virtue of asses

the following are excerpts from a research proposal (*), written by the blogger in the early years after the collapse of the soviet regime.

“the end of the cold war has not signified the termination of conflicts but rather caused a shift in heretofore well known objects, objectives and borders of conflict ... the “new” conflict, which although it actually was always there, was shadowed by the controversy between the west and the east, is the one between modernity, with all the material, practical, social, political and psychological values ... and the non-modern world for which the fruits of modernity are not easily accessible or acceptable and therefore, sometimes an anathema.”

“the border along which ( the conflict) materializes has moved to what was formerly the southeastern flank of the (nato) alliance. of the postmodern threats classified by nato, terrorism and fundamentalism are rooted and nourished in the middle east... (migration and environmental deterioration are not problems foreign to the near east either). terrorism ... is used unscrupulously as a political means by the states in the region and iran is openly an exporter of fundamental islam, as well as a quite probable sponsor of political violence. in short, the eastern and southern frontiers of turkey, in a sense, is the physical boundary between modernity and non-modernity.

[and from another contemporary paper: ... “(terrorism), this “world wide war” thrives in the historical fault line along the schism between modernity and nonmodern modes of existence, easily recognized in a propensity for seeing violence as a solution to problems at any level, from the international to the familial and the personal”...]

... “the empire of evil has toppled to reveal a boiling cauldron of evil, to the east and south of the anatolian peninsula... this borderline of imminent threat to the west, or the western style of life, which now includes former soviet bloc societies as well, is practically extended on an axis that begins from the caucasus, reaching as far as the ionian islands ...”

and the following are passages from an article by robert kagan in the sunday times (**). mr. kagan is a senior associate at the carnegie endowment for international peace and transatlantic fellow at the german marshall fund.

… “the years immediately after the end of the cold war offered a tantalising glimpse of a new kind of international order, the hope that nations might grow together or disappear altogether, with ideological conflicts melting away, and cultures intermingling through free commerce and communications. that, however, was a mirage…”

… “it is a time not of convergence but of divergence of ideas and ideologies ... the old competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of the world increasingly lining up between them or along the fault line of tradition and modernity – islamic fundamentalism against the west...”

… “the islamists’ struggle against the powerful and often impersonal forces of modernisation, capitalism and globalisation is a significant fact of life in the world today, but oddly this struggle between modernisation and traditionalism is largely a sideshow on the international stage. the future is more likely to be dominated by the ideological struggle among the great powers than by the effort of radical islamists to restore an imagined past of piety … the enduring ideological conflict since the enlightenment has been the battle between liberalism and autocracy”...

back to my nato paper, further elaborating on the relationship of modernity and security:

… “(modern west moving toward) an organic functional integration or, as popularly called, globalization... a structural incorporation into the forming organism means taking part in the shaping of the “better” world; of being able to determine for (one)self. the inner core of global security in the near future, is likely to be based on a world that is predictable, controllable, manageable and therefore safe and therefore free, i.e.; where no setbacks on the rule of modern democracy and economic liberalism are necessary or tolerated. this world (of modernity) is one that can expect growth in every aspect of life in geometric proportions”...

then, about islam (religion), democracy and modernity, from another paper:

... “modernity is a uniquely eurogenic phenomenon. it corresponds to the progress of capitalism as a world system and the evolution of a modern geoculture (cf. immanuel wallerstein) i.e., a typical way of mind and life (***), shared values and praxes around more or less homogeneous social, political, economic and psychological structures. the singular "controversy" of essence in the history of (at least) the last five centuries is being or not being modern. along this dichotomy, religion plays a determining role only in relation to and to the extent of its influence on the processes of modernity in any society ..."

oh no, no, no no!!!!

i have not grown complacent, i am not bragging, i am not being vain, i am not jealous, i am not angry and i am not polishing my manure!

i am just laying the grounds so i can demand a hearing ear for what i am going to say in the near future. i guess i have a right to, if long-titled international fellows can only now see or dare speak out what was obvious to me a decade ago.

if that is rodomontade... big deal! the brits used to say modesty is the virtue of asses.




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(*) presented to nato, however not evaluated because it lacked the “hard (physical) science” component required. the project foresaw the extension of western security along a caucasian – ionian axis involving greece, turkey and armenia, through political moderation and mediation, aided by science. it may be worthwhile to remind readers that in those days, “war” was a rhetorical standard between ankara and athens and turkey was chastising the pro-islamic confectionary maker ülker for selling chocolates and biscuits to armenia! prof. burcu bostanoğlu of the gazi university in ankara was my partner in crime…

me? i was, at the time, a humble and happy skipper of pleasure boats in the mediterranean when I was not writing ambitious papers…
(**) september 2, 2007
(***) it is exrapolated in the paper, with elaborate references to wallerstein's "the end of what modernity?" that capitalism involves both economic and political - social freedom and liberalization.

pavarotti

music is the ultimate in human thought because it is where emotion, in its purest, blends with and becomes reason in its most unadulterated: mathematics... music is also quantum physics experienced, for forever, music is the edge of life, a whole, single moment and place epitomized in sound... existence as absolute! undiluted dasein!

thank you, luciano, for a lifetime of absolute life.

hats off to stoner but rossi is still great

i loved the little aussie from the first. casey "crasher" stoner always looked to me as a very talented, brainy and bold fellow, with a heart, as the turks say, "as large as a hearth" (*). maybe that braveness earned him the monicker "crasher" but he is obviously better on two wheels as he is in falling off them.

now, unless the sky drops off, casey stoner is the virtual champion of the motorcycle grand prix, or the moto-gp, the greatest event in motorcycling, for 2007. there still are more races to go but the all-time-grand-champion of the hearts, the "doctor", the "mozart of motorcycle" the great valentino rossi who has elevated riding into a visual art, has already caved in, when his yamaha developed transmission trouble this sunday.

i hope that before he retires, hopefully not before some decades later, rossi will recall his pep and bring his art back to the top of the podium. after all, last year he lost to a mediocre american from kentucky because of a machine that kept failing him and ultimately destroying his morale. this year, he lost first to the excellent and frighteningly fast (**) new ducati and than to casey from down under.

i am a fan of stoner, all right, but without the soul that rossi (whom i prefer to all riders out there), and old timers like max biaggi, alex barros, loris capirossi, marco melandri, john "hopper" hopkins etc. bring to the events, watching bike racing will soon become like looking at a porno movie where japanese robots make love in the finnish language.

it is my hope that the fighting spirit that comes with a sly smile in stoner will, as of next year develop into an inimitable style that can mark his deed and keep the art within the trade.

so, congratulations to the winner, he is a crash!

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(*) americans would take the expression downward into the ball-park...
(**) doing better than 20 kliks faster than rossi's yamaha.

s(h)itting at home!

ertuğrul günay has never been on my list of comment-worthy politicians. to me, he has always been like another hundred billion unbeknownst public servants, only mediocre - no insult meant, with the quality of material available, if i had commented on him, i'd probably have slapped him around like a wet rag. still, by my book, mediocre fares worse than bad...

now i am giving günay a chance for public maturity after years of political adolescence. as minister of culture - which, in turkey, is essentially an oxymoron -, i read his first declaration that he goes mad whenever he sees concrete slabs "grinning like decayed teeth in a mouth", obstructing what remains of seven millennia of history all around the country.

i don't know what he can do about it, or what can be done about it - just recently an antwerper told me that bodrum has no character as a city, it is just a collection of cubic slabs. actually, it has become an ugly collection of white slabs in only the last 20 years; the bodrum of 1985 looked slightly different from the bodrum of 1885, and even for my calloused soul, it was an exciting sight, sailing back to home port from some of the most beautiful cruising grounds in the world.

in two years, marked with the stamp of turgut özal's "money and gains before all" philosophy, the entire old town, consisting at least 75 percent of houses built in the 19th century or before the republic (*), was torn down practically in a fortnight, and rebuilt according to the current templates of temples of terribly pedestrian taste. in worst cases, those character-free cubic hovels surrounded and smothered what could not be brought down of the old stone buildings.

disrespect, the peasantly disdain for history and culture were so suddenly released from long suppressed depths of sick souls of the intellectually oppressed that brazen authorities, despite "strict" laws against building on historical remains, could permit a supermarket chain (now acquired by carrefour) to display a six-seven thousand years old rock tomb inside, along and among their stands! it is still there but even shoppers are not aware of what stands next to macaroni or raki.

bodrum's natives, too, were the first to demolish their hundred-year-old family abodes. after 1989, the "populist" mayor overlooked any and all restrictions in the statutes that protected the old town. by 1990, bodrum looked like a shanty town, built overnight somewhere in deep africa, when some lucky dude struck oil.

a couple years later, during an informal meeting, i complained about the devastation of all those beautiful, historic and historical buildings, which, nowadays, grin at you like a reverie from a full mouth of architectural decayed teeth, the wife of a mayor said "well, they were not comfortable at all. we had to go to the garden and relieve ourselves in outhouses".

you see why günay's job is like don quijote's mission against windmills? people don't mind giants, it is the windmills they want felled...

that is why they s(h)it down, in air conditioned, cinderblock, whitewahsed, ugly, expensive shacks that have bathrooms under their roofs, instead of out-houses.

instead of houses to live in and love...

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(*) i must note that "old" is not necessarily synonymous with beautiful or good. but aesthetically, bodrum until 1985 was a sight for sore eyes indeed. it represented a historically proven solution to accomodate nature in culture that was monumentalized in stone-craft architecture. i searched for old photos on google but could not find any.
(**) except where it pertained to myths of military conquests that had concluded 400 years ago to be followed by an endless procession of humiliating defeats, and sycophantic, hypocritical idolatry of anything remotely religious as "islamic heritage"...

a new covenant from the quorum

i said after the polls that turkey's future now rests with the ability of tayyib efendi & co. in working out a new "covenant", a social contract, that enables turks, who have become absolutely unqualified to live together as a "society", to reestablish the media of coexistence again.

that requires an intellectual acumen and faculty which obviously surpasses the ken of tayyib efendi & co., whose cerebral acuity is mainly honed by islam. however, the legitimacy they have harvested in the elections can only be turned into real political power if they can re-write the rule book of cohesion and diversity.

yes, certainly power writes its own truth; but if the rule book is to be convincing, applicable and workable, it has to be universally functional rather than local, regional, even national or otherwise parochial.

for a basically rural population that has resettled in urban surroundings and modified it to its taste physically,psychicallly and ethically, universality is hardly a priority. furthermore, whether they have a feel for its utility or not, the political cadres of such popular/ist movements as the akp are rarely accoutered themselves to administer and cope with a cognitive innovation that cannot be grasped by practice alone but requires a philosophical gestalt of knowledge and action.

paradoxically however, tayyib efendi & co. are better positioned than almost any modernizer in turkish history to lead a gradually modernizing and geographically urbanizing nation accross that rubicon: first, because the 47 percent poll victory does not give the akp any license to do what they were feared they would do. that leaves them to wear the universal armor of "westernization" for their own "protection". second, they must have realized that while they may keep the outside of their heads islamically geared, keeping time to the universal tango inside, brings more kudos. third, "they" (and relatively, turks) are indeed getting richer; and the hedonism that is the hallmark of richness, simply gets smothered by parochialism - look at the saudi youth finally launching their kind of a "protest" movement. fourth, tayyib efendi & co. are pragmatists enough to realize that their success at the ballot box owes more to the pro -eu policies they adopted in the first three years than abdullah gül's ouster-by-direct-order from the presidential race or the quasi-religious show of nationalism they tried to replace their slackening eu drive with. the eu, after all, is a milestone on the eternal course of universality.

"writing" a social covenant is quite different from writing and passinng a new constitution - you do not do it with your pen, you do it with your life. it is tough because when lives cannot meet and merge in legitimacy, they eventually jeopardize each other. that is why, only in the last week there were more than one "drunken driving caused deaths" reported in the peapers per day. that is why a poor rich not so little fashion model was put in prison, while a mother was murdered by her son after a family sanction. that is also why we have dried up, after very parochially, stealing from our own nature the lakes, wetlands, swamps, moors etc. to turn them into fields, hotels, factories and even universities.

a universal life code cannot brook privilege or exception or stupidity, that have become the aggregate root cause of the anomie that is consuming turkey.

and tayyib efendi & co. are the only campaigners, brave, powerful yet still desparate enough to seek and discover the order within chaos, to serve everyone. the polity quorum (*) they command is not complacent enough to refuse seeking assistance from opinion makers outside their turf, at home and in the world.

after all, tayyib efendi & co. set forth with the ambition of making islam an organic component of the dominant world-culture, what better chance can they expect to have than write its universal tenets into a life-saving covenant of coexistence?

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(*) a polity quorum consists of the designers, deciders, advocates, implementers, alternatives, critics and opponents of policy, active in the fields of politics, academe, arts, media-communications, industry, finance, commerce and the clergy. it exercises its potency, among other matters, on the structures and contents of communication and , even when not directly involved in that trade, can function as a body of "communication elites" by means of its global social influence. a polity quorum tends to establish itself as the david that can slay any goliath threatening society. the polity quorum can sway the representations of truth to its will with recourse to the power of discourse by which it tacitly provides the public with templates of thought and political action.



and if they fail? too many unneccessary but inevitable deaths later, just as was the case in the wild west, the wild east of the third and a half world will also settle its frontier rules. or the frontier will settle its rules.

state of thick headedness

practice what you preach?

according to turkish law, every person who rides a bike is supposed to wear appropriate head protection gear. from time to time, as almost every other law in turkey, that rule is put into effect by our esteemed police officers.

since the norm is not normally enforced, the normal thing to do in summer is not to wear a helmet (*).

so once or twice each summer, the police stop and ban from traffic thousands of riders, also booosting the state budget with the huge amount of fines they issue.

the next day, normal becomes normal again, the norm is shelved again, and the police can't give a damn whether you wear a scarf or the greener half of a water melon on your head while riding. till the next shake down...

you know who does part of the stopping, helmet-checking and writing tickets?

who else? the very motorcycle-mounted specialized traffic police of the state of the republic of turkey, of course.

the point is, those guys themselves do not and are not required to wear helmets or serious protective gear in summer either!

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(*)although turks are angry when you suggest that so long as they do not need to protect it, their heads may be thicker than hot asphalt, they continue to assume high temperatures add extra resistance to their skull.

public enemy on two wheels

i wrote a post in türkiş garfucius about turks smoking and talking on the phone at the same time, while riding a motorbike - naturally, this should go as a follow-up in turkish but i do feel a responsibility to warn the unwary world public against the extent of the threat my countrymen are capable of posing (as to turks who cannot read english, they'll either hear it from me or somebody else, guess it or be the very threat themselves - in any case, they are used to live with turks and their turkishnesses as they still find it necessary to pro(per?)secute those who supposedly insult "turkishness").

yesterday evening, long before any legitimate time for raki, i saw a man lighting a cigarette
while riding with his phone to his ear!.. i stopped to watch, expecting him to fall but probably because something happened with his cell phone only yards from a turn, he parked, fixed the wrong and started talking again. i rode away.

preposterous pagans in muslim prayer

in one of kurt vonnegut's novels, the hero, malachi constant, wallowing through a river viscous with industrial effluent, reached the conclusion that if god allowed nature to be so violated, he could not be caring less about his creation. "i am not a(n environmental) conservationist any more," constant said, "because god himself is not".


i watched in the news last evening thousands of people gather to pray for rain. that collective defiance of reason and common sense was further aggravated because the prayer was official! the istanbul mufti's bureau (probably corresponds to a bishopry) decided that since thousands of citizens desired so, the prayers could be held under official sanction.

there was more to the farce! the national directorate of religious affairs approved and endorsed the mufti's decision. so within 10 days of tayyib effendi & co.'s electoral victory, approaching the second decade of the 21st century, the secular muslim turkish state became complicit in a metaphysical travesty of science and rationality.

three centuries after descartes, in modern turkey hoping to become integrated with cartesian europe, a solution to draught which is the direct outcome of utter human stupidity and lack of mathematical reasoning, was sought in supplication to divine providence.

turkey never was water-rich and the quality of its water reserves was only mediocre. it had to preserve, protect and improve its water as a matter of politics if it were to be admitted to the eu. i harp on the "political" with intent, because unless it has a political repercussion, nothing in the third-and-a-half world is of import. don't believe me? listen to the ruckus over the draught - you'd think it was the eve of the second world war, everyone blaming the other for negligence. let's make it clear that the current deterioration in our entire environment is a national success story. what else can be said in a society where parties do not even bother to pay lip service to environment where 85 percent of the populace smokes a pack of cigarettes per day? it needs far deeper a vision to care about resource economy!

turkey's most popular-ever-politician suleyman demirel first boasted, then apologized for having desiccated 95 percent of the country's wetlands. the state water works, malaria control center, the road, water and electricitiy authority etc., all contributed to the disappearance of myriad streams, both above and under the ground.

lakes were dried to turn into construction sites or agrarian areas. cities polluted any body of water, stagnant or in flux, with their excrement and effluent. the seas got their share of the filth, and until people could not find the water to brush their teeth with, their worth as fresh water sources was totally ignored.

we burnt away our forests. more than the forests we lost to fires, we donated to our enterpreneurial classes and their foreign partners so they could build hotels, other touristic installations, recently, water guzzling golf courses, car factories - even universities!..

every marshland or swamp was dried by planting eucalyptus trees that are as thirsty as sponges.

we washed our precious cars till their paint came off, we watered the streets so that cars and other vehicles could slide dangerously in the resultant mud, we lost water through bad plumbing etc., etc., etc.!

so much irresponsibility, so ubiqutious idiocy and now what do you expect but such official irrationality?

i noticed that some of the muslims praying for rain were replicating drops falling, shaking their fingers downward, as if in palsy. that is a pagan ritual. psychologically, such acts represent an archetype that indicates the individual's urge to achieve his/her object of desire through identification with it. but religiously, it is anti-islamic, anti-monotheistic, it is blasphemy!

thus, in effect, the "modernist", secular muslim turkish state is officially sanctioning and assigning its mufti and clergy to conduct blasphemous pagan rituals which it finances out of its budget!

draught, by proxy of famine is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. had he lived to see these days, would apostle st. john the theologian have added preposterousness? (*)

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(*) preposterous in latin corresponds roughly to "ass over head"


note: i am not (particularly) against religion or prayer, even pagan versions. my objection here is to the state, accepted as the epitome of rationality in the hegelian to weberian tradition, funding and sponsoring a religious ritual held for obviously unscientific, irrational and futile ends.
then, i too, can demand at least that the state pay for (good red) wine that we propose to consume in a drinking orgy to anger teetotaling pagan gods who will send down their wrath in the form of rain . we may also please the dionyssiac deities, who may deign to rain water on us as a blessing. who can say this proposal is more or less viable or effective than praying for rain?

garfucius questioneth

garfucius asketh blasphemously:

how possible is it, not to be proud of being a member of the race of humans who can simultaneously smoke a cigarette and talk on a mobile phone, while riding a motorcycle without a helmet or other protection?

hast the lord bidden that the cranium of that race thicken with the summer heat?

alas, at which stage of evolution does the brain become an accessory only?

america will save europe again

summer laze, i'm just browsing the news if i feel like it, rather than become interested in it. the best pieces that caught my attention in the last two days are about gordon brown's visit to dubya.

i've read that gordon's not going to be dubya's poodle, as his predecessor was (supposed to be). he is not smiling at dubya as much as the one who preceded him did. he is giving back great britain its dignity that it is busy losing in the cesspool of contemporary politics that's called iraq.

lord! how great america really is and how patheticallly small and ineffete its bickering and bitching allies this side of the atlantic!

look at the world, america has long hit the lowest ebb of its popularity in history, much worse than viet nam, where it had at least the filmsy alibi of fighting to free humanity from the evil of communism.

look at the world, look at 500-odd years of modern history pioneered by europe. look at all the ideals held so much in esteem, all originating from the european experience and interpretation of life. look at europe, the fount of philosophy and ideas.

look how poorly an influence europe has on the world, in spite of all that intellectual treasure!

look how meek merkel is, how sardonically vacant sarkozy, how insidiously they are undermining each other to the extra joy of the poodle and now gordon, while how negligibly, as far as the world is concerned, the others are going about their businesses.

like it or not, coca cola is obviously more effective than karl marx, britney spears more guiding than j. p. sartre (if anyone remembers him); everybody knows what a humvee is, nobody recognizes hamlet any more!..

america is great because it has built the world in every corner of which it can exist, at least as an enemy. europe is shrinking smaller and smaller because it refuses to live in any world but its own!

look at europe with its grand history being laid to waste by the likes of merkel or sarkozy who are as alien to its essence as a texan cowboy. look at its ignorance of itself and its obligation, its responsibility to the mental and experiential commonwealth of the human race.

look at a giant drowning in its own feces because it has grown too lethargic to move.

dubya gave the brit pm, the new non-poodle one, a leather fighter pilot's jacket as a present - which he wore with a frown.

don't worry, america will be coming back to save europe of itself, too. not long till it saves itself from dubya and his heritage of evil.

marmara, the pit-island of near future

please forgive me. it is already the end of july and i am still supposed to write about marmara island. even hürriyet beat me to it.

i have a meager excuse. before/during/in the aftermath of the elections, i concentrated on my turkish blog. see today's other post in english, if you are interested in a precis of what i wrote.

in today’s hürriyet, the marmara island was represented as “oases of peace amidst olive orchards” (*). that is a fairly accurate description – “fairly” because, although the island is comely and relatively well covered with green, the western part is sliced off like a chunk from a block of white (feta, if you are more familiar with the greek version) cheese. “marmara” means “marble” and the stone from the island’s quarries has adorned architectural masterpieces the world around since time immemorable.

however, although marble was mined in marmara since time immemorable, the island was still whole (as i used to sail past) in the early 80s. nowadays, at least 10 percent of the mountainous bulk that juts out of the marmara sea is gone! shaved off!

either there have been built too many architectural masterpieces since turks have learned to trade, or we had too little of an island to start with. heavens willing, in 20 more years, we’ll have left none save a flat pit (**). so, go and visit while it is still there.

unless you want to acquaint yourself at first glance with the sorry sight of an amputated island, avoid the northern part, especially saraylı, which unfortunately, is one of the main ports of arrival and marble export. a ferry leaves from barbaros village near the town of tekirdağ and about two hours later, drops you amidst an armory of the kitsch-est sculptory you can ever find; or the worst way to exploit marble or an insult to even post-modernistic pretenses to art (i did not know before how an insult could be insulted!). maybe some 100 statues competing in absolute lack of taste and proportion, lining the town’s harbor and its welcome way, add insult to the injury of nature and urge you to flee. thank goodness, the ferry home does not leave immediately, and the urge pushes you toward other parts of the island instead.

on the way to the center situated on the south side, which is again called marmara, lie the nice little villages that give the island its true charm. in smaller villages like asmalı (vineyard-full), beautiful with what remains of its ottoman and greek architecture, or gündoğdu (sunrising), just 4-5 kliks east from marmara, there are too few accomodations, if any.

marmara itself is of indifferent beauty, not too inviting for some now that most of its historical stone and wood houses have been torn down to be replaced with uniformly ugly, precarious looking, bizarrely colored concrete slabs, 4-5 storeys high. however, it retains some appeal, with huge, historic maple trees that create a real thick canopy of shade, sea side cafés that are cool, offer hearty service and charge funny tabs, passable hotels and by local standards, good restaurants. but if you want to get out of even a small town as marmara, 15 minutes away northwest in çınarlı or manastır, the much, much nicer little cove near çınarlı, where the remains of a monastery can barely be discerned if you search hard, are one or two motels which cater to the day trade as well. we parked at the first one (***) in manastır, where, blissfully, for a change from the ubiqutious, inevitable, unbearable but unescapable moanings in turkish that pass for music (even worse than postmodernistic anything), and seem to be as obligatory in the public entertainment industry as military service, was playing a tolerable melange of light classics, pop jazz and bubble gum rock at a survivable volume.

don’t try to convince anyone in turkey, unless you look menacing enough or rich enough to bribe or tip over generously, that waves beating on sand or rock is an incomparably finer sound.

food-wise, do not expect anything great. seafood is quite ok, also fresh but summer is not the time big fishing boats are out there, so prices may be a bit stiff – better stick to “midye”, (mussels) fried or stuffed. they tend to fry midye with a bit too much flour, making it taste like börek but you can warn the cook. octopus, i did not come accross and calamari are imported - though one time we consumed locally caught stuff. greenery and herbs are fresh and tasty. i never eat meat or poultry so find that out for yourself. my impression is that, prices are pretty cheap, compared to istanbul and bodrum (big deal! turkey's most expensive villages!).

you can reach marmara island by ferry either from barbaros (to saraylı or çınarlı) or from erdek (to marmara), just 10 kliks from bandırma, where the fast ferry from yenikapı - istanbul drops you. ankara or izmir have to use erdek. a slow ferry (still, she does 14 knots and takes 6-8 hours to get there) also leaves from sarayburnu (down from the topkapı palace) on rather unreliable schedules but summer tariffs are more reasonable until september. another possibility is taking a ferry from silivri, an hour from istanbul, to terrible avşa and from there to marmara as a last resort. avşa is about a half hour by ferry from marmara, erdek another two hours or so.

otherwise, do not, repeat, don’t, repeat “again”, do not, no, no, no, do not go to avşa!..
it is bald, it is crowded, it is a monument to pedestrian poor taste and it is even noisier than noisiville, bodrum. the much flattered avşa wine, too, is usually mediocre and cheaper in big towns. however, as the man said in woodstock, “brown’s no good but it’s your own trip”...

although for decades i have ridden or driven ships around marmara island, i had never visited it. i found it go-able-again, except for saraylı. i had been to avşa and just one glance from the docked ferry reaffirmed my firm decision never to set foot there.


note for bikers:
if you are traveling on two wheels, the roads on the island are fairly paved but the physical road structure is uneven. you must not trust the right side of the road, which slants at 20 degrees or more toward the dubious berm. it looks like it may give way under your front. use the center of the way but keep in mind that the oncoming traffic, including trucks hauling slabs of marble, will be inclined to do the same. now, the other danger comes into play: ok, the surface paving is gravel-cemented-with-tar, tar melts under the sun and becomes a sticky, slippery blot on the road. in case of oncoming traffic, dropping right-ward 20 centimeters to another level of your part of the road, where more loose gravel also tends to collect, requires extra caution. do not ride fast if you do not want tar stains on your beloved beast, either.

i did not challenge the northt-to-east-to south coastal road from saraylı to topağaç while two-on because it was under repair and pure gravel. we made the trip in june. enduros or enduro tourers might just wish to do that.

by the way, riding, you come accross specimens of wild life ogling you like foxes or owls and very frequently, rabbits. then, some wild life creeps away or toward you, turtles, for instance, or snakes! they are the harmless variety, more afraid of you than you are of them. so do not risk kissing the slippery melted tar, trying to run over and kill them.


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(*) afraid my translation sounds better and more romantic than the original headline, folks.
(**) ok, laugh at the idea of a “flat pit” and underestimate turkish ingeniuty. we dug 40-years’-worth of poor quality lignite from a 100-meter-deep-pit-few-square-kilometers-wide in yatagan, destroying most of 40-centuries-old stratonichae, which used to be, for the ancient world, about what chicago is to the modern one. we’ll dig the marmara island 100 – 200 meters deep below sea level, leaving just a rim around so it won’t flood. just give us 20-more-years’-stock-of- marble... i wager, the bottom of the pit will be flatter than the one in yatagan.
(***) actually, it was the end of the road and we did have to park there but you can walk to the competition next door through the first one. it is not considered tresspassing apparently.

court confused too? the holy sepulchre of abashed law

all right, as long as i am here, i'd better put down this note:

i am confuused, as apparenntly every other soul who heard it is, over the court of constitution' s newwly published rationale in annullling the presidential elections in parliament.

the court's absolutely but bashfully "political" ruling assumes "compromise" (*), a totally nonexistent requirement, to forever have been haunting the spirit of the constitution, like a holy sepulchre, although it appeares nowhere in the text. the court guess-timates that the lawmakers of the military required the 367 votes (out of 550) to begin voting but not necessarily to finish the vote...

imagine... you have mr. abc on whose candidacy you agree with 367 votes, but then something happens and consenting partties begin a feud... then comes the third vote and mr. abc is elected with just a bare majority while the innter-party wars go on... where's the compromise?

actually, the only case the 367 condition can arithmeticallly be met is if two or more parties run a close race supporting two or more candidates on a parallel course, seldom if ever, reaching the election quorum, eventually, most possibly sabotaging the parliament.

hmmm... sepulchral legal mathematics is a bit heavy on this lazy day... i can only calculate up to third and a half...

excuses and ...

sorry i procrastinated the posts on marmara island and edirne. i am inordinately full (not busy, really, just full!) and cannot seem to make time for my "pleasures". i am also moving out of the apartment on the bosphorus, just accross from topkapı palace and the princes' islands further away; that surely saps one's good moods.

as always in moments of depression, the right cure is a healthy dose of the aegean. i am going to bodrum soon, for the summer at least. i can sit at the balcony, watching the shadow of the castle on the water as yachts cruise by.

i certainly will not miss istanbul: everythhing that is bad here flocks there for the holidays, plus the insufferable noise from all those seaside clubs and our pride: the catamaran disco, the tin can of rackets, the only vessel i'll be happy to see sunken...

so if i have not been able to write, i have excuses...

of the other component completing the expression, well we have... galore!

culturicide

i have been running away on weekends recently. once i visited edirne, another time i took a ferry from tekirdağ to the marmara island, elafonissos (deers' island) or prokonissos (amphora island), originally.

i will try to give some information about both but before that, allow me to make an observation that causes my skin to crawl: anywhere i go, including parts of istanbul, everything that is a) not created by god; b) built after 1950 or so; is absolutely an eyesore, a monument to absolute lack of taste, a bloody handed testimony to culturicide!

culturicide? just a couple days ago, an ancient harbor was reproted discovered during the construction of a tunnel for the subterranean train in yenikapı, with remains of byzantine boats and othre archaelogical artefacts. true to type, the finds will be collected and taken to the museum and the construction of the tunnel will continue as planned, apparently, over the ruins of the antique harbor.

all right, on a hot day, this much annoying news is enough, we all know we are living in the third and a half world.

let's get to the island now...

are only idiots surprised?

running turkey even as smoothly as a farm tractor is noticeably beyond the ken of tayyib effendi & co. so far, whatever accomplishment they can claim to their name is authored (*) not by their political acumen, but a short lived good sense to listen to common sense: the still dubious recovery in economy is due to a "sufficiently" strict compliance with imf recipes. the political "reforms", which, to many in the country are an anathema that has left turkey in the bosom of terrorism and hostile forces; is the dictate of europe.

that leaves the balance sheet of tayyib effendi & co. in great debit. the last six-seven months have passed in constant tension, caused by the akp's resurrected political-islamic tendencies, which have incrementally gained precedence in their style of government and has tainted the presidential elections as well. i am not blaming the akp for getting publicly (and electronically) rebuked by the army and slapped with the threat of a putsch but i am blaming them for not foreseeing the crisis, making the right moves to prevent it so that they could be strengthened with enough public support to resist (**) an intervention in the democratic process. instead, now they have become more obedient to the soldiery, while becoming more malevolent toward those who are not their political kins.

they grossly flunked the test in political aptitude.

the akp's mentality and mental stretch are terribly beneath the required minimum to administer a country like turkey; a fact obvious in the all-over decrepitude. beyond the "higher-up" affairs of state (which are in shambles anyway), the day-to-day management of the society has degenerated in a fashion that will take generations to repair. the stitches that hold together the social fabric have mostly come undone.

the belief in the possibility of a collective and universal legitimacy is the psychological mortar that keeps the society together. for at least a decade in turkey, the society's sense of legitimacy has multifurcated, with each splinter adhering to its own description. the scenes of corruption that resulted from that fragmentation were elemental in elevating the akp to power in 2002. however, since then, the only social reference of the akp proved still to be religion; and religion cannot suffice in keeping a complex, multi-faceted community as a going concern. when no intellectual or psychical orthodoxy could be devised to rally around, the societal mortar became too loose, too grainy to bind the public.

nobody in turkey (unless well connected) has any faith in law, its enforcement or its equal application to all. social norms are disregarded to the point of ridicule. everyone is ready to enforce his/her own rules on another by any means, very often not legal; because legality is not a consideration. morality is largely defunct, immorality is efficacious and proportionately rife. the end result is a pervasive and burgeoning anomie. the society has lost its benchmarks of fair play, because it has lost all measure of "normal" (***); which is the medium of social life.

the author-ity which derives its power from its representative status is helpless or, worse, apathetic to the plight of society. in any case, it therefore lacks the quality of being representative! in the past, there have been governments whose status was challenged, as is the current one, but even the most violently opposing social forces could hardly open their legitimacy to state for debate. the akp, due to its - apparently not unjustified - deficient confidence in its own capability and capacity, forfeited if not all, most claim to that legitimacy.

because of that overstretched capacity and the toil it extracted from the society's schemata of legitimacy, robbers and thieves galore on the streets; communal order is smothered by ubiqutious confusion; as can be observed in the brazen transgression of traffic laws (or any other law, for that matter) to which even dogs learn to obey; any stranger you talk to may pull a gun and shoot you if he does not like you; courts reach legally lame decisions after decades of trying the same case; the educational system keeps turning out religiously thwarted minds and floods of ignorance - and it is possible to prolong this list to eternity...

the problem of turkey is defining a spirit of society that can offer a meaning to individuals for being a member of that commun-ity. the flags; the almost pathological fanaticism that permeates every collective activity which is born of epidemic diffidence; the volatile tempers denoting a problem with individuality; the readiness to violence, reminiscent of friedrich nietzche's famous hammer (****); are among signals that the society is actually pleading for a covenant to muster and conjoin around.

as that hope eludes people, moral (*****) disintegration worsens.

bleak picture eh? no, not really...

the "mind" seeks homeostasis, a "normal"ity, where in the course of life, perceptive shocks to the mental apparatus are tolerably minimized. sooner or later, not by military edict, not by divine inspiration from the imams of akp, not by arcane metaphysical obsessions that keep the souls of many turks under mortgage, not by the business sector with its eager greed to get rich fast, not by knowledgeable intellectuals or academics etc. either; but probably with the contributions of each and all of them, a movement toward a covenant that will establish the criteria of that homeostasis is bound to begin - of course, in the meantime, if you are not robbed, killed and then raped by a psycho, glue sniffing taxi driver, who mugs for profit on the side and also pimps prostitutes!...

except for or absolute idiots, being surprised is an exclusive luxury of societies with a sense of normalcy.

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(*) if i were a (michel) foucaultian, i'd write "auteur", with its emphasis more on authority than writing.
(**) no confrontation with the military is implied in this sentence. the message is that the akp has failed bad in inspiring confidence in its own faith in democracy or its consonance with ideas and life styles incongruent with its own ideology, or its fealty to the principle of rule of law. instead, its nepotism and partisan clientelism, its sub rosa and gradual policy of intimidating and suppressing difference in society, have alienated a sizable portion of the turkish society. there still are segments that align with akp, solely because they believe democracy can catch deeper roots if a counter-state social force can mature. still others siddle up to it because the other parties in opposition are even a sadder sight. those who essentially disaggree with akp's world view, but support it in the hope of pragmatic gains, constitute another category. if it had secured its position as a democratic and (since it is inevitable if democracy is to exist), an adequately secular party, any intervention in the akp's politics would be unacceptable even to the opposition (except, possibly, the republican peoples party).
(***) "normal" derives from "norm" (lat.), a carpenter's square, now used to describe a standard, a (social) rule.
(****) "to one who has a hammer for a tool, all problems look like nails."
(*****) less in the sense of universal ethics than a psychological source of repair where one justifies one's existence.

undignified indignation by tayyib & co.

a couple years ago, i told a journalist that the akp government of tayyib effendi is innately handicapped by a general lack of scope and capacity. "their political horizon endes at parochial administration and their sense of economy is limited to the district bazaar or the organize sanayi sitesi (*)," i said.

"their understanding of democracy consists of shaking their heads in assent and accord to what the chief or 'imam' says or at best, extrapolating on his wisdom. their concept of contrariety, opposition, dissent and diversity stops at splintering over details that poorly mask a contention over booty, and is akin to political patricide (**), so common in the third world and, especially islamic third world".

the akp and its leaders have come to the end of their nervous tether. they are blasphemously abandoning their so-called "islamic" tolerance to difference. they are enraged, because people are protesting them at funerals of soldiers killed in the war against the pkk, actually, blaming the government for the deaths.

enraged, instead of doing something solid, they are furiously attempting to squelch the demonstrations. the government, slapped around ungraciously by the military since april, now indignantly turns on the people. the sincereity of their indignation is also suspect, guessing that they know that the akp has not the slightest hope of garnering the votes of the protesters.

the speaker of the assembly, a target of the protests during an officer's funeral in manisa, claimed "provocators", who were traced by security cameras, had instigated the demonstrations. he asked the government and other "authorities" that "such protests should be stopped". the speaker has a bizarre notion of politics that probably would suit iran better than turkey; but the pseudo-democratic vein in the akp revealed itself again under stress when the effendi himself also reacted, promising retribution to those who yelled such slogans as "murderous government". he complianed that these persons were members of various parties, implicitly underlining the militant role of the nationalist movement party (mhp) in the funeral-protests.

the mhp expects its anti-pkk, pro-army and definitely pro-soldier nationalism will bankroll its entry into parlaiment on july 22; but it is at best simplistic to attribute the funeral demonstrations to any party's politics. furthermore, even if that is the case, it is legitimate politics and a legitimate reaction to the government's bungling southeast/kurdish policy and therefore, legitimate opposition which now, the government seems to be trying to suppress using the means of state in its disposal.

then again, the effendi apparently overlooks that even if there may be provocators, they do seem to find a mass rather ready to provoke! also by that token, the widow of the army major killed last week also is a provocator: she refused to acknowledge the cabinet members' offers of condolences and shook hands only with abdullatif şener (***). "you are the honorable cabinet minister," the lady told him.

when you cannot tolerate criticism and are not sure of your own standing, anger is the first recourse, than the tongued begins to loosen! i remember, as a kid, i'd listen to hippies walking in front of the white house, shouting " l.b.j. (****) how many kids you killed today?". then came the "tricky" dick nixon era of low intensity civil war in america that climaxed with soldiers butchering four students at kent state university, ohio.

tayyib effendi & co., with another obvious dent in their democracy-armor, are at least as aware as i am that they cannot stop the protesters and have, with their loosened tongues, already provoked more of the same to come - since, unfortunately, deaths back east do not look like they will stop tomorrow. hence, tayyib effendi & co. will look even more yellow, with more of the yolk from that egg in their face.

an eagle has far more powerful eyesight than a human, but in the end, all it can see is mice and rats, because that is the extent of its vision!

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(*) see previous posts
(**) like what tayyib effendi did to his master necmeddin erbakan "hodja".
(***) whose decision not to run in this ballot made him the akp' s fair haired child.
(****) president lyndon b. johnson, who escalated the vietnam war and was on the receiving end of the first protests.

garfucius blasphemeth...

betrayal is an essentailly positive action. it is an act, an unexpected act, reviled by the others because it is detrimental to them. for the doer, though, the betraying act is reaching out for something (s)he is deprived of, in hope of expansion. therefore it has an ethical defendability.


denial on the other hand, is the greater sin. denial erases an experience already savored from all time, all history, collective and individual.

it is an attempt to drill an infinite black hole in life, to make it unlived...


alas then... who is the bigger sinner? the one who betrayeth with a kiss; or the one who denieth thrice ere the cock croweth thrice?

faith is a thorny and thistly business, is it not?

garfucius sayeth...

the cliché, every picture is worth a million words, only denotes a readiness to admit limited ability of abstraction.

garfucius sayeth...

once there were opinionated cusses.

in this age of linearization and standard cogitation, even cusses are
opinion-less.

modernity is necessary - even for islamists

mehmet y. yılmaz of hürriyet commented wednesday on an interview with abdullah gül, who said it is possible to make "türban"(*) even "more modern". he added, had he been elected president, his wife, too, would adopt a different style of covering her head. "wives have their responsibilities as well, and hayrunisa hanım is well aware of that," gül noted. yılmaz wrote in response, gül's statement implied that even he found his wife's current headgear unacceptable for the first lady of the country. he then refuted the idea that persons can change their "individual or familial concepts of life" according to the post(s) they occupy. "what is not modern is not that piece of cloth," yılmaz iterated. "it is the idea behind the cloth. the mentality that makes women's equal presence in society contingent on certain dress codes".

although i can not think of challenging anyone for wearing it(**), to me, türban is at best an admission by women themselves that their social status is secondary, albeit, by so called divine decree. furthermore, it is a sad and unfortunate ratification that woman is man's pleasure toy; a plaything that can charm and seduce just by showing a whiff of hair.

covering up makes woman socially recognizable namely by the sexual favors her gender implies. conversely, covering up is the only way she can avoid being just that. a woman covers up because she believes she then stops being a sexual entity, except for the husband/male who practically owns her. concealment denies any "illicit" man, driven only by sex in the hermeneutics of his life, a chance to conceive of her as an instrument to be enjoyed. a türban signifies that a woman willingly submits to an oppressive dress code because she aggrees to the hermeneutics that she is by nature and god's will, afflicted with the curse of representing a sexual being, or a being only defineable by her sexuality!

in iran or saudia, such acquiescence may be coerced out of women. in turkey, in a much worse manner, it is quite often voluntary. "türban politics", especially by men but by women, too, is an admission that the particular individual concerned with open vistas of the feminine is guided more by what lies between the legs than what lies between the ears. therefore, (s)he is dangerous for the mental health of the public in general.

i feel closer to the school of opinion that claims the türban and similar religious dress codes (***) will gradually fade away if not fade out, as modernization progresses. therefore, i believe gül's statement that "türban can be made more modern" does in fact, reveal a new concern among the religious "circles" that "modernity is necessary".

that signals a long distance covered since the days necmettin erbakan, the leader of the "national view" movement and tayyib bey's padre et padrone(****), regarded all mores and ideas blown this way by westerly winds as the root and praxis of evil.

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(*) the turkish version of a turban, the hindu headdress which somewhat and somehow politically motivated muslim women wear to cover their hair in a supposedly more modern fashion than with a plain scarf
(**) someone, regardless of gender, who forces a woman to wear a headdress, though, is another matter. that person is an autocrat, a martinet who imposes on the will of someone else and is no better than any other fascist.
(***) furthermore, i am of the conviction that what is called "political islam" will evanesce in a few decades, just like the political pull of communism is the soviet times.
(****) and his friends and comrades currently in the refah (welfare) party

can patriotism heed economy?

the pkk is not a new phenomenon. neither is its viciousness, nor its evil habit of killing innocents.

i can remember too many tourism seasons wasted because of pkk bombs going off just before the charters start to take off in may or june, scaring the better tourists away, giving an occasion to "shark" operators to bargain prices down to chick peas. the pkk's bombs and bomb threats have been a factor in turning the country into the holiday paradise of international proleteriat.

i recall many-a statements from government officials as well as the bigshots of the tour industry, trying to be persuasive that the country is safe for foreigners to visit.

i have yet to hear a very highly placed state official, like gen. yaşar büyükanıt, turkey's chief of general staff, to come forth and say "the bomb attacks will continue," just as the season is beginning.

i have no doubts that gen. büyükanıt is a most passionate patriot who loves turkey to death and he is at least as vexed as i am, or any other of our compatriots is, because of the bloodlet that spells pkk. indeed the pkk has nosw become a threat not only to turkey's territorial integrity but to the citizens' corporal integrity as well. yet, the statement from the top security officer of turkey that the carnage will not stop may cause the tour industry to bust, which translates to a few billion dollars' loss in revenues; just as the stock exchange fluctuations during the (non-)election of the president cost a fortune to the economy.

this is alfred e. neumann

he comes with the famous caption "what? me worry?"

palestine has to be solved: king abdallah

this morning i watched a bbc interview with jordan's king abdallah. nothing he said was new but nothing he said was unimportant.

king abdallah openly stated, emphasized and underlined that the crisis in the near east, the crisis at the core, is the palestine - israeli conflict. unless that is resolved, he itirated, there can be no peace, no solution to any other issue plagueing the region.

the interview came just as lebanon is once more being drawn into the cauldron of war, after having regained its prosperity - the sole reason being the intransigent ignorance of muslim militants or militant muslims, who, instead of creating or participating in any productive economic activity, prefer to function as semi-amateur mercenaries for the axis of evil between syria and iran, killing and dying as pawns in somebody else's war.

anybody with slightly more equipment for cogitation than the dimwit(s) who claim "ariel sharon is (was?) a man of peace" is aware that unless a more equitable balance between israel and the palestinians is struck than what war and raw power dictate, the very porous near east powder keg will keep on catching fire from one hole or the other.

even the cause of the main trouble in palestine today, the electoral victory of hamas is a metastasis of the same cancer. because israel found an excuse for its belligerent policies in the late yasir arafat's opportunistic incompliance and corrupt regime, hamas could come to power.

then again, the other problematic issues in the region, the matter of iran and its nuclear ambitions; syria, whose main industry in the last three decades has been terror and insurgence; iraq, which is the main and frequently only concern of the west; are all offshoots of the essential trouble between israel and palestine.

that is what king abdallah tried to draw into the very british field of vision of the bbc interviewer; who kept trying to put -especially- iraq on the burner as the main menu.

i have little love to lose for the english. i am, admittedly, an established anglophobe. however, the insistence of the bbc journalist to draw abdallah into debating iraq and iran, with his carefully modulated ox-bridge tones and manners, the slightly condescending attitude when speaking to the wog (*) king of a state, virtually created by "great" britain, while simultaneously paying obeisance to him because the king is a far larger piece of the establishment in which he is a minor pawn; would have done away with most sympathy, if i had any to spare (**).

the passive aggressive technique he employed is taught in interrogation 101 classes, to people whose job is to question others for garnering information, and does not necessarily always manifest the biases of the interviewer. he actually intends to draw out the speaker / confessor by implicitly contrasting him, without putting forth any real contrary argument. i believe the british educated king, too, is hardly alien to the technique, though there is no reasonable cause to accuse him of complicity with the bbc. furthermore, yes, i am an anglophobe but politically, i am not that quite often anti-british. her majesty's governments have had a far deeper grasp of the near east than the u.s., even better than bill clinton, and seem to be more aware that there can be no settlement to any of the dangerously escalating hostilities in the region.

lo... even antonius blarus was conscious of that and did try to warn dubya!..

iran's main and most utilitarian armament is not the shahab missiles, it is the perceived injustice against the palestinian people. hamas? that is just an egg laid by the anka, the mythical giant bird of the persians that signifies the empire(s) of iran.

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(*) westernized oriental gentleman
(**) i am not essentially an undistinguishing lover of the human race and have a grand capacity to hate and despise all nations and their states with equanimity but i do reserve some credit to advance to some races. among her majesty the queen's subjects, the irish and, be "british" as they may, the scots are entitled to it. i used to like queen elizabeth personally but in my heart, although i think i understand her motives, she is badly implicated in the princess diana tragedy. nevertheless i may forgive her if she outlives charles or persuades him not to succeed and thus spares the world a king of brittania who reminds me (and possibly many more) of alfred e. neumann, the symbolic face we used to see often on the cover of mad magazine when we were kids.

love, love where did you go?

just an example of the church's cantankerousness, the holier-than-thou attitude that may not always be so holy indeed: after the first communion ceremony of the two girls and a boy last sunday, there was a holy communion for the rest of the attending public. a nice little girl of maybe 12 was in line just before me and when it was her turn to take the host (*), the priest suddenly stopped and yanked the sacred bread dipped in consecrated wine out of her reach.

"have you had this before?", he demanded the bedazzled girl rather rudely. sparks were flying out of his eyes, which he now centered on me. "has she had first communion in church?" he asked me. now, according to church rules dating back 1000 years, last revised toward the end of the 19th century, a child goes through an initiation into catholic rites by way of first communion, before (s)he can receive the eucharist, that is, unite with jesus by eating the sacred bread/body and sipping the wine/blood of the christ. it is the parents' duty to ensure that the child is duly prepared and does not take communion before the induction. so, i guess the priest thought i was the girl's father and was expecting an answer from me.

i almost said yes. the girl was a total stranger to me - i did not even know she was christian or not.

the catholic church is a creature of habit. it has survived and will survive by clinging to its very well planned and ordained rituals and norms. however, in my view, the priority of the church is, or should be, promoting the love of jesus, and promoting itself as the conduit of that love; rather than enforcing strict liturgical discipline with an unsmiling face. so, for me, a child's happiness and joy and possibly also the pride of being accepted by community, of becoming "somebody", is more important and in decorum with the spirit of christ (and christianity, or any religion) than observing some canon with militant precision.

however, i did not dare tell the priest to go ahead, give the child the host - how was i to know whether her family aggreed with my interpretation of catholic dogma?

the girl, now hesitant and not understanding why she was subjected to this turndown, was visibly disquieted and dejected. she did not fathom why she was denied what was available to all, including the three children - who were all younger than her by the way. she was also somewhat afraid.

some people from the queue told the priest that yes, she was eligible for the eucharist. after that, the fierce eyes, self satisfied with upholding the law of the church, turned with discipline on the girl who was now allowed to eat the holy bread dipped in wine. yet, i guess, this time, the child took the host not because she wanted to but because she was afraid not to, lest she would be the focus of yet another scene! she ate the host, broke away from the row and disappeared through the pews.

later, in the patio, i asked her mother how she fared after the ordeal. the mother told me that she had thrown up in a nervous fit, caused by the anxiety she suffered by reason of a servant of the church.

yes, god's rottweiler, if he really wishes to revive the house of jesus christ, has to fetch love back under its roof. barking for more obeisance, apparently, betrays the purpose.

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(*) the round, flat and thin waffle that represents the body of jesus he offered the disciples at the last supper. only the faithful who observe catholic rites and norms fully are supposed to partake of it.

god's rottweiler

last sunday, i was at a first communion. the first communion is a maturation rite for catholics that is as important as boys' circumcision for muslims or the bar mitzvah for jews, though it is a unisex affair.

normally, i would mourn for the dwindling catholic presence in istanbul but the occasion calls for a more comprehensive critique of religious practice. on the same calender day as the ceremony i attended, the pope was saying mass in brazil, on a trip he set forth in the hope of regaining the popular attraction the catholic church has long been losing.

the sociological reasons for the exsanguination of credence in the church are rather obvious: catholicism, as opposed to the far more strict and pervasive but mobile protestant cliques, is basically far more a rural faith. since the (catholic) reformation, it has done little to address the statistically and politically growing urban masses, preferring to appeal to the peasant masses in europe and its global extensions, mainly in the hispanophone third world and brazil. the rather reluctant secular move to legalize divorce in italy was one example of this obsession with the old, essentially rural practices despite the exigencies of a modernizing world. such fixations persist in other matters as birth control, the attitude toward gays and lesbians, "adultery" etc.

the catholic church makes it difficult to lead an urban, contemporary life without fear of divine retribution. however, since hollywood has come up with zillion more imaginary horrors than st. john the theologian (who, incidentally, rests in ephesos, in the basilica to his name in selçuk) could come up in the "apocalypse" while exiled in patmos, the fear of god can hardly stop an individual from adapting to modern modes and styles of living. man takes a shortcut between his self and his faith and ignores or excludes the church - exactly the protestant thesis.

in the 16th and 17th centuries, the catholic church remarkably renewed and reformed itself, in order to answer to the emergent needs of the remaining catholics in europe. that was done through disciplining the clergy, organizing revenues and finances, better public relations and the allure of vatican's immense cultural wealth.

such a move is again necessary if the church wishes to bring back its glory. true, there are a number of "renegade" priests out there, urging for a more active church that must get involved in society to alleviate hunger, suffering, misery, torture etc. yet that movement, apart from being only seedling if that, is only an extension toward the underdog of the same lord-to-peasant attitude that cripples the church's style. personally, i am very much for a socially active and vocal catholic church but i also resent the dominant style in the clerical hierarchy that views the layman as little more than an ox driving, cattle herding, superstitious and stupid medieval villager. i want a church that argues and debates its positions rather than impose truths based on dogma on ignorant masses who simply do not exist in an age of information. i need a church that can help me become a better, wiser and more adaptive person who can cope with the vagaries and cruelties of modern, urban, contemporary life through the knowledge of my soul in addition to my city-smart, informed mind.

pope johannus paulus II, who, in matters celestial was as dogmatic as his forebears in the middle ages, nevertheless put his stamp, as head of catholicism, on the history of the late 20th century. he made the world go round faster, the force of his personality thus attracting followers all over the world. johannus paulus II was revered all over the world, even in russia and turkey.

cardinal ratzinger, "god's rottweiler" who succeeded him as benedictus II was known for his harsh doctrinalism even before he ascended to st. peter's throne. he was reputed to have kicked out hundreds of people from the cathedral in cologne because reportedly he did not approve of the way they were dressed or their comportment. ratzinger might have been a good choice at a time when the church was bleaguered by decadence, corruption, heresy and desertion to bring order to god's house with an iron fist, albeit in a boxing glove. however, at a time when morality or the sense of good and bad is less explicable through imperious and unchallengeable maxims than the machinations of a far more complex society than the church was ever geared for, more urbane attitudes toward divine salvation might be in order.

and apparently, god's rottweiler would rather guardian an empty house than fetch the urban manna modern souls are craving and which can boost the catholic church on its holy road to eternity.

i'm american!

oh no i'm not jumping on the recently trendy wagon in turkey, declaring "we are all armenian", "we are all christian" etc. - i did that kind of things when i realized, in my latter teens, that "make love not war" is more than a slogan. it just tells you we bloody well are all human...

i say am american because when i wrote about the ugly american, by no means did i use it as a blanket epithet to include each and every citizen/member of the usa. that label has evolved from the title of a 1958 book by william lederer and eugene burdick. the "documentary" story is based on the behavior of some american technocrats running the american aid business in southeast asia. as the date indicates, the events correspond to american international experience in its very early years as a superpower, not fully able to understand the world it has found itself trying to run. it depicts americans face to face with peoples who in their innately intraverted culture, are thoroughly foreign to those alternative but well rooted civilizations. the picture of the ugly american, arrogant, ignorant, thoughtlessly blundering, complacent and snobbish; summarily unpleasant came out as the caricature of a bungling, rookie imperialist in contrast to the suave, sophisticated 19th century euro-colonialist, pretender to a mission civilatrice that was the white man's burden.

that picture of america has never been totally accurate, even during the cold war. true, the u.s. policy machine is guilty of creating and supporting such monstrous political characters as augusto pinochet of chile, georgios papadopoulos of greece or our very own kenan evren but despite a plethora of practices that made itself the subject of hatred and loathing throughout the world, america also was where faces turned when people described what or who they were or wanted to become. one way or other, even sometimes by the abject examples (the rosenbergs come to mind, or dear joe mccarthy) it set, america showed the world how to be free. it was the north all compasses turned to, thus describing all the directions. yes, in many ways, america epitomized evil, yet without for one minute ceasing also to promise the good.

and it was the good peoples saw in the u.s. that allowed it a far more comprehensive and lasting hegemony than britain, for instance. half a century has passed since the ugly american by hit the stands. it may well be 60 years since the authors observed the events they wrote in that milestone in self criticism - including the film version starring the deathless marlon brando. in all that time, even under ronald reagan, the drugstore truck driving man to the woodstock generations and the teflon president to the political intellegentsia, the promise never vanished.

probably, the administration of texas's chief executioner is the lowest point in the post-isolationist history of the u.s., in the way of international sympathy. the current, pathetic image of the u.s. signifies the point where a leader has metamorphosed into a bully. dubya has resurrected the ugly american, not only because he thrusted a totally unnecessary and already lost war into the world's primary field of experience, but because he represents that unfeeling, self righteous, arrogant, ignorant, avaricious, patronizing brute power that rather than persuade, prefers to impose its view and style of life on others. if you think i am speaking loosely, allow me to remind you that a major media issue just prior to 9-11 was how mr. john ashcroft, the then (possibly slightly senile) attorney general, had ordered the marble statues of "naked women" that represented justice at the entry to the department of justice dressed up to cover their nudity. the complex of which dubya is only the spearheas has seldom been so evil in the country's history, evil to the point of jeopardizing its firmest institutions - who could believe that the berkeley university, the heart of the 1968 revolution would shrink from publishing rosa luxembourg's memoirs just because 9-11 happened?

i am still american, that goes beyond dubya, who, thankfully is already a lame duck and thankfully again, is "irreplacable". i am american because for a huge, world-smart, globally minded portion of the u.s., although it may numerically be in minority; the entire universe is also america, and the entire humanity is as good as americans. it is the america of "be and let be", the america that, even in business, knows a richer, freer world is more profitable as well as more fun than a deader world. the america that recognizes its errors and moves first to correct them, even though they may often be hindered by the america of dubya.

alons enfants de la patrie- le ugly american vous attend

the french sunday elected monsieur nicolas sarkozy, or sarko for short as their president.

if you ask me, since general charles de gaulle, whom history should have no qualm calling charles XI (the last king charles, no. X, a post-bonaparte bourbon, abdicated in the upheavals of 1830), the only man who ever filled le trône français to truth with a physical, psychological and political presence, was the late françoise mitterand. les autres were like midgets sitting on a gigantic horse. that probably is the difference between a jockey and a chevalier du sang.

at any rate, sarko, whose track record identifies him with a rather racist annotation of peronist opportunism, represents an a l'americaine retrogression of mainly france but also most of the rest of europe to varying extent.

when the ex-chief executioner of texas dipped his war loving presidential nose in the cess-pit that was iraq, despite my unfounded hopes that the world-wary sector of the american establishment would find a way to stop him, i wrote a piece trying to analyze the motives of the bush-cheney et.al. gang. what i came up with was rather revealing, for me at least: despite its immense size and volume, american economy is inbound or intraverted to the tune of 3/4. in short, the foreign trade deficit that supposedly plagues america is, in one sense, caused by the fact that three fourths of u.s. economy is hardly universally competitive.

economy is the most obvious and most quantitatively measurable aspect of social life. i do not hold to the marxist dictum that it is the infrastructure of society and culture etc, are secondary, superstructural phenomena. however economic activity is an indicator, though not in a causal way, also of life styles and, maybe more importantly, cognitive styles - the way we know our world.

an inbound economy, therefore, signifies an inbound mentality, which does not care where the rest of the world can or will head, as long as a gallon of petrol is available at 25 cents in nebraska. nor does the inbound mentality mind in what state the u.s. will leave iraq and the near east when compelled to withdraw; because the obvious is happening in a war america started despite the world and more and more poor g.i.'s are returning home in body bags. the introverted, world-dumb section of the u.s. population is only interested in its narrow world equilibria and the policies to keep them intact - which is unlikely to happen in a world where the wings of a butterfly in valparaiso cause a storm in odessa.

the inbound mentality is one aspect of the arrogant, incompetent, exploitative ugly american of the 60's; whose daily version you would meet in that fat, sunburnt, unsophisticated tourist anywhere from paris to antalya, asking "but how much is that in real money?".

are we now looking at the prototype of a français moche, a transatlantic update of the ugly american? possibly...

the wave of "opposition" that carried not only sarko, but also his rival mme. segolene royal to the trône was the reaction prompted by the now-almost -proverbial polish plumber episode. there is no secret in that a good portion of the french society has lagged behind in the global race and is suffering from an unhealthy dose of incompetitiveness. add to it the rather strong and despotic state structure, a remnant of the code bonaparte; a not-so-productive labor force protected by unduly strong unions etc.; and the extra euros the frenchman has to pay in taxes to look after the new(ly accessed) europeans, while his products cannot find the easy markets they are accustomed to; the over all balance hardly favors a fully extravert french outlook on world economy or society. the french displaisire already manifested itself in the rejection of the e.u. constitution. the revolution de paisans came with the preference of ultimately provincial presidential candidates as the socialist sego and sarko and the coronation of the latter. the whole phenomenon is reminiscent of american intraverted conservatism.

yet, whatever the cause, france has no chance of withdrawing into its borders as the isolationist (*) americans wish their country to do. but in the immediate future, the necessity prevails to look inward, to do some economic, political, racial etc. house cleaning toward liberalization and to upgrade french economic, political, cultural capital as well as output to more universal levels of attractiveness. however, the problem is not the resolve of french business to secure for itself a fine bite of world economic cake - france already invests a sum in the u.s. about equal to what american companies have invested in france. the resistance, as before, will come from the provençal foci of power, which were strong enough to give sego and sarko the impetus in becoming the major political figures they were not cut to become. if sarko is about to prove his métiere, he has to show virtuoso mastery in conducting that gelatinous peasant renitence into a less viscous gush toward globality.

in the race for supremacy in the world, france has long been eating out of its own capital. and with his intraverted backing that has been the main reason for france's lag, sarko can reverse the trend if and only if america extends him the necessary credit in all fields.

bien venu, le ugly american, ici le français moche. ensemble let us march toward the urbane horizons of globality...!

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(*) there never was any true isolationism in american politics. the term simply refers to the cautious u.s. policy of avoiding europe and confrontation with european powers until world war I. neither can america ever withdraw into its continent and turn its back on the world, at least in the near future. a global political-economy does not allow that simply because globality is more profitable.

who is the patriot?

a friend of mine in the tourism industry received a message from a business associate in the u.s. who (previously) intended to expand his operations in turkey. now he is back pedaling.

reason one: the virtual putsch by internet. we may love, like, be very proud of, many
of us might even prefer to live under a military regime instead of islamists but the
world according to the normal man generally abhors a place and people who fail in
democracy. within the last week, even the usually pro-turkey cnn made us the
stock of laughing matter, commenting extensively on the army's readiness to delve
into politics. we learnt another patriotic lesson on how to slide back into the last
century in ten lines online...
reason two: the may 1 scandal in istanbul. all tour agencies i know are up to their ears in letters
asking whether turkey is safe to visit. loss of revenues adds up the cost of loss of
face... all because one man decided that protecting the virginity of a town square is
good "public administration"; while he condemned the public to suffer, to be beaten,
tormented, humiliated, arrested, gassed and treated as criminals. the governor of
istanbul is incompetent for the job if only because he still confuses "state authority"
with "public order". that is a giant step backward to th 19th century.

heads

just to make a point, a footnote for the future:

it is true that the possibility is quite low that the western world shall willingly accept as its equal associate into its civilization, a turkey whose head of state has a wife who covers her head in religious fashion - no politically correct rhetoric can alter that fact.

however, the possibility that the same civilization will ever accept a head of state in turkey, soldier or civilian, who wears a uniform inside his head is absolutely nil.

blogger plays truant

anybody know a swell definition of what's a good life?

symbols and dead kids

there was a huge rally protesting the premier's rather inarticulate desire and ambition to become president this weekend in the capital. according to reports, the tandoğan square in ankara, just a stone's throw from atatürk's mausoleum, the anıtkabir, turned into a "sea of flags" while hundreds of thousands declared fealty to the republican ideal of secularism.

the moderate and hardline pro-islamic pro-government front contended, rather than through counter-rallies, by verbally denouncing and decrying the secularists' assembly and hanging posters, banners etc. that urged national will as reflected in parliament to prevail in electing the head of state.

while thousands were demonstrating in ankara, a tragedy of catastrophic proportions was lived only 150 miles away in aksaray, where more than 30 schoolchildren and their parents on their way to visit cappadocia were killed when their bus collided with a truck.

the bodies of the casualties were laid to rest with a doleful ceremony in izmir, their point of origin. hundreds, maybe thousands attended. the coffins were draped in turkish flags, too.

question one: if we had spent half the mental effort we do over such high matters as contemplating and arguing how our holy and hallowed state must be run as on such mundane matters like why turkish drivers are world-record breakers in deadly accidents or on why norms supposed to order social life along rational principles, are worth less than the bureaucratic paper they are written on especially in traffic (though not much better in any other area either); could it be possible that neither the rally nor the ceremony might be necessary?

question two: of course participating in others' joy and sorrow is an exemplary act of social solidarity and empathy is a noble feeling. i only have praise for those people who left the sunday comfort of their homes to attend the funeral of the unfortunate victims. however, the question has nothing to do with individuals and their goodwill in this case. should we, instead of stately manifestations such as "ceremonial" gatherings or demonstrations, exalt ultimately less grandiose but more productive achievements as good organization, might it be possible that we would not have to gather to weep collectively after the mass annihilation of our children?

question three: the flag is the simplest symbol of allegiance there is. it is so simple that even the most nescient individuals in a certain society can realize their identification with what the flag signifies. therefore, an exaggerated display of the simplest symbol also manifests itself as a subliminal uncertainty about what it denotes. besides, as symbols, by nature can only convey meanings in their most rudimentary, they can hardly supplant the communication of ideas by words.

so, is it a coincidence that the place of non-verbal signs and tokens are far more pronounced in the third world, compared to societies based on rationality which essentially rely on words? then, as a corollary, instead of trying to impose our truth/message on a situation by means of overwhelming yet obscure symbolisms, could we avoid confrontations and even collisions through sensible and intelligible exchange of ideas, even idiosyncrasies and obstinacies?

peeing in dark trousers

i am not a tv gazer, i am a terribly accomplished zapper.

simply put, regular shows and programs on the tube boooooooore me to death and subsequent multiple reincarnations within 90 seconds. not limited to our very own turkish broadcasting -this morning i spent a full two minutes or so looking at and listening to a chick on the bbc, who, planting flowers and assorted vegetation in a garden, uttered about 1000 words a second, all of them quite familiar, and wove them into a sound cocktail actually saying nothing of substance.
i can't even stand conan o'brien any more. worse, with few exceptions, movies feel toooooo looooong and only a handful of seres/serials are watchable.

but zapping is a good method of sampling what is on show. skip the gibberish and football crap instantly, linger a moment to hear a question asked or a comment, stop there a while if the going is good and you do patchwork a sociological picture of the goings on. however, as far as the turkish stations are concerned, the presidential election, for the american and british channels, the war and the plight of muslims in the west have already lasted longer than the endless and ultimately unviewable young and restless. especially when it comes to tayyib bey's aspired ascent to çankaya; oh lords of fire and ire! have words ever been so completely exhausted out of meaningful ideas and insight! how can so many tongue-hours (*) be spent without a single spark of inspiration slipping through some lips at least?

and then there was a show sunday, which i indeed stuck to for five minutes or so, just for purposes of scientifc methodology, where the recent hyperbole about an alleged and suppressed coup attempt in 2004 against tayyib bey's government. the show, was hosted by

derya sazak of milliyet, whom i know from his rookie days in ankara, fuat keyman, an academic of sorts plagued with the occupational malady of being enamored with his own voice; and alper görmüş, chief editor of nokta which published alleged pages from an alleged journal, allegedly kept by the-then-navy-chief-of-staff allegedly recounting the alleged putsch. keyman spent all that time and probably more speculating about an alleged coup and alleged that it never happened because it allegedly could not have happened!

such epic and universal waste of resources in epidemic proportions, supposing that at least some people do watch those shows, is a devastating revelation of the cerebral levels homo sapiens sapiens has collectively attained but i am past the point where i could feel any social responsability or compunction about that. rather, i am usually amused (bemused?) by the pathetic wisdom that apparently mesmerizes the speakers themselves.

they remind me of what my dear old friend, elder and partner in various crimes, distinguished professor dr. tevfik dalgıç, currently of the university of dallas, would tell his students about immaterial accomplishments: "it's like peeing in dark colored trousers, nobody notices anything but you get a warm feeling anyway..."

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(*) no, you haven't caught me watching. i know the shows take a lifetime because i keep zapping all around all that while.

kid playing with the loaded gun

it's only days before turkey hails its 12th president. of one dozen chiefs of the nation, only a few were elected rather than "approved" by the grand national assembly. turgut özal's ascent to the position was rather tumultuous, süleyman demirel's less so; but none raised a ruckus like tayyib bey's trials.

my opinion of the man is already obvious - he is not up to par for running anything bigger than a small black sea town and that only because it will keep him busy and out of much mischief.

however, under the current settings, tayyib bey -though i hate that it is so- has every right in the book to climb to çankaya, the seat of the top state job since atatürk. if a man is good enough to be premier, he is good enough to become president, too. if you are afraid that his somewhat pedestrian religious, political etc. standing is detrimental to the well being of the state and or the nation, you should have the democratic mechanisms, principles, practices and habits in place even before he started climbing the first rungs of the ladder. not having that, you tried to do it on the edge of a bayonet and the jab you gave him made him spring to the top.

the ongoing blast against tayyib bey's presidency is that if the top seat falls to the islamists, too, there will be nothing to check their controlled march toward sharia in turkey. sorry, but it was not tayyib bey who ordered this constitution or one of his fans who drafted it for the generals; nor were he or his cohorts in the assembly that passed it before the 92 percent majority of the voting public approved it for fear the generals would not leave if the bill was rejected. oh, the authors of the putsch had no real intention of leaving the helm anyway. with the constituiton in effect, some "general", not necessarily military, was supposed to eternally sit at çankaya and safeguard the holy state's interests against such malfeasants like commies or fundamenties. the whole idea then, exactly 25 years ago, was to prevent what is happening right now from happening!

it simply did not work out that way and now you got a kid playing with daddy's loaded gun in the hall!