Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 3

Mother Country or Fatherland?

Hard times, confusing times, no warnings, times of war.  Portents of ending.  Intimations of catastrophe.  Holocaust guilt, nuclear annihilation, the depletion of the ozone, the tigers, the whales, and the spotted owls.

Boredom, weariness, repetitiveness, kept waiting in an outer office, unrelenting crankiness, nagging falsity, insufferable predictability.  There must be more than this.  The price of oil is computed in two currencies, dollars and blood, and payments in both must be made in instalments. 

Life is a series of arrangements and adjustments within which the consequence of error is total disaster.  The only safe assumption is that what one is doing is probably wrong.  Red in tooth and claw, the world is monumentally foolish, sadistically violent, repulsively corrupt and insanely alive.  Much of it is devoid of history and any notion of collective social context.  Sweltering boredom first, and then the anxiety of impending disaster, alternate as moment to moment concerns.

There are no-go areas where it is dangerous to belong to the wrong ethnic group, where they will cut off your finger to get the ring.  There are bearded gunmen on the streets now, backed by portraits 20 feet high of Khomeini and the martyrs Beheshti and Chamran.  Ayatollah Montazeri looks scornfully from a hoarding, Hussein himself from another, the Twelfth Imam, his horses oozing blood amid the carnage on the fields of Kerbala.  At the check points they ask whether you come from a mother country or a fatherland.


To be continued...