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Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Calhoun’s Can(n)on for June 17 2009

Twittering in Tehran

“Show me a day when world wasn’t new.”
Sister Barbara Hance.

The old mullahs, with their world view and brain patterns laid down years ago by rote memorization of a series 15th century scrolls, and all the old Supreme Leaders & Grand Councils of Persian Poobahs with their sclerotic edicts and baton-wielding police are all comically doomed by a Tweet.

Go ahead, old men, shut down the radios, TVs, try to block information transition via phone, fax, satellite dish. Your grandchildren, fiddling with those newfangled iPhones are out of your control. Have been for years. They’re not even living in the same century as you are. So, it’s time warp time here in the ancient kingdom of Persia. Tweet time. Facebook in Farsi. What R U doing? Having a revolution. What RU doing?

With news reporters tossed out of Iran and the old means of information transmission temporarily shut down, our 21st century kids in our Brave New World found a way to stay in touch. Even CNN was patching in their news by using information from Tweets and Facebook and blog entries, all while running disclaimers that the information wasn’t verified. Nope, not verified but unstoppable. The damned kids and their infernal machines long ago figured out a way around their elders, as kids in every generation always do. It was comic. And wonderful.

And another reminder that plan as we must, control what we can, there is no stopping certain things when their time has come. The irony in Tehran is that exactly one generation ago, the parents of these Tweeting kids staged a revolution of their own. This one was against the hated Shah and his dreaded SAVAK secret police. In their youth and revolutionary fervor, they didn’t understand that religious robes and piety are no guard against tyranny and soon found out that replacing one tyrant with a culture of religious tyrants turned out to be a poor bargain. It was a lesson their children clearly learned, so here we are again, spawn of the revolutionaries taking to the streets, cell phone and Blackberry in hand.

Here in the U.S. the cold warrior, sclerotic old guard are knee-jerking the old git-mah-gun rhetoric —their constant default position. Time for a little Shock and Awe? Get the CIA into a black-ops like we did in 1953 to overthrow the duly elected Iranian president and ensure our puppet, the Shah, gets on the throne, complete with billions in armaments – gotta keep our fingers on that oil, now don’t we? Thankfully, a new generation is running Washington. They are apparently better informed about history and mercifully more nuanced about an incredibly nuanced situation. With some luck and with some patience – and lots of nuanced calm – events could unfold safely. Not to mention that wiser heads in this country (and Iran) should know that even if the present Iranian election isn’t sorted out fairly this time, it doesn’t matter in the long run since the old regime is doomed. It’s simply a matter of demographics. The children of revolutionaries should know a thing or two about timing. And numbers.

Similar changes are taking place in this country as well, complete with Tweets. Gay marriage and gays in the military are done deals. Demographics dictate that reality. Just a matter of time. Dittto many other hot button social issues. The young live in a different reality. Always have. And while a certain number of values and traditions get transmitted and carried down like DNA fragments, other realities die off or get mutated into something new. Even technologies are mutating as our clever, clever children look at their cell phones and say, Hmmm, I wonder what ELSE this thing can do. Then go write an App for it.

In the meantime, maybe we should start looking at cells phones as neurons and Tweets as the electrical impulses firing between them. Now picture a neuron network stretching around the world among billions of people . . . in real time. What RU doing? Having a revolution. U? Me 2! Cool.

Ah, such possibilities.

8 comments:

Watershed Mark said...

The pen is mightier than the sword

Alon Perlman said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Alon Perlman said...

To C-Dawg
Agreed, and yes, selling our best military aircraft for fly-overs celebrating the Shah's peacock throne was instramental in the current regime's historical hostility.

Our current Commander in Chief inherited a situation that incidentally and accidentally has American troups in the near foreseeable future on two long Iranian borders and American navy ships patrolling a third.

The ability of an oppressed people to demonstrate the oppression in real time and in visually verifiable manner is a good thing, welcome to the "Information age".

On the other hand;
The reliance of the 24 hrs Newsmarket-competition entertain-u-news Global-con-u-glomeration
on;
I-want-my-instant-gratification-now, lowest-common-denominators, history-is-for-suckers, quick-quote-factoid, attention-deficit-enhancing, Techno-eye-candy
spells
the end of the "Age of Knowledge".

Word verification; Pro cribe
^
s

The hoots of the owls versus the twitterings of the starlings?

Sandra Gore said...

Remember our long discussion about Twitter and relevance? Here's an app I hadn't fully considered....

franc4 said...

Excellent commentary!!!!!!
Looks like someone else besides "the new generation in Washington" knows (and understands) history.
Thanx

Churadogs said...

Sandra sez:"Remember our long discussion about Twitter and relevance? Here's an app I hadn't fully considered...."

Indeed, I do. Also read an interesting article dealing with technology "mutations" that always lead down paths far different from what we had originally planned. The "inventors" of the internet likely never conceived of "twitter" or even cell phones tranmitting real-time photos. As Marshall McCluhan postulated, the transition from the spoken word to the written word literally re-wired the human brain. With the computer/digital media, we now have, literally, a whole generation of re-wired multi-media/multi-tasking/multi-"window" techy brains as the norm. Different way of thinking and seeing the world --quite literally neurologically. And while technology is changing how we're physically "wired" we're also changing the technology into new forms. It's really quite amazing.

Franc4 sez:"Looks like someone else besides "the new generation in Washington" knows (and understands) history.
Thanx"

One of the amazing things (to me) is the American propensity to engage in what I call The Great Forgetting. When the '79 Iranian revolution appeared, Americans were bewildered. Why do they "hate" us? they wailed, then "explained" it all as some sort of inborn wierdness that "muslims" suffer from -- irrational hate of Christians or some such nonsense. Americans either didn't know or "forgot" all about our own country's 1953 CIA meddling in their country's politics. The same thing happened with 9/11. Why do "they" "hate" us? we wailed. Why, it must be more of that weird "hateful" "muslim" craziness, totally forgetting that Osama bin Ladin was a DIRECT blowback to both our using the Afghan mujahedin as "cats paws" in our Great Game against Russia, (then walking away, leaving a deadly vacuum in that sad land) and our hand-in-glove lock on the (non-democratic) Saudi Royal House -- all that nice oil & etc. All arrogant, political, imperial meddling which the rest of the world was well aware of but of which most Americans remain totally clueless.

Shark Inlet said...

Ann,

I gotta agree.

Every time I read a letter to the editor saying something like "The US has no need to apologize for anything because we stepped up to fight Hitler" I gotta barf. Don't get me wrong. I am proud of our Country and our history, but we have made some huge mistakes. For example, if we hadn't overthrown Mossadeq in Iran we would very likely have a stable democracy.

I won't argue that all radical Islamists will be happy with us if we simply cave on a few issues, but certainly we need to recognize that if we make choices that anger Muslims and cause them to turn toward radicalism we are maybe making the problem worse.

Think about international politics like schoolyard politics. Even if you are picking on a bully, sometimes you anger his friends. The bully still needs to be dealt with, but one can often deal with bullies in ways which are just as effective as using force but without the blowback.

Churadogs said...

What's so goofy is that the various black Ops and other CIA shenanigans we engage in, we act like nobody will know. The people in the countries we meddle in know full well, it's the American people who remain in the dark. Duh.