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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Broken Teeth
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It is a longstanding tradition, whose origins are apocryphal today. Part of it stems from a question of chickens and eggs, a question I profess no aptitude for deciphering. The Ayatollah Khomeini had a saying, and he used variations over time, but when a government formed in his absence, he said he would kick their teeth in. When people later he sought to demonstrate against his government, he told them they would desist, that “Otherwise I will break your teeth.”
I trace this back to an old tradition- but you are not one for tradition and history; perhaps you will know it from American West movies. Do you know why they execute men who take horses? It is because without a horse, a man has no movement, no livelihood; in the West, without the horse the man cannot survive. To take a horse was to take a life, slowly. Of course, we don’t get about by horse anymore, and to take away a man’s car is not the same. But depriving a man of survival, without killing him outright, requires only the breaking of teeth. Teeth can be fixed, or diets can be supplemented, but both require money and access that can easily be denied. I do not know, as I said, whether Khomeini demanded it, or if his interrogators took his words for meaning, or perhaps it was merely Allah’s serendipity, but the practice was taken up by the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. Formally, it is the ultimate interrogation method, performed only by a single expert, known less formally as the Ayatollah’s tooth breaker. To his great credit, Khomeini remembered the students. They lifted him up in his exile, and it was standing on their shoulders that he pushed the Shah out. It was they who cleared out the “den of spies” and humiliated the Americans with their hostages. And it was also they who opposed him after, and pushed for democracy and called him an autocrat; it was they who forced him to break their teeth. There were those who feared his successor, Khamenei, might overturn the practice, but we soon learned that there were always teeth to be broken. My time in the post started under Khamenei, and following the advice of my predecessors, I sought my own way and method. Eventually I settled on a hammer; precision, accuracy, durability, yet cheap to replace. But in one specific way if not for others I am like Khomeini: I have not forgotten the students, like you. So you will tell me the name of the man who organized that protest; otherwise, I will break your teeth. |
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