Where We Are This Week
The world loses its finest butcher and with him, all morality, but we lightened the mood with a poem about the Monaco Grand Prix.
Bob Dylan had it. Joan Didion, too. Why don’t we?
At the risk of turning this newsletter into a shrine of devotion to my musical and literary heroes (see above), I’ll forge ahead with my examples.
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion cut through the flowery haze of the counterculture movement of the Sixties to expose the deeply deluded devotees that existed at the core of the ideology. What was billed as a revolution of love and expansion of the mind was in sharp contrast to the San Franciscan scene Didion documented; glorified slums and the dosing of children called ‘high kindergarten.’
Not one to mince words, her essay on the end of the sixties revealed the movement to have been a massively misguided, and at times abusive, failure in cultural reformation despite its popularity amongst celebrities and artists — many of whom were Didion’s peers.
In Bob Dylan’s haunting, pseudo-Western 1976 album Desire, he professed the innocence of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter on the opening track titled ‘Hurricane.’ At the time, Carter was serving a life sentence for a triple murder of which he was found guilty in 1967. In the year of the album’s release, Carter was granted a retrial but the charges and sentencing were upheld.
Dylan correctly surmised that the former professional middleweight boxer was maliciously convicted; the racism of the prosecution and all-white jury was used as justification for the verdict in lieu of actual evidence. In 1985, after two decades in jail, the Federal District Court of New Jersey agreed with Bob Dylan and Carter’s defense; it overturned the sentence and set free a 48-year-old Rubin Carter.
Moral clarity is a phrase that we’re seeing quite a lot these days. Dylan and Didion’s exhibition of the trait certainly didn’t begin or end with the examples I just laid out for you. Both iconoclasts remained just that, unwavering in their opinions of topics that ranged from conservatism and religious beliefs to Israel, Reagan, and the Bush administration. Unmoved by public sentiment or the blowing of the wind, they consistently maintained positions of moral objectivity. So, again, what are the rest of us doing?
The war in Ukraine has seen many right-wingers, first-timers in the anti-war camp, overcorrect into a pro-Russia stance. The events of October 7th in Israel have deranged whole generations into taking openly pro-Hamas positions. Remember the TikTok trend of siding with Bin Laden? None of those conflicts are terribly difficult to tease apart for those of us who still have a moral compass but even the most rational of citizenries could be forgiven for getting swept up in propaganda and emotion every once in a while.
The troubling thing is just that — it’s not every once in a while anymore; having no moral clarity is the new modus operandi of the American and Western public writ large. In many cases, taking a neutral stance that isn’t ‘I have no idea’ isn’t morally neutral. For instance, if you were alive in the pre-Civil War South and were well aware of the practice of slavery yet claimed to have no preference for the status quo or the abolitionist movement, that neutral stance has no legs on which to stand; it’s vile.
It can be enough to plead ignorance but when that ignorance has been remedied, neutrality is no longer an option. What we’re seeing today, however, are Western institutions feigning ignorance to maintain positions of disingenuous neutrality or thinly veiled iniquity.
Now, that I’ve sufficiently buried the lede, for a few hundred words, I’ll introduce the main topic for today’s discussion: the death of Ebrahim Raisi.
Ebrahim Raisi, affectionately known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’, died in a helicopter crash in the Azerbaijani mountains near the border of Iran this past weekend. Raisi earned his nickname the old-fashioned way — by ordering the execution of thousands of political prisoners held by the Iranian regime in the late 1980s. Of course, he’s done his best to keep up appearances by regularly sanctioning the abuse and killing of protestors and the odd girl who fails to wear her hijab correctly.
Raisi, when speaking of his role in the executions of 1988 during a lecture as president in 2018, said that he regarded the series of killings as "one of the proud achievements of the system." These are the words the former president of Iran used to describe the torture, abuse, and public executions of thousands of his own citizens. The death sentences were so numerous and carried out so expediently that many dissidents were hanged by forklifts and cranes. This likely had about as much to do with pragmatism and a shortage of gallows as it did to frighten the public into submission.
One would think that when a man such as this dies, despite how unfortunate it is that it wasn’t at the hands of the people to whom he’d been so cruel, it would be met with celebration. I expected a chorus of ‘ding dong, the witch is dead’ from all major political parties and Western institutions. Where’s Glenda? Where are the munchkins?
Instead, Raisi’s much-deserved extermination has been met with tepid condolences and bewildering sympathy from media and governments alike. Within hours of Raisi’s untimely demise (only because it wasn’t sooner) the United States State Department issued a statement offering Iran its ‘official condolences’ on the passing of its president.
The BBC headline described Raisi’s legacy as ‘mixed.’ In this Reuters article on the helicopter crash and his death, it takes them 16 paragraphs before they allude to how evil of a person we’re all going to miss — only describing him as a ‘hardliner’ in the preceding text.
It gets worse.
The United Nations Security Council held a moment of silence for the man who was viewed as the successor to Supreme Leader Khamenei when he finally bites the dust. Inshallah. Why stop there though? At the UN’s American offices in New York City, they flew their flag at half-mast to display how sullen they were over this very serious, grievous event.
It gets worse.
The United States Senate held a moment of silence for that son of a bitch. I don’t care what diplomatic norms may suggest, there’s absolutely no reason that the likes of Chuck Schumer, John Fetterman, and Rand Paul ought to be meditating on the loss of a man whose greatest achievement was learning how to tie a noose. Schumer and Nancy Pelosi wore kente cloth scarves and kneeled for nine minutes to remember George Floyd during the most fun summer ever but now US lawmakers are going to behave as if American politics are an austere affair.
Raisi doesn’t deserve a moment of peace after death. American and Western politicians ought to be dancing in the streets in solidarity with the Iranian people and the families of the civilians he murdered.
I know what you’re thinking. It doesn’t get worse! It does.
The President of the United Nations General Assembly wrote to the Ayatollah with the good news that a plenary meeting of the UN will be held in New York City to ‘pay tribute’ to the legacy of the expired president of Iran. The United Nations of which the United States is a part. New York City, the place to which Raisi sent assassins to kill (unsuccessfully) Iranian-American journalist and dissident Masih Alinejad.
Not to be outdone, the New York Times reporter Farnaz Fassihi (an American citizen who reports on Iran/Israel relations and the Middle East in general) was caught on a hot mic urging her fellow journalists not to interview the ‘crazy’ Masih.
To their credit, lawmakers Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell have come out with very strong statements condemning the former Iranian president and the feckless responses issued by the government; a point of view that seems to be decreasing in popularity as the days go by.
Moral clarity hasn’t just become an endangered species, it’s being hunted into extinction. What Didion and Dylan teach us is that observers are obligated to make distinctions of the moral and ethical variety when presented with the opportunity. A society that fails to do so will go the way of Ebrahim Raisi, humiliated by disaster, relegated to the annals of history, and soon to be forgotten.
Unfortunately, the death of Raisi likely won’t be bringing about the liberation of the Iranian people. Though his demise was sorely overdue, the seat of power in the Persian state lies with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. The president will be replaced by another subservient, bellicose individual who will hope to succeed the Supreme Leader when he dies and finds no paradise waiting for him.
This is why it’s imperative that the West must unequivocally denounce the Iranian regime and resist the perverse urge to soften Raisi’s brutal legacy. The president may be dead but the Iranian dreams of political freedom aren’t.
In case you’ve read this far and think I may have been sitting on the fence the whole time, I’ll close with this. Ebrahim Raisi is dead. One down, one to go.
I’m not used to openly wishing for the death of another person on here — or in general for that matter. So, let’s not end this week on that note, yeah?
Last year, I wrote about the Monaco Grand Prix and why it’s the most spectacular event in sports. The race weekend starts today (Friday) and the Grand Prix will be held on Sunday. If you’d like a refresher on why I think you should tune in this weekend, you can read it here.
This year, in honor of the 19 turns of the Monaco circuit, I offer you a 19-line poem to celebrate the weekend.
Circuit de Monaco
my imagination captured and calendar marked
where the cars hiss blithely around hairpins
the place where I'd live if I couldn't afford taxes
but wanted to and drink well and sleep better
the tunnel where the robber was caught
the swimming pool and champagne for the victor
the casino for Bond and the luminescent hands of Stefan Zweig
and the grandstands for the otherwise wealthy commoners
the place I've wondered but never been
but heard clumsily explained by a son to his dad
'you just fly to Nice, then drive over' he says, no problem
the smell of rubber carried by the mist of the Mediterranean
78 chances to convince yourself you're not a schmuck
that you choose not to own a yacht and go sailing
that a life of Pirelli et Perrier is all pretense
which the vibrations promptly rattle away
and the horses stampede the corridors and chicanes
and saddled by your most indulgent of dreams
Monaco, merci, bonne chance, merciTo a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA