Revolutionary Road

If you're just tuning in and bewildered by the amount of material on the Dish about the latest events in Iran, all we can suggest is that you catch up by going back to the first post on Saturday night, and clicking forward through the cascading, successive events.

One thing a chronological blog can convey is a sense of passing time, of how events can galvanize each other, how small moments of tension can slowly grow into major crises. It was clear to me that something was deeply awry when I saw the video of Khatami's speech being surrounded by brownshirt militia. Go watch that scene: you will feel the chill of terror and tyranny in that room. From then on, moment by moment, the emotional wave moved forward. It cannot be summarized, because it was history.

Start here if you want to capture its flavor - raw, unconfirmed, chaotic but real flavor. Exercize skepticism: sometimes even what you see with your bare eyes is misleading. But it unfolds like a movie. Start here.

For me, the iconic image - of so many - is the one at the top of this post: a baseej switching sides and being carried aloft by the crowd. Proof of this can be found here. And my favorite quote of the day is a simple one, the kind that a New Yorker might make:

"Are you only brave on your motorbike, you piece of shit?!"