Wednesday, September 04, 2002

Missed blinking this while the hard drive was fritzing. (Computer probably goes offline today to go in for repair, btw, which means this weblog won't be updated until its copy of Radio returns to the Net.) The Sullen Majority, by Tim Judah, in The New York Times Magazine. Down in the basement, a man with a resemblance to the ''Sgt. Pepper''-era John Lennon is rehearsing. With him in the hot, stuffy studio is a bassist dressed in black, a drummer and a 10-year-old Afghan boy playing small tambour drums. Behind the glass, a sound engineer is switching switches and twiddling knobs. A girl in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers is slouched on a sofa with a young man with whom she clearly has rather more than a passing acquaintance. Two other girls are watching the session. As I enter this studio, my first impression is that I have stepped through the looking glass right into another country. A country far from the streets above us, with its women in black chadors, vast murals of revolutionary martyrs and throngs of demonstrators chanting ''Death to America'' and ''Death to Israel.'' But of course, I am not in another country. Iran is a country with two faces. There are the public face of conformity with Islamic rules and the private face, which as often as not shuns, ignores or even despises those strictures. Iran had two faces when I lived there, nearly thirty years ago, as well. I don't think this is entirely a reaction against the broken promises of reform or against the Islamic Revolution itself. But this two-facedness, coupled with raised expectations for civil reform and brute demography, suggests that something's gonna give (or be run over) and soon. More from the article: [W]hereas two years ago only 500,000 Iranians had access to the Internet, today that number is estimated at 1.75 million and is expected to grow to at least 5 million in the next five years. This widespread access has allowed many young Iranians to follow political or cultural developments anywhere on the planet. But even more significant, perhaps, it has allowed people to talk to one another. The computer has become particularly important in the lives of urban girls, often confined at home by traditionalist parents who, by the same token, have absolutely no clue what their daughters are doing online. A lot of what they're doing, it turns out, is blogging. And why not? 6:03:29 AM    comment []