February 25, 2017 - 9:10am
Dictatorship and Theocracy
With all the wailing and gnashing of teeth lately over the new president of this country, I keep hearing the same terms come up repeatedly both online and in conversations. Those terms are 'Dictatorship' and 'Theocracy', and are used typically in that order in reference to the president and the vice president.
While some of these opinions may have merit, the people stating them don't seem to have a true understanding of just what each of those looks like. I can say with confidence that I do.
As a 7-year-old child back in 1979, I had a front-row seat to watch as an ACTUAl dictatorship was rapidly and violently becoming a GENUINE theocracy.
The events depicted in the movie, "Argo" gave a very good look at the way things were during the days leading up the the Iran Hostage Crisis, as it came to be known. My family and I left the country about a week before that happened. Even then, when we gathered up whatever belongings we could carry and left our house in Isfahan, we had to relocate multiple times that night because at one point, there were rebels going from house to house looking for foreigners to kidnap and/or kill.
To give a little background on why we were there, the main reason was my dad. He had been a quality control inspector for Boeing for over 30 years previously and among other things, had specialized on the CH-47 cargo helicopter, AKA the Chinook. Since the United States and Iran were still on friendly terms, a number of those helicopters had been sold to the Iranian army. The army over there hired my dad as an instructor for their CH-47 maintenance crews. So, with that, we made plans to move to Iran.
Since we were planning for the move to take place a few months before my seventh birthday, my parents decided to have my birthday party early at my Aunt and Uncle's place just outside of Philadelphia. Since we had not lived in that area very long, I didn't really have any friends, so the invitees were mostly cousins and other family members. Hooray for me.
Shortly afterward, we cleared out our apartment and headed to the airport. We spent a few days doing the tourist thing in London, which was nice, but being only six years old, I was unable to appreciate most of it. After we flew out of London, we had another multi-day stop in Lugano over in Switzerland. Again, not much to remember for six-year-old me other than that I had my own room with this bizarre bed that was more like a shallow box with a mattress in it, not unlike the cat memes you see all over the internet these days. In this case, I certainly fit in it, so I sat in it...and slept in it. Sorry, that's the best I can do at my present caffeine level.
Why exactly we were in Lugano, I had no idea. Again, six-year-old me was less enthralled with the rich European culture of the region (read that, not at all), and more so with the AM/FM radio built into my hotel room bed as well as playing in the elevator, annoying the concierge during my stops at the lobby in between the half-dozen or so trips from the basement to the top floor.
Hey, don't judge. Everyone needs something to amuse themselves.
Upon leaving Lugano, we finally arrived in Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Hot and dry were my first impressions of that place that my then-limited vocabulary could conjure up. Though I had never been any other places than Chicago and Philadelphia before, Iran didn't seem all that foreign to me. Sure, most of the signs in the airport had multiple languages printed on them, but they also had english markings. Everyone was speaking a language I couldn't understand and some of the signs ony had strange swirly markings on them that my still-developing brain only could interpret as "Jig, jig, jiggla". Previously, I had never even heard of Farsi, let alone having seen its written form, nor Arabic or any of the other languages of that region.
Chapter 2
Having been such a young age back then and now that 38 years have passed since then, I don't have a whole lot in the way of contiguous memory of my time over there. It's more in bits and pieces of significant events that I will share as they come bubbling up to the surface.
Once we got settled in Isfahan, it was in a small house surrounded by a walled courtyard. It seemed that this was the common arrangement for houses in the region. The building was a two-story with us on the ground floor and our landlord (a new term I had learned) was upstairs. Our landlord's name, as I recall, was a Mister Borbor (sp?) who didn't seem to understand a word of english. I remember one day when I had forgotten my key to the gate and was trying to talk to him on the intercom outside to get him to let me in. He definitely didn't speak english. I don't think it was long before my mom came home, so it wasn't a big deal.
At one point, we adopted a dog and named him Ben (short for Benji). I'm not sure what his lineage was exactly, but he was just like the dogs we saw running loose around the neighborhood. The locals called them "Jube Dogs" and the common trait between all of them seemed to be a curly tail. One day, we noticed that Ben had gotten out of the courtyard by slipping under the gate. We found him the first time he did this, but the second time, less than a week later, we never saw him again. It was only until some time after that I found out that sometimes people around there would kill and eat dogs. I don't want to sound heartless or anything but we really didn't have Ben long enough for me to become really attached to him, so I pretty much just shrugged and moved on with my life at that point.
We didn't stay in the house for very long though and I sure didn't lose any sleep after saying a final farewell to our beloved landlord.
The new place we moved into was another two-story house, but it was ours and we had the run of the place. I had both my own bedroom and a playroom that was somewhat detached from the rest of the house. Naturally, the playroom was almost instantaneously strewn with toys from wall to wall.
This time, instead of another dog, we adopted a cat. He was a tuxedo-pattern kitty we named Peppermint Patty (Pepper for short). Well, I say "We" but it was really my mom who named him. Having never experienced living with a cat in the house, I was pretty much indifferent to Pepper so, naturally, he wanted to be wherever I was most of the time.
Another significant event I can remember from that house is waking up at some ridiculously late hour and I thought I could hear voices whispering. They seemed to fade away down the hall from my room, so what else could seven-year-old me do but follow them? I went downstairs to the living room and sat in one of the chairs down there where I could still hear the whispers. I don't remember anything they actually said, but maybe being that it was in Iran, maybe they were speaking Farsi. I don't know. After a while, the whispers faded away and I just fell asleep in the chair. I never heard them again.
The house had a basement with a gas water heater heater in it. The reason I know this is a friend of my dad, this guy named Ed Moorehead, was trying to fix something wrong with it and wound up burning off his eyebrows and the hair on one of his arms. He managed to fix the water heater though, so I'd consider that a fair trade.
I had a friend named Matt who went to the same American school with me. We were thick as thieves. When we weren't complying with some requirement of our parents, we were wandering around the neighborhood, doing the things that kids our age do when allowed to run free. One of the places we went was into the apartment buildings down the other side of the street from where I lived. We used to climb up the stairs all the way to the roof and jump from building to building across the roof. The building at the end was under construction at the time and we used to go over there in the afternoons and visit with the construction crew working on the building. We still had a language barrier to deal with but they were kind enough to share their afternoon tea with us from time to time. There was one occasion when we were at that building and had gone up to the roof where some of the guys were working. When we got bored with that, we went to go back down the stairs and there was a guy there whom we had never seen before. He was only speaking Farsi to us but he seemed angry about something. Maybe it was just us being there in the first place or maybe something else. We didn't hang around long enough to find out. He blocked us from going into the stairwell and kept yelling at us all the while, so we just turned around and ran to the far side of the roof, vaulted the parapet and landed on the roof of the neighboring building. We then jumped the next three buildings until we got to the one at the end where we knew the rooftop door was left unlocked. Once there, we made good our escape and never went back to that construction site.
