Iranian Government Stupidity
If you can’t suppress a population’s beliefs or traditions or language, the only thing left is to destroy their land and their historical objects. That’s what the Iranian government is doing to the people of Gilan province and their ancient trees:
[T]he authorities have ordered the cutting down of dozens of two-centuries-old mulberry trees in the northern Gilan province under the pretext of fighting local superstitions. Some people are placing candles and ribbons under them as part of an ancient ritual. It seems that the Iranian judiciary issued an order to stop this by cutting down the old trees.
The American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote about another tree massacre, one caused by a vulgar fool who sold his land to an oil company:
The War Against the Trees
The man who sold his lawn to Standard Oil
Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show
While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,
Tested the virtue of the soil
Under a branchy sky
By overthrowing first the privet-row.Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids
Were but preliminaries to a war
Against the great-grandfathers of the town,
So freshly lopped and maimed.
They struck and struck again,
And with each elm a century went down.All day the hireling engines charged the trees,
Subverting them by hacking underground
In grub-dominions, where dark summer’s mole
Rampages through his halls,
Till a northern seizure shook
Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.I saw the ghosts of children at their games
Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,
And while the green world turned its death-foxed page
And a red wagon wheeled,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts
The club-roots bared their amputated coils,
Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars
Cried Moon! on a corner lot
One witness-moment, caught
In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.
The people of Gilan province should gather up every chip and branch they can find and make tools and works of art from them, and pass these on to their descendants. And they should especially take seeds and cuttings from the trees so that some day, when the local fools are out of power, a new generation of wishing trees can be planted to take the place of the old.
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