Talk about your blogfathers! Iranian President Ahmadinejad has taken to blogging. As relayed by the Guardian‘s Brian Whittaker (the site is down at this writing), the first (and so far only) entry is pretty ho-hum. (No “Wanker of the Day,” no “Yglesias Award,” no Bush-bashing, no “Cheers and Jeers,” no “Why oh why can’t we have a better…Council of Guardians?” — at least not yet.)
After my birth – the fourth one in the family,” Ahmadinejad writes, “my family was under more pressures.
My father had finished six grade of elementary school. He was a hard-bitten toiler blacksmith, a pious man who regularly participated in different religious programs. Even though never the dazzling look of the world was appealing to him, but the pressure of the life caused that he decided to migrate to Tehran when I was one year old. We chose to live in south central part of Tehran where is called Pamenar.
He concludes, teasingly.
I will continue this topic later on as it took long in the beginning. From now onwards, I will try to make it shorter and simpler. With hope in God, I intend to wholeheartedly complete my talk in future with allotted fifteen minutes.
Whittaker is unmoved.
All this underlines the fact that Ahmadinejad doesn’t really get the point of blogging. A presidential blog is almost a contradiction in terms: blogs represent the voice of ordinary people, not politicians who are pretending to be ordinary people. And of course ordinary people who blog in Iran and other parts of the Middle East risk ending up in jail.
I say give him time to, you know, find his voice.
