THE WALL
I'm standing outside in front of the wall. I'm exhausted and I'm hot, which for me is rarely a good thing. Bri is standing off to the side, dressed head to toe in full black hijab, looking around a bit nervously and our guide, M, is moving me swiftly into place to take any pictures I may want.
We're in Iran. Bri and I have just arrived after a combined seventeen hours of flight. It's hot as hell. And in what seems like the single blink of an enormous and exhausted eye since leaving Brooklyn, we now find ourselves in Tehran standing in front of a giant mural that reads “DEATH TO AMERICA”.
It’s October 2008 and I’m riding shotgun as a part of BriAnna Olson’s “Send My Love To Iran” project.
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UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IS GLOBAL SECURITY
The origins of this trip and this project trace back a bit more than 2 years earlier. The year is 2006, the 5th year anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.
A 20 year old Bri has moved into The Cloud Club in Boston, joining a long, oft-sordid list of artists, inventors, explorers and outsiders, myself included. She comes brandishing a strange and beautiful kind of self that involves UFOs, angels, film production and political activism, and a wide smile that seems to embrace potential in all its forms.
The war in Afghanistan rages on America’s back pages, as the war in Iraq now captures the daily headlines, hearts and minds of a bickering nation. The so-called masterminds of 911 remain at large and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, you know, the ones that launched a second full-scale invasion by the last super power on earth… Well, they seemingly don’t exist. Good one GW.
It’s September, and Bri, as plugged-in-interwebby-super-
At this point Bri and I have had countless all-night discussions – Those beautiful, endless drunken debates about life, love and the pursuit of SuperAwesomeness.
Often in these discussions, motivated, it seems at the time, by my perceived indifference to it all, we find ourselves debating the virtues of ‘Protesting’ something versus the virtues of ‘Proclaiming’ something, the virtues of ‘Doing’ something versus the virtues of ‘Being’ something’. At any moment we each dance from one side of the debate to the other, often collapsing in a shared belief that the veil between ‘doing’ and ‘being’ is so thin as to be ultimately un-debatable. That of course is a story for another bar altogether.
The story here is that 3am Sept 11, 2006, unbeknownst to almost all, Bri gets on a bus bound for New York City. She is armed only with a video camera and a small homemade sign that reads: “Unconditional Love Is Global Security”.
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A SIGN AT GROUND ZERO
It's a simple and potent statement, possessing the kind of cosmically informed naivete that has proven so important in my own life.
"Unconditional Love is Global Security".
I find myself unsurprised that Bri has somehow divined this phrase - a phrase so perfectly summing up the graceful idealism of humanity gone right. I've been learning over time that Humanity Gone Right is one of her specialties.
Talking with her about it later, she denies any sense of great epiphany or even any sense that this sign - this idea - would put so many elements into motion. It was, she describes, a far more benign moment. She needed a sign. She dug up some markers and bought herself poster board and a bus ticket with what little cash she had. When it was time to actually make the sign - to choose what the sign would actually say... She sort of, just kind of, ended up writing that phrase, barely pausing before grabbing her bag and heading for the bus.
Stay with me here, because this is all coming back to Iran right quick.
Cut to Ground Zero, September 11th. Bri eschews the protest groups while simultaneously eschewing the sidelines. She opts instead to quietly hold her sign at Ground Zero: a proclamation, a promise and an action. She has also decided to video tape peoples responses. These tapes later become her video piece "A Sign at Ground Zero".
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THEM
Herein lies the moment of truth or at least one moment from an endless stream of truths.
A couple turns and sees Bri and her sign. An older couple. A white couple in their sixties. I have seen this archetype before: Affluent, well educated New York liberals. It is my high school math teacher and that Bitch from the co-op board with too much time on her hands and too many self-righteous ideas. Ah but I tip my hand.
Spoiler alert: Partial transcript from "A Sign at Ground Zero" below. For the sake of followibility I have dubbed the woman Curdled Milk Lady (There I go tipping my hand again).
CML: "I wish you were in Tehran. With your sign... No I wish you had that freedom... If that's all it takes, take it to them..." (She glares)
Her pigeon-head husband starts sputtering around for something clever and wise to say - Poor bastard. Can't imagine that working out very often with her around. I will now officially refer to him as Pigeon Head or - PH - for short.
CML: "...Where they don't have the freedom to do what you're doing". (Pausing, Glaring, Smirking, Glaring)
PH: "It's a good idea... The fact is it just doesn't work" (Condescending smile for a misguided young girl)
Bri: (off cmera) "You don't think maybe some day?"
CML: "Well why don't you start in Tehran and come back and tell us about it".
PH: (interrupting his wife which surprises me he doesn't get slapped) "No!"
CML: "Because you have the freedom here to do this...You do that in Tehran and... "
Curdled Milk Lady drags her hand across her throat making a cutting sound.
CML: "You're dead." (Posture "You heard me.")
PH: "And you don't have any answer to that question. You just believe in this fairy tale that is not gonna happen"
Pigeon Head has put his hand on his wife's shoulder as if to say "Let me handle this dear" - I think he's feeling out manned at this point by his wife, as she has jumped directly to head chopping from unconditional love, which you know, no accounting for taste.
Bri "Ever?"
PH: "Never."
CML: "You come back from Tehran..."
PH: "There will always be evil in this world... You know that..."
Bri: "Is that for real?"
PH: "Yes."
Bri: "You think so?"
PH: "Absolutely"
CML: "Where was World War 2? Where was World War 1?... And this is now. And you come back from Tehran and you meet me at my apartment in Battery Park City... With that smile... and tell me what love you felt over there....
Pigeon Head has kept his finger on his wife's shoulder the entire time, and begins to mutter and stumble for something to say, and I realize that he isn't saying "I'll handle this", because he doesn't want to be out -manned, it's because she is secretly Bruce Banner AKA The Hulk, and if she continues to get riled up she's going to swell into a bulbous green rage and start smashing everything in sight. And really, who really needs that?
He goes on sputtering away finally re-finding the word "fairy tale" which apparently is a keeper for him the way Tehran is the word of the day for Curdled Milk Lady. He informs Bri that it "simply is never going to happen."
PH: "You cannot do Unconditional Love because there are those that will not do the same as you would like to see."
(Which technically we would call "Conditional Love". Just for the record).
CML: "Which is a wonderful thought, just take it to them first... Because you can walk here all you want."
PH: "And that does no constructive good. That sign."
He touches her shoulder again as if to say let's go. But Oh no. We know who's really in charge here pal. Don't even try it.
CML: "Where these people lost their people. We almost lost our daughter." She turns dramatically and storms off. Okay pal. Now you can go.
There is so much material here for my taste in commentary that I spin with satirical possibilities. For the sake of forward motion - because we have a lot of story to cover, I distill things to this.
Iran, by all accounts including that of the governing administration of the time, had nothing to do with 911. It is most commonly believed that it was done by a bunch of Saudi Arabians working out of Afghanistan though of course there are some that believe it to be the US government for a host of different reasons. All said and done there seem very few that think Iranians had anything to do with it. Until now.
Now, here is this clearly well educated woman, living in Battery Park City which speaks to a minimal wealth much higher than the minimal wealth of many others, standing at the base of Ground Zero, on the 5th anniversary of 911 making blanket statements about Iran as if there is a direct correlation between the two.
In truth - this is all me, about to go off on a long discourse about media manipulation and the unification of masses in the name of patriotism against a common enemy in order to subjugate their exercising of free will. Again a story for another bar.
The much shorter story is this. As Bri and I watched the footage back in Boston, she says to me "The woman really scared me".
"She was fucking aggressive" I say "I can understand".
Bri says, "No. I wasn't scared of her. She really scared me with those stories of Iran. I was really scared that if I were to ever go there I would be killed".
It wasn't five days later Bri comes walking into my place announcing she has decided to go to Iran.
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Bri has a quiet kind of moxi. It got her out of Sherard Illinois, population 700 a year and a half early for college, got her studying film abroad in England, and onto a boat that took her halfway around the world to China, Japan and a host of other strange places by the time she was 18. In fact, shortly after I first met her she took off by herself on a secret mission to Egypt to discover the UFO hidden under the Sphynx and later took off solo for Mexico because - well - she doesn't like cold weather.
Now that same kind of moxi has brought us here, standing outside the U.S. Den of Espionage in Tehran, more commonly known by us as the former U.S. Embassy. It was here, in 1979, a group of Iranian students as supporters of the Islamic Revolution, seized the embassy, capturing and holding hostage 53 U.S. citizens for 444 days. It was what American news stations would dub “The Iran Hostage Crises”.
I was 16 when the embassy was seized and the drama that played out for more than a year was felt through out the nation. The energy crisis, a military made seemingly impotent, sordid stories of a CIA sponsored coup d'etat, a failed rescue attempt costing the lives of American soldiers, all of which would ultimately spell defeat for a sitting U.S. presidency.
M has just finished telling us that no tourists are allowed to take pictures of the old U.S. Den of Espionage and that especially Americans would get in real trouble if caught by the soldiers now working inside.
"For spying" He clarifies.
"Good to know".
He then walks us to this one section of wall, the one with the especially virulent anti-american murals, and says "Here you can take pictures"
"Really?" I say a bit skeptically.
"Yes. The video cameras cannot see you here"
"The cameras that go to the soldiers in the Den of Espionage?"
"Yes"
"That if they saw us they would come arrest us"
"Yes"
"For spying"
"Yes, but, the video cameras cannot see you here"
"Oh really?"
"Yes."
Thanks pal. I've known this guy all of about an hour and this would actually be bit intimidating if it wasn't so comical. In truth we've paid the travel agency in advance, so - I'm running through my head - no skin off their nuts if Bri and I get arrested within 2 hours of landing. In fact, not a bad racket. Line up tourists, paid in full, take them to the wall, urge them to take pictures, wave goodbye, take the rest of the week off.
Bri is having none of it and rightfully so, but never one to abandon skills learned in my misspent youth, I rise to the challenge, pulling out my camera and clicking away, quite confident I have no idea what I'm getting myself into. What I do know is that people walking by the mural have passed this mural so many times they've forgotten what on earth is there worth photographing. It is all quite surreal, the heat, the exhaustion, the history, the mural, the dress Bri is wearing, the people walking nonchalantly by, the threat of possible arrest...
I click away and pack it up. No cops. No soldiers, no spies, just me, Bri and our guide and with our first broken law, we have now officially arrived in Tehran.
