democracy without democrats? balooooooney!..

tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. are in deep, murky waters now, emitting a sewery smell.

they had it coming, they knew they had it coming, at least, they should know it would be coming and therefore they deserve to drown.

look at the old posts by garfucius - the short mental and intellectual capacity, the ethnocentricism and almost autistic assumptions of self righteousness, the revanchist looting of the state bureaucracy and the misuse of the power embedded there, half-bottom faith in democracy, and the obstinate - because repeatedly proven disastrous - conviction that a majority of the popular vote is licence for near-tyrannical arbitrariness.

on the day the turkish court of constitution banned the turban, women's head gear that has become a symbol of religiously tinted or tainted political sympathies, some papers carried the story of two teenagers in love, who were harassed, attacked, mauled by the citizens of sakarya; and arrested, no less, by the police for nothing else than embracing each other in public.

good thing they were not stoned to death!

let's face it. in 2002, tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. won because there was no alternative that offered a promise. in 2007, they came back with a handsome majority mainly because they still had no alternative, except the archaic policitical dementia the republicans and the nationalists spewed forth. so, in one aspect at least, the popularity of the akp is less due to its own preferability than the comparative repulsiveness of the others.

add to that the success stories and elegies sung about tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co...

their accomplishments in politics (passing more liberal laws, the eu packages etc.), economics (lower inflation, more world-oriented approaches etc.) or elsewhere (taking steps to reduce bureaucracy, etc.) were invariably guided, if not chart plotted, by the european union, u.s. advisors and the imf. where success is concerned, tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. were only as successful as the airline pilot who flew the aircraft perfectly as long as it was on auto, and headed to a deadly crash as soon as he began flying manually.

as of 2005, tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co. did scant few, if anything, to be put down in their favor. especiallly since last year's elections, the bearing turned further downward, while an intolerant, partisan view of all affairs in all walks of society, pervaded every niche of life - as witnessed by the incident of the almost-lynched-teenagers.

so much for a democracy championed by non-democrats. and so much for a democracy without democrats.

regarding the future of turkey, it is not an issue of whether the constitutional court's decision is legal, fair and right or whether the turban decision is the harbinger of akp's eventual closure. the problem is that the court has had to try a political party, is likely to come up with a ruling closing it down that just might not feel right; and that the party in the judges' sights is not really innocent either, at least for an equal population to that which has invested its faith in it.

the problem is that, nothing seems right and everything seems wrong.

and for the same reason: still, as in 2002, there is not an inkling of a political resistance to tayyib efendi, rosy-rosary and co., to lead them in a direction where at least some semblance of right can be extracted for the two divided masses currently hiding behind their particular wrongs.

effective resistance to the political authority is exclusively limited to the military and the judiciary whose exclusive domain of power, it should be doubted, may be growing smaller.

the people of turkey voted the 1982 constitution in by 92 percent, and have been wearing it like a noose around their necks since.

the question is, offered the same draft, how many today would not vote for it again? a few generations after 1982, turkey's democracy is hostage to a political system that can only survive as long as it raises as few democrats as possible.