Iran Vs. New York

We don’t know what will happen in Iran in the next 24 hours. Regardless of who wins the Presidential election there, the clerics actually rule Iran and make the most important decisions, which is profoundly undemocratic. But over the past week watching the dueling supporters of President (and confirmed whacko) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his main challenger, the reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi – I can’t help but feel a little jealous. Something is indeed happening in Iran, just as it was last year in America with the rise of Barack Obama and a new age of political optimism. These massive, passionate demonstrations in Iran – particularly the ones for Mousavi, whose inspired supporters are mostly young, often women, and decked out in bright green with painted fingers and faces, who chant “If they don’t cheat, we will win!” – stir up that universal human hope: Maybe we’ll make it after all.

Then I look at New York, at our mostly gridlocked Senate having been overthrown, then padlocked so it couldn’t be opened to be deadlocked… the result of decades of dysfunction further metastasized by secret handshakes and blackberry-offended billionaires. Yesterday the state’s biggest tabloid actually paid a person to wear a clown suit and hang out all day around the Senate. The two most powerful (elected) figures in the debacle literally are criminals. One of the reasons this even happened is because black and Latino lawmakers are locked in a playground rivalry over which race should rule the slides of power. Today our astonishingly unpopular governor implored those involved to “think of the lobbyists” and end the stalemate. We might not have fundamentalist clerics pulling the strings, but we do have our three men in a room. We might not have one side threatening to cut the hands off of their detractors, but we do have someone holding all the marbles for whom the difference between felony assault and manslaughter in the first degree was probably a matter of inches and arm strength. And if I look out my window, any window, to try to see the demonstrations against this ridiculous travesty that is our State government – the most impassioned scene would be a press conference rally where politicians are slightly more flanked by staff volunteers holding hastily handwritten poster-board than they are by TV cameramen. Perhaps out of sight there is another rally for which people have been recruited and bussed in for the construction of a media sugar pile.

In less-than-perfectly-democratic New York a demonstration is a giant inflatable rat and a press agent. In less-than-perfectly-democratic Iran a demonstration stops traffic for half a dozen blocks – a passion that can paralyze a city and captivate the world.

I don’t know what color we should wear, and I can’t imagine a State Senate candidate, or any NY candidate, that could make it through the political establishment and inspire spontaneous demonstrations of support from the increasingly cynical citizenship of this state… But perhaps New York could learn something from the green-faced women of Iran… maybe if people cared as much, believed as much as they do, as we all did last year – then maybe slowly, steadily, New York could begin to belong to its citizens, probably for the first time in its history.

Iranians aren’t even truly free, so what excuse can we possibly have?

Cross Posted @ goMYD