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!

praying to lose football games

sorry, fans but to me, football (soccer) is not only infantile it is also awfully pedestrian. it is far less a sport than an occasion to group, identify, meld with the mass, strip off inhibitions guiding proper behavior and blow steam - both for player and spectator. myself? i hate crowds, groups, masses, dis-individuation of any sort, have few social inhibitions and i don't behave properly anyway, so who needs football? it takes too long (a minimum of two hours wasted? no!), is uncouth and unless you are watching someone absolutely special like the once-upon-a-time legendary pele, it is a totally frenzied flurry of what freudians would call sadistic activity.

worse, for cultures that allow few other outlets or "sublimations" for primeveal urges, it becomes a unique reason for participation mystique, situational and transient bonding, strife for a sense of superiority and in case of loss, occasion for venting out pent up violent anger at anything.

some 10 years ago, when galatasaray had just begun winning games outside turkey, after a so-called victory kalashnikovs were sounding in the streets. so i called 155 (turkey's natiional police dial-up, like 911 or 999) to complain. no answer for minutes. i then called the traffic number, 154 and told my story. "where do you live sir?" the man asked and i almost started citing the address of the friend's house i was staying, when he went on "we won the game!".

no, i did not feel like a tratior when the poor policeman said that but i did lower my national expectancy a few notches. now, we are more officially sensitive to football violence but since nobody can link "football" and "violence" mentally, everybody insistently abstracts each concept from the other and lays the blame on "fanatic supporters" as nevertheless violence spreads deeper every week of the league season. as the national gun association says, "guns don't kill people"...

just for reasons of basic survival and peace of mind, i pray for turkish teams to lose in all international events. i hate officiallly sanctioned hordes roaming mindlessly in traffic, jam packing already clotted city arteries, yelling incoherently, exhuming their libido barely buried under the surface into that forced co-ed camaraderie born of a shared affect, eventually leading to lewdness or worse resulting in fights over women or booze and of course firing guns into innocent bystanders of all definitions, including other stupefied merry makers.

even worse, a false sense of ephemeral superiority wafts in the air as flags dominate buildings, vows of allegience are sung and the media bleat or graffitize elegies for the victorious, with ill concealed glee implying the victory is immanent in the valor of the victor. we win because we are turks, galatasaraians and so on.

can anybody explain the weird existence of trabzon in turkish social - political and cultural life without touching on the phenomenon of trabzonspor?

now that turkey has beat greece 4-1 at home, and at that, after the "enemy" scored first, the football jihad is in full force flow again. next to be brought on its knees is norway. there is no need of course, to compare the quality of life in greece or norway with turkey or commit similar intellectual acts of treason - ours not to reason... ours to kick and cry... period.!

the glee over the victory over greece reminds me of burcu sunar's master thesis, where at one point she puts forth the proposition, based mostly on c.g. jung, that the turco-greek love/hate affair is a gendered relationship / rivalry, with everything reaching into sexual overtones where turkey, the masculine beast, tries to establish its phallic dominance over the feline femininity of greece with his penetrating (goal posts and willowing nets?) strength. greece, more clever and conniving gets her behind bitten at times but usually hisses and spits at turkey perched on a high wall he cannot attain; such as europe!

one last word on football: i totally disdain the national team coach, fatih terim. he stands for everything that i hate in this community, which i believe, is what chains the country to a stagnant and putrid time frame that will never pass unless all that mental garbage is disposed of. however, i take my hat off to fatih terim this once, for what i (the zap freak) caught him saying on the eve of the match: "whatever the outcome, we will shake hands and congratulate each other once the game is over". and i admit that it was less the words than the authority behind the statement. it was his personality that made what he said sound "true".

new post in turkish

hi, i am back. already dropped a note in the türkiş blog for those interested. doing a little checking for a couple posts in english. see you soon.

garfucius a la turca

history continues polyglot and so do the footnotes! go to http://galipturk.blogspot.com/ to view the turkish version of garfucius's wisdom.

achtung! naw-rooz!

naw-rooz (nevruz in turkish) is the day the sun enters the sign of the lamb in ancient oriental calendars or aries in western astrology. it is the day the new year begins.

as in all similar celebrations based on the cycle of seasons, naw-rooz probably extends back to antique dionyssiac - demeterian practices; when the invernal death of nature and its primaveral renascence were alternately observed as marks of collective time keeping.
for some reason or another, naw-rooz, which is persian in name became associated with the kurds. for centuries, kurdish tribes rejoiced the advent of spring on the 21st of march. the main event was jumping over a flaming fire, possibly to symbolize the merriness of the warm days ahead.

however, as the pkk and the kurdish question became more deeply engraved in turkish political society, naw-rooz, too, acquired a political character. first in the east, then the kurd populated sectors of large towns, it became an occasion where separatist slogans were shouted in demonstrations, occasionally acts of vandalism and pillage were staged, the turkish government was protested and clashes occurred with the police and the military law enforcement. the wood fire, too, was replaced with burning truck and tractor tyres which gave less flame but a thick, poisonous, pollutant and very visible cloud of smoke.

about 10 years ago, the state put its hand on naw-rooz. it was declared as a day to observe nationally, i.e., kurd, turk, what remains of armenian, greek and jew all together, as one soul. papers printed and tv's broadcast sights of bejacketed, necktied officialdom wearing black shoes and generals in full uniform jumping over the fire. tyre burning was of course outlawed, not because of environmental or health concerns, but because of the difficulties of policing it. thus, the spirit of revolt injected to naw-rooz by the kurds was enucleated.

yet, during the last few naw-roozes, the revolt was back. clashes, though not major, occurred in the east and big cities like ankara, izmir, adana, mersin, even antalya and of course the largest kurdish populated city in the world, istanbul, between the police and gendarmerie and the kurdish militants and youth, who now include a good many under 18.

tomorrow, march 21 is naw-rooz. information coming to newsrooms indicate there may be protests and demonstrations tomorrow in istanbul. at any rate, the police, in the name of taking precautions, may block, control and close down quite a few roads for security reasons, congesting the already paralyzed city traffic. those who travel around gaziosmanpaşa, tarlabaşı (taksim) and dolapdere should be particularly wary. their daily rhythms may be seriously upset.

happy naw-rooz, to all of us by the way. after all, it is originally a day for merry making. spring is here!

nevertheless, also... achtung, naw-rooz!

wet dreams of wet cement

for the benefit of non-turkophone readers, i got to start this post with a brief:

within the last few weeks
1. a number of public land holdings have been offered for sale and the zorlu group,
the owner of vestel, already bought some huge prime real estate in the heart of
istanbul's "skyscrapers district". do not let the epithet mislead you, the tallest
building here goes 30-40 stories high, lower than the skyline of a mediocre midwest
town in the u.s., although revenues do make the mouths of arab oil sheikhs water.

2. the head of the government, other elected and appointed officials have begun to utter
exaggerated numbers of tourists expected to visit turkey. now, these people are no
dunces and they have at their disposal all figures and statistics.
hence, they know that tourism in turkey is not only an economic but also an
environmental, cultural and developmental midden which nobody dares probe, drain,
clear or even cover. probably since the mention of the word tourism induces a state of
euphoric pipe dreams of sun drenched beaches, white sails, green treks, hot spas or
snowy hills spiced with new, renewed, rehashed or escapade love affairs; nobody really
questions official figures (nobody questions figures anyway, it is still officially
uncertain what turkey's population is!). by the way, although of course such misdeeds
never happen in this land, transparency international cites construction and
tourism as the two most corrupt industries suitable for large scale money
laundering. add to that the fact that one most favored industry of the novo italian
mafia is landfills, especially in the mezzogiorno which still maintains a hefty portion of
its feudal character.

so what? am i against development? am i against capital infusion? am i against the reconstruction of istanbul? am i against the mafia?

not necessarily... every capital infusion allows the total cake to grow somewhat. except, real estate enterprises can hardly be called investments; their value-added contribution is usually lateral rather than vertical. that is why in older economy texts, they used to be called placements.

the reconstruction of istanbul is essential, but not the construction of an istanbul anew. currently, the city, situated in an incredibly attractive natural and geographic setting, is one of the ugliest in the civilized and semi civilized world - take out the relatively virgin historic peninsula and what remains of pera, you are left with heap after heap of clustered masses of concrete, clustered into congested confines where a congealed lifestyle draggles behind a time wasting, tiresome, inefficient national economy. what istanbul needs is tearing down that ill used space and building from scratch according to rational plans. istanbul, to become something real, desperately needs urban utopia of renascence and metanoia.

constructing a burgeoning new, plastic, inflated toy town on the immediate rim of the old city is the textbook worst scenario in urbanization, a guide to what not to do. just considering the extra burden on the plight of the infrastructure and the extra idle population it will draw into the city should be enough to discourage such wet dreams of drowning istanbul under cement. but more importantly, the end-result is so ugly, it so denies the historical heritage of the two empires that created constantinopolis, it is an epitome of characterless poor taste.

so, yes, i am against this epidemic of wet dreams of wet cement pouring destructively into one of the rarest landscapes on earth. i am particularly against this idea of scopophilic "development" consisting on the veneration of phallic concrete dolmens blocking the sight and breath of the city; the american injected oil sheikh idolatry of the so-called new in foul appreciation of the classical. i amnauseated by this malgusto arabian model of urban concretization that greedy, taste poor, culturally noveau riche accolytes here swallow as development and insist on pushing down my throat with wet cement.

let them spill their seeds on that wet cement. we already have enough eyesore monsters anyway.

cyprus and cypriots

speaking of cyprus, must have been 10 years or so... during a conference in vienna, we had this band of greek and turkish cypriots sitting in the same session and suddenly voices began to get too loud in the corridor at lunch break as they began arguing about the well known and well worn issues. i made a remark, more as fun than anything serious, and adamantia pollis, the dear lady from new school, new york grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me away. "addie" is barely half my size but the strength of her personality and presence reflects in her sinews and i docilely tagged along. in a safe corner she chided me "you crazy? in a minute they will begin speaking cypriot with each other, we'll understand nothing of what they're saying but will remain stranded here fighting over what matters to only them".

addie is one of the wisest, most clever and most intelligent ladies i've ever met. i guess she summarized the real cyprus problem as simply as it ever can be.

empiricum at work

i hope to be leaving for xios tomorrow, via izmir and by ferry from çeşme. i am (*) an organizer, chair and commentator on the 3d greek -turkish workshop on cooperation, security, communication and scientific dissemination in eastern mediterranean panel that the imsam - empiricum contributes to.

the workshop begins with a discussion on turkish - greek relations, of course, but as opposed to before, we do not argue about who is right any more. not only because, objectively, nobody is (nor can be) that right but also we - even us academics! - have wisened to the fact that doing something together renders such arguments as moot as who is winning the uefa cup. excitement that leaves no aftertaste once it is passed.

this third meeting covers topics ranging from shipping to chemical engineering and cinema or from development to how iran's missiles add to the equation in the eastern mediterranean. no more the boring fir lines, continental shelf issues bickering over oil that is not there and of course, cyprus.

all that, fortunately, is now intellectual garbage politicians, journalists and diplomats have to sweep. oh, and also some self important academics who think it is a goo thing to be a politician, journalists or diplomat. well, it takes all kinds.

for our part, we of the empiricum now do what is right and try to make the best of what we have! we do, indeed: this is a copy-paste from the official program (**): round table discussions (to be continued in a taverna!).

thus, i shall be absent for a few days with your leave.

xara sas!

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(*) supposedly, it's john karkazis and nikitas nikitakos did almost all the work...
(**) just in case some stuffed shirt airbag may be reading this and accuses us of being un-serious let me note that the taverna part of the program extends to after 2100 hours.

success is bovine waste

are you aware how the word and concept "success" has dominated our language and hence our thought templates with the invasion of every aspect of our lives by the corporate mentality "results count"? we used to say "good in bed", now even that is "a successful lay".

i am about to ban the word in my classes because it has become another roadblock before the alleys of thinking. it is an utter confusion of means and method with consequence. it is a false idea, a false representation.

"success" is not of itself. it is the end-result, an outcome, a consequence of a process or various processes totally dependent on other factors related and unrelated to the acting person. you are lucky, you succeed. you are well prepared, you succeed. you are well off, you succeed. you are well trained and educated, you succeed. you are in the right place at the right time, you succeed. you know the right people, you succeed. you work hard, you succeed. conditions favor you for a number of reasons, you succeed.

so, you succeed or don't only if other factors are in action. therefore, successful can hardly be an adjective. success can hardly define any quality, beyond a situation - it does not qualify.

let us talk correct if we are to think correct. if we talk bovine excreta, we may end up mooooeing like cows.

thank you for being ill - florence nightingale hospitals

florence nightingale hospitals group is celebrating its 20th anniversary and has decorated istanbul's billboards with their announcements.

actually, the florence nightingale hospital is much older, named after the lady of the lamps, the heroine of the wounded in the crimean war, who initiated modern care for the sick and the injured in turkey; although more soldiers died under her care at the scutari (üsküdar) hospital of typhoid, typhus, cholera etc. than battle wounds, due to poor hygiene - istanbul's bane is historic as well as historical isn't it?

anyway, i believe it would be more appropriate to say that the group is rather celebrating the 20th anniversary of the privatization of florence nightingale. good for them! i congratulate. the fn is a fairly good hospital, i've got a very good friend practicing there, too.

the 20th anniversary billborads are interesting. they give statistical data about the heart transplants, kidney operations, bones mended, c-sections, acne treatment etc. that the hospitals have carried through. so far, that's understandable but what baffles me is that the announcement ends with thanks to the turkish public.

you're welcome. but what do you thank us for? consuming cigarettes like food so that our "ethnic" epithet has become synonymous with smoking: "fumer comme un turc"? greasy, protein deficient malnourishment that screws our hearts and veins? inhaling the worst air in europe, caused above and before all else by vehicles of the city government belching deadly fumes, among badly driven cars and trucks which also serve as death's scythe? drinking too little water and fighting dehydration with salt consumption? frightening hygiene conditions and child swallowing sewers reminiscent of nightingale's times in disease ridden scutari? lack of exercise? living in stressful environments while turning every single environement voluntarily into one of stress? etc., etc., etc.?

are you thanking us for having bad hearts, leaking kidneys, raki blown livers, faulty spleens, infected bowels, poor eyes, fat bellies, weak bone marrow, prostate, carcinoma prone lungs and lymphs; so each one of us potentially can blow your healed patient stats to international levels of success?

why didn't i read how many patients die, in proportion to the lives "saved"?

many happy returns florence nightingale group- but for the next 20 years, please either hire a better pr crew who knows what it is talking about or at least learn the nuances of turkish better enough not to thank the people for being sick.

financing someone's penis with my money?

yes, islam is a definite obstacle before turkey in becoming a member of the european union or a part of european civilization! not per se because it is a religion but because it is a weltanschauung, a way of looking at, mentally shaping and experiencing the world and because it is a comprehensive, pervasive and oppressive religious weltanschauung(*) permeating every iota of man's being, expropriating all aspects of individuation and hence, free thinking.

islam is representative of the a-mathematical and anti-mathematical modality of thinking typical to the orient. the orient cogitates without mathematics, or at least without proportion and relativity as an aspect of mathematical thinking. the orient, therefore, is not rational, the thinking of the orient is ordinal, i.e., it uses arithmetics to count and order things. since, without proper individuation and rationality, personality, too, can hardly develop, the oriental, is less an independent free human than a subject. after all, being muslim literally means to surrender.

since ordinal thinking is the motherlode of ordinal systems of living i.e., social organization, there are no "equal" beings in the orient either; just an escalation of people who must kow-tow to each higher echelon on the licking order. such systems are by nature military, and what a military system needs last is a "citizen", an able-minded, free thinking rational individual.

an ordinal system thrives on the number of able-bodied subjects who obey rather than think, who believe rather than question, who resign rather than organize and who live on the generosity of superiors rather than what is rightfully earned, instead of the supremacy of law where rights and duties are objectively defined, rather than by command. therefore, in the irrational orient, fealty counts, not merit. economy-wise, too, because a sense of proportion is not developed, it is not per capita wealth but a conspicious, imperial total of riches, which naturally collects and concentrates only at the top, that determines prosperity.

the orient wants soldiers instead of citizens. therefore, to the oriental mind, a large population is a sign of power because that mind is stuck in the ages when prosperity was the result of the spoils of war - war needed people who would die on the battlefield, thus also keeping the number of mouths to feed relatively under control. that is why, borrowing from judaism, which continuously needed a minimal population to survive, islam based its own human resource policy on a hadith that orders muslims to reproduce.

yes, there was a time during the capitalization of the occident, too, when a growing population was encouraged, because it was rational to have more hands to work the labor-intense mills of production and fight in the wars that were shaping the modern world. as technology reached certain levels where manpower was gradually replaced by machinery and computers later, and when it became obvious that another world war was quite unlikely, that rationality demanded a slow down in population growth which corresponded to an increase in proportional per capita wealth.

oh sure, the occident's cut down on reproduction has a significant aesthetic and hedonistic factor too, which the oriental culture lacks: fewer children means more free time for the adult individual to enjoy to pleasure.

in the meantime, the orient continued to fill its ranks with poor, unfed or malnourished, uneducated, unhealthy, unfree masses draining the already meager resources, even in the oil rich countries. and what did the politicians do? they encouraged the great unwashed to reproduce and multiply - obey the prophet's orders!

now, the man who thinks he is the latter day caliph of turkey has declared that his government will issue state (government?) support for families (meaning married couples) and more children (in arithmetic terms, more than two). even if that support realizes as tax cuts (which the great unwashed don't pay anyway) it means that i, a single, childless, high bracket wage earner, shall be paying more tax for the reproductive purposes of a poor, unproductive (which unfortunately is not synonymous with infertile), uncouth, rowdy, uneducated, unskilled, ignorant family of slobs at the expense of my welfare!

in other words, i shall be financing the pleasures of some stupid dude's wimpy penis!

no wonder rationalists in the islamic orient were called mut'azil, the isolated!

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(*) for a good account of what weltanschauung is, read master sigmund freud's last chapter in the new introductory lectures (penguin freud library). even if you are one of the unfortunate souls who dis, mis or demi understands psychoanalysis, the reference should provide satisfying reading. here is a sample paragraph where the master defines weltanschauung:

‘weltanschauung’ is, i am afraid, a specifically german notion, which it would be difficult to translate into a foreign language. if i attempt to give you a definition of the word, it can hardly fail to strike you as inept. by weltanschauung, then, i mean an intellectual construction which gives a unified solution of all the problems of our existence in virtue of a comprehensive hypothesis, a construction, therefore, in which no question is left open and in which everything in which we are interested finds a place. it is easy to see that the possession of such a weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of mankind. when one believes in such a thing, one feels secure in life, one knows what one ought to strive after, and how one ought to organise one’s emotions and interests to the best purpose.

suicides, the media and the bridge

this post is corollary / supplementary to the previous one about the effects of the media on (especially violent) behavior:

reha muhtar, once the chief editor of show tv, is one of the two(*) pillars of populism who contributed extensively to establishing hebetude and banality as national intellectual virtues and institutionalizing ignorance as a mass occupation by dethroning whatever there was of information in order to institute infotainment as the primary resource of cognitive apathy.

the muhtar style of televized news and funmongering was once harshly criticized by the intelligentzia among many other reasons also for promoting suicide attempts because, cameras would flock to the bridges spanning the bosforus whenever some nincompoop threatened to jump unless his beloved were to come and declare her undying affection to him or another hanging down the balustrades (gunwales?) would blackmail his father to buy him a new car. once or twice, some unfortunate blighter - as the brits would say - did slip his hold or actually took the death plunge. however, most of the times, it was a parade and a charade as well as vicarious relief from bogus excited tension for millions of viewers.

when criticism reached political levels, - i believe it was rtük the censorship board again - the authorities intervened and jump-from-the-bridge-suicide-infotainment dispatches virtually disappeared.

pheeewwww... suicides thus abated as people were not incited to take their own lives by the "visual stimuli" not supplied by the now-censored-tv-stations ... thanks... who?

***
to the media of course, oh dear reader, whose colossal lack of a sense of follow-up, the catechism of journalism, did not urge them to even check the stats... i recently found out due to a very sad and misfortunate incident, that a minimum of two and maximum of 10 persons per week continue to throw themselves off the bosphorus bridge according to the police.

only, we do not know that and what is not known cannot hurt the great public conscience.

do i hear someone say "the effect of the media"?
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(*) the second institutionalizer is the late actor kemal sunal, whose characters always came up on top through some kind of peasantly cunning in his immensely popular movies despite their epic stupidity.

death and measures of stupidity

radikal's lead story on monday recounted how a 12 year old girl in urfa hanged herself and suffocated after telling her sister and cousin that she would come back from the dead as she had watched in a show aired on samanyolu tv, a decidedly religious and conservative channel. "i'm going to rise again, too", she reportedly said.

the next day, the "secular-ist" press mused that the child's death "caused" by the samanyolu program put the state's regulatory body of communication, rtük (the superior radio and tv committee) which in practice is a board of censors for tv and radio stations, in a quandary because they were reluctant to impose sanctions on a religiously oriented channel, much less one affiliated to the rather popular and politically influential fetullah gülen hoca, but the direct reference of the deceased girl to the show made some action mandatory.

what else would you call a delusion of grandeur but the assumption that some tv show can carry the power of life and death? the media have blown their own industry so much out of proportion that they can presume and pretend to possess such might.

since psychoanalysis was foregone by mechanized and digitalized squads of intellectuals in search of scientific idiocy instead of idiosyncracy, we have been condemned by a mediated collective obtuseness to suffer such aetiological nonsense as demonstrated by the editorial command of radikal, not differently from any other member and manager of the media.

there exists no shred of evidence that can conclusively assign blame for any act of violence on viewing visual material which contains or suggests violence. the homo sapiens sapiens is an aggressive breed by nature and seeks the cultural material that suits such urges. violence prone individuals, depending on their level of intelligence among other factors, either derive cathartic pleasure from vicarious violence or at the very worst, learn from movies or tv shows the methodology of venting brute force and if necessary, making moronic excuses for it. "normal" people, as they are called according to statistics of rule-obedience, devise methods of sublimating their destructive drives or simply get married and beat their spouses or offspring.

at the same time, by nature, the homo sapiens sapiens is a nice, benevolent, altruistic creature but nobody attributes its generic goodness to religious, moralistic, educative etc. electronic evangelism on air or online. one could almost be led by the alleged correlation between tv and aggression to assume that there were no wars before moving pictures were invented. nor was there charity.

war was one of st. john's horsemen of the apocalypse. then, too, as at all times, the personality of an individual was shaped by the exigencies of a cultural environment one had to adapt what he could of his personal potential to. in other words, personality was a structure that evolved for adaptation of survival means and skills to a social milieu. some employed violence and/or generosity to survive, others turned their aggression within, to themselves and who was theirs. the rate of suicides to population and various causes of death was probably still the same at the times of lion heart and saladin as it was when emile durkheim was writing his famous study. rape or murder were probably no more uncommon than it was in west manhattan of the eighties.

in short, death lives with and within the human individual. depending on the degree of obstruction and frustration that the individual feels life imposes, death may become a pseudo exit or relief from the tensions of life. master sigmund freud said it represented a wish to return to the inorganic state of matter, with zero level of stimulation on one's psychic apparatus. if idiosyncracy had dominated intellectual thinking instead of (digitalized) idiocy, even radikal could discern and perhaps inquire into why and how a 12 year old girl in urfa, incidentally, a region where women are suppressed and restricted into quite frustrating and restrictive social roles from very early on, wanted to die that much so she could be reborn.

what was it that made her want to leave this particular life in the hope of coming back to another?

how, then, could a mentally debilitated tv show encourage her to die? or was it other features of life as she knew it that generated and raised her interest in death so that she sought the methodology of dying in that idiotic episode?

death and measures of stupidity

radikal's lead story on monday recounted how a 12 year old girl in urfa hanged herself and suffocated after telling her sister and cousin that she would come back from the dead as she had watched in a show aired on samanyolu tv, a decidedly religious and conservative channel. "i'm going to rise again, too", she reportedly said.

the next day, the "secular-ist" press mused that the child's death "caused" by the samanyolu program put the state's regulatory body of communication, rtük (the superior radio and tv committee) which in practice is a board of censors for tv and radio stations, in a quandary because they were reluctant to impose sanctions on a religiously oriented channel, much less one affiliated to the rather popular and politically influential fetullah gülen hoca, but the direct reference of the deceased girl to the show made some action mandatory.

what else would you call a delusion of grandeur but the assumption that some tv show can carry the power of life and death? the media have blown their own industry so much out of proportion that they can presume and pretend to possess such might.

since psychoanalysis was foregone by mechanized and digitalized squads of intellectuals in search of scientific idiocy instead of idiosyncracy, we have been condemned by a mediated collective obtuseness to suffer such aetiological nonsense as demonstrated by the editorial command of radikal, not differently from any other member and manager of the media.

there exists no shred of evidence that can conclusively assign blame for any act of violence on viewing visual material which contains or suggests violence. the homo sapiens sapiens is an aggressive breed by nature and seeks the cultural material that suits such urges. violence prone individuals, depending on their level of intelligence among other factors, either derive cathartic pleasure from vicarious violence or at the very worst, learn from movies or tv shows the methodology of venting brute force and if necessary, making moronic excuses for it. "normal" people, as they are called according to statistics of rule-obedience, devise methods of sublimating their destructive drives or simply get married and beat their spouses or offspring.

at the same time, by nature, the homo sapiens sapiens is a nice, benevolent, altruistic creature but nobody attributes its generic goodness to religious, moralistic, educative etc. electronic evangelism on air or online. one could almost be led by the alleged correlation between tv and aggression to assume that there were no wars before moving pictures were invented. nor was there charity.

war was one of st. john's horsemen of the apocalypse. then, too, as at all times, the personality of an individual was shaped by the exigencies of a cultural environment one had to adapt what he could of his personal potential to. in other words, personality was a structure that evolved for adaptation of survival means and skills to a social milieu. some employed violence and/or generosity to survive, others turned their aggression within, to themselves and who was theirs. the rate of suicides to population and various causes of death was probably still the same at the times of lion heart and saladin as it was when emile durkheim was writing his famous study. rape or murder were probably no more uncommon than it was in west manhattan of the eighties.

in short, death lives with and within the human individual. depending on the degree of obstruction and frustration that the individual feels life imposes, death may become a pseudo exit or relief from the tensions of life. master sigmund freud said it represented a wish to return to the inorganic state of matter, with zero level of stimulation on one's psychic apparatus. if idiosyncracy had dominated intellectual thinking instead of (digitalized) idiocy, even radikal could discern and perhaps inquire into why and how a 12 year old girl in urfa, incidentally, a region where women are suppressed and restricted into quite frustrating and restrictive social roles from very early on, wanted to die that much so she could be reborn.

what was it that made her want to leave this particular life in the hope of coming back to another?

how, then, could a mentally debilitated tv show encourage her to die? or was it other features of life as she knew it that generated and raised her interest in death so that she sought the methodology of dying in that idiotic episode?

know thine enemy

well, it's always nice to be able to say "i told you so", especially when it supports a life-time decision you have made. i have reached the conclusion on the morning of 12 september 1980 that kenan evren, the leader of the putsch that cost turkey at least a century of civilization right on the edge of a breaking point, is my sworn enemy. i do not mean an enemy in the millitary or feudal sense of course, or even target my hostility at his person - his person is ephemeral, what he stands for is eternal in an oriental despotism. i rather harbor an undying opposition executed through intellectual and democratic means to whatever he stands for, which invariably perpetuates that despotism.

i said in one of yesterday's posts about evren's suggestion of a federated turkey that he would never aim for more liberty but for increased control through a series of cloned minor and junior ankaras, all flawed by the same festering ailments.

even in that form, his outburst was blown back to his face by the majority of the polity quorum - a gung ho prosecutor even attempted to bring the ex-junta-leader to court, we'll see how he sits back in his chair -. turks are apparently so much in love with their defunct, archaic and totally dysfunctional system of state that they consider it a taboo and a crime to discuss, much less to alter it.

the ex-dictator reportedly called m. y. yılmaz of hürriyet who was also outraged at his suggestion of a federated turkey and told the columnist that he did not have in mind a "federation" but a system of districts whose administration depends on the "principle of appointed regional governors".

know thine enemies. little chance you can beat many of them, but they do tend to trap themselves by the reason of the obvious, so that you can slip by the thrashing dragon on your way to freedom.

not humans, properties!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

am i being too harsh? exaggerating?

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

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

set the controls federated-ly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

guess that makes him the artist in turkey.

emre the intellectual football racist

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

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

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

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

hi, folks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tame tot of tint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

people sketches

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

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

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

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

so what was the solution?

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

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

imsam-empiricum

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

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

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

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

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

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

æsthesia is infrastructure

why?

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

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

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

to pooh pooh indoors

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

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

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

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

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

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

why?

organize sanayi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

brain is worth less than testicles!

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

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

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

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

aberration... oh, i'm coming back

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

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

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

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

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

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