khatami. he served in previous term. as a matter of fact, these people have always been bringing forces together and they've been attacking this government, criticizing this government trying to hurt this government. of course people know all about this, but they should also realize the fact that i am not standing, i am not competing one single candidate, it is a group of people with mr. mousavi of access and cooperating and moving against me. the reason for this heavy pressure on me the past four years and also heavier pressure during the election days, i think this comes down to one thing. in the past three governments the administrative structures were formed some managerial chains were formed and they went awry. they distanced themselves from the revolution. i don't mean that military services in europe rendered, but gradually, there was a current that came in and acted as if they were as if they possessed and they manipulate it and they had an open hand and doing everything they wanted to

the 1300 pitchers that appear in my book basically began as a singular vision of america, but the khatami,, what i came away with is that basically it is not my vision of america. it is a plural because its visions of america. because you and i are part of that mosaic so every time you take a picture and when you go back home or are in washington d.c. you to our photograph in democracy and of what i would like to say is that what i saw then and what i see today matters. when you go back home and you remember what you saw in washington d.c. that you share with some of your pitchers then to tutt until your photo history but specifically when you get home also now want you to tell everybody that she met jo shmo and he took her picture. at all like to finish with a picture of you because you are the subject of this talk. okay, so everybody smile. [laughter] always remember to turn the camera on a. [laughter] okay, thank you very much. [applause] if anybody has any questions i would be happy to answer them. >> where are you going to start getting pictures for your talk? >> well, i am currently

because at that time, there was a moderate in power, president mohammed khatami and there was a particular set of power that he would be transforming iran to a more democratic and a more open society. as i was living in iran at that time and i was in my early 20s, and these young people were my friends and my relatives, and i grew quite fascinated with their political attitudes and behavior. and i felt that i couldn't really capture what they were striving for in these short 600-word news stories. and so i wrote -- i decided to write a book about them to portray how they were going about trying to transform their society. many of you may have read that book but i'll quickly because i think it's important to talking about what iran is going through today remember what young people were dealing with back at that time, in the years sort of early 2000/2001. i described their culture of as-if pretending all the rules in place, what people could wear, how they could behave and read and watch, they pretended these rules did not exist. young women started to flout the dress code and wear brighter

they can feel between a very conservative president like mahmoud ahmadinejad and a moderate like khatami. would come back with what came after and the heart of that goes back to elections. they can go and they can vote for him again and choose a different leader because i think they feel as though who they choose makes a direct -- or has now, now they realize, makes a direct impact on their daily lives. >> yeah, thank you. i'm from voice of america persian news network. i have a bunch of questions so i just chose one of them. you talked about the iranian society, and you also described different aspects the cultural aspects and the economical crisis, how have these factors affected the iranian culture or the national identity? and is there any national or cultural identity crisis or not? and how this political situation impacted there the definition of their cultural identity? >> uh-huh, uh-huh. that's a really interesting question. i think that certainly -- i think we came to see during the mahmoud ahmadinejad years that there was a sort of dormant iranian nationalism all of these years