Welcome to America, Please Leave Your Passion At The Door

This Iran shit is crazy.

I was listening to NPR on the way to work (because I find factual, unbiased media soothing in the morning), and they were continuing their coverage of the election aftermath in Iran.

For those of you who aren’t UTD on world politics, Iran held a recent presidential election where the current conservative president Ahmadinejad (pronounced ah-mah-DEEN-ah-jad, only the ah part is said like you’re hocking up a loogie) was challenged by the reformist party leader Mousavi (pronounced moo-SAH-vee by Americans and moo-sah-VEE by Iranians, who are obviously wrong because they don’t talk like us).

According to Iranian state news, Ahmadinejad won the vote 66% to 33%. However, Mousavi and his supporters believe that the election was rigged and that there are 14 million unaccounted votes. Since June 12, Mousavi supporters have been rallying and calling for a new election. They’ve been taking to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in protest of the alleged election manipulation. Most media sources say that the Conservative and Reformist parties alike are taken aback by this unexpected display of protest. Much blood has been shed in clashes between demonstrators and the authority, and Mousavi himself has retracted his call to protest in order to prevent further injury and death.

In other words, shit be goin’ down.
Like, LA-riots-of-1992 style. (otherwise known as the good ole’ days…)

After listening to reports and interviews of irate Iranians (say THAT three times fast), I am deeply impressed by the passion that these people have for their democratic system.

But at the same time, I am deeply saddened by our own country’s lack of fervor for the political events of the past decade. Where were we when Bush was accused of rigging the 2000 election? Why did we not take to the streets in protest of this alleged conspiracy to maintain a disastrous presidency for an additional 4 years? Where were the demonstrations and the petitions and the general sense of outrage that we should have felt as our democratic system failed in front of our very eyes?

WHERE WAS THE FUCKING REVOLUTION, MAN?!? I had my gun ready and everything...

It makes me sad to think that we as a nation have grown so complacent as to let accusations of such ghastly proportions go largely uninvestigated. I truly believe that our mass media made more of an effort to cover the switch from analogue TV to digital TV than it did to explore the possibility of a rigged presidential election. And there is something very wrong with that.

Let’s do the math:

IF loss of television privileges = nuclear Armageddon
AND rigged presidential election = furrowed eyebrows and a trip to the kitchen to get another pint of rocky road
THEN America = bunch of good-for-nothing, beer-guzzling, NASCAR-watching, reality TV-obsessing, obesity epidemic-starting A-holes.

(My Intro to Logic professor would be proud. And to think he gave me a D, that sonofabitch…)

The only thing that keeps me from calling it quits and moving to Canada is the fact that we voted for Obama, suggesting that enough people were mildly agitated by the Bush presidency to spend 10 minutes driving to their nearest voting booth.

Well, that…and the fact that Canada’s so cold I seriously considered throwing myself on an electric fence the last time I was up there.


In conclusion, I apologize for getting preachy on y’all for two days in a row. I promise that tomorrow, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled nonsensical programming.

Whatever.