Man Of The Year: People Are Scared to Death

There are still pop songs, peddlers and even discos, but life is much changed

Clustered around the kebab and hamburger stalls behind Lala (formerly Farah) Park in downtown Tehran, young members of the postrevolutionary jet set are smoking a little hash and swaying to the music of Gougoush and Shoreh, two Western-style pop singers who have been barred from performing in public by the Khomeini regime. Elsewhere in the downtown area, near Mellat Park on a street that bears the nickname "Hippiabad," vendors sell Top Ten tunes on cassettes, blasting out their wares on expensive Japanese tape decks. In an apartment in North Tehran, at a birthday party for a well-known singer, champagne and Scotch flow as freely as they did in the days before prohibition was imposed last winter.

Such scenes in Tehran are vivid reminders that two worlds coexist uneasily in Iran today. The first, the political world of the revolution, is currently focused on the U.S. embassy, where the crowds—smaller than they were a few weeks ago—still gather to shout anti-American slogans and epithets of Islamic fervor, especially when cameramen are on hand. This world also includes the universities and technical schools, the late-night meetings of the supreme Revolutionary Council, the intraoffice struggles within many government ministries and the intense rivalry between the new Pasdaran revolutionary militia and the now eclipsed armed forces.

Surprisingly, the cataclysmic events of the past year have not drastically affected a second world that includes millions of Iranians, both city dwellers and peasants, who are struggling to maintain a semblance of normality in their lives. Tehran's traffic, which may be the worst in the world, is as bad as ever, and so is the smog. Most people still go to work and shop at corner groceries or reasonably well-stocked supermarkets. Their children still go to school, although classroom discipline is poor after a year of revolution. In the suburbs of North Tehran, people still line up to eat in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant (whose English-language signs, following a franchise dispute, now read simply FRIED CHICKEN). It is still possible to buy certain foreign-made luxury items, such as French perfume, that have been smuggled in from Europe. Sidewalk vendors with boiled sugar beets, pistachio nuts and sunflower seeds still do business in the streets. Peddlers hawk everything from blue jeans to plastic kitchen utensils. Even some discotheques continue to operate, illegally but discreetly, serving soda instead of booze. But there is a flourishing black market in liquor: Scotch, bootlegged from Iraq, sells for $60 to $90 a bottle and moonshine vodka from $15 to $30.