Why I Visited Iran (as an American tourist)
I went to Iran in June 2018 because I knew this day might come. I knew there might be a time when my nation was moving toward war with Iran and the noise of disinformation would threaten to drown out everything else. I wanted to have my own first hand-experiences to counter that.
Traveling there as an American was difficult. At the airport in Tehran an immigration officer pulled me aside for a private interview then handed me off to another government official. Ali carried a binder with him with a photo of me on the cover — the same photo I had to submit to the government as part of my visa application. Within a few minutes of meeting Ali, he causally showed off that he had done his research.
“Your book’s title is Illegal, right?”
“Do you still use Bitcoin?”
His questions were rhetorical; he had the answers in his binder.
Ali was my tour guide and translator, but I always thought of him as my government minder. He was the one who told me I could only visit certain places; he was the one who made sure I never spent time alone with other Iranians I met; he was the one who reported what we had done each day to a supervisor in Tehran.
Those restrictions made all the small interactions I had that much more meaningful though. The Air Force pilot in the park who invited me to join his family picnic; the women sitting next to me who shared her popcorn as we watched a World Cup game in an old movie theater; the two teenagers in our compartment on the overnight train who practiced English and taught me Farsi over games of Chess; or the taxi cab driver who turned to me as I was opening the door to leave and said: “America people my friend, only love. Government not me, not you. We only friends. America people friend. Iran people friend.” Ali told me he had talked the whole ride about how much he wanted to deliver a message of peace to me and was nervous his English wouldn’t be up to the task. I was the first American he had ever seen.
The image that defined the trip for me was when Ali and I were under the archway of a bridge whose river had run dry. A diverse set of people, mostly strangers to each other, had gathered to take advantage of the acoustics and the cool night air to sing together until a van full of police appeared and chased the crowd away. Humanity succumbing to fear.
Qasem Soleimani — the Iranian general killed in a US airstrike last week — and his government represented most people I met about as much as Donald Trump and his administration represent me. Very little.
You don’t have to travel to Iran to know the situation is much more nuanced than the propaganda we see on television. You don’t need taxi cab drivers to remind you that citizens often don’t agree with the politicians that lead them.
But we are all more susceptible to propaganda, nationalism and simplistic answers that make ‘us’ good and ‘them’ bad than we may want to admit. I traveled to Iran 18 months ago because I knew this day might come, and I knew having real memories of my own would be an antidote to what I saw on TV. I knew this day might come when I would be told that war is peace, that violence is salvation and I wanted to be sure I knew in the deepest parts of my body that was all bullshit, that the people pushing that narrative — in whatever uniform, in whatever language — were more my enemy than the people I met on the street in Iran.
