Monday, June 15, 2009
Tweeting Iran
Iran is a nation where one would not want to be a Jew, a Bahai, a Sunni, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist. It's not a great place to be a woman, either. There are no homosexuals in Iran! They can't tweet this away.
Many Americans would be comfortable under a system of government like the one in Iran, but designed for a "Christian Republic." We might be surprised how many. Glenn Beck's fans, certainly. But also a lot of basically apolitical people. If we care only about the liberties we take & the rights we actually use, we become indifferent to the rights of others & harshly judgmental of those who take liberties we consider morally offensive at worst, or frivolous at best. Why, we ask, should others have the rights to take these liberties when we ourselves wouldn't take those liberties & therefore don't need those rights?
The grand fantasy of the Evangelical Right in the last decade of the 20th Century was that if it gained complete control of the federal government, it could get a handle on popular culture & redirect it. There was some reason for believing this. The entertainment & mass media communication industries were in a period of frightening corporate consolidation. Since these corporate behemoths only wanted to generate as much profit as possible for shareholders, government would use a carrot & stick approach to influence the products of these corporations. It did happen, up to a point, but only in the manipulation of information - the "news." The run-up to the Iraq War was a great success for the right wing, lasting through the 2004 election until Katrina news coverage - no manipulating those images or silencing those voices - exposed the true breadth & depth of the collaborative scam. In other areas, movies, music, TV shows, video games, the corporations went with whatever they thought would sell, promoted what sold the most & ditched everything else. The everything else went on the Internet. What sold the most was rarely what Evangelicals were selling. The only big crossover successes were self-help books & apocalyptic fiction.
The wielding of political powe in a nation with strong constraints on political expression is easier than the management of culture & the suppression of ideas, but it sure helps to have those constraints. It's more difficult to manage culture where free expression of political views is part of the cultural marketplace. The religious right in America, even when it had influence & allies at the highest levels of government, had limited cultural success. In order to promote lifestyle, they have to sell product. This stuff is packaged, of course, as family entertainment & moral instruction. But it generally squeezes into the mainstream only in the milder forms.
During George W's first term, I found myself rooting for the success of "American Idol," & for celebrities like Paris Hilton. She had nothing to sell but her own example & image, & spin-off merchandise; a reality show, perfume, the Paris Hilton product. 12 year old girls adored her; they graduated from Barbie dolls to Paris.
Iraq expects to maintain an Islamic Republic with an educated, technologically-savvy middle class but with a medievalist Supreme Leader having the final word on everything. Rather than a reformist president, the Iranian system is just as likely to raise up a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad type with some real political muscle, a religious fanatic who figures out how to get the armed forces, secret police, & a majority of the Council of Guardians on his side, & turns a faltering Supreme Leader into a puppet. I'm hoping the culture of Iran prevents it.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Many Americans would be comfortable under a system of government like the one in Iran, but designed for a "Christian Republic." We might be surprised how many. Glenn Beck's fans, certainly. But also a lot of basically apolitical people. If we care only about the liberties we take & the rights we actually use, we become indifferent to the rights of others & harshly judgmental of those who take liberties we consider morally offensive at worst, or frivolous at best. Why, we ask, should others have the rights to take these liberties when we ourselves wouldn't take those liberties & therefore don't need those rights?
The grand fantasy of the Evangelical Right in the last decade of the 20th Century was that if it gained complete control of the federal government, it could get a handle on popular culture & redirect it. There was some reason for believing this. The entertainment & mass media communication industries were in a period of frightening corporate consolidation. Since these corporate behemoths only wanted to generate as much profit as possible for shareholders, government would use a carrot & stick approach to influence the products of these corporations. It did happen, up to a point, but only in the manipulation of information - the "news." The run-up to the Iraq War was a great success for the right wing, lasting through the 2004 election until Katrina news coverage - no manipulating those images or silencing those voices - exposed the true breadth & depth of the collaborative scam. In other areas, movies, music, TV shows, video games, the corporations went with whatever they thought would sell, promoted what sold the most & ditched everything else. The everything else went on the Internet. What sold the most was rarely what Evangelicals were selling. The only big crossover successes were self-help books & apocalyptic fiction.
The wielding of political powe in a nation with strong constraints on political expression is easier than the management of culture & the suppression of ideas, but it sure helps to have those constraints. It's more difficult to manage culture where free expression of political views is part of the cultural marketplace. The religious right in America, even when it had influence & allies at the highest levels of government, had limited cultural success. In order to promote lifestyle, they have to sell product. This stuff is packaged, of course, as family entertainment & moral instruction. But it generally squeezes into the mainstream only in the milder forms.
During George W's first term, I found myself rooting for the success of "American Idol," & for celebrities like Paris Hilton. She had nothing to sell but her own example & image, & spin-off merchandise; a reality show, perfume, the Paris Hilton product. 12 year old girls adored her; they graduated from Barbie dolls to Paris.
Iraq expects to maintain an Islamic Republic with an educated, technologically-savvy middle class but with a medievalist Supreme Leader having the final word on everything. Rather than a reformist president, the Iranian system is just as likely to raise up a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad type with some real political muscle, a religious fanatic who figures out how to get the armed forces, secret police, & a majority of the Council of Guardians on his side, & turns a faltering Supreme Leader into a puppet. I'm hoping the culture of Iran prevents it.
