Better Than War by iamak Vossoughi

Author:iamak Vossoughi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2015-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

1953

I might’ve been the only guy walking around through Jimmy’s Old Car Show and Picnic looking at all the big 1950s cars and thinking, I guess this is why they overthrew Mossadegh back in 1953 and brought back the Shah. It was funny because I looked at the American people and I knew that a lot of the ones who were alive back then didn’t know about it and a lot of the ones who weren’t alive didn’t know about it either, but there was nothing to do but look at their cars and look at their pride standing next to the shine of the chrome and want to tell them that if this was just a by-itself thing, if it didn’t go back to Iran and 1953 and to a lot of other places and times, I would be all for it, but it did go back to those places and times, so I could only be all for some part of it, which had more to do with seeing them than with seeing their cars. A person has more of a chance of looking like more than you see before you than a car.

I saw Jimmy drive by on his Park and Rec mower and called out to him.

“Shh,” he said. “This car show’s been around for eighteen years and most people still don’t know if there’s a real Jimmy or not. That’s the way I like it. Are you having fun?”

“Sure. I like looking at all the different people.”

“The people? The cars are the stars. That’s been my motto from the beginning. That’s why I don’t want anyone to know if there’s a real Jimmy. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to take their picture with me. Who needs it? The cars are the stars.”

“Okay, Fred.”

“That’s it.”

It’s a blues thing to be alive, and it’s a blues thing to be alive in America and to be from a country that you would’ve stayed in if it hadn’t been for what America had done to it. And it’s the funniest thing in the world to set out to tell Americans about that. I mean funny as in if you do set out to do that, you had better keep a laugh with you at all times.

Some men and women were leaning against cars from the fifties, and they were dressed in the style of the fifties. “What is it about the fifties?” I asked.

“It was before Vietnam,” said Jimmy, who’d been there.

I guessed he was right, but it was during a lot of things and after a lot of things too. Still, if you were going to be in America, you couldn’t let Americans see that you carried 1953 around with you all the time as an Iranian, just like you couldn’t let them see that you carried 1954 around with you all the time as a Guatemalan. You had to wait until it came up, and then you had to act like you suddenly just remembered. It’s a funny thing.

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