A friend asks me if I’ll write about the latest violence between the United States and Iran. I tell him no: I am out of words. This is an era of machines killing machines , and humans are the ones who suffer the consequences. The lives of 170 children and their teachers depended on one president’s folly and indecision. What good were the words that came before ? What use will there be of the words that follow ?
Let’s look instead to the old stories, I tell him, the words learned in school and passed down across the generations.
The stories that those children carried with them into the darkness of their graves are the same stories that the men who give the orders, who issue the commands to fire missiles into the night sky, studied when they were children. These stories are as valuable as any offered by the current rotation of Iran experts. Stories make the present intelligible, as Washington and Tehran tumble towards a unimaginable future . Self-Defense against Giants Here are three parables drawn from Iran’s elementary school curriculum, lessons in self-defense and defiance as well as narratives of discretion, school-age stories that teach children the importance of restraint and reason as a way to avoid unnecessary violence.
“Way to Victory” is a fable for second graders about a desert flock whose lives are put at risk by a stomping and uncaring elephant. With their nests nearly all destroyed and the remainder of their unhatched eggs in jeopardy, many of the birds are ready to give up and abandon their homes.
But their leader implores his followers to stand up to their tormentor. “This desert is our vatan , our homeland,” he proclaims. “We have to protect our children.”
The other birds are hesitant. “But who can stand up to such a strong elephant?” they ask. “When we all work together,” the leader replies, “we can do anything.”
So, the birds set off together to meet the elephant face to face, to reason with him peacefully, to show him the error of his ways. It does not go well. The elephant loudly rejects their appeals. In possession of unstoppable strength, he trumpets that he can go wherever and do whatever he likes.
Without hesitation, without warning, the birds surround the elephant in concert, swarming and pecking at his eyes without mercy. Blind with arrogance, now made blind in the flesh, the doomed beast tumbles into a ditch, where he meets his demise. It is a gruesome scene with a vivid message for the young reader. When reason and patience fail to protect, violent attack is permitted. The weak once again prevail over the strong, albeit in a less violent fashion, in the ironically titled third-grade story, “The Strongest Bird in the World.” A mother sparrow, the eponymous “strongest bird,” is awoken from her slumber by (yet another!) elephant, ramming his head against the tree where she is caring for her brood. Despite her pleas that the elephant is putting her newly hatched chicks at risk of falling to their doom, he refuses to stop. As if this weren’t bad enough, the mother is unable to draw water from a nearby river because a crocodile is guarding it. Just like the elephant, the crocodile refuses to be persuaded by the mother’s peaceful appeal.
So, the mother turns to guile. She challenges the elephant to a contest of strength, a tug of war to determine who will possess the tree. Incredulous, the elephant accepts the offer, not realizing that at the other end of the rope is the crocodile, also fooled into participating in what appears to be an easy contest. The two pull and pull with all of their might, confounded that such a tiny bird would be in possession of such unexpected power. Representing the great powers of the world, unable to relent to the weak, the elephant and the crocodile are defeated by their mutual arrogance. “The Strongest Bird in the World” provides students with an allegory for how Iran navigates the real world, its post-revolutionary policy of defiant independence, of belonging to “ neither east nor west ,” born as much out of necessity as it is of ideology. The Importance of Self-Reliance Self-defense is impossible without self-reliance. This is the message of “Cow and Wolf.” Penned during the Shah’s reign and carried over by the new regime following the 1979 revolution, the second-grade story is part of a longstanding effort to impress upon young children the importance of standing on one’s own feet and of national strength in an anarchic world.
The lesson introduces the character of Amu Hussein, a simple farmer who wonders if the time has come to relieve his prized cow of its horns, which, although useful, have become a possible safety hazard. Before the farmer can make up his mind, a wolf takes advantage of Amu Hussein’s absence to attack the farm and pin his young daughter Mariam and a tiny calf against a tree. The family cow who nearly lost its horns comes to their rescue in the nick of time, fending off the wolf with ease. Elated by God’s protection and compassion, Amu Hussein marvels at how close he had almost come to disaster. “God,” he thinks to himself, “never does anything without a reason [and so he thanked] God that he had not cut off the cow’s horns.” Holy intervention and luck were no replacement, however, for prudence and preparation, as the questions that appear at the end of the lesson make abundantly clear:
What does the bee use for defense?
What does the dog use for defense?
What does the cat use for defense?
What does the human use for defense? The Stories Trump Tells Then there are the stories that the U.S. president tells himself. Trump announced on a Saturday morning that Iran had 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz or face the obliteration of its energy infrastructure, only to unilaterally extend the deadline by five days on the following Monday. Then on Thursday of that same week he extended the original extension by an additional 10 days, “per Iranian Government request” (the Iranian government denied any making any such request). He announces in the morning that a whole civilization will die by 8 at night. He declares at night, that same night, that the day is instead a big day for world peace, a golden age for the Middle East.
It’s impossible to know what happened to change Trump’s position. With this president, facts and narrative fiction fold into one another until they become indistinguishable, disappearing into a singularity of bullshit . His retelling renders indecipherable the full account of what took place behind the scenes in the situation room, or ahead of the online betting markets . But it’s clear that Iranians will continue to fight , and that they will do so because Iran is their homeland, because they are Iranians , regardless of who is in control of the country. The nation is at stake, and whether leftist, liberal, or Khomeinist, patriotic defense of the land is the default position, the big idea that holds the country together.
Like Amu Hussein, they will fight alone and on their own. Nearly a decade ago during one of the countless preludes to the current war, the novelist Salar Abdoh observed that “Members of the generation running the Iranian government and military…came of age during the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq war.” Writing in an essay that anticipated the present moment, Abdoh described how these same men “pushed expertise in asymmetrical warfare and a homegrown mastery of missile, cyber and drone technology because they saw no other way to have a fighting chance in their long struggle against the United States.”
In this extraordinary age, lives are saved and lost by the stories that television and TikTok relates to its most devoted audience member, a viewer who happens to be the most powerful person on the planet. The circumspect advice of a single cable news host proved decisive following Iran’s 2019 shootdown of an unmanned American drone, dissuading the president from stumbling into what would likely have become the biggest catastrophe of an already disastrous administration.
Those barriers are gone in the second term. NBC News reported last month that military aides present Trump with a daily video compilation of the “biggest, most successful strikes on Iranian targets over the previous 48 hours.” It is a curated snuff film, a two-minute palliative of hate for the chief executive’s distracted mind tailored for the urgency of executive time . With each day comes a new performance, an improvisation produced by and for a world class fabulist, who is both narrator of and audience for his own mendacity. One imagines him, telephone in hand, frantically rewinding the digital tape, his face inches away as he screams through the scrim of a screen.
What of the rest? What are the stories the Americans bring with them when they deploy? What sustains the drone pilot, seated in an unmarked and windowless room in the Nevada desert, or the naval officers gliding over the Bandar Abbas shoreline, guiding their crafts by the lights of fishing boats gently bobbing in the water below? What will they share with their children when this is all over?
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