The Center Wing

In today’s Baharestan Square, via Persiankiwi’s Twitter:

phone line was cut and we lost internet – getting more difficult to log into net

rumour they are tracking high use of phone lines to find internet users – must move from here now

reports of street fighting in Vanak Sq, Tajrish sq, Azadi Sq – now – Sea of Green – Allah Akbar

in Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping ppl like meat – blood everywhere – like butcher - Allah Akbar

they catch ppl with mobile – so many killed today – so many injured – Allah Akbar – they take one of us

Lalezar Sq is same as Baharestan – unbelevable – ppls murdered everywhere

they pull away the dead into trucks – like factory – no human can do this – we beg Allah for save us -

Nico Pitney adds some much-need perspective on the last couple days:

5:20 PM ET — A word about the past two days. In ordinary times, the violence in the streets on Sunday and Monday would have been shocking. But compared to Saturday’s massive outpouring, the turnout of demonstrators has been significantly smaller. There is a good reason for it.

Over the past week, the reformist rallies that have succeeded were those scheduled days in advance, with turnout aided by massive word-of-mouth promotion. Today’s mourning rally for Neda, on the other hand, was announced only this morning on Karroubi’s social networking sites. In the midst of a near-complete media and technological blackout, these large demonstrations need time to develop.

It’s virtually impossible for anyone to gauge whether there is a petering off of intensity among demonstrators, who now know they face incredible risks if they show up in the streets. But the last two days should not be used to argue that the unrest has dampened. The reformists are organizing another major demonstration for Thursday, and a national strike is set to begin by tomorrow or Wednesday. Those will be far better guides to how Iranians are reacting to the government’s campaign of repression.

Anybody who says that this is over doesn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

From Tehran tonight:

Her name was Neda.  It means “voice”.

That seemed to be worth sharing.

Full video here.

A couple striking Tweets from Iran:

Mousavi – SATURDAY is a big day for fighting fascism

Only 10 hours left until the Iranian people finally disobey their dictator. History is watching. Let’s make it proud.

Sully has “confirmed” written next to that Tweet; I assume he means that Mousavi himself wrote that. Mousavi also writes:

1.05 pm. Mousavi – confirmed – IF I AM ARRESTED THE NATION IS TO STRIKE INDEFINITELY

I think he knows that this isn’t about him anymore, that his election is small potatoes compared to the animosity that Iranians feel towards their entire government right now. Still, he seems to be playing his part in it pretty well.

Finally, a really sad, disturbing video has popped up on YouTube and Facebook from the streets of Tehran, of a young woman dying of a gunshot wound as someone tries desperately to resuscitate her. Definitely not work safe, but pretty visceral proof of how “real” this business is, and how determined the Iranian people are to take back their system.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: those of you who pray, pray for Iran.

This is pretty powerful. I don’t know how this is going to turn out for Iran ultimately, and I still have my doubt that this series of protests and demonstrations and full-on riots will bring about an end to the theocrats. But something has fundamentally changed in Iran since last Thursday. At the very least, this series of events represents a major crack in the facade of the ruling regime – and those who would claim otherwise, and pretend that this doesn’t entail what looks like the beginning of the end of the Revolution, aren’t watching these videos or looking at these photos.

So I was catching up on clips of “The Daily Show” over the internet this morning, and I happened upon the interview from last night’s episode. It was a discussion between Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee upon that most contentious of domestic political issues: abortion. You can watch it here; it’s definitely worth a viewing or two.

One of the things that struck me about this interview was how both participants (briefly) touched upon the terms in which the broader abortion debate is framed, and how those terms do a great disservice to both sides involved. The term “pro-life” carries with it major implications – specifically, that the other side of the debate is anti-life, or at least not pro-life. Yet, as Governor Huckabee freely admits early in the discussion, no one (outside of a fringe minority that’s so small, it’s not even worth discussing in this context) is really “pro-abortion.” No one sees the termination of a pregnancy as a good thing in and of itself. What’s more, I think one would be hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t want our society to become one in which abortions simply don’t happen.

So if both sides really do share this much common ground at this elementary level of the debate, whence arises all the animosity that this topic engenders? How does the discourse jump from that common starting point, to the point where someone shoots and kills a doctor in the middle of a church service?

“Well, the shooter was clearly deranged,” most people say as they shrug off the question. Probably true; I have little doubt that Scott Roeder, the man who allegedly murdered Dr. George Tiller, had multiple psychiatric issues. But just being a complete nutball rarely seems to be a sufficient motive to actually take the step of putting a bullet through someone’s head at point-blank range, especially while that someone is working as an usher during a worship service. Instead, I’m firmly convinced that the way in which we, as a society, have taken to debating this issue played a significant role in how this tragedy unfolded.

Now, here’s the great, unmentioned elephant in the middle of the metaphorical room that is this great, decades-long debate that American society has had over abortion: no matter how afraid we are to admit it, we can’t say for sure when “life” begins. If God exists, it’s really up to Him/Her/It to decide when life begins, but He/She/It certainly hasn’t been too terribly specific about it when it comes to Scriptural references. Now, yes, I know that a lot of the anti-Roe crowd likes to cite Jeremiah 1:5 (“Before you were formed in the womb, I knew you”), in order to demonstrate that God considers life to begin at conception. But I must say, I don’t find this to be a terribly compelling argument at all; to me, this verse seems to be saying that God knows each and every human’s ultimate destiny long before we were born – and some zygotes are simply not destined to make it to birth. 10-25% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, most of them during the first trimester. I’m not sure what the exact proportion is, but I would imagine that most of these occur when the embryo is little more than a clump of cells, ie: a blastocyst. It might just be me, but I find it hard to believe that God considers these embryos to be “human lives” – and even if He/She/It does, I think that everyone can agree that it’s not a black-and-white issue. Otherwise, why aren’t we having funerals for each and every blastocyst that spontaneously terminates? Why aren’t self-proclaimed pro-lifers pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into research that decreases that 10-25% of embryos that spontaneously abort? And no, I’m not being sarcastic or snarky in saying this; I’m genuinely wondering why there isn’t more of an outcry for a solution to something that might be preventable, and yet continues to cause the death of anywhere from 10-25% of the entire human population, according to the logic of those who would claim that life starts at conception.

On the flip side, however, I must say that I see a distinct lack of humility in a lot of Roe v. Wade supporters as well, and I say that as a supporter of Roe myself. On one hand, like I said, I don’t know when life begins, and I doubt that it begins at conception, when an embryo is nothing more than a fertilized cell. On the other hand, that great expanse of time between conception and birth consists of a pretty massive “gray area,” wherein a fetus develops a LOT of human-like characteristics. It’s such a gray area, in fact, that I must say, I find claims that anyone knows for sure that life doesn’t begin until birth, to be extremely dubious, to say the least. And it really doesn’t do the public discourse on the issue any good for someone to make that claim, either. So why do so many Roe supporters make such a claim when they can’t really back it up? It seems to me that such claims are little more than a big “screw you” to the Religious Right – and while I’m sure those utterances are cathartic, do they really help to advance the discussion any further? Or do they only serve to polarize the discussion further than it already is? In my experience, it’s a lot more of the latter option, unfortunately.

Words mean a lot more than we in the Western world are comfortable admitting. Whether we realize it or not, the rhetoric we utilize to express our opinions can have an effect upon how we, and those we agree with, perceive the rest of the world. We, as a society, do not benefit from when we hat, of course, is taken to the next exponential level when we add mass media hysteria into the equation. I, personally, can’t see how one can argue that the killing of Dr. Tiller, or the Holocaust Museum shooting, wasn’t in any way, shape, or form connected to the lunatic rantings of the Glenn Becks and Sean Hannitys of the world. Nor do I imagine that callous, unthinking claims by socially left-wing individuals that they know that a third-trimester fetus isn’t a human life and therefore doesn’t have value, had absolutely nothing to do with these sorts of tragedies, either.

We as a society would be much better-served if we humbled ourselves when it comes to making big metaphysical calls like these. I’m of the opinion that both sides of the discourse would find a lot more common ground if they began from a common position (ie: that abortion is, overall, not a great thing and we’d like to make it unnecessary in our culture), and if they abandoned a moralistic or rights-based mindset for a pragmatic one (for example, HOW do we make abortion an unnecessary option in our society, without doing even more damage to society as a whole?).

Personally, I ask myself the question, “When does life begin?”, and I can’t say for sure. Because of this, I look at this issue from a standpoint of caution and humility. Since I can’t say for sure when life begins, it’s kind of tough for me to say that it DOESN’T begin somewhere in the first trimester, and therefore people can have abortions without it being “wrong” on any level. It’s for this reason that I think abortion is, overall, a net evil in our society, and it would be best if we made it an unnecessary procedure.

On the other hand, I also believe that it’s incredibly arrogant for someone to claim that the “best” we can do as a society, with regard to an issue this complex, is to criminalize it, and then dust off our hands and watch what happens. Andrew Sullivan has posted some poignant, sometimes heartbreaking, stories from regular readers who have had abortions over the years, and as one reads them, it becomes more and more clear how incredibly personal and painful a dilemma an unintended (or ultimately doomed) pregnancy can pose to the individuals involved. It’s impossible to read these stories and then assert that there’s somehow a clear-cut, righteous course of action for any of these sets of circumstances.

One of those stories cuts to the core of the debate, too: assuming our government decided to criminalize abortion, what then? Does abortion simply end in America? Or does it simply become much more dangerous for those involved? And is it okay that obtaining an abortion becomes much more dangerous for those involved? Personally, I have a had time believing in an All-Loving God who sees that as a solution to such a complex, deeply personal, painful issue. The God I worship is capable of a little more nuance than that.

So because this debate is fraught with so many gray areas, and nobody can really claim to have any certainty for where the lines are drawn between life and not-life, justified abortion and unjustified abortion, etc, I think we as a culture are left with two options: one, continue butting heads with each other while speaking in terminologies upon which neither side agrees; or two, leave the metaphysical and liberties-based arguments aside and deal with the argument on purely pragmatic grounds.

If both sides can more or less agree that abortion is a negative thing that we’d like to see less of, it shouldn’t be hard for both sides of the discourse to produce a range of very viable solutions (or at least options that ultimately ameliorate the problem). Most people would rather see teens waiting to have sex until they’re at least in their late teens, if not until marriage; that said, all available evidence suggests that abstinence-only sex-ed really doesn’t curb rates of premarital sex. Therefore, we, as a country, need to start implementing comprehensive sex-ed programs, which emphasize both abstinence AND properly-administered birth control and contraceptives. This one step we, as a culture, could take, would undoubtedly take a tremendous chunk out of our national elective abortion rates. I would imagine that improved social services catering to unwed, unemployed mothers-to-be would take another sizable chunk out of those numbers.

Ultimately, I can’t help but see elective abortions in this country as anything but unfortunate signs of how we, as a society, have failed our younger demographics as a whole. We’ve failed to educate them properly about the consequences of their mistakes; we’ve failed to inform them of how they can mitigate the fallout of their mistakes, so that other lives or potential lives aren’t harmed in the process; and we’ve failed to volunteer our own time and money to help clean up the mess of their mistakes, once they’ve come to fruition.

How often, for instance, do you see a rabidly anti-Roe activist go up to a young woman walking into an abortion clinic, offer to take that girl in, pay for her prenatal care and education, and promise to help raise her child if she carries it to term? Not all that often. I see a lot of bluster from so-called social conservatives on this issue, but not much constructive action, and even less sacrifice. And yet, if abortion really does end human lives, shouldn’t someone claiming to be “pro-life” be only too willing to give up his or her time, money, and energy to help that young woman carry her fetus to term and raise the child? I wish I could say I see this happening frequently, but I really don’t. That’s a big part of why I believe we, as a society, are not well-served by the terminology we use in this debate. I find it hard to see someone as “pro-life” when they’re really only willing to spew a lot of bile and demonize desperate young women and well-meaning doctors to defend what they claim is a full-fledged human life.

Ultimately, I think we would be better-served to change our terminology to something more along the lines of “pro-Roe” and “anti-Roe,” or “pro-criminalization” and “anti-criminalization.” More importantly, I think we would be better-served to admit that everyone discussing this issue is dealing with a very complex dilemma that only gets more scarring, more confusing, and more desperate the more directly one is involved. We’ve exhausted the framework for discussion that we’ve been using since 1976 until now, and we’re unlikely to get any further than disagreeing along the lines of, “Life begins at X!” “No, life begins at Y!” A new framework for discussion is needed, one in which the vast majority of those involved can agree on the ultimate goal for our society: less unplanned pregnancies, and less abortions. Only then can we hope to see an end to the caricatures, hyperbole, and ultimate demonization of the “other side” of the discussion; only then will this complex issue stop bringing out the most monstrous side in some of us.

Hi everyone – sorry for the radio silence; it’s been a busy last couple of days. Yeah, I know, world’s smallest violin and all.

In the meantime, I found this pretty amusing:

PETA wishes Obama hadn’t swatted that fly

1 day ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants the flyswatter in chief to try taking a more humane attitude the next time he’s bedeviled by a fly in the White House.

PETA is sending President Barack Obama a Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher, a device that allows users to trap a house fly and then release it outside.

“We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals,” PETA spokesman Bruce Friedrich said Wednesday. “We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals.”

During an interview for CNBC at the White House on Tuesday, a fly intruded on Obama’s conversation with correspondent John Harwood.

“Get out of here,” the president told the pesky insect. When it didn’t, he waited for the fly to settle, put his hand up and then smacked it dead.

“Now, where were we?” Obama asked Harwood. Then he added: “That was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? I got the sucker.”

Friedrich said that PETA was pleased with Obama’s voting record in the Senate on behalf of animal rights and noted that he has been outspoken against animal abuses.

Still, “swatting a fly on TV indicates he’s not perfect,” Friedrich said, “and we’re happy to say that we wish he hadn’t.”

Deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said the White House has no comment on the matter.

This, of course, raises an extremely pertinent question: does PETA really not realize how it’s perceived by the rest of the world?

Anyway, good for them, I guess, for being consistent. Still, not exactly the way to make your group seem relevant…

As an archaeologist, I do a lot of thinking about heritage.  What it is, if and how it should be preserved, who it belongs to, and what it looks like under the ground.  These thoughts, combined with Steve’s post last night, have me thinking about heritage as it relates to the current situation in Iran, and around the world.

As I said, I do a lot of thinking about physical heritage, because it’s what lies under the ground or under the ocean.  What we’re seeing now, in this country and others, is intangible heritage.  I’ll explain.

In the United States, we hear quite a bit of talk of “the values that this country was founded on,” or “traditional values,” or whatever the guise of Heritage is at the moment.  We sometimes hear of the “American myth,” that nebulous collection of values, usually cited in the fashion most suited to bolster the argument at hand.  Some commonly cited components of the American myth include individualism, a community spirit, socioeconomic mobility, and freedom (which is the topic of another entry in its entirety).

The important thing about heritage is that it belongs to all of us. This is a hard thing to get one’s head around, especially as an American, product of a country that respects individualism and property rights to such a degree.  Of course, we are then left in a curious situation: communal ownership of an individual heritage.  Communal heritage ownership makes more sense in a physical realm: we have national parks, national monuments, state parks, etc.  I think most of us can appreciate the value in all of us owning, say, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, or Gettysburg.  And these are “easy” things to own.  We can survey them, delineate them, and manage them physically.

Intangible cultural heritage is a little harder to deal with.  Primarily, it’s difficult because it’s whatever we think it is, and as I mentioned, it’s so frequently bent to the needs of the current debate that it gets very hard to define.  Our American cultural heritage includes the lone pioneer, but also the Amish barn raising.  It includes the railroads crisscrossing the country by the hand of the market, but also by the hand of the government subsidizing these same railroads.  In short, the complete American cultural heritage does not tell one story, and it does not exist for the purposes of one argument.  It is as murky as it is rich, as obscure as it is wonderfully complex.  Our cultural heritage is the biggest of big tents, even including those who wished and still wish to make it a small tent.  As I said, wonderfully complex.  And we all own it!

I discuss all this for several reasons.  First, our history does not have a single arc.  Stop pretending it does.  It does not point the way towards libertarianism, towards strict – or loose – constructionism, nor towards socialism or communism.  This is challenging for us as pundits and writers – we can’t use the Appeal to Authority justly (of course, we shouldn’t be using it anyway).  I know it’s easy to scream “He disagrees with me, and thus, WITH AMERICA,” in bold text.  But it’s not fair, and usually, not true.

Equally importantly, I bring this up to discuss our relationships with other countries.  Every country, every city, state, and group has its own cultural heritage.  The oft-repeated phrase “Clash of Civilizations” is too broad, too partisan.  Instead, the political situation is a clash of individuals, each with their own interpretation of their own mix of heritages.  Many of the great ideological clashes in history have happened when two overlapping sets of cultural heritage appear to diverge enough.  Witness the Civil War, when (say) North Carolinian Heritage could not exist simultaneously with American Heritage, at least as the belligerants imagined it.

Now we’re faced with dealing with other countries.  Iran, for instance.  As Steve already pointed out, we helped to install the Shah.  The Shah was friendly to the West, but not so friendly to his own country’s cultural resources.  Understandably, there was a backlash, as there always is when the rulers of a country get too far away from what the populace imagines their cultural legacy to be.  We’re still feeling this backlash today, and I think it would be fairly understandable to most Americans, if they were to know the situation in Iran.  Imagine, if you will, an American leader who urged us to give up our clothing, music, and traditions, and get on board with China’s cultural.  There would be a tremendous (and understandable) backlash.  That leader would not last long.

I should add here that when I talk about an imagined cultural heritage, I’m not casting any aspersions. In many ways, what American history, or world history actually is is less important than what it is imagined to be.  I advocate learning actual history, of course, but it seems to be a losing battle right now.

The challenge for the modern global age, then, is primarily one of competing cultural legacies – how does a people keep their own identities in an interconnected world?  The answers to this question are variable and complex, as complex as the tapestry the heritage itself is woven from.  But it must always be remembered that a people does not give up its heritage easily, no matter who the people are.  To ask them to do so is madness, and doomed to failure.

Remarkable:

According to the Cyrus News Agency, Tuesday morning 16 senior members of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps were arrested. “These commanders have been in contact with members of the Iranian army to join the people’s movement,” CNA reports. “Three of the commanders are veterans of Iran-Iraq war. They have been moved to an undisclosed location in East Tehran.” This report has not been confirmed by other sources. If true, it shows that the regime is losing the loyalty of some members of its control appartus, which is necessary if the opposition has any chance of achieving fundamental change. Mass rallies can easily be broken up and revolutions crushed, as we saw at Tiananmen Square in 1989. But if members of the armed forces, police and especially Revolutionary Guards decided to switch sides, then one can begin speaking of revolution.

This is the sort of thing that turns a Tiananmen Square-type event into a 1979 Revolution-type event.  It’s going to be important to see how many other members of the armed forces of Iran take up the cause of the protesters.  If that number reaches a critical mass – and no one can really say for sure what that number is – we could be witnessing real change in Iran.

That’s obviously a big “if,” but it’s something to keep monitoring.

I figured I would make my first post on the topic of Iran, since it’s timely and I already had a discussion going on my Facebook account (here and here).

So, what, exactly, is going to happen with Iran?

The short answer is, “I don’t know.”  And neither does anyone else, for that matter.  This topic of discussion requires some of that humility that Eric and I wrote about in our mission statement.  Plenty of people in the mainstream press and across the blogosphere have been spewing long-term predictions since before Friday: “Meh, it’s Iran.  It’s a dictatorship.  Nothing’s going to change there.”  Or, conversely, “It’s Iran!  The younger demographics are educated and Westernized and don’t like the regime, and now they’re going to overthrow it!”

I’ve found that at times like these, those who make the most-grandiose pronouncements are the ones you should listen to the least, while those who reserve their judgment really are the ones who know what they’re talking about.

The reason why this is one of those times is because the vast majority of the information we’re getting out of Iran is the swarm of Tweets from people in the thick of the action.  Some of those Tweets are inaccurate rumors, some of them are speculative, and some of them are factual, but it’s currently pretty tough for those of us on the other side of the world to tell which is which.

For now, here’s what we know: evidence is pretty strong that there were significant irregularities in Friday’s election results.  Lots of people are out in the streets protesting.  Mousavi has formally submitted a request for canceling the election results to the Guardian Council (translated here by niacINsight).  The military has declared neutrality, which is the smart move on their part – plenty of people are already calling this a coup. The last thing Khamenei and Ahmadinejad want is for the military to intervene and prove those people right.  Finally, a nationwide strike is scheduled for tomorrow. (today? I’m not sure how far ahead Iran is, timezone-wise)

I somehow doubt this will, in and of itself, bring about the end of the government in Tehran.  But by the same token, I strongly doubt that the ruling regime will escape this situation with its integrity and perceived legitimacy entirely intact.  Indeed, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei are likely to come out of this (if they do come out of this, politically) as far more isolated, marginalized figures than they were previously.  The younger generation of Iranians will likely be even more disillusioned with the Revolution, at least as promulgated by the ruling mullahs.  The Guardian Council will have to start making concessions, or else risk more uprisings like this.

In the meantime, what should be the U.S.’ role in the matter?  For my money, Obama and his government have played their cards appropriately thus far: keep as mum as possible on the matter.  Express your support for the Iranians choosing their own leaders, and whatever you do, don’t evoke the memories of Mosaddeq. Until the dust settles on this whole affair and we know who Iran’s next president is, openly setting policy would be a mistake.

What we as Westerners tend to forget in looking back on major revolutions, like Iran’s own in 1979, is how nationalistic they often are in character.  We see students marching through the streets of Tehran to bring a man like Ruhollah Khomeini into power, and we automatically assume that it’s borne out of an overwhelming support for radical Islam, Sharia Law, and all the rest of it.  But so much of it is fueled by their reaction to our own interferences in their internal affairs.  To many of those who initially fight in the streets of these rabidly anti-U.S. regimes, it’s nationalism first and radical ideology a distant second (if even that).

Anyway, that’s why our government needs to keep as quiet as possible about what’s going on in Iran right now.  If this is really going to bring about change in Iran – be it short-term or long-term change – it’s going to have to come from the Iranians themselves.  And Western leaders worldwide are going to have to make extra-super-duper-sure that Ahmadinejad and his handlers on the Guardian Council can’t blame this unrest on Western agitation.

From a longer-term perspective, our government could probably find a way to make lemonade from the lemons of an Ahmadinejad victory.  We’ve been looking for a way to seek more leverage over countries like Russia concerning the nuclear enrichment issue; this could help provide it.  Even Russia has a limit to how much it will let a client-state embarrass it.

At any rate, like I said, I won’t pretend to know exactly what’s going on, and I certainly won’t pretend to know how it’s all going to turn out.  But anybody who says that this series of events isn’t going to contribute to major changes in Iranian society doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.