In November 1980, a twenty-nine-year-old contract worker in Hammond, Louisiana by the name of Stephen K. Clark was arrested and charged with criminal mischief for painting a thirty-foot mural of Mickey Mouse “making an obscene gesture to Iran” on the side of Sunflower supermarket. According to the store's manager, Clark had been hired to give the store a fresh coat of yellow paint before going wildly off script. The Hammond city prosecutor told the press that Clark would face jail time if convicted for his renegade painting, which, alongside the enormous image of Mickey, featured a word balloon proclaiming “We're fed up. Hey Iran!”Footnote 1 This was no one-off use of Mickey's likeness to send a message to Iran. At the dawn of the 1980s, the image and sentiment Clark felt compelled to share had become curiously popular across the United States, appearing in surprising places all over the country.
These messages were a response to the events of the prior year, when on November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian student revolutionaries stormed the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran, taking its staff hostage. This act capped off a transformative year in Iran in which a revolutionary movement overthrew the US-backed Pahlavi monarchy, creating the Islamic Republic of Iran.Footnote 2 Despite having no foreknowledge of the embassy siege, Iran's revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, swiftly signaled his support for the student militants, setting in motion the tense 444-day standoff with the US that would dramatically change relations between the two countries going forward.Footnote 3
President Jimmy Carter's administration was hyperaware of the extent to which events in Tehran represented not only a diplomatic emergency for the first-term president, but also a crisis of public relations. In a confidential memo written to Carter four days after the embassy seizure, White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan anxiously noted that “CBS news last night devoted 55% of its coverage...to Iran. The Today Show this morning spent the full first 20 minutes of its half hour on Iran.”Footnote 4 Media coverage of events in Tehran would only escalate from there. The next day, the ABC television network created a nightly program called The Iran Crisis – America Held Hostage. News anchor Ted Koppel counted every day the hostages were held – “America held hostage: day five; America held hostage: day two hundred and eleven; America held hostage: day four hundred and six.”Footnote 5 Throughout the crisis, Americans fixated their rage on Khomeini, whose image – grim, forbidding, and seemingly inscrutable – became quickly ubiquitous on screens and in newsprint across the country.
Even now, the hostage affair remains a matter of public significance in the US, routinely referenced by presidents, congressional members of both major political parties, and award-winning Hollywood thrillers.Footnote 6 Following the crisis, a steady stream of books appeared in the US detailing aspects of the standoff. Most of these texts focused on state-level stories, highlighting faltering efforts at diplomacy and espionage.Footnote 7 Yet from the earliest days of the crisis – as indicated by the proliferation of bootleg Mickey Mouses telling off Iran – events in Tehran made waves with the American public far beyond the highest levels of the government and media. Grassroots efforts initiated by everyday people were key catalysts of popular hostility towards Iran and Iranians. As Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet describes, Americans began a yellow ribbon campaign for the hostages when the wife of one of the captives “tied a yellow ribbon around a thick oak tree in her yard,” prompting the Carter administration to invite her to do the same at the White House.Footnote 8 Americans also organized protests demanding the return of the hostages and promising militarized revenge if Iran did not comply.Footnote 9
Alongside these efforts, a remarkable subterranean material culture circulated across the US, shaping and being shaped by the country's growing antagonism towards Iran and its new revolutionary leader. It is this now long forgotten and mostly discarded ephemera, what I call “Khomeini kitsch,” that is the subject of this essay. But just what is Khomeini kitsch, and what is its political and social significance? This ephemeral material culture took multiple forms – T-shirts, badges, toys, bumper stickers, vinyl records, and sometimes even paintings on the sides of supermarkets – and typically featured crude messaging and images meant to humiliate or antagonize Khomeini specifically and Iranians generally, or to mobilize the US towards anti-Iran sentiment and action. Occasionally, when this ephemera came from subcultural contexts such as the underground punk and hardcore scenes, Khomeini kitsch instead subverted, upended, or otherwise mocked the standard power dynamics at work in these materials. There was a distinctly entrepreneurial political economy to Khomeini kitsch, which was unofficial, unlicensed, and produced by unknown artists, activists, or those engaging in the most time-honored of American activities: trying to make a quick buck. Anti-Iran records pressed in small numbers on fly-by-night independent record labels became minor hits on local radio stations. Bumper stickers demanding that Iran be nuked adorned cars. Bootleg T-shirts with mocking caricatures of Khomeini, declaring Iran's revolutionary leader “Ayatollah Assaholla,” became ubiquitous in public spaces. A cartoon version of this T-shirt would even make it into the hands of Homer Simpson on a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. Footnote 10
It is in part this ability to trigger and inscribe shared sentiments among a mass of Americans that gave this material its kitsch quality. As art historian Whitney Rugg notes, “Kitsch does not analyze culture but repackages and stylizes it. Kitsch reinforces established conventions, appealing to mass tastes and gratifying communal experiences.”Footnote 11 To this end, Khomeini kitsch typically featured familiar American tropes and imagery. As evidenced above, the most ubiquitous recurring image from this do-it-yourself (DIY) material culture featured one of the most recognizable figures of the 20th century: Mickey Mouse. In the hostage era, a slightly demented-looking Mickey – that quintessential American icon – was depicted on items ranging from T-shirts to badges to bumper stickers, waving an American flag – that other quintessential American icon – while gleefully shouting, “Hey Iran!” and flipping the bird (Figure 1). In this iteration, Mickey-as-icon harkened back to an earlier and nearly forgotten version of Mickey Mouse: Mickey-as-trickster. As semiotician Josh Glenn notes, it was during the 1930s that Mickey Mouse transformed from a mere symbol into a true icon. This transformation was predicated on Disney's explicit efforts to change Mickey's image from a “child-like imp (scandalous, id-driven, loveable yet uncanny) into a childish ’toon (cheeky, playful, cute, sympathetic).”Footnote 12 As Rugg further notes, kitsch repurposes popular images and icons, and as such is “a source of pleasure for a mass audience.” The crass and off-brand pastiche image of Mickey telling Iran off is thus the quintessential piece of Khomeini kitsch – at once familiar, cheeky, playful, vulgar, antagonistic, and jingoistic.Footnote 13 If news anchor Ted Koppel's somber visage and sober voice greeted American television viewers nightly to relay the latest news from Tehran, this bootleg Mickey's grinning face and defiantly confrontational gesture greeted them almost as often, suggesting a very different mood and emotion circulating the country.
“Hey Iran!” badge, from the author's personal collection.
How do we understand this now discarded and ephemeral materiality when thinking about US political cultures, particularly in the context of several decades of intense official bellicosity towards the Islamic Republic of Iran? What were the political and social effects of Khomeini kitsch – this tacky, mocking, and often grotesque slice of weird Americana?Footnote 14 How do we understand ephemeral materials that appear as both dominant culture (that is, in line with the aims of US imperial power) and as subculture (that is, self-produced, circulated without corporate distribution, and reveling in seemingly taboo sentiments or images)? How do we make sense of xenophobic and Islamophobic materials in the US that are not the product of mainstream media discourses or state-level saber-rattling, but rather grassroots products of a mobilized, angry, and perversely creative citizenry? And, crucially, how does Khomeini kitsch continue to generate political meanings and shape the United States’ relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran today?
Following sociologist Kusha Sefat's essential rejoinder that material objects are “generative actors” that occasion politics, I argue here that the materials I refer to as Khomeini kitsch produced key political languages and affective worlds, making the inchoate anger of the hostage affair in the US context both legible and fundamentally social among large swathes of ordinary Americans.Footnote 15 In focusing on material cultures – even seemingly minor or ephemeral objects – as a realm in which political affinities were formed and fixed, I draw from rich traditions in critical theory, cultural studies, and diaspora studies. Since the flowering of Iranian diaspora studies in the 1980s and 1990s with the work of scholars such as Hamid Naficy and continuing to the current day, this field has taken cultural production and material cultures as sites of social contestation and meaning-making.Footnote 16 More recently, Iranian studies has also fruitfully turned to the study of material things – including such previously overlooked objects as corpses, film ephemera, and videocassettes – in key works by Sefat, Kaveh Askari, and Blake Atwood respectively.Footnote 17 In what follows in this essay, I analyze a material archive that has to date been ignored in telling the story of the hostage era in the US, otherwise largely cast as a state-level geopolitical story. In doing so, I show that Khomeini kitsch comprised grassroots material cultures through which ordinary Americans generated meaning and feeling for the hostage affair – and for their long-term relationships to Iranians, Iranian Americans, and Iran – casting the embassy seizure in a historical narrative of unprovoked American injury and the wished-for catharsis of militarized American retribution. Khomeini kitsch, then, played a distinct epistemological function, circulating new political knowledges and vocabularies with which Americans and Iranians continue to live into the present day.
Material cultures, ephemeral archives
To better situate this material culture historically, we must first consider its place in the current cultural and archival ecosystem. I discovered many of the items I write about in this essay in thrift stores and garage sales around the United States over many years, having found relatively few such materials in formal government or university archives. The idiosyncrasy and ephemerality of this archive is evident even in popular representations of Khomeini kitsch. In the aforementioned episode of The Simpsons, for instance, Homer and Marge Simpson find Homer's old “Ayatollah Assaholla” shirt in storage in their attic while preparing for a garage sale. Marge encourages Homer to get rid of the shirt, since, as she reproachfully notes, “Khomeini died years ago” (Figure 2).Footnote 18 Most Khomeini kitsch was likely considered expendable not too long after its production, put away into storage or discarded altogether once the hostage affair ended. Yet these items – and the sentiment they produced – did not disappear altogether. A vintage real-world example of the “Ayatollah Assaholla” shirt, for instance, reached my hands after a friend serendipitously found it in a thrift store in Texas (Figure 3). This material has been mostly passed over by scholars perhaps in part because these items have been treated as junk, cluttering up attics, deteriorating in junkyards, or sitting forgotten in thrift stores across the country. This junk, like the “junk prints” of popular mid-century Iranian film studied by Kaveh Askari, is “matter out of date, out of place…matter that piles up over time.”Footnote 19 And yet, as I argue in this essay, this material had an important life, insofar as an untold number of people in the US interacted with Khomeini kitsch and the informal yet powerful political and social sentiment generated by its circulation. Further, Khomeini kitsch has had surprising afterlives, shaping ideas and feelings about Iran and Iranians in the US long after most of it fell out of mainstream public consciousness.
The Simpsons, 1996.
“Ayatollah Assaholla” T-shirt, from the author's personal collection.
Some further examples will help illustrate the mood, aesthetic, and texture of this budding material culture. As noted above, the messaging on a significant portion of this ephemera was both jingoistic and vulgar, deeply hostile to Iran and its new leadership, and drawn from familiar American tropes and imagery. One exemplary item, which I found in a thrift store in rural Illinois, is a red, white, and blue badge with the message “Honor America – to Hell with Khomeini” (Figure 4). Other images and slogans found on Khomeini kitsch feature a distinctly scatological orientation. One badge – brown – reads straightforwardly, “Khomeini is a Shit” (Figure 5). Yet another badge features Khomeini's face superimposed over the rear end of a cartoon donkey, proclaiming the Ayatollah the “World's Biggest Asshole” (Figure 6). Similar items were produced by entrepreneurs and hucksters keen to turn the hostage crisis to their financial advantage. In the early months of the affair, for instance, a store in West Palm Beach, Florida found great success selling ashtrays featuring Khomeini's image that exhorted smokers to “Put Your Butt Here.” According to store president Morris Smith, this item was so popular that the store had shipped out 25,000 ashtrays by January 1980. Despite this, Smith admitted that he saw the item's success as akin to earlier novelty consumer trends, destined to burn brightly and then fade away. “It's a hula hoop situation,” he explained amid the craze.Footnote 20
“To Hell With Khomeini” badge, from the author's personal collection.
“Khomeini Is A Shit” badge, from the author's personal collection.
“World's Biggest Asshole” badge, from the author's personal collection.
The scatological fixation of Khomeini kitsch – an apparent rebuke to the religious seriousness with which the Iranian leader carried himself – went even further than these badges and T-shirts. Novelty toilet paper, with wrapping paper featuring caricatures of Khomeini, became a popular gag item. One version featured a drawing of Khomeini inside a toilet seat and demanded the user, “SHOW HOW YOU FEEL AND PUT HIM IN HIS PLACE” and “Clean your can with that guy from Iran.” Another version, marketed by Ray Crouch of Rochester, New York and called “Aya-Toilet Paper,” featured a wrapper telling consumers that with this item they could give Khomeini “a taste of his medicine” and “rub his nose in it.” The toilet paper was a success for Crouch – who claimed to simply want to “relieve a little tension” – selling for $1 a roll in the Midwest and up to $2 a roll on the East Coast.Footnote 21 In response to the popularity of such items, a Jackson, Mississippi salesman named J.R. Johnson decided to make and market flyswatters with Khomeini's image emblazoned on them in early 1980. The idea came to Johnson when using a regular flyswatter: “You could probably sell a lot of these if you put the Ayatollah's face on it,” Johnson reasoned in an interview at the time. The item was more than just about money, Johnson further explained. “It's not just for flies, it's a form of expression…I can't go over there and poke him in the nose, but I can use that flyswatter.”Footnote 22
The combination of the entrepreneurial, the vulgar, and the cathartic was a typical feature of Khomeini kitsch, which included items such as target practice posters and dart boards with Khomeini's likeness. Some of these became public attractions around the country. In December 1979, for instance, Discount Gifts in Independence, Missouri advertised the “World's Largest Khomeini Dart Board,” where visitors could come and “throw a dart at Khomeini!” As an advertisement placed in The Kansas City Star explained to readers, “We provide the darts & world's largest Khomeini Dart Board, you provide the skill” (Figure 7).Footnote 23 Such items reveal the distinctly social component of Khomeini kitsch, as well as its underlying fantasy of retributive violence – with these items, Americans made sense of, domesticated, and symbolically overcame the humiliation of the hostage crisis. Given this, it is no surprise that the language popularized and circulated through these material objects entered the popular lexicon in new ways. In one telling instance, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term “Ayatollah” itself dramatically changed meaning in English-language usage in this period. Whereas the term is first attested to in the English language in the OED beginning in the 1950s, as a little-used descriptive (“an honorific title for an Iranian [sic] Shiite religious leader”), it came to commonly be used in 1979 and through the 1980s pejoratively to mean “a dogmatic leader.”Footnote 24
“Throw a Dart at Khomeini!” ad.
There were those who disliked the vulgarity of Khomeini kitsch, even if they shared the animus represented by these items. In April 1980, under the headline “Mickey's image spoiled,” The News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware published a letter from a nine-year-old boy named Don R. Lloyd from Newark. In the letter, Lloyd – with possible help from an elder, given the grammar and tone of the note – writes,
I am writing to express my feeling concerning the “Hey Iran” Mickey Mouse sign. It displays Mickey with a clenched fist with his middle finger sticking straight up. This is an obscene gesture that should not be associated with the American image of Mickey Mouse.
Lloyd was sure to explain to readers that, while he was no fan of Iran, it was rather the rude depiction of the otherwise wholesome Mickey that caused him distress.
It is not that I am for Iran but I am against the disgraceful use of Mickey Mouse. As a 9-year-old concerned with the present state of foreign affairs, I will direct my efforts towards writing letters to the news media and political leaders and I encourage others to follow my example.Footnote 25
For her part, Janet Williams, a columnist for the News Record of North Hills, Pennsylvania, bemoaned the trend of “inane” bumper stickers adorning cars, including “America's answer to Iran – dear old Mickey Mouse with his outstretched finger.” As Williams explained, this bumper sticker “says a lot about the driver of the car,” though not in a good way. “The proliferation of bumper stickers should come as no surprise,” Williams wrote derisively, given “the national obsession with bubblegum philosophy and politics…It's easier to commit oneself to a few simplistic phrases rather than a well-thought-out position on critical issues.”Footnote 26
Others took umbrage at the fact that people were making money while the hostages were still being held. Unsurprisingly, some of the most vocal critics of Khomeini kitsch were family members of the hostages themselves. “It's tacky,” complained Dorothea Morefield, wife of Richard H. Morefield, who had been serving as the US consul general to Iran during the embassy seizure. “It's people making money at our expense.”Footnote 27 Family members were particularly aggrieved by the many products and events that falsely claimed to be sending proceeds to the hostage families directly – a seemingly common ploy among purveyors of Khomeini kitsch. In the spring of 1980, Mary Lopez, mother of hostage and US Marine Corps member James Lopez, forced several local bars in Arizona to stop marketing events as benefits for the hostage families by getting local news reporters on the case.Footnote 28 The entrepreneurs behind Khomeini kitsch typically shrugged off such critiques. “I feel anybody takes advantage of any given situation,” Joe Miller, president of Waldman Mercantile Company and purveyor of “Hey Iran!” Mickey Mouse T-shirts, told reporters in 1980. “The Ayatollah's not going to be around too long,” Miller continued hopefully (if erroneously), “so you might as well take advantage of him.”Footnote 29
Though Khomeini kitsch was often puerile, Khomeini's image was also used to demand much more sober forms of evident resistance to Iran's revolutionary leader. For instance, a remarkable billboard from the early 1980s in Wisconsin featured Khomeini's characteristically unsmiling face glowering at passing cars, demanding that drivers “Fight back” against the Imam by keeping to a speed limit of 55 miles per hour (Figure 8).Footnote 30 No other message or context was provided by this self-proclaimed “billboard editorial.” Drivers would likely have connected two recent American crises: the hostage crisis and the so-called oil crisis of the mid 1970s, triggered by the OPEC-led raising of oil prices. By this point, oil and Iran were linked enough in Americans’ minds – and could provoke enough distress to an average driver in Wisconsin in the early 1980s – to allow such a billboard to be legible to passersby.Footnote 31 Khomeini's ubiquitous image had, by this point, come to stand for a generalized (if de-contextualized) Iranian or Middle Eastern opposition to the mid-century American way of life – including cheap and easy access to oil. In this sense, Khomeini-as-icon refracted back to the Iranian understanding of the events of 1979 – hostage affair included – as a result of US oil policy in Iran, albeit with an entirely different relationship to and understanding of the history of this natural resource.
“Fight back…Drive 55!”.
Cultures of protest
Anti-Iran protesters in the US linked the embassy seizure to the other attacks on US sovereignty or personnel, mapping Tehran onto a distinctly American geography of political grievance and perceived unprovoked assault. In December 1979, for instance, a group of medallion taxi drivers in New York City organized a demonstration for the hostages on the 38th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, linking the two events into the same political imaginary. As one military veteran-turned-protester told The New York Times, “Thirty-eight years ago today Pearl Harbor united this nation…I don't think anything united us as much since then until the Iranian students took the hostages.”Footnote 32 Some explicitly grafted the new public animus onto other forms of American racism, including Jim Crow segregation, with signs found in restaurant windows avowing “No dogs or Iranians allowed.”Footnote 33 Others dug even further back into US history for their inspiration, singing the civil war-era anthem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while simultaneously chanting “Deport Iranians” at anti-Iran protests.Footnote 34 It was in this social and political context that Khomeini kitsch circulated, providing cultural and political meaning to recent events in Tehran for angry US citizens.
Khomeini kitsch was ubiquitous through the end of the affair. Upon a massive ticker-tape parade held for the returned hostages in New York City in 1981 – an event estimated to draw a remarkable two million attendees – The Washington Post reported that “Children playing hooky from school sported T-shirts or buttons on which Mickey Mouse shouted ‘Hey Iran,’ and made an obscene gesture.” Other attendees wore items adorned with the slogan “Now That You Are Free, I Wish I Was a Dog and the Ayatollah a Tree.”Footnote 35 In expressing relief and catharsis at the hostages’ return, parade attendees drew telling parallels between the hostage affair and other recent crises, particularly American military (and moral) failures in Vietnam. A Chappaqua, New York-based housewife named Susan Ryan, for instance, linked the festivities to her longed-for celebration of Americans who fought in Southeast Asia. “I think this a coming-home party that the country has missed for a long time,” Ryan happily declared. “I think people are cheering for more than just the hostages. They're cheering for the bands, the Marines, for all the men in the Vietnam war…It's a celebration of freedom.”Footnote 36 For people like Ryan, the apparent triumph of the hostages’ return home finally provided a happy ending to a decade in which US involvement in overseas affairs – particularly the grueling, brutal, and morally dubious quagmire of war in Southeast Asia – had been anything but triumphant.
For Iranian, Middle Eastern, and Muslim diasporas in the US, the hostage crisis was a very different experience.Footnote 37 Among those most immediately affected by the changing geopolitical context was a large and politically active group of expatriate Iranian students, many of whom had first come to the country thanks to US and Pahlavi state funding before 1979, but who were, in many cases, members of the revolutionary anti-shah coalition. Iranian students – largely revolutionary Marxists, but with some pockets of Islamist students as well – spent the years before 1979 loudly agitating against the Pahlavi dictatorship and its close relationship to the United States. The hostage affair ushered in a sea change in mainstream American views of these US-based Iranians, swiftly shifting these students in the Cold War imaginary from what Manijeh Moradian has termed “imperial model minorities” – young people meant to benefit from the US's imperial largesse towards a compliant Third World government – to violent terrorists and invaders. As Neda Maghbouleh notes, the approximately 50,000 Iranian students based in the US at the time of the revolution – and the 100,000–200,000 post-revolutionary Iranian exiles soon after – were confronted with a budding wave of American anger that engendered years of “racialized hostility, discrimination, and bias.”Footnote 38
For their part, Iranian students in the US continued organizing protests and distributing ephemera of their own, including political broadsides and pamphlets similar to those circulated in the years leading up to the fall of the shah. These student-led protests increasingly led to confrontations with unsympathetic state officials and angry counter-protesters. Just days after the start of the crisis, for instance, an Iranian student-led protest in Washington DC brought out approximately 900 young Iranian dissidents. The permitted protest, organized by the Muslim Students Association for November 9, 1979, was a point of contention between DC mayor Marion Barry and the Carter administration, who urged Barry to rescind the permit granted to the Iranian students. In the days leading up to the rally, White House spokesperson Jody Powell announced that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had advised Carter, “the situation is so delicate that any demonstration would pose a clear and present danger to Americans in Iran.”Footnote 39 Barry insisted that the permit not be withdrawn, although Park Police and Capital Police revoked it for the parts of the march that included federal property.Footnote 40 Two days before this rally, a small group of about thirty Iranians protested in front of the Immigration and Naturalization Services building in Washington, surrounded by about 200 District of Columbia police officers. The protesters were met by chants of “go home, go home” from agitated passersby.Footnote 41 This would not be the only time American protesters – or the material cultures produced by those protesters – targeted the Iranian student presence in the country.
There were also small pockets of political sympathy, however fringe, for Iranian revolutionaries among some American political groups, particularly those still championing the language of revolution. Bob Avankian, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party in the US, for instance, gave a speech in November 1979 in solidarity with the Iranian students, in which he – like the New York housewife mentioned above – put the embassy takeover in the same context as the Vietnam War. Avankian, however, had a very different understanding of the meaning and legacy of that war and the anti-war movement it engendered, stating,
I remember in those days, 15 years ago, when we were first taking up the question of Vietnam and taking it out to the students and taking it off campus and into the communities to the masses of people in this country, I remember when that was an unpopular position.
For Avankian and other revolutionary fellow travelers, solidarity with the Iranian revolution in 1979 was born out of earlier political encounters with the militant Iranian student movement abroad. He continued:
I remember, when you got up to speak, the same thing that's happening now was happening then. Here come all these silly little frat rats and all these jocks and all the rest of them running up there with the American flag trying to act all big and bad and everything else. And often times, and whatever else happened, one thing you could count on was that if there was a group of Iranian students on that campus, if nobody on the entire campus stood with you and stood up in the face of those reactionaries and stood squarely with the Vietnamese people in the struggle against imperialism all around the world, the Iranian students did and we will never forget that.
Unlike those who viewed expatriate Iranian students with increased hostility, Avankian recalled the Iranian student movement as a key part of the broader anti-imperialist struggle. It was for this reason, the chairman argued, that committed revolutionaries should stand in support of the Iranian students and their revolution.
Khomeini on the airwaves
Music was a key means through which Americans expressed their budding anti-Iran sentiment. Many of the themes outlined above – from cheap access to Iranian oil to xenophobic hostility towards US-based Iranian students to crude references to Khomeini – were captured in songs released on independent labels and played on radio stations across the country. Jingoistic and often outright racist novelty songs addressing Khomeini directly and calling for the annihilation of Iran became minor hits, particularly on country radio stations. In Nashville in late 1979, a song called “Let's Make Islamic Atomic” by Carl F. Mayfield – featuring the lyrics “Let's not shuck and let's not jive, let's drop what we dropped in ‘45” – reportedly got “big airplay” on local radio. At the same time, in Chicago, local DJ Steve Dahl retooled The Knack's recent new wave hit “My Sharona” as an anti-Iran anthem titled “Ayatollah.”Footnote 42 In December 1979, country singer J.W. Thompson released a single titled “Khomeiniac” on Southern Star records, a small country music label linked to Southern Star recording studio in Shreveport, Louisiana.Footnote 43 An obscure group calling themselves the U.S. Sutters Mill Spirit of ’79, featuring one Bud Mathis, released a single entitled “Hey Khomeini” on ROM International Records.Footnote 44 Dixieland jazz guitarist and banjo player Bill Newman released a single in early 1980 titled “Khomeini Go to Hell” on Vancouver, Washington's Ripcord Records.Footnote 45 In 1979 and 1980, several groups, most popularly Vince Vance and the Valiants, recorded re-workings of the Regents’ 1958 doo-wop hit “Barbara Anne,” a song popularized in the 1960s by the Beach Boys. In this new iteration, the song was rechristened “Bomb Iran” and included the lyrics “Went to a mosque / Gonna throw some rocks / Tell the Ayatollah / Gonna put you in a box.”Footnote 46
As the hostage affair stretched on, the regional pop and country hits kept coming. Fort Worth, Texas-based country musician and independent record label head Major Bill Smith released two 45 RPM vinyl singles with lyrics referencing oil and the hostages and music quoting the melody of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The first, entitled “Take Your Crude and Shove It, Baby” was popular enough that the record sold thousands of copies, at least according to Smith himself. Of course, as with those selling Khomeini-themed novelty items, there were those who disliked musicians seemingly profiting from the crisis. When pointedly asked by a reporter in January 1980 if he knew of anyone else “making money off the hostages,” Smith balked at the implication, admonishing the reporter for questioning his motives. Some of the profit from his music, Smith insisted, went directly into “mission work in the Fort Worth area.”Footnote 47 How much was “some,” Smith did not specify.
Wherever the money was going, the success of Smith's first song quickly led to a second release, a country-tinged spoken word track entitled “Thank You, Mr. Khomeini,” in which Smith placed the hostage crisis in a revealing historical lineage with other key events in US military history and imperial hegemony. In that song, Smith proclaims in his thick Texas drawl:
I would just like to take this opportunity as an American / As one who loves this country / As one who has fought and shed blood for this country / And as an American who would die gladly for his country / To thank you Mr. Khomeini / What for? What in the world for? / Because you have brought this great beloved nation of ours together / Like no person, like no war / Like no bullets, no propaganda / No Bull Run, no Bunker Hill / Alamo, San Juan, Pearl Harbor / Like nothing or no one in the history of this nation / Has been able to unite and the bring our country together.Footnote 48
Smith's political mapping combines familiar revolutionary war, civil war, and settler colonial geographies, none of which, according to Smith, were as powerfully able to unite Americans in common cause as the eponymous “Mr. Khomeini.” Of course, not everyone appreciated the message. Years later, famed New Jersey-based independent radio station WFMU played “Dear Mr. Khomeini” on an episode of the World's Worst Records Radio Show – a show dedicated to “the worst, and most hysterically funny, records ever made.”Footnote 49
Among the most commercially successful of these anti-Iran protest songs, Alabama's Roger Hallmark and the Thrasher Brothers’ country song entitled “A Message to Khomeini,” was released in late November 1979, in the early weeks of the standoff.Footnote 50 The Thrasher Brothers were by then a long-running, if relatively obscure, Christian music group who had released several albums on the small Birmingham, Alabama Christian label Anchor Records. This song eschewed the Brothers’ typical Christian lyrical themes to address the revolutionary Iranian leader directly. Songwriters Sid Linard and Johnny Chance Jones, who claimed their song was “a constructive way to vent our frustrations about them holding our hostages in Tehran,” and “a tongue-in-cheek song with a patriotic ring,” explained to the press that they “hoped that [Khomeini] would get the message.”Footnote 51 Elsewhere, Jones explained their message to Khomeini in more explicit terms, lifting directly from the song's lyrics, “We more or less told ol’ petrol breath that he could shove his oil up his only unholy place.”Footnote 52 Jones would later try to re-create the success of “A Message to Khomeini” by writing a similarly vitriolic (and Islamophobic) song about the 1985 hijacking of Trans World Airlines Flight 847 by Islamist militants.Footnote 53
According to Billboard magazine, the first radio station to play “A Message to Khomeini” was Birmingham's WSGN-AM, which began playing a tape of the song in November 1979 before the vinyl record had even been pressed and released.Footnote 54 This led to other stations picking up the song. “We heard about the song from our sister station in Birmingham,” DJ Mason Dixon of Tampa's Q105 radio station explained not long after. The song was an immediate hit with listeners. “After the first one or two playings [sic],” Dixon continued, “our phones were ringing off the hook. In a matter of days, it had become the most requested song.”Footnote 55 Upon its official vinyl release on the independent Vulcan Records, “A Message to Khomeini” became a minor sensation. The Atlanta Constitution reported that “Record-pressing plants were working overtime Thanksgiving Day, churning out thousands of copies” of the single for interested listeners.Footnote 56 The record's official distributor, Nationwide Sound of Nashville, told reporters in early December that they had been “deluged with requests” from across the United States and even Canada, and they believed – however improbably – that the record could eventually sell a million copies.Footnote 57 That the song's release corresponded with the Christmas gift-giving season evidently helped boost sales. In West Palm Beach, Florida, a record store called Evil People Head and Sound reported selling twenty-five copies of the single during the weeks leading up to Christmas, while at the nearby Palm Beach Mall, at Specs Records, store employees had to resort to buying numerous copies from other stores to keep up with demand.Footnote 58
The song resonated with radio listeners across the country. When a radio station in Oklahoma City played the song for the first time just after its release, the station's “phones went berserk” according to station promotion director Jane Graber. “Within one day we had 150 calls and our phones are still ringing off the hook,” an astonished Graber told the Washington Post in early December 1979. “Oklahoma City has gone crazy over this record,” she continued. “We're playing it 12 times a day now and people want more. I don't understand it.”Footnote 59 In Lake Worth, Florida, a DJ for WIRK-AM radio named Lord Richie reported that the record was “a very requested number,” though Richie also admitted he had never heard of the Thrasher Brothers before hearing the song.Footnote 60 When the song hit the airwaves in Rochester, New York, WHAM radio DJ Mike Harvey said, “the reaction knocked our socks off.” As a result, station DJs were “under orders to play it regularly – and to promote the fact.”Footnote 61
Lyrics to the Thrasher Brothers’ anthem promised swift and devastating revenge to Iran. This would-be retaliation included several now familiar themes: a promise to starve Iranians, reduce all of Iran to an “oil slick,” and revoke the visas of Iranian students in the US – a marker of just how well-known the presence of Iranian students had become across the country.
Dear Mr. Ayatella / we know you call us yella / And you'd like to see us crawlin’ and a'bowin’ at your feet. / You think you're so dern bad / but when Uncle Sam gets mad / there's gonna be an oil slick right where Iran used to be… / Cuz we could take our B-B guns / And blow your buns to the sun / And just our Boy Scouts could wipe you out. / Someday soon, Khomeini / you'll burn one flag too many / Uncle Sam's got his pride and you're ‘bout to feel his clout / By the way, petrol-breath, you know what embargo means / That's American for starve / And about that petroleum you been robbin’ us with / Well as far as we're concerned, you can kiss our tanks / We gonna send all your school boys back, too, after we cancel their Visa cards / No more Big Macs, see how they like walkin’ a mile for a camel-burger.Footnote 62
For Hallmark and the Thrasher Brothers, who had been performing and releasing Christian music since the early 1950s, the song proved to be their most popular ever, eventually making the Billboard country charts for five weeks.Footnote 63 As a result of the song's success, the group signed a contract with the major label MCA Records, for whom they released two albums and several more pop country singles. They could never replicate the popularity of “A Message to Khomeini,” however, and afterwards returned to Christian music for the rest of their careers.Footnote 64
Khomeini goes punk
The above materials, whether ridiculous, profane, or deadly serious, nonetheless drew on a shared view of Khomeini and the role of the United States in the world: Americans had to fight back against the Iranian leader – who had, in this telling, attacked Americans unprovoked out of a sheer evil fanaticism – by thumbing their noses at his demands in any way they possibly could, whether that meant driving at a reasonable speed or using Khomeini's face as target practice. Yet xenophobic calls to arms were not the only political or social feeling evoked by circulating images of Khomeini in the US in this era. Khomeini's image also circulated to remarkably different ends in some oppositional subcultures. In particular, the young underground punk rock scene – with its hand-made, self-promoted, do-it-yourself flyers, fanzines (magazines and pamphlets made, copied, and distributed by fans), gigs, and bands – repurposed Khomeini's image to its own (contradictory) ends.
The punk rock and hardcore punk scenes of the late 1970s and 1980s often featured irreverent and satirical imagery that took a wide array of icons – Margaret Thatcher, Jesus Christ, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, swastikas, the hammer-and-sickle, the crucifix – and repurposed them in all sorts of bizarre, disturbing, politically critical, absurd, or humorous ways. Many punks – most famously bands such as Crass and the Dead Kennedys – espoused political views aligned with leftist causes including anti-war and anti-religion platforms, anti-capitalism, vegetarianism, anti-fascism, feminism, and more. Those punks who did not identify explicitly as left wing, including those who actively disdained the left wing of the punk scene for its purported ideological rigidity, nonetheless typically promoted anti-conformist, anti-government, and socially irreverent views that placed them outside the mainstream. Fittingly, collage art and pastiche were major components of this hand-made aesthetic. After the transformative events of 1979, Khomeini quickly became part of the punk collage.
Many international and hardcore punk bands had explicitly anarchist, pacifist, and anti-imperialist leanings; their appropriation of Khomeini iconography was often a direct challenge to the warmongering and jingoistic ephemera commonly associated with the majority of Khomeini kitsch. One such example comes from Norwegian hardcore punk band Svart Framtid (Black Future), whose 1984 EP on X-Port Plater Records included a large poster insert featuring Khomeini's unmistakable likeness (Figure 9).Footnote 65 The hand-drawn poster depicts a bunker in which Khomeini plays cards with a smiling Ronald Reagan, American politicians dine with Russians, and Jesus is merrily sharing a drink with Satan. Above them, in the real world, children are dying, people are suffering, and even the grim reaper is weeping at the wanton violence. The implications of these juxtapositions were, for Svart Framtid, clear: government leaders such as Reagan and Khomeini are ultimately cut from the same cloth, and their self-serving actions are destroying the world.
Svart Framtid – 1984 7” EP insert, from the author's personal collection.
Left-leaning political punk bands, such as Svart Framtid, and their earnest critiques of state power, represented only one part of the broader punk orbit. Beginning in 1979 and throughout the 1980s, DIY punk and hardcore bands also used Khomeini's omnipresent likeness, and global awareness of the revolution and hostage crisis, in much more intentionally silly ways. One German punk band even went so far as to name itself Hostages of Ayatollah – its first EP included a cartoon image of Khomeini playing an electric guitar superimposed over a photograph of a young girl wearing a black chador, the form of Islamic covering for women preferred by revolutionary Islamists in Iran.Footnote 66 Hostages of Ayatollah would later explain that their band name – basically just a sarcastic non-sequitur – was particularly well-received by punk rockers in the United States.Footnote 67
Other punk bands featured art and messaging that drew on several discourses at once: racist tropes about Muslims and Iranians, snarky punk irreverence towards any form of authority, and classic themes of teenage angst and alienation. The Hates from Houston, Texas, founded in 1978, devoted the booklet insert of their Panacea 12” EP to a hand-drawn eight-page comic entitled “Hates in Iran” (Figure 10). This insert, which was drawn in 1980 and released in 1982 with the record, featured a farcical story in which the group was sent to Iran to try to free the hostages.Footnote 68 The comic featured the irreverent sense of humor often found in punk subcultures to lampoon the US government, the band, and Khomeini alike, although it also mirrored the racist discourses of the mainstream rather than the anarcho-leftist critiques referenced above. The comic begins by setting the stage for the story to come:
Deep in the bowels of Houston, Texas…far beneath the rumbling freeway…a black sedan speeds to a hidden studio…and secret laboratory where millions of Hates E.P.s are pressed…and shipped to unsuspecting kids throughout the free world! The Hates race to their TV hotline to the Secretary of State… [ellipses in original]
The next panel features a cartoon figure evidently meant to be the Secretary of State, Edward Muskie, addressing the band:
Boo-hoo-sniff. Boys, I've got the President's okay to use tactical punk-rock weapons in Iran…Your mission is to free the hostages and reduce Teheran to hamburgers and kitty litter!…Boys! America needs your help in wasting that scum-bag pig-animal nothing Ayatollah Khomeini!…What about it? Boo-hoo-hoo…Can we count on the Hates? [emphases in original]
Given the jingoistic national mood around Iran, and punk's typical antipathy to mainstream narratives, this panel clearly satirized mainstream discourses. To this request, the band responds self-deprecatingly, “Why not?…we've got nothing better to do with our wealth and connections!”
Hates in Iran record insert, from the author's personal collection.
On the next page, the Hates arrive in Tehran, where things do not go as planned. The band lands near a structure with a barricade and minarets, where a watchman shouts, “Infidels! Sound the alarm!” The Hates go into the building with guns blazing. When they reach the hostages, one of the hostages demands, “Who the fuck are you?” To this, the leader of the band shouts, “WELL WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?” He then opens fire, killing the hostages. “Oh well, they were spys [sic] anyway,” a band member proclaims, echoing the Iranian revolutionary message that the US embassy was nothing more than a “den of spies.” The Hates do not stop there. They storm Khomeini's compound, where they find the Ayatollah engaging in obscene acts. A shirtless and oddly muscular Khomeini shouts, “Infidels!,” and a band member immediately shoots him with a gun that incinerates him (the sound the gun is shown making as it shoots is “PUNK!”). The comic ends by promising a follow-up issue with the Hates in Cuba.
Khomeini also made his way onto the hand-made and photocopied art of DIY punk flyers across the country. Handmade flyers were a key part of punk subculture. Displayed in cities and towns across the world to inform like-minded people of underground gigs, venues, events, and ideas, these flyers were a key component in the making of DIY punk aesthetics.Footnote 69 As such, such flyers were seen by punks and non-punks alike. One example featured a ghoulish rendition of Khomeini's face drawn on a handbill for an early 1980s Los Angeles appearance of Washington DC political hardcore act Government Issue. To the left of Khomeini's skeletal and decaying face, the flyer features the hand-written logo of a group of Iranian revolutionary students in small Persian-language script, evidently appropriated into this cut-n-paste montage by the anonymous artist who created the handbill (Figure 11). Although there is no evident reason why an organization in the Iranian student movement abroad was invoked on this flyer, this reference is another reminder of the deep impression Iranian students made in mainstream and subcultural American contexts alike.
Flyer for punk show in California, from the author's personal collection.
On punk flyers of this sort, Khomeini's forbidding likeness could be used to frighten typical American audiences – that is to say, “scare the squares” – as on a flyer from 1980 or 1981 from San Francisco's Maximum Rocknroll punk radio show, a program founded and hosted by Tim Yohannan, an ex-hippie turned communist punk rocker of Armenian Iranian heritage. (In 1982, Maximum Rocknroll would also begin self-publishing a magazine-sized fanzine of the same name, which would go on to become the longest running DIY punk music fanzine in the US). This flyer, which was taped onto poles and walls around the San Francisco Bay Area, featured a menacing photo of Khomeini exhorting viewers to listen to MRR radio without providing any further context.Footnote 70 Punks familiar with Maximum Rocknroll would have gotten the message and tuned in, but other passersby – primed to fear both Khomeini and the burgeoning punk rock scene due to popular accounts of both as violent and fanatical – would likely have been unnerved. In the hostile climate of the US in the early 1980s, this type of public display was a kind of guerrilla art.
One of the most striking examples of punk's “scare the squares” principle can be found in the 1980 Kill the Hostages EP by Benedict Arnold and the Traitors, a band whose members first met in 1979 through the short-lived Los Angeles chapter of Rock Against Racism, an organization to which I return below. “Kill the Hostages” begins with the voice of a mocking newscaster discussing the hostage crisis just before the Traitors begin gleefully shouting the shocking lyrics to their anti-anthem: “Kill the hostages / make ‘em into sausages.” No message could have been further from the mainstream political zeitgeist of the US in late 1979. The art on the Traitors’ 7” vinyl EP, now an expensive item coveted by record collectors, includes a ridiculous collage of cartoons and images from Iran, including oil fields, maps, a picture of the erstwhile shah saying “I ran from Iran,” and a drawing of Khomeini responding “I run Iran.”
The Traitors’ relationship to the Los Angeles chapter of Rock Against Racism (RAR), co-founded by Traitors’ member Stephen Jay Morris, aka Stephen Stink, is worth examining in further detail. RAR was originally a grassroots movement and organization founded in London in 1976 in response to rising levels of racist street violence and the concomitant rise of the National Front, an explicitly racist and fascist political party. RAR was a movement of bands and artists drawing from New Left politics across the United Kingdom over the next several years. RAR in the UK was, as Stuart Schrader writes:
an effort to reorient pop music toward a substantive commitment to antiracism, which included concerts, fanzines, records, and mass protest, as well as support for self-defense against street violence by the Far Right. Rock Against Racism demanded that music, particularly punk and reggae, not be escapes from the everyday, the street, and politics, but be deeply informed by and answerable to these domains.Footnote 71
Rock Against Racism never made the same inroads in the US as it did in the UK, and the short-lived RAR Los Angeles was no exception. RAR chapters in the US were not officially linked to the original UK organization, which chose not to centralize or control the Rock Against Racism name and logo. As a result, local US-based chapters cropped up whenever the DIY spirit moved sympathetic fellow travelers, from California to Ohio to New York, to work towards the organization's stated goals: “Bury the Nazis, Smash the Klan, Rock ‘n’ Roll throughout the land.”Footnote 72 While Morris and company's efforts did not lead to RAR's long-term establishment in Los Angeles, their work did lead to one RAR concert on October 27, 1979, the eve of the hostage affair.Footnote 73
As Morris later explained, he co-organized that RAR Los Angeles gig to create a public show of force against racists, anti-LGBTQ activists, fascists, and the ever-looming threat of police violence. Morris wanted to shine a spotlight on the fact that racism was alive and well in the city of angels, countering the claims of those who pretended otherwise.
I thought that having an anti-racist concert in downtown L.A. would be a profound statement! Racism existed in any climate and L.A. was no exception. This was 1979 and the L.A.P.D. still had a racist presence in the ‘Hood. The L.A. County Sheriff was still harassing Chicano youth. In El Monte, there was a Nazi group headquartered next to a McDonalds, on a major street. When gay groups held demonstrations, Nazi counter-demonstrators would show up. The general perception, however, was that L.A. had no racism! It was a sub-tropical paradise.
Why was L.A. so segregated? Blacks lived in the south, Chicanos in the east, gays and Jews on the west side, and the Whites were in the valley or near the beach. Yeah, racism was very real. I chose MacArthur Park, located in the outskirts of downtown L.A., for the event because it was across the street from the site where the Punk Riot of the Elks Lodge took place on March 17, 1979. The LAPD had cracked punks’ skulls on that particular night.
Although RAR LA only organized this one concert, the chapter would also eventually play a small role on Benedict Arnold and the Traitors’ aforementioned Kill the Hostages EP in 1980. The copyright for the record is attributed to Rock Against Racism, although the purposely sarcastic and offensive humor of Kill the Hostages was quite far afield from the typically earnest and straightforward political messaging of Rock Against Racism.
If Benedict Arnold and the Traitors’ lyrics and message shocked some listeners in 1979, a later US-based hardcore punk band stands out even further for their audacious name, rhetoric, and aesthetic: The Fearless Iranians from Hell. Based in San Antonio, Texas, The Fearless Iranians from Hell were founded by a group of young punk rockers, some of whom were Iranian Americans. The Fearless Iranians channeled their anger and alienation into biting, acerbic, thrashing hardcore songs presented from the ostensible point of view of Muslim radicals hellbent on destroying America. Nothing summarizes the band's brand of intentionally provocative and satirical humor better than their iconic song “Blow Up the Embassy” from their first self-titled EP: “I'm gonna kill myself / I wanna lie dead on the floor / It's none of your fucking business / what I live and die for / I do it over, again and again — blow up the embassy!”
Throughout the late 1980s, the Fearless Iranians’ album art, lyrics, and aesthetic showed a similar combination of the purposely inflammatory, utterly irreverent, and absurd, all in an effort to upset the literal-minded among their audience. Their 1987 debut album featured a serious image of Khomeini and included the title of the album, Die For Allah, in bold print.Footnote 74 Their next album, 1988's Holy War, featured a goofy cartoon drawing of a grinning Khomeini holding a giant bong and getting stoned while looking over a scene in which a mushroom cloud explodes in the background over a field of fighting soldiers.Footnote 75 Advertising for this album in punk fanzines included the tagline, “The sound of the American dream being blown to bits” (Figure 12).Footnote 76 The Fearless Iranians’ final album, entitled Foolish Americans and released in 1990 (a year after Khomeini's death), featured an image of a group of smiling Iranian students burning an American flag. On the back of the album, next to a black and white photograph of Khomeini sitting peacefully, is the simple message “Dedicated to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”Footnote 77 Advertising for this album published in fanzines described it as “Islamic insanity.”Footnote 78
Boner Records advertisement for Fearless Iranians from Hell's Holy War LP.
Although the Fearless Iranians were often misunderstood in their day, many punks got and appreciated the joke. One such person was Tim Yohannan of the aforementioned Bay Area radio show and fanzine Maximum Rocknroll, an avowedly anti-corporate publication with an explicitly leftist worldview and the most widely read US punk fanzine of the era. In a 1986 review of the Blow Up the Embassy EP in Maximum Rocknroll, Yohannan described the record's appeal positively, in characteristically succinct terms: “Four pounding punk tunes with great, shouted vocals…this bunch pokes fun at both Khomeini fanaticism and the U.S.”Footnote 79
Not everyone had such sanguine responses to the Fearless Iranians, who worked to keep their membership and intentions cryptic, choosing to let audiences decide whether they were for real. Approximately twenty-five years before the Islamophobic hysteria elicited by the September 11 attacks, the Fearless Iranians skewered Americans’ fear of militant Islam by presenting themselves as radicals hell bent on destroying the United States. For their troubles, the band was often attacked by a diverse group of naysayers, including the police, skinheads, earnest leftist students, and right-wing jocks, many of whom did not understand that the band was intentionally trying to provoke a response. Fearless Iranians from Hell member Omid, who is of Iranian heritage, later admitted that band saw themselves essentially as performance artists who reveled in the antagonism they evoked from credulous and gullible audiences. In an interview published in 2009, Omid explained, “Americans, as a whole, have an underdeveloped sense of irony.” With the Fearless Iranians, Khomeini kitsch came full circle: from home-made ephemera that provoked and circulated barely suppressed jingoistic rage at Iranians to a group of anti-authoritarian punks, some of Iranian backgrounds, intentionally trolling a country fixated on anti-Muslim and anti-Iran sentiment.
Conclusion
In the aftermath of the November 1979 seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran and capture of dozens of American hostages by Iranian student militants, anti-Iran sentiment in the US boomed. In many cases, this newfound antipathy was promoted by high-level members of government and broadcast daily by mainstream media outlets. Yet new ideas, languages, and images of Iran and Iranians also circulated organically through grassroots material cultures – including T-shirts, badges, flyers, records, and other assorted ephemera – that I dub “Khomeini kitsch.” Upon the return of the hostages in January 1981, Khomeini kitsch – which was often produced by unknown artists and entrepreneurs and circulated person-to-person – was often treated as junk, discarded, stored away, and seemingly forgotten as new political and social crises came to the fore. Yet this ephemeral material culture, along with the powerful political sentiment and understanding of Iran and Iranians that it produced and evoked, has never fully stopped circulating in the US.
Remarkably, in the years since the hostage crisis, Khomeini kitsch has even made its way to the highest levels of state power, despite its origin as irreverent grassroots culture that first circulated among everyday people. In 2007, a reporter asked Senator John McCain, then-Republican party nominee for president, about how the senator might deal with an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program. With a smirk, McCain started singing song lyrics from the Vince Vance and the Valiants re-working of the song “Barbara Ann” first popularized in the hostage era: “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb I-ran.” McCain's impromptu performance of the warmongering novelty song, which was released as a vinyl 45 and played on regional radio stations across the country during the hostage era, drew knowing chuckles from some in the crowd.Footnote 80 In this moment, Khomeini kitsch had come full circle: from a seemingly minor material culture to a retaliatory threat made by powerful state officials, used to buttress and reproduce understandings of Iran as a fanatical forever enemy of the United States and its people.
Despite the absence of Khomeini kitsch from the official historiography of the hostage era, this essay shows how these ephemeral materials were instrumental to shaping, provoking, and circulating new understandings of and sentiments towards Iran in the social and political imaginary of the United States. As such, I show here that a proper accounting of the relationship between the US and Iran – and between Americans and Iranians – requires a methodology attentive to the ephemeral, material, unofficial, and the seemingly minor. Khomeini kitsch reveals sentiments, economic circuits, and social worlds that have rarely made it into official accounts of the hostage era but have left affective traces and sedimented political epistemologies that extend far beyond that which can be easily discovered in traditional archives or state-level stories. Such traces of Khomeini kitsch, such as pejorative uses of the term “Ayatollah,” T-shirts proclaiming Iran's clerical leaders “Ayatollah Assaholla,” and jingles demanding the US bomb (bomb bomb) Iran, have continued to circulate in US popular cultures, shaping common understandings of Iran. Khomeini kitsch has also circulated in new social networks, such as in 2022, when an LA-based hip hop, streetwear, and street art company made and sold an updated version of the “Ayatollah Assaholla” shirt in solidarity with the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran.Footnote 81 From its inception, Khomeini kitsch appropriated already circulating images, words, and items – from Mickey Mouse to toilet paper – to make sense of radically new political circumstances. These circulating images were often pasted together in counterintuitive ways, such as the decontextualized circulation of the logo of expatriate Iranian revolutionary student groups on punk flyers next to unrelated hardcore punk band names. In this sense, Khomeini kitsch provided – and continues to provide, even decades after the end of the hostage crisis – a living archive of languages, images, and objects generated and circulated by ordinary people in the US that ascribes social meaning related to Iran, its government, and its people.
Open access
