A Streetcar Named Disobedience

Grumpy, rude and stubborn: this is a character sketch of Iranian capital's public bus drivers. They have always been so, at least from a passenger's seat. On Dec 25, 2005, many added another upsetting adjective to their identity kit: disobedient.

Most people ignored the drivers' threat to go on a strike. These sullen workers would never keep their buses snoring for an extra minute, people and officials thought. Drivers are supposedly boss just inside their bus and humble citizens outside.

Tehran bus driver have traditionally handpicked one easy target for unleashing daily frustration: a lame-duck passenger. As a rule of thumb, no sane commuter disputes navigational skills of the captain nor begs for early landing. To brazenly challenge him, one should have a thick skin and slick tongue to parry the flying insults in the packed bus.

Now by making good on their threat to stop working on a date not marked as Christmas Day in the Islamic Republic, the madcap captains have widened their target choice. Also they inconveniently yet boldly wrote a piece of history: the very first strike during the President Ahmadinejad's tenure.

His fellow conservatives have denied the bus drivers claims that their wages are doggedly kept unchanged for three years in a country whose official inflation rate is over 15 percent. It seems the arrest on Thursday of a handful of strike leaders has merely emboldened the drivers and other workers in the state-run bus company.

Their strike, for sure, would remain an isolated incident, but with deep echoes. It would stitch up a chain of sporadic acts of civil disobedience by Iranian disgruntled teachers, nurses and workers.

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue," Oscar Wilde says in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891). "It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

The Irish author believes rebellious activists, like striking bus drivers, can bulldoze a road towards democracy.

"Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them," he says. "That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilization."

Nowadays labeling someone an agitator connotes a rather anarchistic tone, but the Iranian bus drivers are unlikely to mind. It commands more respect for grumpy heroes.