Wampum

I watched Jackie Beninion's "Iran: Going Nuclear" on PBS, last night, aired during AIPAC's sweeps week in Washington City. I missed the "Blair Witch Project", but what I saw seemed similar to what I know about that project -- "art film" sequences of scenes shot from moving cars, views of Tehran, Isfahan (conversion from U3O8 to UF6), and Natanz (U-235 enrichment from .7% to 3.5% to 5%) and the Bushehr reactor (conversion into fuel rods and element assemblies) in winter -- cars on urban streets, Iraq-Imposed War memorial signage used to frame shots, some satallite images available at John Pike's globalsecurity.org, interviews with IAEA staff who don't do interviews, and of course, the fish that got away. The 19 minutes of bad travelog. I was laughing my ass off at the end.

Here's the key moment:

So they opened our cases, started throwing our stuff around. There were six guys, apparently from the security services, and they confiscated our phones and told our translator to leave. I was really worried, protesting through our translator that we needed him to be able to communicate, and one of the men laughed at me. "Mr. Kenyon," he said, "We all speak English."
I was presented with a weird kind of social etiquette question: do you laugh back, or don't you? I decided to be completely formal. "Why don't you speak English with us, then?" I asked.
"We hate the English," he said. Finally they took all our tapes and sent us back to our hotel.

Jackie didn't get it. Iranians really do wrap up conversations about what's wrong with Iran with "Its all because of the English." He was lower down on the social totem pole than undocumented Urdu, Hindi and Bengali speakers with shopping carts of baggage at Heathrow and he was so clueless he couldn't appreciate the humor in the exchange, or show a spark of wit, a la "We English didn't do so bad with Reza Shah."

I'm not likely to get a grant to go to Tehran with a crew and shoot footage and then assemble the footage into a third of an hour tutorial on anything intended for an audience that ranges from Air Force photo interpretation and targeting inventory specialists to Peace Action Maine activists, and all the persons in various persistent vegetative states between those two sample sets, but I think I could do better. I actually watched the show because I thought the production team would use footage produced and commercially available from several major content sources during the government sponsored walk-through six weeks ago -- footage of the facilities, not jerky through-a-fogged-up-moving-car-window approach shots of garden variety WWII style anti-aircraft gun positions and wire fences. The Rice-bots at Foggy Bottom can say running 50 journalists through the set of facilities was just a media event, but they at least don't pretend it didn't happen and that they don't have the footage too. BTW, the BBC had a reporter on that particular bus.

It was wicked underwhelming.

Then there was their purpose statement -- "... what our program set out to do was offer a look at the Iranian point of view: that Iran has an absolute right to a nuclear energy program..." I was reminded of the famous exchange between a Kersan woman and an academic. "We have a corn song. I will not teach it to you." The exchange is famous because the academic expected, because he was saving Indian culture, making a living out of it, that he'd get it all. He he he.

Twenty minutes of interviews with Iranians, women and men, in Los Angeles, Germany, and Iran, about gender, about the reform movement, about Islam and social justice, about businesses and moneymakers, about the record of the 6th and election of the 7th Majlis, and the records of the 5th and 6th (Rafsanjani) and 7th and 8th (Khatami) Presidents, and the election of the 9th, and Ayatollah Khamenei, that could be more interesting than yet another 19 minute Kevin Costner epic about the Sioux, even if the Tribal Police hadn't bagged most of the stock when the crew tried to sneak off reservation.

The final show of the hour was worth the wait. The pottery of Juan Quezada and his atalier in the village of Mata Ortiz. We did a lot of "ooh" and "aah" during that slice of the pie.