ARTICLE: "Dispatch From Iran: Iranians may have lost faith in the mullahs, but they're not about to overthrow them," by Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, 2-9 July 2007, p. 32.

This article aptly captures what I saw similarly in the USSR in the summer of 1985: most people simply opt out. They've figured out how to make their private lives decent through a thriving black market and off-line alternative lifestyle and in their public lives they pretend to obey so the mullahs can pretend to rule. This is the dropped-out mentality Gorby ran into in the USSR with his perestroika: basically everyone told him to go shove it cause they weren't in the mood and there was nothing he could offer them. Thus, the Sovs' sad decline pushed that train right off the tracks. Watch Ahmadinejad's hard-liner-approved reformist successor try to revitalize the masses through such tactics after Ahmadinejad's crackdown tactics achieve nothing but more opting out in the face of the accelerating economic collapse. Then watch the real change begin.