Apart from the pleasure of hearing again from someone with whom I had had little contact recently, I was struck by how little X knows of the way the election crisis has been depicted in the West.

“We are so depressed [because of] this problem and we don’t know what will happen in the future,” X wrote. “All of important news web are filtered like BBC and about 2 weeks SMS are disconnected in Iran [and] we can not send any SMS. Sometimes our mobiles are disconnected too.”

None of this is news to us here, and obviously, X was able to access my blog, which is possibly too low-profile to be censored. But the limits placed on freedom of information mean that in general, only a distorted mirror of outside attitudes is visible to those caught in the meat-grinder of current Iranian politics.

X insists, as have many others, that Ahmadinejad’s poll results were much lower than reported. Without a proper recount, that’s impossible to verify, but at this point I’m forced to question, at the very least, my earlier assertions that Ahmadinejad likely did win enough votes. He began to lose some of his core support a year or two ago; in addition, there have been many anecdotal stories about natural hardliners abandoning their belief in their leaders. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8116825.stm for one example that, while written post-election, reflects a reality that was obviously forming before it.

Iranians take immense pride in their nationhood, and their collective power as a people who once overthrew the Shah. Right now, as their story takes second place to the posthumous adulation of Michael Jackson in western media, the loneliness so many are feeling behind the communications barriers their leaders have erected must feel like a kind of madness.