Robot Gulls Steal Turkish Election

I have mentioned this before, but Turkey, like many of its Middle Eastern neighbors, is a country that has turned conspiracy theories into a work of art. After a while you start to suspect even the seagulls of plotting against you. (I don’t know what the gulls are planning, but whatever it is, its big. The swarm my rooftop by the hundreds and squawk in that foul (!) sneaky language of theirs, all the while staring and staring and staring. I’ve seen The Birds. I know the score. Perhaps they work for the Israelis? Or Al Qaeda? Robot gulls? Has Osama Bin Laden’s reanimated corpse sent an army of robot gulls purchased from the CIA to kill me?)

Robot Gulls in training

It’s not all crazy though. An old special ops man, Ayhan Çarkın, confessed to the Radikal newspaper to executing several Kurds on behalf of the government back in the 90’s. This had only been unsubstantiated rumor before. Mainstreamers called the people asking for investigations crazy, paranoid, and provocateurs. Yet, unsubstatiated rumor is realer than one might like to believe in Turkey. The trouble is, anyone can start gossip, so you have to be really sharp to know which gossip is true and which is made up to hide the true ones. It’s like being friends with the popular girls in junior high, only this gang of Heathers kills.

The people behind the Turkish political system--'OMG he is such a skank!'

Sigh.

In any case, I saw with my own eyes today what should have been a story told by a conspiracy obsessed paranoiac, but was, in fact, reality.

Today is June 12th, the Sunday of Turkey’s fateful election. The results will determine who gets to write the next constitution—the one that will replace the dinosaur imposed by the military junta some thirty years ago. If the majority AK party can win two thirds of parliament they will be able to push through any changes they wish without asking anyone else—a grim prospect given the scope of human rights abuses in the last few years. Over sixty journalists are behind bars for criticizing Prime Minister Tayyıp Erdoğan, which means that thanks to the AK folks, Turkey ranks near China for press freedom (that’s like saying you rank with Stalin for religious tolerance) with new arrests every day on some trumped up terror charge or another. They have sued thousands of writers for ‘slandering’ the government, are instituting a far reaching government monitoring of the Internet, have bugged phones, and started using the police in heavy handed ways against protesters—a man died recently out East after being tear gassed, for example. And now with the new constitution, they aim to change Turkey into a presidential democracy which would leave Tayyıp Erdoğan in power for the next ten years.

Not that they don’t have a good side. At least you can say you are Armenian or Kurdish these days without too much backlash.

Whenever I hear 'AK party, I always think of Bill the Cat's Ack

Anyhoo,

Delal supports a party called the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). It is mainly made up of Kurds, but also leftists like film director, writer, and talk show host Sırra Sürreya Önder—a Türkmen from Adıyaman. The candidate for Kadıköy, Sebahat Tüncel—a woman who has already served a term or two, owes us 5 lira for the börek we brought to her office one day last week. Delal says let it go, we were trying to be supportive, but I’m counting kuruş. Cough it up Sebahat!

Sırrı Süreyya representing his super cool movie Beynel Minel

Today we went to Üsküdar, the AKP nest on the Asian side, and served as election monitors at the precinct where Delal and her sister vote. Now the BDP could not directly take part in the election (you have to command ten percent of the election to do that—the military junta’s idea). Instead they joined as independent candidates—a coalition of individuals who planned, once in office, to form a coalition block. So we call them the block.

This all gets very complicated so let me leave the politics aside.

I was pretty excited to be a monitor (müşahit). I had my own badge from the coalition block and stationed myself like a Secret Service agent on the second floor of the school where the elections were held. I kept an eye out for any kind of hijinx and hooliganism—in the weeks before the election there were riots in the streets, Molotov cocktails, tear gas attacks. It seemed anything was possible. I did not have to wait long for action.

A small band of covered women from the AK Party (ACK!) had staked out each floor of the school—about five per flight of stairs. One of the them, an old shrew in a lead-colored headscarf with similarly colored eyes sat beside me and scanned the hallway like one of the robot gulls I mentioned earlier. She had a sour expression and an enormous honker (indicating, a friend in Boston once told me, that she has a big penis). As soon as a new voter appeared on the stairs, she turned on the smile, flew to her feet and asked, ‘Oh, do you need help finding your voting booth?’ She’d put an arm around their shoulders and start to lead them away, talking the whole time. ‘Do you understand how to vote? Would you like me to help you?’

This sort of thing is completely illegal in Turkey. As monitors, I and Robot Gull Woman can only watch and report anything we think is strange. We are not allowed to guide or direct anyone. I didn’t understand what the big deal was at first until Delal pointed out that in the past people have used this same approach to threaten, bribe, or intimidate voters. If you happen to be illiterate, they may even try to cast your vote for you.

There were about twenty five of these women at our school—wandering the halls in their covered lady trench coats and cornering people before they went into the room with the ballot boxes. We called the police on them, and they went away for a few minutes only to pop up later and do the exact same thing. This went on for hours. They were very aggressive with people, and hysterical when confronted, but they clearly knew they were doing something wrong because they would vanish until the coast was clear and cops had gone.

For the first time since coming to Turkey I began to understand the suspicion that people felt toward the covered women. At least the ones who came today were abusing their power as monitors and pressuring people with sheer numbers--during the vote counting process too. They finally left when Delal threatened to call one of the election lawyers on them (another shouting match ensued) and they regrouped in the parking lot outside. (Another gull-like behavior—you shoo them off but they just trot down the beach and bide their time).

We called the lawyer anyway. She said that there were so many incidents in our precinct that she was handling them in order of importance. She never did make it to us. If it was like this in our small little section of the city, God knows how it was in the rest of the country. (Next day flash forward—the newspaper mentioned today how bad it was in the rest of the country. In Ankara a fight broke out because opposition party members said they saw AKP people planting false ballots. In Adana, block supporters stormed a school they said was trying to steal votes. In other parts of the country, there were missing ballots, false signatures, and lots and lots of women doing what our covered gals were doing. A couple of these chicks in Denizli were caught trying to pay people to vote for the AKP. Imagine, that many irregularities! Other scandals made the news last night before polls had even closed. There were ballots found Saturday, a full day before the election, signed and sealed—more votes for the AKP. Someone was caught burning ballots with votes for Sırrı Süreyya over on the European side. In our own school, several of the election workers refused to give us official copies of the election results (something they are required to do by law so that we can corroborate vote counts and challenge discrepancies). One woman even tried to shut the door on us while they counted votes unmonitored. (You’re disturbing my concentration! she screeched.)

In Fikirtepe, another part of Kadıköy where our candidate and lendee Sebahat Tüncel cast her vote, the election officers refused to let the coalition’s monitors into the room. When they gathered outside (following the strategy of the Robot Gull Women but with different results) the police tried to disperse them by force (again illegally) and only them--there were several other people from the AKP outside with them who were not dispersed. After several meetings and threats by the election lawyer, and probably after it was way too late, the let the monitors in.

And just to add my own little 2 kuruş worth to the conspiracy pot. From the ballot box I was monitoring, there were 81 votes for the CHP and 120 for the AK guys—and this in a neighborhood known for its almost unquestioning support of the AK party. One wonders how the AK people were able to sweep into power (25% CHP, 50 % AKP) if the ratios even in their fortress of fortresses were not that high.

And my favorite--caught and documented by a reporter no less.  A young man walks into the offices of Mr. Sureyya and after some complimentary tea and chatting, bids them adieu but forgets to take his bag.  Inside are several Molotov cocktails.  Ten minutes later, the police arrive saying someone had tipped them off that a riot was being planned. 

Ugh.  Christ, okay.  I’ll never dismiss a conspiracy theory out of hand again.

All very dramatic. But I had the sense that I was actually doing an important job. International observer. Me! The vote counting itself was the most exciting part for me. One by one the ballot chief opened the envelopes, showed it to the room, and ticked off the votes. I sat in my chair with a very serious look on my face, but was grinning like a fiend on the inside. I had my piece of paper with me and ticked off the results. Whenever one for our candidate came up, Delal and I looked at each other and did a mental high five. There were about six of the covered ladies crowding in front of me, and just as many sitting next to Delal. They crowded the front and pushed others away which made it a little difficult to do proper monitoring. Even the election officials asked them to back off.

Despite all the hullabaloo, in the end, our party did rather well. According to the latest reports, we took 35 seats in Parliament, about ten more than we had before. We. Yeah, I said we. Now that I am getting married to someone local, local politics matter, and the independent candidates support of equality for women, equality for all minorities, and a responsible environmental policy resonates with my own position on such things.

We ended the night with fireworks on Kadıköy wharf. The supporters of the block were there in mass, waving flags and dancing the halay. Some AKP supporter smirked and said, if they get this worked up over 36 reps we could just give it to them—we’ve got plenty. But 36 is nearly double what it was before and it’s enough to play a role in shaping the new constitution. So stick it, dude.

Celebrations in Kadıköy

My teacher, my enemy--Miss Peacock of Istanbul

The Gürsel companyt that ferries Ms. Peacock to her roost.  No, as one friend asked, they are not like the pick up trucks that take migrant workers to the fields.

Let me be brutally honest. There is a side of me--rearing its ugly head more and more these days as the end of school draws tantalizingly near--that absolutely despises Istanbul—the traffic, the trash, the horns. Call it ‘culture shock’, call it humbuggery or sourpussery, call it sociopathic tendencies—whatever the explanation is, venom has been circulating in my brain fairly frequently lately, and it really gets going whenever, at 6:30AM, after insufficient rest and coffee gulped down as I run out the door (forgetting either keys, my computer, or once, even a shoe) I climb on the service bus to school—the trusty number 46 which brakes and charges and brakes again the entire forty-five minutes to work. (Woe is he who has a hangover). It is kept hermetically sealed in all types of weather—people here have a bizarre terror of air.

Number 46 is driven by the intrepid Mehmet, who is infallibly red and bleary eyed every morning and can barely sputter out a ‘Gunaydın’ when I board. He makes me sit in the front seat next to him for some reason—the foreigners cat-bird seat, I reckon, as a couple of my other foreign colleagues are similarly situated by their drivers.

I spend my entire ride in the front seat scowing and mocking everyone in the back—cussing as we crest Çamlıca Hill and the breathtaking view of the Asian side of the city emerges from the sunrise fog, the Marmara Sea glittering like shredded silver. And rolling my eyes in fury as we reach the Bosphorous Bridge, where the number of cars surpasses the legions of damned that will be dumped duly into hell once Armageddon finally arrives (the date pushed back to October 21st, or, if your posse is the Mayans, December 2012).

Why?

Well, the main source of my ire is a woman I call Miss Peacock—mainly in tribute to the way her hair fans out around her head, but also for the mother birdy way in which she treats her eight year old daughter (who also rides with us) which is, namely, as if she were managing a very fragile but talkative egg—the last of its kind, delicate, on the verge of extinction, which must be guarded against disturbances and disasters of all degree and manner—and the usual tool of Satan is moving air. Yesterday, the red level threat was a deadly draft from an open window on the driver’s side—Mehmet had uncharacteristically cracked it. But Snookums was a little ill and the wind might give her le grippe and could Mehmet please turn on the heater even though it was approaching 78 degrees outside? It was for Snookums. (Snookums herself gives a feeble little cough and says ‘Mommy, I’m so cold.’

Snookums. Why the silly nickname? It’s hard to translate the barrage of pet names Ms. Peacock fires at her offspring. It runs like this ‘Canım benim, kızım, ne oldu aşkım?’ Which translates literally as ‘My soul, my daughter, what’s wrong, my love?’ It makes the Anglo Saxon blood in me curdle.

Today Snookums’ destroyer was the dust. ‘Mehmet,’ Miss Peacock says in that breathy, consumptive-aristocrat tone she likes to use. ‘You must really have a professional clean the inside of this van. My little Snookums can’t tolerate all this dust. It gives her allergies.’ As Miss Peacock says this, she pats Snookums cheeks and makes a kissy face and Snookums herself responds in an appropriately tubercular dying-any-day-now breathiness. ‘Mommy, my eyes are getting itchy!’

‘That would be too expensive!’ Mehmet protests.

This is how I imagine Miss Peacock, only with the skin color of a Saltine

And Snookums adds, ‘My eyes are burning Mommy!’

My theory is that Miss Peacock frets over Snookums to have something to talk about. On the whole, if the woman is remotely concious, her mouth is moving—which is why the mornings can be relatively peaceful, for she often sleeps, especially in the depth of winter when the darkness of our 6:30 journey keeps Miss Peacock, as it does with most birds, soundly and dormantly asleep. I have proposed that Mehmet, on these brighter almost-summer mornings, drape a cloth over her head as one might a parrot’s cage, to trick her into sleeping longer, for alas, with the light comes wakefulness, and with wakefulness comes the never ending chatter. She doesn’t even stop to breathe—and that’s no exaggerating. Rather like a trained musician, she has worked out a method of wheezing at the end of her sentences which enables here to take in breaths without actually having to stop talking. Whenever she laughs, she uses the opportunity to suck in particulary deep draughts of air, just as my ney teacher taught me, a kind of Tuvan throat singer circular breathing, right through the nose so that mouth movement need not cease.

Sometimes to keep the empty conversation flowing, she asks Mehmet questions, peppering her sentences with his name, even using it as bookends. ‘Mehmet, why is that car stopped in the median. Huh, Mehmet?’ Or ‘Mehmet, where is that truck going in such a hurry. Mehmet?’ To these he usually replies, ‘How should I know?’ But then, she’s not really interested in the answer. It’s just a launching point for more talk and more questions. I think she might use the driver’s name so much because the airy H sound in the middle enables her to take extra breaths when she talks. For example, yesterdays 6:30 am conversation went like this.

‘Mehmet, are you taking a different way today? Mehmet? Oh no, this is the same road. I didn’t recognize the McDonald’s. Is that new, Mehmet? Where are those men walking, too, Mehmet? Did his car break down, Mehmet? Or maybe he is walking to the bus, Mehmet, but it’s not legal to cross the road like that, is it Mehmet?’ The use of his name is rather like a musical rest.

I am scribbling this furiously into my notebook on the service bus at 6:47. For some horrible reason, Miss Peacock is not asleep today either but perkily chattering to whoever has bumbled into her line of vision. Her egg snores soundly beside her covered with a variety of jackets because, despite the 79 degree weather, she must be incubated properly.

The Dalai Lama says our enemies are our greatest teachers. From them we learn patience. Well, Miss Peacock, I may be your greatest student, or just a cranky old man, but I have yet to learn my lesson.

Black Vest and White Shirt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbm0QVmxYls&feature=player_embedded


‘The months before a wedding are a nightmare,’ a married friend told me at lunch the other day. ‘Finding a house, moving, buying furniture, managing the relatives, invitations and everything else—it’s a hot pit of stress and strain.’

We have one thing taken care of at least. We have decided to stay in Delal’s old apartment out near Çamlica hill. Her uncle repainted it for us this past week and on Saturday, we dropped by to pay him and say thanks. The usual round of tea drinking and chatting ensued. A picture on the wall of her uncle’s parents inspired him into talking about his grandmother, an Armenian who escaped the genocide by hiding among the Kurds. Her name was Makrik.

‘Weeks before the genocide began,’ Delal’s aunt began, her eyes wide with amazement at the story she was about to tell. ‘She had a dream that she was drowning. She saw a man in a white shirt and a black vest reach down in the water and lift her out, saving her. Later, when the soldiers came, everyone in her family was killed. She and her sister escaped by hiding under a pile of corpses. Then they covered themselves in mud and fled down the river, breathing through reeds. Her sister died but his grandmother found our village. She was making a living by sewing for people. Oh, but she could sew! She knocked on the door of his grandfather and there stood the man from her dream. Black vest and white shirt, just like she had seen him. Now he was already married but he told his wife, ‘There’s this girl, an Armenian, very handy with a needle and threat. She is in big trouble.’ His wife said ‘Go bring her here! At least she can help me with all these children and the housework. I can’t manage it alone.’ They married and she converted to Islam. And like that, he had saved her, just like in the dream!’

The friend I was having lunch with is married to a Turkish woman, and when I brought up the topic of the genocide he just kind of shrugged and said, ‘I think it was all just a civil war that got out of hand.’ It’s not the first time I’ve heard a foreigner buy into the Turkish government’s line, but it’s always disappointing. Marrying into a Kurdish family, I don’t really have to worry about any friction over historical matters. Delal’s aunt and uncle say ‘genocide’ rather freely. They’re from the land where it happened. They come from a people (Kurds) enlisted to help in the slaughter, whom, as far as I can tell, don’t have the same squeamishness about admitting what happened and why. Perhaps because the same thing would be attempted to some degree against them. (From the stories I’ve read of the Dersim massacres alone—the piles of bodies, the escapes down river, the excuses made for the killings—the parallels are legion)

A small step was made this past week when an Turkish-Armenian singer, Sibil Pektorosoğlu, had her song broadcast in Armenian. It was a huge first on the national channel. The comments on the newspaper article making the announcement were the usual nationalist claptrap—‘Why are we being so nice to these people?’ one asks. Referring to the celebratory tone of the article ‘Why do we go to them like beggars showering praise over their songs when Turkish singers publish great songs every day?’

Her song is here, and its a bit sugar poppy, but its a huge first in a country where admitting that more than one language exists on native soil sometimes risks a jail sentence or an assassination attempt.

The Everyday Morning Walk to Catch My Ride

Thrown against the curb in a sprawl of gray and white feathers was a seagull. Its head turned toward me as I approached, the eyes like glass, but no, not like glass--alive, but reflecting a mind that was utterly alien. A cat batted the tips of its wings, a small little thing. This was just a prelude. There would be others—the streets swarmed with them--and one would certainly kill it. The bird bore the cat, seemingly indifferent, tilting its head up at me as I passed. There was no sign of blood, or injury, or fear. Its feathers were as white and clean as milk. Its beak curved and yellow and as flawless as newly minted plastic.


The sky was a powdery blue and pink--all the warm luxury of summer mornings here. The man at the cheese shop was sweeping the sidewalk. I nodded as I passed.

There is a rhythm to my walk—this white-frocked owner of this cheese shop, the rhythm swishes of his broom, the fat young man waiting for his service bus, the ruins of the Byzantine tower, the smells of poğaca wafting from the bakery, the blue minibus at the light, the doting mother and her little boy waiting for their own service, who wore jackets no matter how hot the weather, the smoking taxi drivers at the four way.

And today the gull.

Death was settling around that bird like snow. It fell slowly, and covered more with each passing second.  The animal waited with the same momentum that had made it circle our rooftops in search of food and fucking. What the hell is the magic word that animated this thing that soon would be a pile of bloody meat, and then bones, and then nothing?

Karabaş Otu

We weave among the weeds, among puffs of pollen yellow and white. A path cuts through the underbrush. In the brush, we gather lavender flowers. Their soapy smell soaks the air and our fingers and our shirts.


‘It’s not regular lavender,’ she says. ‘It’s called ‘Black Headed Lavender’. You boil it to make blue tea, which, everyone on the island tells me is, great for memory.’

The path ends on the red cliffs. There is a red rock stairway in the cliffwall and we zig zag sliding down, back and forth among the thistle and juniper and brine. A green peninsula of grass and rocks just out into the sea back toward the other islands and Istanbul. There’s no garbage yet because the season hasn’t started. We are alone.

A boat teeters against the white sinking sun, the shape of the sail blotted out by light. I take off my shirt, and for the first time in months, feel the touch of ultraviolet on my chest. Every cell tingles and unfolds itself to the sun. She sits beside me. I rest my head on her shoulder—the wool fibers of the sweater hot from the same light that heats the rocks.

‘This is Martha’s Beach. There was a family that used to live in that stone house there, just inside that copse of cedar or pine or whatever. The mother was Lebanese-Armenian, and everyone kind of made fun of her for being Armenian. And she was different in other ways, too. They said she would go swimming here in the nude, do different crazy things. And so they made fun of her, you know, for like a long time until one day, she went out into the water and drowned herself.’

‘And now it’s Martha’s beach.’

‘Now it’s Martha’s Beach forever.’

The shore crackles with waves on white stone streaked with sharp stripes of rust orange. We call out ‘Martha! Martha!’ A seagull sits motionless on a rock in a puddle of light.

‘I wouldn’t say that too loud,’ she says. ‘Martha’s children still live in the house.’

The stone cottage is surrounded by garbage—plastic chips bags, a blue pipe, an armless doll with the eyes burnt white by the sun and sea. Two teenagers are camping beneath a clearing in the pines. They poke sticks in the water and wave as we pass. The boy has a long scruffy dark beard, the girl puffs and puffs of tight curly hair. They wear black concert T-Shirts.

‘In the summer, all sorts of people stay here. They build rock shelters in the trees or wood huts.’

‘And the kids don’t mind?’

‘Those guys?’

‘No. Martha’s kids.’

The path that leads up to the road is guarded by a pony-sized white dog. He is not looking at us, but sniffing the wind, his ears down and his eyes half closed. He belongs here. As we pass, he moves in front of us and leads us up another flight of stone stairs that are now wearing away and crumbling. We slide over pine straw and gravel—hang on to shrubs as we move up. The dog looks back when we struggle.

At the top, he turns back and starts the return descent. Between twig and branch and trunk and shrub, you can see an orange plasmal glitter—the kids have started a fire in the beach.

The wind is cold up here on the hill. It swirls down past the houses, runs along the empty streets and loses itself in the wall of trees that hide the paths to Martha’s Beach. We follow the road down toward houses, past an old monastery, past the almond trees and their pink blossoms and the caretaker’s shack with gourds hanging on strings.

The sun is setting—the city across the water is being swallowed in a pink smog. The sun is spinning down into the horizon and everything is filled with the sound of wind moving through it as if the breaths of the island itself were withdrawing back down into the way we came, into the rock and weed and stone and sea.

I pull her close to me and bury my face in her black hair. She smells of heat and cut lavender and gathering bees. There once was a whole field of lavender, on the opposite side of the world. The girls were just eight then—it was before almost everything. And the swaying purple reached all the way to the low green hills and there was ice cream and a horse for the tourists and a woman in yellow shading her eyes and old friends laughing as they sank deep deep into the flowers and remained there, waiting all this while.

The Wedgie Defense

HE HAS GAINED LOTS OF WEIGHT SINCE THIS PICK--GO ON THE FASCIST ASSASSIN DIET!

MRS. GARRETT, THE GREAT WALI, WOULD HAVE BEEN HORRIFIED IF ARNOLD HAD DONE WHAT OGÜN SAMAST DID!

AND WHAT WOULD CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS SAY???!!!

At some random time in the middle of each semester, we have a day called ‘Veli Toplantıs Day, or the meeting with the wali (the original Arabic version of the world—Turkish has no W).

Wali is an interesting word, being the Arabic for ‘enlightened one’—or ‘friend of God who is without fear or sadness’. So, of course, we use it for Parent’s Day—parents, those mystical beings who without fear descend upon the school to demand to know why I have destroyed everything their divine prodigy has struggled to build. Of course, Veli also means ‘guardian’ in Turkish—‘one with authority over the child’--and I guess it is vague enough to cover grandmothers, uncles, lesbian lovers, godfathers, robot maids and whoever else might take care of the wee ones. (Incidentally, in conservative Turkey, no Mehmet has two mommies. It’s far more likely that a non-robotic maid will come in to speak for the parents, though I have confused the two. One girl’s mommy brought in her maid to the meeting, and I was convinced for a while that she cleaned more than the house. But she apparently served more of a Mrs. Garrett role than an Ellen DeGeneres one.)

In any case, the parents of one of my sixth graders came to me toward the end of the day very miffed looking. ‘Our son says he is being harassed at school,’ the father says with controlled rage as the mother nods indignantly behind him. ‘He’s a good boy! He behaves! The others are very naughty, but he follows the rules and does his work.’ More backseat nodding. Their son Efe often echoes the same sentiments in class. ‘But I didn’t do anything! They did it! But that’s not fair!’ Just the other day, I watched Efe slowly rip apart a page in a notebook and then sprinkle it around his desk like sugar on a giant cookie. When I held him after class to clean it up, he said ‘But I didn’t do it!’ ‘I watched you do it,’ I countered, and the debate culminated in a screeching fit, a kicked wall, and a trip to the principal.

‘Look,’ I told the father, ‘Efe’s a good kid. I’m not saying that he’s not. I just want him to learn to take responsibility for his actions:’

‘Well,’ said the father. ‘Taking responsibility is not part of Turkish culture!’ The mother nodded enthusiastically and smirked.

Now this is a sweeping generalization of course, which offended several very responsible Turkish friends that I told it to, but I do see a certain tendency at times, on a general cultural level, to never face up to the havoc one has wreaked and is often standing in the wreckage of—with bloody hands. Let’s take another incident.

Despite having learned that a middle schooler can take any good deed or virtue and twist it into evil, I encouraged one of my seventh grade boys to read. This was—let’s call him Mark. His name is close enough to it and the slant rhyme joke that his class mates torment him with ( Fart Mark, Mart Fart) still works. Mark eagerly takes up literary pursuits and updates me daily on how much fun he is having reading. He has started with the Captain Underpants series, a volume of books I also found amusing when I was reading them with my 5 year old godsons. About one week into Mark’s bibliophilia, I walk into class to find three boys clutching the backs of their trousers and groaning as two more hold another down in the corner of the room. There are screams, shrieks of rage and defiance. ‘Mr. Gibbs make him stop!’

Mark has discovered ‘wedgies’ and shared the knowledge, Prometheus like, with his unlearned friends.

I pull the two boys in the corner off their prey and lift the victim to his feet. He starts to pick his boxers out of his ass.

‘There will be no wedgies in this class!’ I tell them.

‘But we weren’t doing anything!’

‘I suppose his underwear crawled up his butt on their own?’

They stifle giggles.

‘Well he was making fun of us.’

‘I don’t care. That doesn’t mean its okay to torture him like that.’

They point to all the other boys prying out their undies.

‘But look, everyone else was doing it!’

I resist the classic every-one-off a cliff response and say instead, ‘So that means you, by law, have to do it too? That you’ll go to prison or perhaps burn in hell for not giving a wedgie?’

‘Yes. And anyway it’s all Mark’s fault for bringing in that book. He gave us the idea!’

There’s a murderer on trial now using the same defense—I’ll call it the Wedgie Defense. Four years ago he shot Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. His first explanation was ‘I shot the infidel!’ (In other words--he deserved it!) These days, his argument has moved to phase three of the Wedgie Defense. He didn’t really kill Dink. The media did, because the media published articles and broadcast shows that implied Dink was a traitor. ‘I am not guilty,’ he said. ‘The guilty ones are the headlines that made me think Dink was a traitor.’ Arrest those headlines! (This indeed is true enough—one of the things that made Dink a traitor in the eyes of the Turkish media was his suggestion that Atatürk’s adopted daughter, Sabiha Gökçen, was an Armenian herself, orphaned in 1915—by what, no one is saying. Apparently, heroes can only be full blooded Turks.) So you see, Ogün Samast pulled the trigger and then later posed with police in front of a Turkish flag to celebrate the killing—but he didn’t do it. The newspaper headlines did it, because they gave him the idea. This would probably be just something to roll the eyes at if the Dink family wasn’t having so much trouble getting the case prosecuted and if it didn’t look like several state officials were involved in the assassination as well. And that’s where things get sticky.

Dink never publically mentioned the Armenian Genocide—which I am assuming is still a crime of sorts in Turkey (Look at me! I’m a felon!) But his very existence begged the question. The odd thing is the deniers of the Armenian Genocide (felon again!) also use the Wedgie Defense—or at least the first two arguments of it. It never happened, they say. And if it did, they deserved it for fighting with Russians.

Taking responsibility—as an American, who am I to talk? I mean, how much does it mean that President Clinton went to Africa and apologized publically for the slave trade, or that Obama gave a tacit apology for Bush Era exploitation, or that again, Clinton, wrote a letter of apology to the Japanese held in internment camps and sent it accompanied by 20,000 dollar reparations checks? And the letters were pretty explicit as to why it happened—we were racists and failed you as leaders. (Read it here--http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/clinton.html) These apologies were too little too late in many cases, more political than sincere, and met with disapproval in a lot of segments of society and we do new things to apologize for every day. Yet...yet...it kind of sets a standard at least. It implies we SHOULD apologize. That these things were wrong. That we should feel bad afterward. Maybe Clinton didn’t feel bad for these things, maybe we should feel bad BEFORE we do things and not do them rather than AFTER, but when the apologies go in the papers and the history books—it says--this is the ideal. Yeah, maybe we are not living up to it, but this is what is right. And it becomes a guide we can refer to when judging our future behavior—not by hiding it or justifying it or denying it or dismissing it as unimportant or crying foul or pointing fingers—but by saying we’re sorry, we were wrong.

In Turkish, as one commentator for the Radikal pointed out, the word used for apologies is much different than the English ‘I am sorry.’ ‘Sorry’ is an adjective—and the only person involved in the sentence is you. The ‘being sorry’ is a quality you benevolently take on. In Turkish the word is özür dilerim. And dilerim can mean ‘I wish’ or ‘I beg of you’, and ‘I beg’ implies a loss of face and honor, a lowering of oneself—as if you are surrending your army to the conqueror. The whole phrase means something like ‘I beg to be excused.’ In other words, you are kneeling and waiting for their ‘özür’ to be lowered onto your penitent head. And so that’s why so many Turks were enraged at the Özür Dilerim campaign that began in 2009 to amass the signatures of people on a petition officially apologizing to Armenians for the ‘Great Disaster’ of 1915. Conservative and ‘Liberal’ alike screamed that it was an affront to Turkish honor (and thousands of people simply signed). And if you are wondering why liberals would be so fascist—well, me, too. The secularists here call themselves ‘liberal’ but they only mean in terms of drinking alot and hating religion, I think—they are the same ones that made me read the Prayer to Ataturk from two entries back and the same ones who were upset that the prayer was not crazy enough. A history teacher said huffily that it was wrong to call him ‘Mustafa Kemal’ because, using a run of the mill name implies he was an ordinary man. He must be called Atatürk!

Anyway, as Turkey confronts its Armenian issue with the Wedgie defense, I tried a new tack on my wedgie givers.

‘Boys,’ I say. ‘Now you know how touchie feelie the counselors are here. I have seen you guys use it to your advantage, exaggerating some silly little incident so that you can sit in the her office and talk about your feelings instead of going to class.’

No one denies this. Smirks all around.

‘So I wonder what would happen if I went into the counselor’s office and put on my best worried face, asked to go to the private room, and then explained that say, Mark, had started touching other boys’ underwear. I would shake my head, say how it had come on suddenly. I would ask if there was perhaps a problem at home, if maybe they were having feelings they weren’t sure how to handle. There would be meetings. People would draw up behavior charts. We would set up times for you to regularly meet with the counselor and talk about your progress. ’

And Mark interrupts, ‘Come on Mr. Gibbs, we’re not closet queens!’

I had asked him to bring in a slang book. I told him it would help him understand The Outsiders (our novel for the term). I thought it would help him improve his colloquial vocabulary. Like I said, middle schoolers can twist everything into something wicked and evil.

BİJI YEK GULAN!

I have a good, fairly tightly organized piece coming up about wedgies and genocide, but until then, I would like to offer up this messy bit about May 1st—International Labor Day. This is not a holiday that the average American knows about—which is a bit odd since it started with us. I had somehow associated it with the founding of the Communist Party and Soviet Russia, but it actually commemorates the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago way back in 1886 when police fired on demonstrators who were holding a strike for an eight hour work day. The Turkish left celebrates in a huge way. Today, more than a million people converged on Taksim Square and sang leftish fist pumping marches in Turkish and Kurdish, gave (to my mind) rather longwinded speeches, waved banners written in Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian, and of course, danced the Halay. I was one of them.


I am not sure I can say Delal comes from a leftist family—but her father is definitely leftist and he brings home the political bacon, thus not going to the May Day celebration would be a bit like my family not celebrating Christmas. The trick is, of course, that it’s been forbidden in Istanbul for quite some time. Last year was the first time in decades marchers were allowed in Taksim—May Day, like most everything else remotely interesting, was made illegal after the coup of 1980.

Our cortege was the BDP—the Peace and Democracy Party which is made up mostly of Kurds. Yes, ‘cortege’. I had no idea what that was either, and yet that’s the word in the Turkish English dictionary for kortej and it baffled everyone why in the hell I couldn’t understand what it was. It’s in the damn dictionary! I am rather left leaning American—far left for a good many of my relatives, and yet in the rest of the world that means I’m slightly right of center and so I am pretty unfamiliar with the jargon of demonstrations. The cortege, if you wallow in decadent capitalist ignorance like I do, is the column you march with. Your comrades. The BDP are new this year because they didn’t exist last year. Before that they were the DTP (The Democratic Society Party), and before that the DEHAP (The Democratic People’s Party) and before that...well you get the idea. The Turkish government has a fun time banning the Kurdish party and making it reshuffle its initials to incorporate under a new name. This year is special though, because, as I explained in the last entry, several of their candidates were banned from the elections a few weeks ago (and reinstated after bloody protests) and the turnout today was meant to be a show of solidarity and strength—the triumph of democracy and all that.

We woke up at eight in the morning. Delal’s grandfather wakes with the sunrise and was impatient with all of us ‘young’uns’ sleeping the day away. He was very excited. When I came out of the shower he’d turned on Roj TV—a Kurdish channel broadcasting out of Denmark--and explained excitedly to me about the post-coup days when the Kurdish language was formally forbidden. ‘Imagine!’ he said. ‘You can’t teach your own children their mother tongue!’ Grandfather had attended last year’s celebrations when Delal and Zelal marched the 81 year old villager up and down the hills on the European side for nearly six hours. While visions of workers of the world uniting danced in the heads of most, sore legs and feet danced in Grandfather’s head. Our ‘You coming with us?’ was met with a wave, a shove out the door, and ‘Have a nice time!’

We had a light breakfast and then hit the street—me; Delal, and her sister Zelal. Down at the wharf we met their cousins Yağmur and Yasemin, along with two of their friends, then took the ferry across the water to the European side. I was just a tiny bit apprehensive. The Turkish May Day has a checkered history. There was a massacre in 1977 where over thirty people died in a stampede. Some blame the police, some the Maoists, some (as always and maybe with a ring of truth) the ‘Deep State’ and CIA. Plus demonstrations just two weeks ago had been met with tear gas bombs (over 200 on Istiklal alone) and water canons, and rightwingers were angry with the Kurds. Moreover, the TV that morning had announced some39,000 security forces deployed around the city. (Before we left, I had asked Delal, with a bit of my smarmy American humor, what we should do if we were hit by tear gas. ‘Rub lemon in your eyes,’ she’d answered with a straight face, then pulled a lemon from the fridge, and put it in my hands.)

The streets around leading up to Taksim were closed to traffic and empty except for Gypsy musicians on the drum and zurna trying to make a buck (or a lira) off the people winging their way up the hill toward the square. We passed through the first police checkpoint—men and women were divided up and frisked. I was patted down by no less than a line of twenty policemen who formed a sort of tunnel of uniformed groping arms and fingers. I felt like I had just finished a little league baseball game and was tagging the other team’s players.

On the other side was a man standing on a barricade holding a fountain pen high in the air, turning it left and right, and clicking the top. Now in Turkey, everybody’s got a conspiracy theory—you can tell a lot about a person by knowing what group they secretly believe is controlling the country—but I couldn’t quite figure out any reason for this man to be clicking a pen in the air except that he was a plain clothes security agent taking not-so-secret photos of the crowd.

There was a huge stage next to the Marmara Hotel (from which shots were fired in ’77)—flags and banners and plankards were everywhere you looked—red and yellow and more red and a couple of blue ones. A gigantic banner of a socialist realist worker with giant arms covered the Ataturk Culture center. The main flag bearers were DİSK (The Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey), who had organized everything (as they had in the 70s) and marched around in smart Che Guevara berets, patrolling the crowd. There was also KESK (The Confederation of Public Workers' Unions)—a Union with affiliates all throughout Europe. The Worker’s March called, I guess, ‘May the 1st’ blasted from every speaker and each band that took the stage lead with that song so that by the end I had memorized it and now cannot drive it out of my head even—I suspect—with a chainsaw lobotomy.

Bİr Mayis! Bir Mayis! Işçinin emekçinin bayramı

Bir Mayıs! Bir Mayıs! Işçinin emekçinin bayramı

Or in Kurdish:

Yek Gulan! Yek Gulan!

Or in English:

The first of May! The first of May! The holiday of workers and laborers!

Granted, the lyrics are not all that poetic but the music is rousing enough. I felt dropped into a socialist rally right out of the 60s. The Proletariat unite!

I must stop for a moment and say something rather personal—Delal was particularly gorgeous today. She chanted and belted out songs and danced and pumped her fist to slogans—this must have been how Woodstock felt—only without the sex and drugs. She was filled with such energy and life and enthusiasm that it made her whole body glow. I felt I had caught a glimpse of her in her early twenties. And her black hair and black eyes were breathtaking—maybe it was something about the long awaited warm weather stirring my blood.

We joined a halay going on in the middle of the square. I don’t quite get the politics of the halay. It’s a folk dance found, in one form or the other, all across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. When I tell my students at the elite richy school, they sneer and smirk and make disparaging comments. It‘s like telling your friends on the Harvard crew club that you do line dancing. I get the impression the dance, like everything else here, marks your politics in some way. People on the left (Kurds, socialists, the intellectual poor, bleeding hearts and artists) dance the halay. Or rather I should say ‘Pull.’ In Turkish, you don’t use the word dans but rather halay çekmek which means ‘pull the Halay’ or even oyun oynamak which means ‘play the game.’

In the middle of our Middle Eastern socialist line dance, we ran into one of my old students (how I will never know, given the two million pushing shouting people thronging every nook and corner) and together we cleared a space and pulled halay like taffy on carnival day.

Engin is Kurdish and an activist and was delighted at my T-shirt which I had bought in Diyarbakır. It has a picture of a dengbej singer on the front with the G and B in caps standing for ‘Gigabyte’ to commemorate the legendary mnemonic powers of these Kurdish story tellers. Engin has just finished starring in Press, a movie about the harassment of reporters from Özgür Gündem (Free Agenda). It’s hitting the international festivals soon, and I highly recommend it. Engin plays Alişan, the young reporter who gets shot in the end (that’s not much of a spoiler—almost no one on the newspaper staff survived the nineties—it’s the whole point of the film).

Engin and I were talking about the strange religious reverence for Ataturk in Turkey. ‘When I was a kid,’ he told me, ‘I remember my preschool teacher telling me that Ataturk lived inside all of us. Well I imagined a tiny little Ataturk clone living in my stomach, so for three days I wouldn’t drink any water because I thought it would drown this Great Man Who Saved Us All and my parents had no idea why I had suddenly gone mad. That’s how deeply these ideas infect you, and how early they start!’

I thought this was a very funny story and not particular indicative of any dangerous idolatry, yet Engin was deadly serious. And of course, to be honest, though this seems like some cute anecdote of how mixed up kids can be, at the same time another friend’s two year old daugther is being taught to memorize her basic shapes which apparently include a circle, a square, a triangle, and Ataturk’s profile (she triumphantly identified the strange shaped blob next to the triangle on her homework paper to the bafflement of her American mother), and, sorry if this offends you and makes you want to shoot me, or insults your whateverishness, but it’s weird. Just profoundly freakishly weird. And as one offended Turk said, ‘You will never understand because you are not a Turk!’ I have to agree-- a cult is often incomprehensible to the people outside the cult.

We ended with a picnic under Galata Tower, the 1st of May March still echoing in my head. I kind of have a special relationship with Labor Day—I was born on it, the first Monday in September in the United States at least (I am not sure my mom ever thought of the pun on ‘labor’—she celebrates by showing me the scars on her stomach that mark the C-section that brought me into the world—‘See, this is what you did to me.’). And despite its rather homely associations with picnics and veterans parades and the opening of football season, it was once a celebration of America’s Worker until our own Red Purges, I suppose, made suspect any sympathy with the working stiff. (In fact in 1949 May 1st was proclaimed rather unsubtly ‘Loyalty Day’) Our US Labor Day commemorates the massacre of demonstrators by Federal troops during the Pullman Strike and was set up by then President Grover Cleaveland to placate the fury of the labor movement. You still get your occasional wacko and foreigner trying to get them some May Day stuff going in America—but like with our system of measures—I am sure they will never get it changed to fit with the rest of the world.