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August 5, 2004Top * I'm Croatian and proud I just got done reading the new article by Siamack Baniameri [Drama queens]. I stayed up until 3 in the morning the other day to see Iran's second match in China live, and man was it painful. Here, while I would like to echo and sustain all of Baniameri's many right-on and witty points, I would like to especially draw out one particular point. He is absolutely right about Iranians propensity to blame their own shortcomings on others. It's always someone else who has done us wrong, while we, the righteous have always been victims of evil-doer's satanic designs. As the matter of fact this point is in my opinion one of the most essential factors that ever and again short-circuits our growth and stops us from reaching maturity. It is a systematic way of taking the lens away from ourselves, changing the subject, throwing in static, anything and everything but looking at ourselves for the cause of the predicament we are in. Baniameri names some of our favorite scapegoats: England, America, the Arab world. There are of course many more. Depending on how "suffisticated" we reckon ourselves to be, we anal-ize things even more in depth: Not only the Arabs, but furthermore the criticism of Islam as the root of all evil (done to us) is quite fashionable at the moment. And then there are the deep-shits who go even further and reach the conclusion that Islam is really a Jewish religion and so the Jews and Israel are to blame... And of course the way out according to many An-tellecutals is also to go back to another sort of pure origin, another fundamentalism that would make a binary with the Islamic fundamentalism we are enduring at the moment. Much to their credit Zoroastrians have quite cleverly said that they don't accept retarded converts, otherwise we would have a huge fundamentalist Zoroastrian contingency ready to perform racial pogroms that would put Hitler and his fellow gangbangers to shame. Of course it must be mentioned that many times these very people who are the advocates of a pure Iran, do so as a reaction to decades of a systematic persecution of any claim for the Iranian identity. And screaming and yelling is quite often the result of being shut-up for so long. But back to football: whenever a country feels good about itself, regardless of whether this feeling is based on correct assumptions or not, this country will do good in team sports generally and first and foremost, football. Today the Iranian society is very polarized, and this is reflected in our national team as well. Gone are the fake-highs of early Khatami, or before that, the revolutionary spirit of fraternity just before the Islamic Revolution, we are now in a twilight of sorts and cannot do anything but mistrust our own members. In asserting this I am not exempting myself from blame. This is just the state of things as they are. Continuous repression with no real hope in sight, and a struggle against second rate teams that we know we are superior to... We know, but can't prove it, because we can't get over the deep fissures that permeate our Zeitgeist. |
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