and more ambivalent and lazy and disconnected from the future. It's all so sad and pathetic. I remember crying myself to sleep one night from thinking about how everyone in the USSR felt like they will just living in some weird prison and all they could claim for themselves was whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. It was supremely depressing to see all that talent wasted, and their profound sense of injustice.

This guy describes the workarounds, but that's not a life, and no one trapped in that existence pretends it is.

But, of course, this rich guy is trapped by nothing. It's only the lower classes who really are disconnected from their desires. This rich pharmacist vacations 2-3 months abroad each year, putting him more in the category of the KGB general (who, frankly, never had it THAT good).

The saddest part here is that the rich guy expects the revolution will come only when the masses are disillusioned enough to take matters into their own hands.

Sounds to me like Iran's rich are about as cynical as the mullahs.

Still, the larger point is this: this is not robust authoritarianism. It's weak. It's flabby. It hypocritical to a fault. It's not going anywhere. It's not accomplishing anything.

In short, it's ripe.

Comments

[RIslander]

Overripe, perhaps.

[TM Lutas]

What was the Soviet equivalent of the Hojjatieh?

I'll grant you everything you say is true. It's plausible and explains an awful lot of what is going on in Iran that is externally visible. Unfortunately, we've got a lot of people who are still personally invested in the revolution and the idea of Khomenei. The flab is there but so are people who took a personal part in the events of 1979 and have invested their entire lives to making the monstrosity work. Are these people just going to give up?

As I understand it, Soviet style dictatorships tended to really soften once the people who had a personal hand in creating them went to their reward. What makes the Iranian regime more flexible, more willing to give up their enormous personal psychic investments in 1979 than their Soviet compatriots had in 1917?