Ahmadinejad

It’s actually incredible but rarely is one in a political situation.  Mostly we are political agents passively, part of a politic, receiving information from the distilled resources of news, reading, watching TV.  The act of politics for most is sitting, silently, a half mast position.  Actively mute, watching.  We formulate conclusions that we rarely talk about publicly with friends or otherwise, no action, no talk, just thinking, about, you know, politics as delivered in the media.  On September 27^th I was on the corner of 55^th St. and 6^th Ave. amongst Iranian American protesters as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exited the Warwick Hotel to leave New York after the UN.  All week protesters had been telling me about his secret nuclear weapons, about public executions where people were either hung or stoned in the streets.  As the cars pulled away and the secret service men leaned out the windows with their sunglasses  on and their ear pieces in, the protestors waved giant flags and screamed ‘Ahmadinejad go to hell!’, their whole bodies were in it, shaking signs, leaning forward to yell making their whole bodies into trumpets shouting to the sky, at a man, not a god made by the media, all image and mystique, power without material form, no, the people shouted directly at a person.  True politics involves the body, and it involves the streets.  The political is a gesture, a movement, being seen, acting as an agent.  The crowd’s passion felt like fire on the back of my neck.  ‘This,’ I thought, ‘is the difference between civil and political rights, literally making a stand’.