The Tale of the King Who Banned Farting

Recently, a short story written here by an ingenious anonymous blogger has gained enormous popularity in the Persian blogosphere. It rose to the top of the ranks in Balatarin.com which is the Persian equivalent of Digg.com. Many people are also posting it on their blogs and posting it as notes on Facebook and other social networking sites. I thought it might also be interesting for the English speaking world to read the story that has interested so many Iranians. So I’m going to attempt to translate the story here. Disclaimer: I’m going to translate everything directly and so this post contains language that I don’t normally use in my writing.

Long ago, a foreigner king rose to power in the homeland. He was evil and at the same time cunning, and he had a vizier who was even more evil and cunning. He ordered the vizier “find a way for me to dominate the life and soul of these people without them realizing or revolting.” The vizier contemplated and composed a scroll and handed it out to the king’s heralds to announce it across the towns and villages of the land. The new laws proclaimed that belief in the old faith and education were now illegal. Taxes were raised threefold and the king was granted “first-night” rights to any newlywed bride. The value of the life of countrymen was announced to be equivalent to that of four-legged animals in the neighboring country which was the king’s place of origin. Any protest or disagreement with these rules was to be punished by death. Finally, farting and flatus were also announced illegal.

The king said “Oh vizier! All this pressure is going to cause uprising and were we not supposed to carry out a velvet revolution?” To which the vizier relpied, “Do not worry your highness, you are not considering the last part of the new law, it is percisely the safety valve for them to empty their defiant energy.”

And so it happened as the vizier said. The people spoke up in protest to the obvious injustice. It was natural for the king to promote his own religion or ban education. And kings have always raised taxes and “first-night” rights to newlywed brides is an ancient tradition. And the little value of our lives compared to the neighbouring country stems from the king’s nationalism, but the ban on farting and flatus is just too much! And anyways, the king cannot possibly put guards in every toilet of the land. The more knowledgeable ones cried “emptying the intestines is good for your health and is nothing to be ashamed of. This is the work of uncivilized persons to snoop around in other people’s undergarments.” They were delighted to have found scientific support for their position and to be able to call the opposition “uncivilized” and they nodded their heads in this delight and called themselves intellectuals. And they said, “Does the king not fart himself?!” They made myriads of jokes about the king having exploded from withholding his gas or how the king has put a cork up his ass to control himself or how the king is like a dog sniffing for farts and sticking his nose up people’s behinds. And they would SMS these jokes to each other and laugh and laugh.

The king’s guards spread across the land to enforce the new laws. Once in a while, they would surge into toilets and arrest the farters and take them in for inquisition.  But people continued to fart and break wind in private and considered the odorous noises of their bowels to be huge acts of protest to the government. People would take trips to the desert so that they could fart freely. In the town alleys, they would look around to make sure no one was looking and then fart. They threw underground parties where they would serve beans and have group farts. After a while nobody remembered the ban on education and the forced faith and rape and degradation and taxes and all everybody was concerned with was to defend their last remaining trivial right to fart.

Meanwhile in the palace, the king and his vizier laughed and giggled at how they had drowned the people in their own acidic gases and turned everyone into farters.