not humans, properties!

the recent hot topic is the sad death of the little girl who fell into a sewage drain, was dragged for a mile and emerged drowned from another outlet of public un-hygiene. the incident reminded our esteemed press and good public of similar "accidents" caused by such atrocities of management by our local and national government institutions where eventually, the victim was virtually found to blame. nobody recalled, however, that one of turkey's most popular and best known poets, orhan veli had died the same way, half a century ago.

in the last case, too, the lawyer of the contractor firm (which is apparently related to such dignitaries as the prime minister, the justice minister and other notables of the genre) attempted to blame the child for falling in the drain where she died. that did not wash in the media but the courts may still uphold the lawyer's claim.

anyway, that is not the point here. the issue is that a city becomes an urban space only through its citi-zens. if the denizens of an urb are totally and also proudly ignorant of a city-sense, the organic mathematics of thriving in tandem, not only are lives in jeopardy, but the jeopardy will persist as well, because there exists no system to indicate the right course of action for urban survival when the mathematics of space is not organic to the mind of its "occupant".

as always when peasant or schooled-peasant (diplomé, as the french call them) minds are at work, some researched how european cities cope with the problem of underground public works. photos appeared of london where the danger zone was segregated by fences, distinctly marked and lighted. so far so good, but the research, or at least attention to the results of research came after-the-fact-of-death: not before-the-fact-of-construction. the media commmented: "see how human life is valued in the west and how it is valued here".

wrong! there is no "human life" in peasant societies because there are no humans. "human" is not a biological or evolutionary category that classifies all specimens of the homo sapiens-sapiens as such. "human" is a derivative and function of "individual" which is the historical and historic product of the process called freedom. freedom is the last concern of peasant societies where lack of control means loss of status, power, holdings and the means of holding on. therefore, there are few free, individual human-persons in peasant societies.

there exist mainly subjects - of the state, of the prophet, of the imam or the priest, of the political leader/party, of the father, of the family, of the football team, of the street gang etc.

the chief characteristic of a "subject" is its expendability in inverse proportion not to its merits but its usefulness to the "owner".

am i being too harsh? exaggerating?

here, let me recount two lines from a childrens' march (yes, march as in military marches) from the 40's which is still sung collectively at schools:

children are sacred properties of the motherland
each a tree of the august tree
who should be cared for and supplied with aid.

set the controls federated-ly

kenan evren, head of the 1980 putsch who got himself elected president in polls "guarded" by soldiers and guns in 1983 came forth and made a correct comment for once... old age must be lifting the inhibitions on his wisdom caused by military training, apparently. he suggested that turkey can be run better if divided into some sort of federated states that he says must number eight.

for some reason, the akp government spokesmen who, normally, would stand to gain the most from decentralized rule in turkey were the first and harshest to respond - perhaps simply because they hate evren as much as the (ex) communists do. all in all, the ex-strongman's suggestion sems to be swept into oblivion.

ask me, a switch to federated state structure is one of the very few measures, short of a total and unconditional democratization, de-statization and capitalization (which look impossible), to keep the country "unitarian" - a nondescript ideal that recently seems to have acquired religious fervor. however, such a federative system, too, must be accompanied by liberalization and democratization, in-situ rule and administration, due autonomy etc. in order to function. otherwise, it will just replicate the centralized, control freak, non liberal despotism of ankara in secondary or auxillary centers. just as the 80 odd years of republican experience shows, any centrality tends not to liberate but increase control. in the chaotic and unpredictible dynamics of a capitalist world, that results in decapacitating doses of anomie. a federated cloning of ankara without copenhagen criteria liberties will simply aggravate the malady becaus it will bureaucratize the state regionally and locally.

i got a feeling that evren actually yearns for that option. instead of ankara's diminishing hold on the country, he wants tighter reins strongly held by bureaucratic sub-despotisms. why else does he not campaign for "elected provincial governors" for instance, if his (impossible and incredible) goal is freedom?

people sketches 1 - yavuz tanyeli, the artist, part II

in order to keep it short, i cut down on the post about yavuz tanyeli in the first people sketches. then i simply procrastinated. naturally, a few posts can hardly say much that is significant about the artist in turkey. he deserves this second page of the sketch book at least.

yavuz has an ongoing exhibition in the karşı sanat gallery in galatasaray, accross from the church of san antonio on istiklal caddesi (beyoğlu) that will close on march 3. if you visit it, i think you'll aggree with me that he is the most interesting painter alive in turkey.

art criticism is an art in itself, so i am not pretending to know about paints, tints, thinners, techniques etc. but art appreciation is a direct derivative of one's capacity to perceive and represent the world mentally. so, what i write about yavuz's work pertains to content, which, in the context of plastic arts, also comprises form.

you cannot just look at yavuz's paintings. you watch them. what at first seems to be an abstract blotch of colored oil, sometimes literally splashed on the canvas, slowly reveals a very defined form that appears through the contours of colors. from the contours, form jumps to the contrasts. thereafter, the whole canvas, often larger than an ordinary living room wall, assumes a life of its own. it guides you through its own tale interspersed with myths and questions while
after the initial shock you realize that there is nothing in the picture that is abstract; only secret messages and meanings that lurk in every twist of the brush.

the main form is a story - whether it shows dead horses under the debris of an earthquake stricken town, a jazz band blowing wind instruments under the vine, kurds "cooking" heroin in a cave, it depicts an odd cross section from life that contains elements presumed contrary. but the story unravels. a colorful handkerchief sprouts from a trompet player's pocket, a cat juts its head into the picture like an indifferent self-critic, somewhere in what is supposed to be the background, another story breaks from an immorally brazen play of solidifying shadows
that links straight to the other acts in the picture (sometimes, even onto another picture). so, the apparently static frame grips you and drags you into multiple adventures at once. the overall effect is mesmerizing : looking at the whole, you see a complete picture. looking at the parts, you see a number of complete pictures which also are complementary to the whole, a sense of a tumultuous placidity that belies infernal action, which resembles standing at the edge of an abyss at once quiet, deadly and alluring.

i once spent a whole week gazing and watching only the hieronymus bosch and pieter brueghel collection in the kunsthistoriches museum in vienna - this is not meant as a comparison of artists and their art but the feeling of being in flux with the picture is the same. a sensation of something sweeping up your spine urges you to think again, that your mind is gathering cobwebs and is hungry for new knowledge, which indeed, is synonymous with a new reality and a plethora of experiences awaiting to be savored; what existentialist/phenomenologist jargon calls noemases.

the color expressions and the shapes yavuz likes to paint are also often bizarre and ominious at first - he has switched to livelier colors recently but the majority of yavuz's paintings tends to be dark. then, all the mockery and humor emerge from the brush lines and the macabre feeling goes away like watching a suspense movie.

i think of art as an exploration for the artist and as a journey of expedition for the viewer. yavuz and i have been on too many travels together, maybe it is not so surprising that his pictures can take me away on never-ending-trips-everywhere. however, after all those years, i have come to the conclusion that if you dig art and after looking at yavuz's work long enough, are still where you started, you are either beginning to "know the place for the first time" as t.s. eliot said or you have not the courage to launch on a voyage into your own void.

we are talking here of an artist who not only has a distinct style, but the class and competence that can establish the parameters of that style as a school of art. yavuz' s art is universal in quality. few contemporary galleries abroad carry few pictures that are as rich as his in content and strong in technique. furthermore, his work is unique, inimitable, inventive and original because of the particular path of creativity he has chosen and carved. yavuz's pioneering style takes not only its inspiration but also its matrices from the orient. he applies the orient to the practice of an art that is occidental to the last spark of its spirit, rather than repeating the third world mistake of applying the west's techniques to reshape the east's unmalleable soul.

guess that makes him the artist in turkey.

emre the intellectual football racist

oh no, i am not going to wallow in that simplistic media guagmire debating "whether turkish nationalism is racist or ethnicist". like atoms that form a molecule and molecules that form a mole, all particularisms accrue and attach to complementary particularisms. just as a mole reacts differently from constituent molecules in different circumstances, the resultant particularism at times may even seem to exclude some constituent - the hottest dixie soldiers fought under the old glory along with 'em yanks and even the "niggers" toward an american victory in two world wars. see what i mean? no? go back a decade then and look at rwanda; the end 20th century showdown of colored racism between the tutsi and the hutu.

i just want to touch on the case of emre belezoğlu, a turkish footballer playing in england for newcastle united. i heard of emre when he made front pages due to allegations that he voiced racist remarks about his teammates. he is supposed to have called a black player a nigger (or negro) and racially insulting an arab player. he reportedly defended himself saying he is a muslim and therefore cannot be a racist and that the word "zenci" which corresponds to negro or nigger in turkish is not an insult. actually, he is mostly right on that latter one - zenci is part of a relatively upper class vocabulary and is not necessarily insulting. however, turks' lack of differentiation intervenes in favor of racism in a worse form: black and colored people come from the south, and hence are assumed to come from arabia, more familiar because it is the land of pilgrimage. thus, they are called arabs. arab, can be and is used very commonly as a derogation.

my favorite is not that however: emre said in defense "my best friend has black skin". poor ballhead, he does not know that in the unspoken language of discourses, he has thus sung the rhyme chanted by all notorious whites accused of racism: "some of my best friends are negroes..."

well, i don't know what kind of football he plays but i am willing to bet he has not read as many books in his life as the goals he has scored this half season in britain.

hi, folks

it's weird but apparently blog writing, which is supposed to be something totally volitional and therefore spontaneous and capricious rather than consistent and routine, is also subject to "writer's block". in the last week or so, althougth i did desire to scribble a few words here, i could not bring myself up to do it.

nevertheless, i see that the mass of readers who gaze at these virtual pages have not abandoned me. in more than two months, i have curried almost 500 (480+ to be more exact) readers, averaging seven persons per day despite my truancies.

i never intended to make this a popular blog, rather a loose journal to log loose opinions to track the passage of days - a reference (maybe) to come back to in the future with the record. of course, that not just gives me the right to say "i told you so," it also enables others to point out to how my wisdom flopped.

so thank you folks, for your visits. i hope i'll soon pull up the energy and write outrageous entries that will to keep you interested.

people sketches 1 - yavuz tanyeli, the artist, part I

yavuz tanyeli is my oldest friend, almost from the times we could not hold our peepee. we grew up together. in my book, "growing up" reads as collecting experiments, so when and if the time and opportunity arrive, one can dive into any experience one wills. we played together, we fought together, we formed opinions together -not necessarily the same opinions, of course-, we chased girls together, we stole my father's car and went joyriding together... we even harassed homosexuals together, during the insecure years of our early teens, and almost as divine reprise for our bigotry, we got mauled by fascists together at the end of our teen ages.

when we were kids, we used to go into greengroceries and while i stalled the shopkeeper, yavuz, using the tip of his house keys, would carve the faces of political personalities on water melons. when we left, you'd see about a hundred green suleyman demirels (who was then just warming up as would-be prime minister) and ismet inönüs (atatürk's comrade-at-arms, the co-founder and second president of the republic who, during the heyday of nazism, declared himself the national chief and who at those times, was serving his final months in any public office as pm - he died as an "ordinary" member of parliament) with green smiles.

i finished the ankara college a couple years earlier than yavuz. i went on to the mekteb-i mülkiye (faculty of political sciences) to study international relations and politics, yavuz finally made it to the sanayi-i nefise mektebi (the istanbul academy of fine arts). i became a journalist (wow, this must be the confession hour) and yavuz started off as an illustrator at the bab-ı ali (the sublime porte, actually, the slope that led to the sublime porte on which during the terminal period of the empire, the sadrazam's office, or the prime ministry was located - naturally the power hooked turkish press/media flourished on that road).

in those years, you were lucky to get back home alive, provided you could reach your place of business in the morning. an average of six people were being murdered daily on what passed as a patriotic war between the nationalists (who aped the nazis) and the revolutionaries (who aped them, pretending they were aping che or lenin' s russians). after escaping three lynching attempts, i decided i'd better switch to the academe where at least i had the chance to know why if anybody would kill me. i was beginning to affect (extra) personality deficiencies because people wanted to kill me not because of who i was, not even because of what i had done but just because i happened to be working in an institution that displeased them - regardless of the inherent silliness of that instituiton!

yavuz launched on his career as a professional painter and sculptor, initially spilling on canvas the plight and struggle of the working man, moving slightly toward abstract concepts and designs (which, incidentally, i hate) but eventually finding himself a course, one meandering through forms and colors which he learnt to combine in a unique manner. yavuz's maternal uncle, the late orhan peker, was a famous painter, too, and he was not only an influence but also a teacher to him. i am definitely not an expert, but yavuz's artistic maturation was the mathematical function of a process during which his political(*) weltanschauung crystallized and through the consolidation of ideas, his color sense that peker taught him to perfect developed into a typical methodology of defining form. yavuz developed a unique style to himself that, if there had been enough talent around to understand what he was doing and saying, could have developed into a school which, for once, would have originated in turkey or the orient.

now i can say what i intended to say from the beginning: yavuz tanyeli is the only modern painter in turkey who is of universal value and deserves to be called an artist.

p.s.: yavuz has a web site where he displays his work but his pictures require viewing to appreciate at all. still, a glance is a glance: www.yavuztanyeli.com

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(*) not in the general usage of the word but in its original sense derivimng from the word "polis", i.e., pertaining to the modern, social animal.

tame tot of tint

this is a post i started and abandoned weeks ago during artistanbul 2006, istanbul's yearly art "fair" organized by the metropolitan municipality, art gallery owners association and the dream design factory.

oh, how i hate this twisting and wringing of letters into fartsy fantasy nonexistent abracadabra words! playing installation with langauge, making words, the cornerstones of meaning into scrap junkets of that crap-artsy postmodernist handicraft-ism! just like crashing a semi truck head on with a ferrari and obtaining a vehicle that can supposedly haul things at 1000 mph if only it can move to go anywhere!

while language in the form of words devolves or degenerates into communication by sights, motions and raw sounds, similar to what it was 80 million years ago, such diarrheac verbal creativity is becoming more and more faddish. and what to call this fad? it is not hybridization, it is not even bastardization. it certainly is an abomination and can be called awkwardization, though hardly insulting enough to emphasize the inherent abhorrence.

hear that now: art fair? the word "fair" evokes a crowded marketplace with lots of fun going about - the bearded lady, sword swallowers, fire eaters, pickpockets, midgets and happy harlots where craftsmen display their handy skills and spawn. it calls to mind times when art existed not, or rather when it was not differentiated from the crafts. that is a greek tradition where the shoemaker and the sculptor were both dealing with techne, i.e., art - that is, when the shoemaker worked to produce all answers neatly packed and gift wrapped in his product wrought with the mastery that marked his life. art that did not end with a question mark!

for that, in the end, is what art does: ask questions.

touring artistanbul, i was dispirited and bored from observing works that acquiesced so obviously. no questions hung on the walls, to pull you awake, throw all your lights on, incitre you to probe your mind, squirm with the desire to know and the frustration of not knowing whether what you surmised is the right question to the answer you've already discarded! all the gentle and genteel colored canvas on the walls inspired was shushed reverie, deferent and thankful to exist; silent to the complacency of that existence. yet, that is the last thing art should convey - supplicant existence; that is the last thing colors should paint, hypnosis into gratitude.

tots of tame tint, celebrating what is with no revolt, no rebellion, no surge of uprising and no question to start the avalanche. almost as mangled as newfangled word-ishes like artistanbul...

wonder what it would be called is somebody passed the wind while walking those corridors of colored compliance.

people sketches

while in bodrum, i had to do a lot of manual and menial work in order to ready sarpa for the sea again. a few t-shirts and a totally machine oil spotted jean are now totally discarded, assigned for dirty stuff alone.

manual labor is like therapy at times. it is good to see what you are doing and coming up with, if you are wrong, to correct your mistakes and literally see how you can solve problems. i did all that in a particular mechanical workshop belonging to a particular mechanical genius called niyazi usta (maestro niyazi). bantering and joking with him i realized what an important person he is. how, doing what he must only, he can influence the lives of those around him. then i decided to devote at least some of the posts here to those people who are unknown landmarks in time. i will start with niyazi usta, but have to ask you for patience, these days are a bit hectic at school what with the registrations, haggling with the students over courses and grades, the international organizations and what not.

niyazi usta's workshop is in the organize sanayi sitesi of course. in addition to its total and perennial chaotic organization, the site is located right on top of what is believed to be the hippodromos of ancient halicarnassos. the site was built in 1986 during the heyday of özalism when anything that made money was legitimate even at the expense of law or culture or history and especially fine taste. at the time, the valid laws said you could not develop any area that is possibly an archaelogical site. to determine whether the organize sanayi sitesi was going to be erected on top of historical remains, a team of danish archaelogists were commissioned. the danes concluded after months of initial surveying that some deep research was necessary to assess what was under the earth - they were not certain it was the hippodrome, but something was there. they had to dig for three years before they could tell what it was.

that verdict practically pulled the noose tight on the site's neck. now, a site is usually built by a cooperative, usually pioneered bu local notables and again usually, it serves to provide some sort of unusual benefits for the members of the cooperative, still usually at taxpayers' expense. during özal's reign any obstacle before business was simply intolerable, especially when such local and constituent-pleasing deals were concerned. a solution had to be found!!!

so what was the solution?

simple, of course... a band of turkish archaelogists were summoned. they decreed after three days of shoveling earth that the area was clear, not a historical site and very suitable for the organize site. see how organized an organize sanayi sitesi is built in turkey?

what did the danes say? "oh it's alright," said the chief digger. "if we had begun excavating the ruins would probably end up half exposed due to lack of funds. exposure ruins archaelogical artefacts. this way, they remain buried to be taken out some day with proper planning and funds".

imsam-empiricum

alas, i have been unfaithful for such a long while, oh my swarm of readers, depriving you of the chance to wallow in my wisdom! should i be flogged for that? normally yes, but i have some good news to ransom my way out of that!

i hereby have the pleasure of notifying you that a new scientific - academic entity is officially born, whose focus is the eastern mediterranean, which historically extends to the mesopotamia area. actually, the new institution is a revival of the former institute of middle east studies (imsam) that also was known as “al mamun”. the new one is called imsam - empiricum.

the opening of empiricum, i think, also describes the purpose of the institute, as well as its founders, professor john karkazis of the aegean university of hellas (my preferred name for greece), professor yosi vanunu of the hebrew university of israel and yours truly from the istanbul bilgi university of turkey, who has the honor of being elected president of imsam - empiricum: eastern mediterranean panepistemic institute for research, innovation, cooperation, understanding and mediation.

as the name suggests, we hope that knowledge and science, all sciences (panepisteme) technical and social can be not only an instrument but also a goal in itself to bring about the desired values listed in the name, which in themselves are nothing but a basic path paved toward a life of well being and prosperity for the denizens of the region.

for capital, we have little more than our science, and to an extent, maybe the support of the academic establishments we belong to. and despite the lazy spell i am cruising through since the new year, imsam - empiricum is preparing to launch itself with a conference in bodrum (where else?) hopefully this fall or next spring. details will follow, not only here but in all appropriate media to announce conferences and calls for papers. the topic, i believe, can be a (re)definition of what problems are (rather than what are problems) in the eastern med - mesopotamia region.

but that is for all of us to decide, not me alone.

æsthesia is infrastructure

why?

because æsthesia (*), as the infrastructure of life is the measure of advanced evolution in individuals and marks the level of the collective capacity to cogitate, of cognition in social beings.

unfortunately, the rules of evolution apply. it is not the survival of the best, it is the survival of the fittest. the best rarely thrive in infrastructural conditions that favor the fit.

(yes, there will be more coming on this)
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(*) gr. sense perception

to pooh pooh indoors

i have made it a habit to sit with my back to any city or town i happen to be visiting in turkey. well, of course exceptions occur. back street coffee shops in ayvalık for instance still bring whiffs of ottoman life when together with lesbos and izmir, the town used to be the hub of inndustrial trade in the aegean. in istanbul, i like to watch the historic constantinopolis or kostantiniyya, the palace and the mosques, never failing to admire the majesty of hagia sophia. in ankara, only at night, when the concrete eyesore ghost town is smothered by lights, do i look out the window. here, in bodrum i turn southward always, toward the sea and the hills, also taking the famous castle into the margins of my sight.

the rest is ugly behind the most evil imagination. indeed, as i commented recently, anything touched by human hands looks incredibly hideous. there is no architecture to speak of , an array of distinct and identifying styles of building, that marks the space interpretation of a culture, because there exists no culture to speak of. instead, the towns are replete with the ravings of various so called architects that horrendously mismatch each other, resulting in an æsthetic disaster that is the visual equivalent of cacophony and also exhausting to the senses.

turkey is the victim of terrible bad taste. and there is no foreign power, no capitalist-imperialist conspiracy or non-secular islamist threat to blame this one on. it is plain, unmitigated, epidemic lack of taste. turks love the ugly!

why else would anyone complement 100 year old specimens of popular masonry with rectangular blocks of cinderblock, whitewash them and turn a historical stone house into something a cow would turn its nose at if it were used as her shed?

we turned bodrum into pooh pooh only because bodrumers wanted to pooh pooh under their roofs! the only way they could conceive, with the aid of raving architects, of moving outhouses indoors was to completely tear down centuries-old architecture and chop the trees.

istanbul's demise is not worth a comment. there will always be hordes of barbarians, some of whom these days carry shiny diplomas from prestigious american universities. that is why a 3000 year old city is beginning to look like a desert village in the u.s.

why?

organize sanayi

today, a paper reported 1000 eucalyptus trees were cut down in iskenderun to make room for an "organize sanayi bölgesi or an organized industrial zone".

now that term, in itself is a key to its own impossibility. it assumes that outside such a zone, "industry" is, by definition, unorganized!

as a matter of fact, when turkey is in question, it is!

i told you before that 65 percent of the population (45 out of 70 million) live in an area that covers about only seven percent of turkey. this triangle is the most developed, urbanized, industrialized etc. region in the country. since, in normal terms, industry implies production for the market and is therefore a rational enterprise, one expects this to be also a highly organized region. all right then, let us run a cursory analysis:

* the auto industry is centered in and around bursa, together with metal industries, textyles, food and so on. bursa used to be one of turkey's primary, intensive, high yield agriculture zones. now the fertile fields are spattered by thousands of "factories" the best of which supply the big auto manufacturers. there is no railroad access to bursa. therefore, instead of shipping thousand or more cars in a single party by train whether for export or home consummption, the hundreds of cars produced are loaded on trucks by dozens at most, and begin cluttering the already congested highways even before they start to roll.
air in bursa is barely breathable. there has been no study conducted yet but it is safe to assume that pollution from the industry has contaminated the agrarian yield as well. most rivers that cross the area are, anyway.

* adapazarı is catching up with bursa. this is also a fertile agricultural zone that is already half laid to industrial waste. i realize the comparative advantage but have difficulty in understanding why it is so hard to plan a combination of the two. adapazarı was a late comer into the boom, well after the need for urban and regional planning had become obvious. but the main motive for its development was abundance of cheap space to build factories - some of which got their land from the government for free. so much for planning, planned development, organization etc. - at least the train station is nearby.

* the izmit - çorlu (thrace) line is the rhineland of turkish industrialization. although the former developed together with its own sensibility to its physical and social environment, the only reason the turkish counterpart prospered is proximity to istanbul. in the beginning, all capital concentrated in istanbul and was invested as geographically close by as possible. there was a human capital accumulation, too. technical infrastructure was the best in turkey, though nevertheless pathetic: suffice to say that in the 60's, thousands of migrants met their death on the ankara-istanbul road, opening the way for the grand anatolian exodus.
there is no need to extrapolate on the current plight of the izmit-çorlu trail. istanbul's perennial traffic mess is symptomatic enough for the lethality of the disease called disorganization.

* last, izmir... still the third largest city in the country, though badly dwindling. it lost its primacy as an alternative industrial center during özal's crusade against local capital in favor of big money in the 80's and 90's. in spite of that, izmir is a dumping ground for thousands of small scale, labor intense, possibly nonproductive, inefficient, polluting industries and a land development craze that surround the town, devour its greenery, conquer its hilltops and cut its breath off. a total lost cause. an iresuscitatable corpse of a city.

thus, even a cursory glance reveals why an ignominy like "organized industrial zone" may be a viable cocept in turkish.

by the way, for the unititated, let me remind that an organized industrial zone is, in fact, a designated area where blocks of rows of not-really-so-large shops or workshops dealing with mechanical and metallic manufacture and repairs; especially, auto repairs, so that the word "sanayi" (industry) has come to mean a conglomeration of car repair shops.

unless all readers have had the good fortune to take their vehicles to a mechanic in a sanayi, allow me to describe them as the muddiest, worst paved, hottest or coldest (depending on season), dirtiest place in whatever town they may be gracing. the traffic in a sanayi is inevitably abominable, with not just cars but also their gutted carcasses strewn along main arteries, trucks unloading heavy metals and machinery on the roads pockmarked by grave size potholes etc.

indeed, an organized industrial zone in turkey is anything, maybe even industrial, too, but alas, never organized.

forgive me, oh what few readers i have, for i have sinned against you. i promised posts i have not even drafted yet. i have no excuse. just did not feel like it. or rather, i felt like other things.

however, i shall still write about how i think the crowds at hrant dink's funeral were actually petitioning powers-that-are-not by their bodily presence, as they had done once more 10 years ago. i shall also write on islam's æsthetics -or truly, the lack of it- and how that reflects on social relations as "respectfulness" rather than respect for personality. i hope to write on why turkey has become one of the ugliest places on earth wherever human hands have touched. and a post of how we are already losing enis berberoğlu of hürriyet to ankara-ization.

just bear with me please, till i return to the world. after all, we're just a handful chatting amongst ourselves - almost.

brain is worth less than testicles!

i feel like steve mcquinn in the great escape, being hauled back, bound and chained, to the camp after another attempt at freedom. instead of the magic softball he tosses around, though, i only got my proverbial pen. yes, i'm old enough to have seen the movie and admired the man; just don't forget the motorbike scenes he was in!

anyway, being back blogging is not so much of an arrest either, there is yet the ordeals of istanbul to come... i look out the window at the lights of greece and a town, a winter weary town that has bled the cream of its populace which hits highest at about 40-50 thousand plus the tourists, is brighter than kadıköy, population minimum 8 million, watched from my window in karaköy- gateway to the greatest human bordello in europe!

i've been here just over a week, doing real work in mechanics' shops, carpenters' yards and marine docks. the futilityof the mind and/or doing mental work in turkey has become as obvious as the red behind of a rhesus monkey in a cage... i have always marveled at how, in this country, even in a meyhane (turkish taverna or liqueur house, to translate), brain costs less than ram's testicles as a mezée (appetizer, hors d'ouvre)! i have read the papers here much like a visiting foreigner would and man, do i feel like the whole place is like a meyhane! the only article that made sense was urging orhan pamuk to flee the country a.s.a.p.

i concur. not because he'll be safer elsewhere but because, even while he lives, he'll be worthier as a brain than a horny, hairy, horse humping "hero" ready to shoot him; an aberration who loves his country by destroying its valences who should have remained stuck to his father's testicles.

aberration... oh, i'm coming back

i am almost back. end of next week, we'll be ready for the next term.

maybe it is a way of getting old, maybe it is the start of a new search to find more meaning in life (mine of course, not life with a capital "l" which i don't use here anyway!) but i now realize the significance of all small, unimportant, trivial things. not that i used to ignore the things, but i had gotten used to taking their significance for granted. don't give your beloved the customary good nite kiss for no reason once, and you'll realize what i am talking about. nothing really changes, except the way you feel, which, at the end of the day, is everything that matters.

again, maybe it is getting old, maybe it is just a spell in the trenches lying at ambush but i feel that the fewer and the simpler one's interests are, the fuller time seems to have passed. night time fatigue makes sense, even sleep comes easier. chocolate tastes richer, wine smells more fruity, cigarette smoke is more stinging - all because the senses become alert to normallly neglected scattered details.

the irony is, as a social scientists those trivia should really constitute the essence of my work and hence my interest, because any science worth its name is less about normalcy than aberrations; even normalcy has to be defined in reference to aberrations.

i am almost finished with my dinghy, sarpa, though i probably won't have time this once to sail her. the house in bodrum is in shambles and i did not have the energy or the funds to deal with it either. so, it was not really a trip for fun, but it was a fun trip after all, mainly because i convinced myself of the odd idea that education cannot be a system-matter but only and at best an initiation into a structure. from now on i shall try to imitate what a light at sea does, mark not a way but a point, by which any way can be found -even on to the shoals.

an aberration, after all, is not always a mis-signal but often a mis-read-signal. so, i am coming back...

reflected in greek lights, ismail cem!

looking at the lights of greece, i get mixed feelings. today, ismail cem ipekçi was laid to rest, too. we seem to be losing the good ones, already few, rather fast. he was one of the very very rare politicians that i considered human. i was even surprised at his obsession with politics. actually, he was not so good at it i think. that is why he was respected though, i bet, not understood even by his peers, let alone the common constituents. he certainly was never the "people's men" deniz baykal declared him to be, although he took his mandatory political time with the great unwashed and looked like he truly liked it!

watching the lights of greece, cem becomes a far more meaningful colleague i am glad to have worked with. i spent a good part of my life trying to promote some sort of rapport between turks and greeks in any capacity that was available to me. yes, i am a peace freak or a freaky pacifist etc. but that is not the reason. the everlasting love of my life isthe aegean sea and what she nourishes on her shores. therefore, forever, greece has felt like home to me, even at times i could not travel there.

then came years of arguing, haggling, commiserating and reaching aggreements with greek officials of various titles, mainly the limanarcheio, the harbormasters... i captained peace voyages, sport events, cruises and stolen escapades into the other side of the aegean and loved every minute of it - even with passengers aboard my ships!

i learnt first hand during the difficult times, what it means to be an "enemy" to persons whom you bear no grudge against. i felt the frustration of being branded under a blanket category by people i wished to get close but who would not desist from viewing as sommething i was not except in their prejudices. what most ired and tired me was how, on both sides, individuals, or people massed by a narrow vision of the world, who were supposed to be individuals, played the party tune written by their governing apparati. i still enjoyed my repeated visits to greece - especially because each time, i would meet a considerable number of persons who particularly made an effort to be friendly or more importantly, just were friendly because they really were.

the "rapport" that would make friendship over the aegean a possibility could only come if more greeks and turks could get to know each other. unfortunately, such an occasion occurred only after thousands died under the rubble that was caused not by any so-called enemy but by the greed of developers, building contractors, nature violators and consumers themselves when the quakes of 1999 fell.

ismail cem was a special person because out of the rubble of the earthquakes, together with his counterpart o kyrios papandreu, who defied his father's contrary legacy of antagonism between the two nations, he was able to construct a modest abode for rapprochement that is slowly growing into a mansion. without cem, the lights of greece might not be shining so alluringly, invitingly and familiarly for many turks as they do now.

can you lay shame to rest?

the "other" or "alterity", to use the more academic term, is a pet explanation in latteer day social sciences, together with such concepts as "identity", which explain nothing at all but make you sound like you are saying something deep.

the "other", supposedly, is a projection of what we dislike in ourselves (*) but it is actually a project. it is not something that comes into being of itself, the "other" is deliberately -though not necessarily consciously- construed. the "other" is always functional, and therefore ever present. at times, your mom who suckles you is an "other" if you don't want to suck. so is your wife when she doesn't let you watch the ball game, your best friend when his soccer team beats yours; even your pet dog when it wants a walk in the rain... what we call "other" is that part of our own life we can put aside when we do not wish to brook anything or anyone who differs from ourselves. the other, at best, is a temporary assignation of that status to a subject in our lives. the richer the life, the more temporary the assignation; because difference and diversity is what makes the world go round. without that we designate as the other, we are all practically like the zillions of ken and barbie dolls that come out of the plastic factory and are distinguishable only by what they (are made to) wear.

the zen of it is that, an intelligent being can float and cruise among all those different aspects of existence that potentially are tthe "other", picking at will what suits him, what complements him, what pleases him; in short, whatever is desirable. thus integrating, accomodating his self with all that used to be other, the soul grows, enlarges and encompasses as much of the universe as possible while experiencing its own being.

even then, there is some other - or else, evil would evaporate from human culture altogether. yet, that is an other which life has taught us may become functional some moment of the cruise, therefore not really so alien, so "alter" but merely a spare part of our life-world.

the homo sapiens has grossly failed in its 80-million-year-history to prove itself an intelligent being. earliest findings show it to be a creature whose idea of zen-wise integration is post cannibalistic digestion. every moment of the history of the species is a record of one or other form of self destruction . history tells us there really is no "other", except, we can "other-ize" anybody, even our prophets.

in a sense, hrant dink was being prophet like, fearlessly pounding into our pathetically dwindling vocabulary that "different" is not necessarily "other". because the poorer the vocabulary, the blunter the mind, the more primitive the thought process, we killed him, too, because we refused, chose not to understand. and no, we were not magnanimous enough to protect that we could not understand. we feared him for ignorance is also cowardice.

then we walked behind his coffin, letting out spiritual gases out of our conscience... we walked behind what put us to shame by dying because living and writing, he could not reach us.

the shameless shunned even the walk. there was a thankful absence of politicians . what few there were, were there apparently more for the protocol than the funeral. during his service hrant once more did a service to his countrymen, showed them how much better things can be without the state as we know it. even the security forces belonged to the people during the procession, not to the state.

so we laid hrant to rest. silent but still spreading meaning to life. we were ashamed of his death but we can't lay shame to rest...

so much the better! we must now nourish that shame, lest we forget.

-------------
(*) also what we covet, envy and cannot attain; which can be considered a form of evil in itself.

social æesthetics & islam... coming soon

a post will be coming later today on what i think the crowds at poor hrant's funeral meant. it is not grief, anger, hypocrisy etc., but a silent cry for help!

another on how we can't lay shame to rest...

right now, though, the pathetic inferiority complex of the media, purporting to be the voice of the public, gains precedence. in extracting a juicy drop of pride from the huge gathering behind someone's dead body, someone we have ostracized, persecuted, failed to protect and finally murdered; only to mourn en masse; can you not see a downright despicable attitude to garner respect from shame? is this not akin to social vulturing? how pathetic can pathetic get! sorry hrant, we did not know we loved you so till we destroyed you!

i think this kind of bankruptcy in relational æsthetics is a consequence of the absence of visual arts in islam, which then contaminates all æesthsia in life... but that's also a teaser for another post.

now, i have to go check what the carpenters are doing to sarpa. sarpa is my other love affair, together with pipican, my bike. she is a 20ft motor-boat. she is currently undergoing winter maintenance in the bodrum marina.

yes, i am on an escapade to bodrum, too.

sorry hrant, they've also shut you up!

don't be overwhelmed by the cow manure they're unloading on you - the polity quorum of the untouched untouchables, government members; politicians; bureaucrats; the so called security apparatus, police etc.; the media the wannabe élites whose idea of "change" is a shift at the helm in their favor... they'll al promise revenge, retribution, justice, fraternity of the people, human rights and all the usual dose of hypocritical abracadabra.

but sorry, hrant dink. not only have they killed you, they've also choked your voice.

do you reallly think that a government incapable of curbing an imminent attack on an obvious target like hrant can really find his assassins? do you really believe - supposing they can in the first place - the teenager nitwit, whom the papes called "traitor" suspected of the murder is the culprit?

only 60 thousand armenians left among 70 million - 70 million who cannot bear to hear their dwindling voice. and those brazen fartbags who stoop lower than their levels of existence in their attempt to switch the blame on armenians abroad for the murder...

how many more hrants do you think will dare rise and raise the flag? the voice of difference is now silenced for good. as it was in all previous decimations of good minds and souls.

sorry hrant, you should have left long ago. left just as raquel suggested, with your children by your side... to marseillles, anaheim, boston... anywhere where a voice is not a lethal risk.

forbidden and "definitely" forbidden

in the previous post about the mut'azil, i contended that the so called problems in turkey / istanbul are not of a technical nature but essentially cultural.

riding to bilgi today, i passed through kasımpaşa (*), a zone i try to avoid because of traffic congestion since a fenderbender in galatasaray had blocked the whole main east - west passage on my regular course. on the way i saw a signpost, with the stamp of the beyoğlu municipal authority that read:

"it is definitely forbidden to dump garbage here" (my emphasis).

you think that is a grammatical transgression and the local government added the qualifier "definitely" as a decoration or a slip of the brush? of course not, it is the signifier as well as admission of and submission to a way of mind, a way of interpreting the world, a cognitive style!

when you are in the a-mathematical and anti-mathematical orient, your life is governed by restrictions. indeed, everything is restricted. you can't step on the grass, you can't wear silk stockings to school, you can't cross the street, you can't picnic in the forest, you can't enter, you can't get out, you can't park, you can't have a boy/girlfriend and what not. shortly, anything not prescribed by custom is proscribed by it.

however, life is a flux and it cannot brook restriction the more it flourishes into urban and urbane diversity. so, slowly, some restrictions simply melt away in the higher velocity of modern tempo. you meet a girl / boyfriend. it is forbidden but you meet in secret. you smoke cigarettes and maybe even a little grass, sneak out to ball games, steal your father's car and park it back in the garage before he comes home, cheat your wife/husband etc. the nonfunctional proscriptions remain in place but do not remain in effect.

again, as modern life expands laterally, allowing "other" styles of existence - such as the peasantry or the newly urb-settled blue collar classes -, many prohibitions from a former universe become obsolete, though not annulled. however, since there is a large difference between urban dwelling and urbanization, which is both a forerunner and component of civilization, the newcomers seldom possess a capacity to enlarge and diversify their mental scope. they rarely ignore restrictions whose elimination can emancipate their thinking habits and life-enjoyment.

instead they relax the rules that must be observed in order to sustain the organization in a complex, varied, networking environment with little concern except exigency in their routine. a taxi driver may kill his daughter if he sees her flirting but won't mind rushing in front of a streetcar at red light, risking his own life and those of his fares.

so, the sedimentation of a selective and regressive anomie begins and grows. bans that reach over from an archaic form of existence stick to modern life like a stifling preservative, while prohibitions that are in place to order and reproduce civilization lose their meaning.

during the whole process, the original ban on everything-but-custom is still formally there, although with varying, often diminished and sometimes depleted influence. in other words, almost everything is still forbidden. a middle aged adult of 40 hides his cigarette from his 70 year old father because tradition forbids but smells like a chimney when embracing him. the same man has no compuction flipping the finished butt into the sea, which is also forbidden (**). thus emerge tacit hierarchies of observable/better to observe/negligible restrictions. some prohibitons are thus definitely forbidden while others are not that definitely forbidden.

in this case, you can dump your garbage on the mayor's table. it is forbidden but nowhere it says definitely, yes?

-----------
(*) kasımpaşa, on the north shore of haliç, the golden horn, is where the arsenal of the imperial navy was housed. as in most old cities, the arsenal area absorbed new immigration into the city and was rather proletarian in character. in some way, those areas initiated and schooled the newcomers into urbanity.
(**) one cigarette filter sucks the oxygen in a bucket full of seawater before only the tar is neutralized and dissolves.

the mut'azil, the isolated minds

the hot issue of the week was istanbul's population concentration and traffic. as always, numerous pundits, know-alls and "authorities" said everything already told a million times; speaking chiefly of first hand experience, limited observation, meager statistics and off the cuff.

there was, again, as always, no theory proposed to refer data to, which means what were called facts were open to interpretation in hundred ways without making sense.

the only data that had any meaning was that the number of motor vehicles per square km or per km of road in istanbul is only about one third of cities in a civilized world. in other words, a car in turkey/istanbul occupies at least three times the space as a (probably larger) automobile elsewhere, in, say, dallas/texas, which can be considered to be on the same level of intellectual development as it has been the seat of dubya' s power for years.

this fact speaks of one truth only: turks (as are other members of other underdeveloped societies) are unable to develop or abide by the norms of a culture that can optimize space and space usage.

i have been saying for decades now that there exists no traffic problem in istanbul/turkey. the mess on the city roads that has recently reached epic proportions of absurdity is a drivers' problem, a human problem. therefore, it is not technical but a matter of logic, mindsets, rationality, i.e., a cultural problem.

modernity is basically not an addiction to new technological products but a way of mind (i.e., culture) that rationalizes thought processes through reference to mathematical constructs. ratio-nality is a specialized practice of logic that by nature looks at the relationships between things and concepts. it processes the relativity of experiences whereas, for a non-modern mind-set, mathematics simply denotes a counting and numerating system, usually to order things in hierarchies.

numerating is an absolute process, it feels scant need for relativity, comparison, coordination and organization. for instance, it cannot relate the possible outcomes of the simple act of beating a red light in relation to the temporal schemes of all the elements sharing the same traffic-space. an infraction to gain a moment adds up to a colossal loss of time collectively. this is not selfishness, this is a plain lack of comprehension that disables an efficient organization of social time into a medium that allows for the most lucrative, fulfilling experience of life - a failure to comprehend the totality of an alien culture.

turkey's traffic problem is misuse of space, basically a derivative of geometric ignorance, but it is also caused by a direr psychological urge - heuristically, the only time and place any turk can decide for himself without interference from another body is while at the wheel of a car. therefore, breaking the rules, seeking prominence by sneaking in front of another driver who has priority are all praxes of that autonomy that is but a birthright to a civilized individual.

add to that the policing system administered by persons raised in the same culture and the effective emasculation of the police through political influence: everybody in istanbul who is not somebody is is somebody's something, with enough clout to threaten a newly appointed officer with ostracism. plus, the ridicule of norms in a show of personal importance; now you have a clotted traffic.

istanbul's spatial mess is just a glass of water in a bucket: a population of 45 million (65 percent) is living in an area that amounts to 5 percent of turkey. that area produces the significant bulk, possibly two thisrds of the entire value added. almost every penny of investments concentrates in that area, making it the most illogically congested this side of china.

istanbul's traffic is nothing, compared to problems such asymmetrical distribution of resources are about to spring in our faces. just as the traffic problem that does not exist in istanbul, they will be insoluble largely because they, too, will not be technical but human, cultural problems or problems of rationality.

why? back in the bright days of islam, imam gazali and his disciples said a limited doze of mathematics is enough to uderstand, order and run the world, more of it leads to more knowledge, more science and hence paves the way to blasphemy. the mut'azil, the countering camp of philosophy who basically followed averroes's mathematical rationalism were practically forced to intellectual exile. that is why the rationalists of the islamic / oriental world were called the mut'azil, the "isolated".

a last word, then, for the exiled rationalists of this universe, from ovidius, who wrote it en route to the black sea, where he was banished for life by caesar augustus:

Often the sea broke over the ship: still I spun
my verse, such as it is, with shaking hand.
Now the rigging shrieks, taut in a north wind,
and the curving breaker rises like a hillside.
The helmsman himself raises his hands aloft,
begging help, in prayer, forgetting his skills.
Wherever I look, nothing but the shadow of a death
I fear with anxious mind, and pray for in my fear.
If I reach harbor, the harbor itself will scare me:
the land has more terrors than the hostile sea.

apology,
from tristia book I

(tristia: sadness)

i repudiate tayyib bey

i am totally decided not to take receb tayyib erdoğan seriously any more, in any matter. no person in a responsible position would declare a gang of bandits in northern iraq more important than turkey's eu relations, just stop short of threatening america with war, and think of banishing his own citizens from free travel in their own country, or passing a fiat that subjects their property rights to the approval of officialdom within such a short span to be called almost simultaneous and hope to be taken seriously.

now i know that his ascension to the presidency is a necessary evil. it is the surest, safest, shortest, face saving method of getting him out of the way, so affairs may be run without interference. since the job in çankaya is politically irresponsible, tayyib bey may shoot his mouth off as he pleases. since the job also lacks any real authority, he can do no harm to speak of even if he speaks more fantastic nonsense.

since i totally decided not to take receb tayyib erdoğan seriously, in principle, i will refuse to comment about him either. however, since what i intend to write in the next post albeit tangentially, somehow touches tayyib bey's recent genius proposal to solve istanbul's traffic by limiting the licences granted to vehicles, i had to make this statement of repudiaton publicly.

"love comes to you and then after
dream on,
on to the heart of the sunrise.
sharp distance!
how can the sun with its arms all around me?
sharp distance!
how can the wind with so many around me?
i feel lost in the city"

so sang yes back in 1972, in the heart of the sunrise, last cut of the fragile album, one of their best, definitely. i was a city boy with spoilt child access to "nature", and though i liked the song very much, had not put much philosophical stock in its complaints. however, in those years, i used to live in ankara and the capital of turkey respired such low quality air that snow would turn black, not just grey but black, in one night and if we missed playing snowball the first few hours, forget it till next time. so, the suffused breathing space often did make me empathize with yes anyway.

i spent the longest stretch of my life in bodrum, or on the mediterranean sea, to be more exact.
i guess i can claim that i know what it is to feel the wind play around your body, how to listen to the water, watch the dance of the changing lights like looking at your favorite daughter sleep and all that romantic stuff. i'm still like a duck in water in any big city anywhere but the thought and the sense in the lines "how can the sun with its arms all around me, how can the wind with so many around me" never leave me alone in istanbul. i never liked this overgrown, filthy, oriental village of false sun and false lights and please don't come up and say "but it is beautiful". beauty is hardly ever a reason for love or liking, maybe infatuation.

besides istanbul, now, is only as appealingly beautiful as a 95 year old elizabeth taylor.

in these days of lovely sunshine, a prolonged and prolonged, much welcome midwinter spring, all i wish is to jump on the saddle and ride aimlessly around, toward any place that sounds or feels attractive. to roll on the throttle, watch the scenery float by, totally alert, totally in tune with the moment. but alas!
dream on on to the heart of the sunrise
sharp distance!
how can the sun with its arms all around me
sharp distance! how can the wind with so many around me
i feel lost in the city

and how does that mood leave me feeling:

midwinter spring is its own season
sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
(t.s. eliot, little gidding, I)

armageddon

we know that the earthquake shall strike istanbul and whatever our sins, like in the promised coming of christ, the apocalypse will cleanse us of all our tresspasses. so never mind the danger and keep on tresspassing.

but till the lightning of doom strikes us, what other evils and ills of our own making may claim our souls in a more slowly encroaching armageddon? how responsibly have we approached and formatted our collective life that in fateful submission we await the end with such abandon that sodom would envy? so, the earthquake is imminent, but is it the only killer lurking? let us have a look at the basics elements of life then:

air: air is a lethal matter in istanbul, as it is in almost every single settlement throughout turkey. it is replete with sulfur dioxide, suspended micro particles, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and various volatile chemicals. high pressure often brings about respiratory and coronary illnesses. the traffic mess exacerbates noxious emissions. the winds simply shift the polluted air around city blocks instead of away from it because unplanned urbanization is badly unmatched to topography and the city's airways are clogged by high-price high-rises. a permanent cloud of yellow smog which denotes alarming sulphurous concentrations hangs above us like a halo of evil. add to that the army of smoking turks, which only in istanbul, is no fewer than 10 million, consuming no less than one pack of cigarettes per day.
what about the lungs of istanbul? the woods and the forests? prime real estate out for grabs. consumed by concrete!

water: joking? what water? even before the mildest winter in years is over, "authorities" have already begun mumbling their concern about water shortages. shortages? the least of our problem. the environment is so badly damaged, so soaked with chemicals, poisons, even nuke material according to some that untreated water can melt one's bones! sea water... hmmm... free sewage and effluent dump. release all kinds of liquid waste into 50 meters and forget about it. it's called deep sea discharge and it has plagued the marine environment all around the anatolian and thracean peninsulae where turks reside. of course, dumped (instead of treated and purified) water is also wasted water, so hello again, dry days!

fire: sign of purity? the ultimate cleanser? sure. 3 million or so heavier motor vehicles in urban istanbul, most of them active during the daytime, emitting fumes uncontrollably by way of their combustion chambers many of which either can't burn the fuel any more or is not supplied with the right quality of fuel to burn. petroleum products in turkey are still below par by global standards. they don't even burn properly... the simplest measure is to compel at least buses, trucks and the like to funnel their exhausts upward, through pipes that reach high into the air. instead, we breathe in the gases and particles they emit.
add more than four million buildings to warm up. half of them lack natural gas connection and burn anything, including wood, scrapped wood, sawdust, cowdung and burnt engine oil. sometimes they soak the sawdust or dung in burnt oil. wood is a major pollutant, oil is worse and gas is best. but gas, too, is a pollutant nevertheless! especially if two million buildings and more factories are using it.
then industry... the industry uses the highest priced energy in the world, fossil fuels and electric power. it also uses it in the least efficient manner. the industry, including manufacturers that are state owned, dump their effluence, untreated of course, into nature. most rivers in turkey that are situated near industries, even small town machine parks and repair shops are so polluted that they cannot sustain life.
turkey's industry is almost exclusively (about 70 percent according to economists) stuck into a triangular strip that extends from adapazarı in asia to çorlu in thrace, then down at most to balıkesir via bursa in the south. the whole triangle represents an area of 200 by 25o kilometers at best. turkey, which is close to a million square kliks, houses, feeds, toilet trains, tries to clean after, mismanages, malurbanizes about 45 million people, more than 60 percent of its population, in only 50 thousand kms square.

earth: read the last sentence above again. then tear down fertile farms, fields, valleys, woods, forests to build houses that are at best eyesores, factories that produce incompetitive goods, shanty towns to shelter peasant populations flocking to find work in those industries but mostly cannot, make roads for more cars.
release pollutants into rivers and seas so they seep into the soil. de-plant slopes and watch erosion wash the country into the ocean. emigrate from rural areas into towns.
on top of a barely or poorly competitive industry, lose your edge in agriculture. start importing food.

earthquake: if you screw up god's earth like that, you'd better be expecting it to shake you up and awake or down and dead!

apocalypse addiction

an earthquake is imminent in istanbul!

any moment, the forces of evil will unleash their nefarious might through the heart of the soil. the earth shall fold upon itself and death and mayhem and strife will befall the sinners of kostantiniyye, as the three seas rage heaven-high over the city's dwarf skyscrapers, to wash away the human detritus and the human made debris, already decimated to ashes and dust!
no matter that some optimistic geologists claim the mother earth shall not let loose its wrath but merely give a severe warning to the sinners, that the crust of the world shall shake but not a break and open to devour god's favorite children! like any bad tv show, it is the apocalyptic vision that collects the rating. doomsday, everyone knows, shall happen, so it is ordained.

the only mystery is how imminent is the imminent!

so, row after row of titled earth academics hit the media, reading their scientific coffee cups and all but brawling with each other about the magnitude, timing and the malevolence or the benevolence of the inevitable catastrophe.

ok, it is very tempting but i shall refrain from psychoanalyzing the obvious guilt ridden, self devaluative and absolution seeking psychology behind that kind of apocalypse addiction. just suffice to say that as everything else that is ostensibly taken seriously in turkey, the earthquake is actually only marginally serious. no, i am not going to reitirate an umpteenth time how istanbuleotes insistently neglect taking any precautions against the quake whose mere idea frightens them to death. i am reminded of st. francis de lasalle's homily "fear is a greater evil than the evil itself that causes it". what lasalle overlooked is that fear, as every other psychic phenomenon, is functional and the function that necessitates the fear is frequently more important to sustain than to abolish its cause.

turks, especially istanbuleotes will always fear an earthquake, until it occurs but won't do anything about it either, because the pending danger justifies their philosophy - the philosophy that since all in life is ephemeral, for the mortal, everyhting is there for the taking in this short, decidious stay on earth, with no regard for the style, method, norm and ethos of taking.

partition inevitable in iraq

dubya did it again. he first lied in order to launch a war that would obviously serve no purpose at all. he won the battles but could not win the war. he caught and hanged saddam, establishing his tombstone as a "milestone of history". out of a villain he made another hero. just as many muslims went into a frenzy of naming their new born sons osama in the aftermath of 9-11, an army of new borns as of 2007 will probably drift through life answering to the name saddam.

dubya also failed to gain the hearts and minds of the underdogs of the middle east and the rest of the poor world. instead, he lost the hearts and minds of "allies". the normally quite pro-american angela merkel is lukewarm despite -or maybe, because of - the backrubs dubya dons for free. even antonius blarus is also hitting the backpedal, contemplating a withdrawal of brit troops, in spite of the honeytrap promises in the new iraqi oil law empowering u.s. british and other western firms to monopolize the petroleum yield. at home, the slumbering democrats have rolled into the senate and now are hoping to sleep bush off his throne. they'll eventually succeed of course only because he must leave anyway in less than two years.

however, dubya is still piloting the world on an increasingly deepening pool of blood. now he is raising the ante in iraq by sending more troops in.

why escalate? to save the country (?!?) from falling apart? to instate peace? to stop the civil war? iraq's fate was sealed when, right after the invasion, the kurds and the shiites insinuated themselves into positions promising some control over the oil producing areas. the minority sunnite arabs who exploited their military and political superiority through the baath state apparatus were not mourning the invasion or saddam as much as they were crying over their lost access to the perks of power. with the sunnites out of the frame and instead fighting the legal government of the country, the only logical consequence emerged as the partition of iraq. in the first place, iraq's borders were artificially drawn by the british in their imperial pissing contest with france. they never did contain a nation as much as an array of competing and alternately suppressed interests which are very unlikely to compromise in the foreseeable future.

the new american troops can do little more - except get killed - than slightly postpone the inevitable partition. the central government of iraq is too plastic to command any respect or even instill awe and terror in the hearts of its own subjects, as is the custom in the middle east. they are obviously avaricious and supplicant enough to pass the oil drill bill through parliament, they will, for a time, try to control the situation with american trained soldiers, who are mainly shiite and eventually are bound to end up oppressing and exploiting their own people -especially the militant opposition of the sunnites. such blood spattered civil strife always carries the risk of giving the symbolical upper hand to the recruiters of al kaida and the like.

all that brands the nuri al malikis of iraq as incompetent to run the country. since no sunnite yet can (or needs) be appointed to top positions with any real effect, we are looking at a stalemate which again points out to partition.

however, partition is a tough cookie, too. the general intelligence indicates a tripartite iraq of kurdistan in the north under some american auspices, a shiite state in the south that is practically what the turkish republic of cyprus is to turkey, and a kind of embittered, beaten, empoverished, disillusioned, enclaved and possibly belligerent sunnite community tucked away in a remote area.

the picture looks incomplete though: first of all, the kurds and the u.s. must somehow appease turkey in order to transit smoothly into sovereignty which does not sit well with iran either. just as with turkey, kurdish independence is a thorn on the side of any possible american policy toward iran. furthermore, although they perfectly allied up in order to carve a practically autonomous kurdistan from iraq, the tribal factions within the kurdish community are still far from reconciled. the pkk, hoping to chop off a slice from turkey, is a far minor problem in the global scale, except for ankara. turkey can only in naiveté expect any dire or harsh measures against the pkk from washington which keeps it as a hole card to play against talabani's and barzani's forces in case of a mix up in northern iraq.

secondly, although they are thick as the haramis of ali baba, the arabic and arabophone shiites of iraq and the farisi shiites of iran have little in common, sociologically. this matter seems to need more analysis than a taken for granted future integration.

third, what is america going to feed the sunnites on? if assad's syria is on america's soon to be bygone list, one way at least, is to incite upheaval using the sunnite majority dominated by damascus using their iraqi brethren as leverage. since syria is as artificial as iraq, it is also as vulnerable.

all right, speculating on the course of history is no less fun than having your turkish coffee cup read by a fortune teller and i admit i, too, get carried away sometimes. yet, i promise that i never lay it out of my mind that the smears to be gawked at here, are caused by human blood.

viva carlos, en via!

hurray for carlos sainz, the rally legend from spain - well, catalunia, actually. he is leading and winning stage after stage in the toughest of all motorsports, the lisboa - dakar. although he had retired from regular car races, he launched on a new career in in 2005-2006 racing for the vw dakar team last year. he performed well in the european stages but lost to luc alphand and the other mitsubishi drivers. in 2007, he is at the top of the charts for the moment.

this year he races again with vw and finished the 6th stage first thursday, in his touareg, navigating the dunes of mauritania. sainz said yesterday he was frightened of the dunes and worried his inexperience in sand racing might eat away at his hard earned points today.

the dakar still has a long way to go till january 21. i root for sainz, hope he comes out on top. in the motorcycle section ktm are racing among themselves with no competition to speak of. my favorit is spaniard marc coma.

dakar is great even to watch yet it is also cruel. it has become almost customary to bury at least one participant each year in the motorcyclists' category. on stage 4 this year, elmer symons a south african from the u.s. crashed and was killed. a similar fate found australian biker andy caldecott last year and the year before, motorcyclists juan manuel perez of spain and italy's fabrizio meoni. they died doing what they loved, their souls must be in heaven, however the vatican issued a message condemning the dakar rally

frankfurter with lip service, please

not too recently, i had a discussion with one of my assistants. well, that is not exactly right because it so happens that whenever i start talking, they get rather awed, almost frightened and although it is not my intention in the slightest and acquiescence almost always bores me, a discussion either becomes an argument or an asymmetrical power show. anyway, she boasted that she is an adept of the "critical school".

as an aside for the uninitiated, the critical school in sociology, also called the frankfurt school is the popular culture of the social science community. its major brands include marcuse, adorno, habermas, horkheimer etc. i do not hesitate to call them "brands", they serve exactly that function in the markets of conspicious culture consumption in dimly lit locales frequented by the often also dimly enlightened intelligentsia. the frankfurters are also the inventors of such totally unexplainable, arbitrary, unscientifically eclectic and unproven categories as popular culture (as if culture, in its final totality, could be any other way!), public sphere (which in compounding ignominy, was translated to turkish as "public square!"[*]) an undefinable concept except in law where it comes closest to a socially comprehensive covenant; or habermas's famously impossible ideal speech situations.

if you ask me, the best frankfurter contribution to understanding society was the authoritarian personality, an immense field study on fascistic and discriminative behavior as a function of personality, by theodor adorno, else frenkel-brunswik, daniel levinson and nevitt sanford, . conducted at berkeley university (therefore also referred as the berkeley study), published in the aftermath of the ww II, the beginning of the so-called cold war and the heyday of mccarthy and unamerican activities committees, the study reached the uneasy conclusion that a respectable population of the americans who only recently were victorious against fascism, nazizm and japanism, fared no better than antisemitic and nazi loving, at least nazi obeying germans when it came to espousing character traits that could make a democratic society easier to achieve.

the authoritarian personality research, conducted on 50 thousand people was finally squelched to silence. its statistical findings were attacked on (arguable) technical grounds while nobody attempted to tackle the hurting politico-psychological conclusions, except the likes of edward shils who, practically using the results of the berkeley study, contended that there might be authoritarianism on the left, too. prof. shils, it might be worth reminding, was in that team of comparative theoreticians (the modernization theorists) who advocated in the 60's and 70's in samuel huntington's apt adage that "students and priests cannot run a state but colonels can". wondering how apt the statement is? ask three neighbors, at least one will tell you about the "torture counters" of the 1971 and 1980 coups d'etat in turkey. richard perle, a neocon adviser to the hopefully fargone don rumsfeld, who at the time was in an intelligence position in turkey reported the 1980 putsch with the note "our boys did it".

anyway, thus was wasted the only real and possibly universal contribution of the critic(al)s. after that they turned into intellectual passa tempo rather than hard research orientation, an excuse for sob sistering for the squeamish left, a source of enlightened ennui for misfits like me who felt sick running around in verbose circles of misapplied logic leading nowhere etc. if you have a half baked, unfounded, precariously grounded theory about society, go to the frankfurt school. their tomes will supply you with plenty of plausible sounding truistic arguments that you can pass of as proof of anything if you have the inclination. change your mind? now you think just the opposite of what you thought is true? go back. you'll find enough material for that, too. see what i mean?

well, they are not all too bad either, in the last analysis though. the frankfurters did supply a load of arsenal for the critics of raw positivism and empiricism, generally mocked as scientism. they pointed out to the contextuality and thereby the fragility of reality construction and truth building, i.e., knowledge and science . they did that without resorting to metaphysics, ideologic inerrancy a la positivism or divinity (which, through al gazali, was the bane of islam, through confucianism, the far east and through orthodoxy, the russias). their guide, true to german idealism and aufklaaruung spirit, was always rationality.

however, as ever, disciples of the school wove a mantle of piety over the teachings of their masters. the critical school, which in fact came forth with no coherent ideology has become so much the basis of an idealistic, ethicist and also etic ideology of knowledge that i am awestruck to see how far more liberal i am than many of my younger colleagues and students in almost every matter in life. more than 90 percent of the youngsters i am in touch with are rigidly ensconced in one ethos or other. well, all right, i am a totally unethical rationalist, for me ethics do not exist in contradiction to rationality and aesthetics, which are the true binding of society. from history, i have learnt mainly that the more copious the rules organizing "good conduct", the worse frayed are social mores.

such rough ethic-alism amounts practically to taboo-ism. taboos are only valid with censorship. most, indeed an alarmingly large majority of my students imply in their work they are ready for censorship in defense of their own morality and weltanschaauung. in fact, this is what the alarming results of the authoritarian personality had revealed in the 50's. the comic paradox here is that my students were mentally shaped to become intellectual and ethic witch hunters by their teachers who are minions of the frankfurters and their cohorts. they are supposed to think critically. yet, my dear colleagues think that critical thinking is thinking like their pundits. they are happy belonging in a school that follows particular protocols of cogitation, forgetting that schools of thought are here to partition, to make parties of thought. they end up complaning rather than criticizing when they start citing from their gurus much as a priest would quote from the old testament.

thinking critically is like sailing a ship in a storm. it requires putting all your life's knowledges into finding the right waypoint without drifting too much off your course and always considering what the weather dictates. watching each wave, the closer the sharper, for the effect it can make on him, his actions that determine the fates of the ship, the crew, the passengers, the cargo, no skipper can claim the right to believe in a universal rule will render the ocean lenient if you show obeisance. life is seldom an anthology of ethic and etic collective truths than irregular exigencies that challenge those ethics. only rational and sensitive, well thought out and heuristically tested covenants can help man build good ships to cruise the currents of the mind.

the better the ship, the more skilled the captain has to be. therefore, the only valid critique is only situation deep. withot forgetting however that, situations sometimes may be life-and-death-deep, indeed.

that probably is why oscar wilde wrote that the critic must know more about the subject of the critique than anyone he is criticizing [**]. critical thinking, after all, is how an individual places himself in the flux of life.

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[*]- field, to be exact but square covers it better -

[**] the critic as artist

head of an onion

past weekend, orhan pamuk played the chief editor of radikal the nominal left liberal, intellectual-ish daily, incorporated within the doğan conglomerate. that kind of sit-down corporate radicalism visits me with such qualifiers as pseudo, quasi, masquerade, façade etc. so i do not normally read it. i learnt about the pamuk-as-chief-editor-show through the paper's commercials. since i neither read pamuk's version, i cannot say what the nobel prize contributes to or deducts from desktop journalism. when i saw the photos on radikal's cover page, monday, my initial impression was a churning in my mental bowels that only bad taste can produce. the whole scene was such a pathetic reflection of turks' schemata of power.

allow me a diversion please, i have to draw the cultural background of what i saw in the pictures here.

the cognitive map of power in the way turks construe the world is predominantly pyramidal. in other words, a person's standing in life is determined according to definite, rigid and generically bureaucratic hierarchies of power and position. since "free enterprise" and private business are still secondary to, regulated by and dependent on state-like social organization, titles in any walk of life are important beyond their dues. as long as the pyramid of power can make or break men and their lives, people submit willingly. and hierarchy, rather than a necessary evil for efficient functioning in a productive organism, is often usurped as an instrument for the use and abuse of power. the only ethos in this battle to use and abuse is determined by the level of tolerance among contending factions, namely, how far they can brook the trespasses of their rivals.

as power is the mainstay of life, nobody is wont to relinquish any standing they achieve - hence, not only turkey but all societies with a compulsive fixation on power are often doomed to be run by political, bureaucratic, administrative, managerial and even cultural gerontocracies who have been in the scene forever.

recruitment to the structure is of course handled by "uncles", the established end of the axis of nepotism. however, since the structure does not essentially require bloodlines, its public façade is one of open access. if you have the merits, you can join and climb, the message goes. therefore, ostentatious rituals of enticing the youth to "public" service in both state and business (*) are a part of the cultural manure that keeps the structure nourished. in turkey, the charade begins early. young primary school children play at being governors, members of parliament, cabinet members, prime ministers and recently, corporate managers, too, on the "childrens' and national sovereignty day" on april 23. for a short while, the pharaohs climb down their thrones and let a tot sit in, mouthpiece grown up bovine excrement, even make a few silly decisions while cameras record and flashlights explode.

pick any year in a newspaper morgue and look at the pictures. notice how impossible it is to miss the deep anxiety on the autocrats' faces, hidden behind an avunvular smile, born of the realization that power is not eternal, that it is decidious and conditional upon the seat occupied. it is not something of the guy in the photo, it is not really his and without it he is nothing either. therefore, every april 24 in turkey, newspapers appear with a plethora of photographs depicting this pathos of the title bearers.

***

ok, the tedious lecture on political psychology is over. back to pamuk and radikal: when i first saw the paper sitting at feyda and ceren's room with erkan present, i commented that pamuk had become an "april 23 editor". erkan told me, in the previous day's editorial, pamuk had referred to himself the same way. however even that jovial self mockery you would expect from a nobel winner did not disperse the discomfort i felt looking at radikal's front page.

now, let us together take a glance at radikal's front page photo of the pamuk scoop. you cannot miss the uneasiness, not only in the wry way the "regular" editor-in-chief ismet berkan smiles but also in his mannerisms, the positioning of his hands, his slump on the chair and his proximity to orhan pamuk, how he perceives in the novelist a threat that goes between him and the seat of power.

the picture on the inside page is even more telling. there is a meeting of the editorial board. by the seating arrangement, pamuk at the head of the conference table and seems to be conducting it. however, berkan, in power attire, no coat, just a shirt that says he is at home but with the sleeves unrolled which could give a surer signal of ease and command, is next to pamuk and claiming a larger surface of the table leaning slightly farther into whatever activity, a loud body language declaring who actually calls the shots.


the whole charade looks multiply pathetic because orhan pamuk definitely did not ask berkan if he could do his work for a day. pamuk's call in life is not only far, far more fulfilling, it is also no less lucrative. naturally, you ask nobel prize winners to promote you rather than vice versa. berkan seems to have become crushed and afraid of a play he wrote the scenario of. insecurity?

ismet berkan is an animal lover, a dog person (he has a few pet dogs as far as i know). that automatically makes him "good guys" in my book. "canine" owners tend to be straight and reliable. however, oftentimes i can't fail to detect that urge in them to "control and command", for which the poor mutt (berkan's is probably a pure, "brand" breed, not a mongrel, i'd bet) is an excellent outlet.

i love dogs as a rule, and in many occasions, more than their owners but give me cats anytime. friendly, soft, unimposing yet winning, independent, fickle, loving not out of dependence but mutual understanding, supple and sophisticated but a creature of simple carnal pleasures.

cats teach how not to possess love but to prosper with it.

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(*) there is no paradox here, just two sides of a rorschach blot

$ 9 billion! missing?!

so, the global chief executioner (*) of texas & u.s. got saddam hanged, making another obvious move in a chess game he plays like bowling. it was obvious what the war in iraq would wrap into before he began it, but he did begin it. now saddam's death simply officially seals an ongoing civil war, which, as the reshuffle in cadres probably indicates, will roll more iraqis to the fire and into the coffins, without getting the americans out. as all civil wars, this one, too, can only end in temporary suppression of one faction or a division amongst all. apparently, the bush regime did not dare or afford to adopt a direct and outright policy of partitioning iraq, which threatens further division in the entire syro-phoenician geography and opted to bring about that result by pouring fuel on the fire by killing saddam, not that it does not suit dubya's temperament. indeed, the only way america can pull its hedad out of the mess at least as far up to its neck, is only if the partition of iraq is in effect, so that there will be fewer or at least cleearer causes to keep a fight going on. oh, the iraq mess has become a perfect industry by the way. u.s. media report that close to 10 billion dollars of taxpayers' money, appropriated to pay "contractors" -whomever they may be- cannot be accounted for, in addition to the immense sums already spent above the table. that figure does not include the mass revenues of illegal and illicit trade either. also, the body count that has crossed the 3000 mark is altered significantly if loss to american civilian or para/crypto military lives, mainly employees of such contractors, are added, too.

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(*) the epithet "chief executioner" is borrowed from a source i cannot remember and cannot therefore attribute to. i think i came accross it in the village voice when dubya was busy lethally injecting texans only

hello the split&spilt nations

hope for a better world where peace, cooperation, friendly relations, diversity and all similar higher ideals can shed at least some light on the misdeeds of politicians? believe that a forum of nations is a medium where understanding can become at least a possibility?

my condolences, folks! another sand castle built on the silt of the east river has crumpled when the new south korean united nations secretary general ban ki moon declared saddam's execution an internal affair of iraq, doing an about face from the usual policy of scorning the death penalty.

his master's voice! after all, it is dubya, the global chief executioner of texas & u.s. footing the bill for the u.n., and moon had to say his thanks! the comments on saddam's hanging are only the beginning of supply-side politics in the u.n. where the voice of the poorer and the dissident will no more than drone as the chorus of power puts an ever larger claim on the legitimacy the forum affords.

another strike of cow herders' pragmatism from the neo-cons, appointing moon as the peasants' polonius! if you want to promote yourself, the more credible way is to find or hire a mouthpiece. well, even caesar needed marcus antonius. after kofi annan, moon the lackey will shine bright on anything his paymaster wants glossed.

he might even moon the world...

global chief executioner

the chief executioner of texas & u.s. did his deed again and got off on global scale, having saddam hanged.

my dislike of dubya turned into indelible disgust when about a decade ago, i watched the glee in his simian eyes on the night he sent karla fay tucker to the death chamber, when he was "contained evil" as the chief executioner only of texas. he even joked about it!

well, it runs in the family, bro jeb, too, recently chemically fried a hispano in the name of justice.

worst in the name of american justice, dubya did claim that saddam got a fair trial! if this is his idea of fair, it's time someone reopened all those capital cases he signed to death and see how far justice was raped in any of them.

does the media, the common denominator of mediocrity (*), turn people into idiots or does it elevate the already idiots to the dizzying heights of mediocrity?

look at what interests them re the hanging of saddam: that the sights of the crime were leaked and some total psycopath who gets off hanging men takes another big leap down into the cesspit of humanity and also films it, was arrested!

no one no longer discusses the hanging itself - the man was absolutely nefarious, he dirtied the world by his presence but his absence left it even dirtier.

is the dirt gonna go if we know who spilled the swill?

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(*) it used to read mediocracy here. i edited it because i am afraid, the disease is not limited to cratia but covers a good portion of the demos as well.

happy new year

hallo the great population of blog readers - a happy 2007 is about as likely as a happy 2006 but nevertheless, i wish the best can be for everyone. i am in ankara, technologically marooned with me old lady's analogous telephone system. so no posts for some time. unless i cut her connection with the world off, i can't get online so she has priority.

oh the matters old ladies yap about! i'd guess they would complain about their ailing health but it takes only about 20 percent of the conversation. the rest goes to how the country is sliding down the drain, what a curse tayyib is, how islamic radicalism is erdoing the country, how dubya is even worse than tayyib, whether he did well or ill by hanging saddam etc.

that's the difference of being "republican" - my mother is the first of my granddad's six children who was not born an ottoman subject.

wish my students were as old as mom and her cronies!