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Jewish World Review Sept. 7, 2011 / 8 Elul, 5771 Iran's government afraid of the water By Dale McFeatters
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Somewhere behind those bushy beards and black turbans, Iran's ruling clerics must know their predominantly youthful nation regards them as a group constipated, joyless old men. Paranoid, too, but increasingly with much to be paranoid about.
Recently, flash mobs of young Iranians have been gathering spontaneously for water fights in the country's urban parks, shooting each other with squirt guns and spraying each other with water bottles. It sounds remarkably like an American college campus in the warm spring nights leading up to final exams.
Part of the old-timers' antipathy to the water fights — aside from the natural resentment of puritans toward anybody having a good time — is cultural: "Hard-liners see the water fights as unseemly and immoral, breaking taboos against men and women simply mixing, much less dousing each other with water and playing in the streets," observed the Associated Press. Iran, it appears, is still not ready for wet T-shirt contests.
But other senior officials in Iran's repressive government see darker forces at work — foreigners, counterrevolutionaries, Iranian exiles in the U.S. and, perhaps most menacing of all, the outlawed Facebook.
"This is not simply a game with water. This act is being guided from abroad," a spokesman for the judiciary warned darkly.
Thus, the police have been cracking down on the water fights and arresting some of the participants, although even some clerics thinks this makes the regime look ridiculous.
But ever since the giant protests over Iran's crooked 2009 election, the regime has been skittish and nervous about large gatherings, especially since the massive protests of the Arab Spring began ousting unpopular dictatorships.
Revolutions now come with names — the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the sadly short-lived Jeans Revolution in Belarus.
It would be altogether fitting if the corrupt killjoys currently ruling Iran were ousted by an event called the Super Soaker Revolution.
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