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Persia or Iran? |
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 by David Silverman, September 28, 2007 |
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Persia: Not Ahmadinejad's IranMy girlfriend is Persian, which is a nice way of saying "Iranian" if you live in America and want to draw a line between yourself and, say, ululating, consulate storming terrorists and elected Holocaust deniers. I'm serious. I believe it is this distinction that allows her brother, who is an actor, to get parts on Law and Order as an evil doctor or evil TV executive rather than being put in a long beard and told his character is planning to blow up mini-malls in Totowa.
Apparently, 6' 2" Persians are even harder to cast on TV than Mexicans. Or, as George Lopez, who's show was replaced by "Caveman," which is based on the Geico ad character, put it, "So a Chicano can't be on TV, but a caveman can?"
Of course, anyone who would confuse my girlfriend, a North Carolina born, Ivy-league educated lawyer who works for a bank with a terrorist would be the kind of person who doesn't doubt that Bin Laden has Totowa's famed Holiday Inn high on his list. ("They provided transportation to the mall.")
But growing up in the South in the '70s, she faced the pressure of being lumped in with the students holding Americans hostage--this despite her parents having moved to the US to avoid exactly the same extremist Islamic government.
Calling yourself "Persian" was the only recourse. Either people could understand the reason for distancing oneself from Iranian politics, or they simply had no idea where Persia was anymore than Paraguay. Either way, conflict avoided.
However the issue hasn't gone away and it's the same as it always has been: racism. It's what keeps Carlos Mencia on TV making the kind of fat, gay, black, Asian, Mexican, Jewish, jokes that frat boys, anonymous website commenters, and Beavis and Butthead enjoy. At least Beavis and Butthead was supposed to be ironic.
It's the same thing that Jewcy has been pointing out about the ADL selecting which kinds of genocides qualify as "mean spirited enough" to be real genocide.
There's no point trying to shut up the idiots, but at least we can call their bluff and remind them that they are what they are. On a trip to Australia an old man I'd met said to me, "New York City? You know there are 3 million Jews there?"
"No," I responded, "Actually, there's 2,999,999, because I'm here with you."
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David Silverman is the author of Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost $4 Million. His other achievements include captain of his college computer programming team and high school chess team, and, if prodded only slightly, |
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Anonymous
I dig exotic chicks.
Anonymous
just in case someone is wondering. The name persia comes from one of the western provinces called pars. people to the west mislabled the whole country persia even though that is only one province. its a bit like calling the netherlands holland, even though holladn is only one part of the netherlands, or calling the UK England.
the name Iran comes from the word Aryan. yes, like the germans, iranians (and afghanis by the way) consider themsleves aryan.
Anonymous
It's rather more complicated and rather less settled, Anonymous. Some of the Wikipedia articles on this topic are quite good (and some are not; but see generally "Iran naming dispute" and "Persian language" and "Persian people").
That the Persian language is called that (in Persian Farsi, and certainly not "Ayrani"), for instance matters.
That the Persian people is an identifiable ethnic group, much of which lives within modern Iran; and that many citizens of modern Iran are not, in fact, of Persian ethnicity, matters as well.
Here is a good summary
http://www.iran-heritage.org/interestgroups/iranorpersia1.htm
Anonymous
just to be clear, i am the second poster above.
yes the language is called farsi, which is a cognate of persain and again comes from the western province of pars (the p and the f sounds are often interchanged because we get many of our words describing the Middle East from arabic which does not have a p). it was once said that a language is a dialect with an army. this can be applied to farsi in Iran. it was one but by no means the only dialect spoken in iran. similar to the way tuscani became the official dialect of italy and is now known as italian, pars became to officially accepted dialect and therefore the official language of iran. while the language is called farsi or persian by iranians, the country is not called persia in farsi, it is called iran. when reza shah asked the international community to begin using Iran instead of persia in the 1930's, he was only asking the rest of the world to call the country by the name that its residents use. the name persia is just as historically inaccurate as calling the UK england, despite the rich history of each of those countries. i use wikipedia all the time so i dont want to seem like i am belittling it...i am not... but my knowledge on this subject comes from years of study, not the internet.