SKYSCRAPER HEAVENS
Introduction:
The title of the book is Skyscraper Heavens. Those two words came to mind before dawn the morning of December 31, 2014.
The skyscraper is a male-dominant image, a phallus, a challenging conception of engineers, developers and heads of law firms, banks and insurance companies. The skyscraper, or hi-rise, is prevalent in history [See, “Tower of Babel” Genesis 11:4 et seq., the necessity of shared resources of a unit or firm {e.g. a library or intelligence unit}, the World Trade Center attack, Manhattan, New York City, New York, September 11, 2001, as well as to objectify in concrete, glass and mirrored terms the concept of professional success in the industrial era; see also Marcuse, Herbert The One Dimensional Man (1964)]. The history of the modern hi-rise, perhaps beginning with the Eiffel Tower in 1889, includes prestige as a by-product of the partnered construction of hi-rise real estate by numerous parties: architects, builders, financiers, contractors, unions, and taxing authorities.
The dialogue in Skyscraper Heavens seeks to create a mosaic exposing dialectic themes of “opposition” and “containment”. Narration and dialogue weave into the backdrop of a 1978-1980 revolution in the fictitious Middle Eastern country of Baug. Khalid, our narrator, often plays a CD or DVD the contents of which we read in quotation marks off and on through the entirety of the book. Retrograde time and space sequences jump into a loopy weave with the culminating audio-visual reports recorded on discs by United Corporate [UC], their benefactor. Khalid, and two cousins, Jahan and Jaleh, are given the task of rectifying the data they are given by UC and find models that can predict how strife and conflict run a course from its cause[s] that portend to mischief, and how mischief having run their course, leads to calls for law and order.
The three main characters are researchers attempting to chronicle the events of a timeline that includes the years 1978-1981 during which the fictitious country of Baug has undergone a revolution. Khalid, Jahan and Jaleh are funded by a UC grant and tasked with scrutinized collaborative recap of the chronological events leading up to the revolution, and how its “molten lava” cooled in the subsequent decades leading to Baug’s “present” state. The historical record of past revolutionary events in Baug is dictated to us either in person or by UC analysts on the pre-recorded discs. The numerous opposing parties mentioned throughout the story form a mosaic of the dialectic.
Prologue:
When I was a student at Warren College, one of a cluster of colleges at the University of California at San Diego, I took a job as a janitor, cleaning dorm rooms during the transition from Spring to Summer Quarter in 1980. One day, I was browsing the cork bulletin board at the Student Center in my spare time and came across a 3 x 5 inch flash card soliciting a ghost writer for a book about the Iranian Revolution. American hostages were still being held in Tehran at the time, and being a Lit./Writing major, I took down the phone number on the card and contacted ‘M’ for the first time. ‘M’ was a newly arrived resident of the United States, a former professor and the Director General of Educational Research of the National University of Iran, Tehran (1966-1978); we started work on the book in San Diego on July 7, 1980.
I was so happy working on a book about a major media event I remember riding my brown Schwinn ten-speed all the way from La Jolla to the Marine Corps Air Station—Miramar. Stardom was just over the next hill, or so I thought. That was thirty-five years ago. We worked almost every weekend for a few hours and then his wife would cook an Iranian dish for the family which I was always invited to once we were finished working on the book. It often got hot and steamy in the dining room at dinner time, and that meant quitting time. Mrs. ‘M’ smiled as we relinquished the dining room table back to her. The whole family was called in from the other rooms in the house and we would sit down together at a big round table adjacent to the kitchen to enjoy each other’s company during the delicious supper prepared just for us.
The book was originally submitted for publication to a half-dozen publishers in the winter of 1980-1981 under the title The Iranian Revolution: Iran’s Struggle with a New Father. Although I did not find a publisher willing to take on the responsibility of publishing such a controversial work at the time, I did get two encouraging rejection letters; one of them had a handwritten note below the boilerplate which read simply “Not my cup of tea.” That cup of tea is currently located at the blog johnrubens.wordpress.com under the title Installment 77: An Account of ‘M’ [Call No Man Father] copyright July 8, 2014. ‘M’’s son wrote me in 2014 telling me that his father sold the story he told me to an unidentified buyer for “not much money” after I left the San Diego area.
The names of the people, places and institutions in the following work of historical fiction have been changed to protect the innocent and a few conjectures inserted due to the benefit of revelations gleaned from continuing education.
“Have we not all one father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the covenant of our fathers?” Malachi 2:10 [King James Version modified with capital letters beginning a sentence].
Prelude:
“Call me Khalid. I’ve got a story to tell you about the Baugi Revolution, or what I remember of it, but I’ll begin by relating some of the major political events that transpired some twenty-five years before that in the early 1950’s. These 1950’s events had a direct bearing on the seminal stirrings of revolution that took hold in 1978-1980 era the remnants of which still exist today.”
Father May I?
Call No Man Your Father on Earth for One is Your Father Which is in Heaven. Matthew 23:9 [Original King James Version].
“Prime Minister Rahmat, a populist, led the people of Baug from 1950-1953. He supported an inclusive central government with Baug’s periphery but Baug was disjointed and spread out over a large geographical area. The metropolis of Tealandir was the governing seat of Baug. As its Capitol, rulings from Tealandir affected every Baugi, even if they lived thousands of miles away. Many grew dissatisfied with life in Baug at the time, and opponents of the Rahmat Administration voiced opposition to the incessant compromising that had to be done to mollify every stakeholder and citizen of the country.
“For their part, the multi-national oil companies of United Corporate [UC] could not stand Rahmat’s laissez-faire government and decided to overthrow him with a coup d’etat. UC supported the coup because they wanted to reinstall Amir as a regal leader of Baug. A quasi-monarchy would allow UC greater influence in the ways and means of petroleum procurement within Baug’s borders and if within Baug’s borders, elsewhere as well. UC wanted Amir’s Administration to be hailed as a model of the Common Concept of Mutual Interest [CCMI] between Baug and UC that had been strained for as long as anyone could remember.
“A slender, scrappy and determined individual named Jahan I met in the courtyard outside our mosque told me the logistics of the 1953 coup d’etat were spear-headed by the Central Wombat Agency [Wombat] of Sargon in conjunction with disaffected youth of Baug. He said in the ‘first salvo buffeting Rahmat’, demonstrators shouted taunts, degrading his name while lifting praises to the Amir day and night. The relentless derogatory chants and Rahmat’s misplaced trust in the lawfulness of the assembly allowed the demonstrators to overcome Rahmat’s guard and enter his compound. After a brief struggle, Wombat’s operatives seized Dr. Rahmat and transported him to prison to await trial in an Amir-led government.
“The success of the coup made Amir’s return to power imminent. The Emilians, another rival of Rahmat’s government to the southwest of Baug had concealed Amir and his extended family to preserve an opportunity for Amir’s emergence and return to the Imperial Throne of Baug as His Eminence. For his part, Amir was grateful and indebted to his Emilian benefactors, and planned to lead Baug into a firm alliance with them and their greater Western allies. Amir envisioned a land of skilled and educated Baugis coming together as one nation. Operation e pluribus unum could now move forward to its blessed fruition, or so he thought.
“Jahan soon introduced me to his first cousin, an attractive medical doctor named Jaleh. They looked alike with their thick black straight hair and tanned complexion, but while Jahan was wiry and surprisingly brutish for his lean frame, Jaleh was supple and compassionate. We were in Baug on a grant from United Corporate to investigate the Baugi revolution of 1978 and its repercussions. They provided us with a stipend and essential materials, which included secret reports and a scrutinized expense account to conduct our research. Sometimes Jahan would fill me in on what he knew about the revolution and other times it was Jaleh, but increasingly, we used secondary sources such as DVD’s produced by United Corporate. Sometimes we would listen together and discuss what we gathered from the lessons on disc, while other times we would research on our own as our programme [sic] did not always overlap. Jahan and Jaleh were a bit my tutors both in practice and under the provisions of our contracts with UC. The work would have been boring if I didn’t take the ball the other way. I guess I was a little like the Harlem Globetrotters making fun of the game but at the same time, seeking to accomplish amazing feats of dexterity and novelty. Jaleh was a counterweight to the severity of the research required under the UC contract, and I my wife Zareen provided me with much needed support. Throwing Jaleh in the mix made my heart pound and my dick hard. Maybe UC found in their many research projects grantee work product is enhanced by the introduction of romance. Although we were directed to destroy the DVD’s once ‘consumed’ I never did.
Let’s Flashback: Why Rahmat’s Government Was Troublesome
“What I have so far on the history of Baug that Jahan prepped me on was Rahmat’s Administration gave Baugis a sense of freedom and liberty that they hadn’t had for ages. His Administration modeled itself after democratized nation-states such as Sargon of the Continent of Kir and Jahangir of the Continent of Bahar. In those two democracies, citizens were allowed to retain certain inalienable rights allowing them to think and act on their own initiative and to speak out loud what they believed to be true. These freedoms were upheld as rights protected by the Baugi Constitution until the 1953 coup toppled his government.
The Bahram Party
“Numerous political parties were allowed to co-exist and thrive within constitutional boundaries set up, interpreted and enforced by Rahmat’s government. However, the lax regulation of social discourse and investigation of racketeering created an opportunity for the Bahram Party to disrupt the delicate balance which shaped Baug and maintain a peaceful coexistence within its borders. The Bahram Party was determined to destabilize ‘peace’ in Baug at whatever cost, and to overthrow its opposition, whoever that might be, at any given time. During periods of unrest, Bahram was able to make inroads at fracturing whatever confidence Baugis may still have had in their democratic constitutional society.”
We live and we learn…then we die I suppose