BUSking in Tehran

Here he is (on right) getting in trouble with the bus driver (in light blue shirt on left):

And a kid with an violin plugged into some kind of backtrack-producing machine that he slung from his shoulder:

The 18th Brumaire of Donald Bonaparte

I just looked it up on an online French Republican Calendar converter (of course it exists) and this upcoming election day is in fact going to be 18 Brumaire CCXXV! The parallels of The Donald to Louis Bonaparte as described by Marx, a buffoon with a ubiquitous name who gained the support of the rural underclass and the lumpenproletariat by entertaining them and playing to their prejudices, seem amazingly relevant but I have only found 1 article on the interweb that mentions the similarity: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/197905/brand-awareness
I think I'm the first to realize that Trump may be elected on the 18th Brumaire and should reread Marx and write an article about it.

5 years later

I’m in Tehran. I wrote this a few days ago but haven't been able to post it because this website is blocked and the Iranian authorities (and maybe Google, which continues to block gmail business accounts despite sanctions relief) have upgraded their anti-anti-filtering technology since last I was here. Tor browser no longer works and it seems people now have to use paid VPN services--paying for which would have been a hassle if I didn't have someone to pay for me from the US.

In the 5+ years since I’ve been here (see tehran09.blogspot.com) things have changed, and what pops out at me in rough order of how much I care:

1) high speed internet: Anything faster than 56kb/s dial-up speed internet was unavailable to the general public back in 2009, the authorities’ answer to the threat of “cultural invasion”. Now there are cafes everywhere advertising free wi-fi and I got a prepaid 4G SIM card with 1gb of data and plenty of talk and text credit for under $20.

2) inflation: The largest bill when I was last here was 50,000 rials, confusingly referred to at 5,000 tomans, which are not official currency but what everyone talks in. Now there is a banksnote printed 100,000 rials (referred to as 10,000 [tomans]) and notes called “Iran cheque” that are not officially currency but are treated as such and, just to add to confusion, are printed in big letters with their unofficial toman values of of 50 and 100 (thousand) and not their official rial values (i.e. 500,000 and 1,000,000 rials, respectively). After some early confusion I tried not to buy anything yesterday until I had a chance to spread all the bills out on a table and figure them out, for fear that I would accidentally pay 10x the price.

Along with economic inflation has gone physical inflation of the bills. The notes that are valuable enough (worth more than 30 US cents) to carry around are all too big to fit in my wallet. I guess I should just carry them loose in a dedicated jacket pocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPB59bVSbck

3) EZ PAY cards: I will also carry around the cards they finally introduced as a unified form of metro and bus credit (about 10 cents per ride). Before you had to get one kind of (almost free) paper ticket for 1 kind of bus, pay cash on other buses, and use a different kind of cardboard ticket for the metro, which then only had 2 lines forming a cross. Now things are easier, though I still managed to screw up and not pay by swiping my card at a bus station before boarding the women’s area at the front of the bus. Having public transit divided between women-only and co-ed sections seems like not a terrible pragmatic choice to me; certainly doesn’t fix the root cause behind sexual harassment, but lets women do their commute without the constant threat of it.

The buses going north and south on Valiasr street have dedicated lanes (which I think they were just pissing people off by piloting 5 years ago) but seems to come by infrequently enough that every one is crammed to the gills. It is the same with Istanbul’s metrobus system and a source of much confusion to me: why go through the engineering feat of building a huge system of elevated roads across Istanbul only to send 1 bus down it every 12 minutes? My guess is that when I pose this to Istanbulites (I haven’t yet) their stock response will be corruption, but can’t corrupt companies profit from bus production and operation just as they can from construction? Maybe it’s just that whatever planners are calculating how frequently buses need to come are looking at maximum physical capacity rather than quality of passenger’s lives. Because on Istanbul metrobuses especially, every time I have ridden, whether rush hour or a weird off hour, I have been smushed.

Pollution and traffic seem about the same despite improvements in public transportation.

4) outlet stores: A lot of stores have popped up that look exactly like official outlet stores of companies like Nike, Adidas, Asus etc. complete with the sparse, carefully laid out floorplans of downtown NYC and Dubai shopping mall outlets, but I don’t think they are actually outlets. They all seem to have instagram pages and websites that aren’t actually connected to the corporations they claim to represent (Iran hasn’t signed the international intellectual property agreement that would make this illegal). For example http://filairan.com/ looks pretty legit but isn’t listed on the “Country Select” of the http://www.fila.com/ mother page.