We Are Finally Free From Khamenei's Suffocating Gaze

The face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has loomed over every significant milestone of my life — of everyone's life — in Iran. The requisite photo of him that was hung in every public space, where people learned, worked, lunched, transacted, watched theater, saw art and visited the doctor, altered over the years. In my youth, in his middle age, his image was toothy and callow. As the years passed, his expression grew truculent, his beard gray. But he was always there, always watching.

You get the face you deserve, said Henri Cartier-Bresson. Ayatollah Khamenei never developed the fleshy, decayed look of Muammar el-Qaddafi or the hooded rage of Saddam Hussein. Age turned his image haughty and domineering, rather than mad and ravaged. Yet he outlived them, our seemingly immortal dictator, resisting every effort to oppose and resist him — at the ballot box, through elite maneuvering, through sly satire, through years of protests, first by varying segments of society and then increasingly most of them at the same time.