Apotheosis in Washington

The Apotheosis of Washington, U.S. Capitol

 

 Fellow Citizens: I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony. 

—George Washington’s second inaugural address, 1793

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

—Article Two, Section One, Constitution of the United States

Thirty-five words in front of a judge or a notary public. This is the pomp of presidential inauguration, and everything else is circumstance.

I will not watch the presidential inauguration Tuesday. I have no disrespect for the man who will be our new executive, but I refuse to glorify the office he will assume.  The president is a citizen, a magistrate, and nothing more, and his assumption of office is a thing we ought not observe.  

No man, no matter how high his office, how strong his mandate, how historic his victory, deserves the exaltation our new president will receive this week. No matter, though, for today’s president is no longer a man: he is hope bringer, protector, decider, curator and Commander-in-Chief of our National Destiny. The celebration surrounding the modern inauguration is as fit for our Imperial President as it is for caesars and kings and rulers by divine right. For the religious, this sort of adulation is an affront to God; for Americans, it is an affront to our republic. 

Once, presidents shunned ceremony, and took care to avoid ostentation. George Washington’s second inaugural address was just 140 words, delivered before a small assembly of judges, cabinet officers, and members of the Continental Congress. It was shorter even than the speech he delivered in 1789, and for good reason: Washington was careful with the precedents he set as the first president of a new republic. He rejected “your Majesty” in favor of “Mr. President.” He resisted a second term and ardently refused a third. His modest inaugural was designed to promote government of laws over men.

Thomas Jefferson was even more humble—and more determined to reject the trappings of kings. In 1801, he walked from his D.C. boarding house to the Capitol, gave a quiet address, and walked back home. That night, the third President of the United States declined a seat at the head of the dinner table.

Today, a presidential inauguration is train rides, black ties, dinners, concert balls, Marine Bands, motorcades, balloons, parades, speeches and invocations and benedictions and ceremony and celebrity—first $33 then $44 now $150 million worth. It is a spectacle built out of lego, made into holograms, broadcast to rapt millions watching Jumbotrons on the national mall. 

There is a fresco painted in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol titled “The Apotheosis of Washington.” There, the president sits in purple robes alongside Victory and War and Science and looks down on men.  The tourists shuffle through and look up and take pictures. After all, it looks beautiful.

(photo via flickr user H4NUM4N)

Misadventures in Turkish: “What can you do with a knife?”

Turkish class. Students have just learned the abilitative mood. İnce, the instructor, is holding up pictures of common household objects, and students are practicing their grammar by describing what they can and cannot do with them.

İnce: A ball!

Kathy: You can throw it, but you can’t eat it.

İnce: True. What about a pen?

Henning: I can write a letter, but I can’t write an email.

İnce: Good job! A bowl?

Jennifer: You can eat soup, but you can’t eat a sandwich with it.

İnce: A knife?

Connor: I can rinse it in a sink to wash off the blood, but I can never scrub away the human stain.

İnce and class: …

İnce: What about a  shoe?

Your serve

My friend Justyn has a couple quibbles with my recent column on national service. Time to bring one more blog into the fray. Point by point:

1. You didn’t address public schools!

It’s true that I didn’t address national service policies that won’t affect current college students. Alas, there’s only so much room on page four, and so much interest from the average college student before they flip over to the sudoku. However, the proposed policy for K-12 schools—to make federal funding for public schools contingent on some sort of national service program—is even worse than the tax credit, because it’s both less voluntary and more insidious.

Contra Justyn’s original column, which surmised that tying federal cash to service programs “seems contrary to the spirit of what Obama is trying to do,” Sen. Obama has said directly that “we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs.” There is no doubt that this means mandatory service for most, with the dirty work delegated down from the federal government to local school boards.

I object to this sort of plan on moral, consequential, and constitutional grounds. But I especially object to it out of respect for federalism. Tying federal money to local policies is a nasty little trick that allows the federal government to muck around in all sorts of places where it doesn’t belong. The way this plan would be implemented is just like the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which required states to raise their drinking ages to 21 as a condition of receiving federal highway funds. Technically, nobody was “forced” by that bill, but it didn’t matter much—today a 20-year old can’t buy a sixer of Sam Adams anywhere in our federal Union. Leaving local democracy to the mercy of the federal government is a recipe for no local democracy at all.

If a local school board wants to put a community service requirement in place, they have every right to do so, and indeed, many already have. But the federal government has no place dictating policy to the Waldorf County Board of Education. Not on national service, not on standardized testing, not on curriculum.

The “require” rather than “encourage” bit came from Obama’s website, and is supported by statements from his wife Michelle.

2. Separating “government” from “private” matters “stems entirely from the notion that any form of government is alien to and opposed to the way people actually live and conduct their lives.”

I don’t think this is true. Government isn’t opposed to the way people live—it’s been a feature of pretty much every human civilization since forever, and people have been living with it for at least that long. As I see it, government is just a tool for implementing collective choice, and often kind of a sucky one that makes people do things they don’t want. That doesn’t make it inherently more evil than any other kind of sucky things that can make people do things they don’t want—muggers, big terrible corporations, angry mothers, &c.

There shouldn’t be a Great Wall between private and government matters, especially when it comes to the sort of civil society volunteer stuff we’re talking about here. Both are just methods of social organization. The difference is that government, which uses force instead of consensus, often has nastier unintended consequences and bigger failures.

3. Hiring the unemployed at market wages rather than overpaying college students is kind of mean.

I’ll admit that this is my least persuasive point, because I don’t think government ought to be hiring anyone at all to do these “national service” sort of jobs. But, under the assumption that we must have some sort of national service program, I’d prefer that it stays as inexpensive as possible.

The reason nobody’s lining up to fill the jobs now is that they aren’t jobs. They’re volunteer positions, for which the market wage is effectively zero or negative. The “hard-up workers” are out there looking for real jobs. Thus, any national service program offering a stipend or a tax write-off is also something of a make-work scheme. But yeah, you’ve got me on this one—it comes down to whether you value the amorphous intangible social benefits of national service more than its outrageous cost.

On ‘Muslim democracy’

Journalists and commentators often describe Turkey as a “Muslim democracy” or a “predominantly Muslim country.” Ezra Klein is the latest, in a smart post on Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan’s recent offer to broker talks between Iran and the Obama administration. I’ve even done it before, in one of my columns at the Wildcat. These sort of phrases are tough to avoid when writing about Turkey, especially when official statistics claim that 99 percent of Turks are Muslims. But they are terribly facile. Consider a few improvements:

• Turkey is a predominantly Sunni Muslim country with a heterodox population that includes a significant Alevi minority.
• Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country with deep historical ethnic divisions between Turks, Kurds, and other groups.
• Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country where newborns are listed as ‘Muslim’ by default in public records.
• Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country with a laïcist government frequently criticized by fundamentalist Muslims around the world.
• Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country that once ruled most of the Islamic world, but didn’t always keep its subjects happy.

It’s fair to call Turkey “predominantly Muslim.” But it’s unwise to give this fact too much geopolitical importance. After all, Austria is “predominantly Christian,” but that doesn’t give it a whole lot of heft with Bolivia.

Misadventures in Turkish: “peace”

A bus station in Şanlıurfa, thirty miles from the Syrian border. An OLD MAN approaches CONNOR, who is carrying a duffel bag and waiting for a bus, every inch a dumb American.

Old man: Has the bus to Erzurum left yet?

Connor: I don’t know. We’re going to Ankara.

Old man: Where are you from?

Connor: I’m an American.

Old man: Ah…Barack Obama! New Negro American President! Bush is finished!^[1]

Connor: Yes. Soon, new president.

Old man: I think Obama is good. Israel is filthy! Israel is foul!

Connor: Yes, I think Obama wants to make a filthy^[2] Israel.

Old man: Palestine? Good! Israelis? Filthy! I think Israel is foul!

Connor: I agree. Soon, all of Israel will be made filthy, God willing.

Old man: The Jews! The Jews are bad! The Jews are evil!

Connor: Ah…I’m sorry, what?

CONNOR realizes “pis” might not be an English word.

Connor: Is that the bus to Erzurum, over there?

Exit OLD MAN.

---

[Back] ¹ Since Nov. 5, I haven’t had a single conversation with a new acquaintance that has not started with this very exchange.

[Back] ² NB: The Turkish word “pis,” meaning “foul,” “filthy,” “shitty,” or “disgusting,” is a homophone for the English word “peace.” The Turkish word for “peace” is “barış,” which I’ve known for a while. But when the English kicks in, man, it kicks in.

‘Büyük beyaz makinesi’

The phone is ringing.

I throw off the comforter and stagger out into the living room. It is cold, I am still sleepy, and the phone is stabbing my ears with sound. I am wearing only my underwear; everything is underwater without my glasses. I run to the closest source of noise: the black base of the cordless phone. Nope. Handset’s gone. I dash back into the foyer, narrowing down the source. There it is! Under the sweater on the big chest.

I pick up the phone on what must be the last ring…and stare at it. Now I’m facing a dilemma. Odds are whoever’s on the other end will not speak English. I might be able to explain that I can’t understand them. But what if it’s something important? What if a grandma died or a test is positive or a library book is overdue, and all gets sucked down the memory hole of my Turkish incompetence? No good.

Or what if it’s something worse? What if it’s the police, calling to let me know they’re deporting me? Oh, God. That’s it. They know I watched a YouTube video the other day. They know I ran my residence permit through the washing machine. They know I wandered onto a commando base on fall break. Holy crap—that’s three strikes. Do Turks even play baseball?

It doesn’t matter. They figured it out. It’s the police on the line, just waiting to tell the stupid foreigner to pack his bags and ship out on the next freighter flight to the states. Better not answer. Better pretend I’m not here. Better play it cool. I put down the phone and take two steps back like it’s threatening to mug me.

All of a sudden, I grab it again. What if it is something important? What if it’s a warning? The tranny hooker who works the corner by the apartment went crazy and started killing the neighbors. There’s a protest in Kızılay and I should stay away if I don’t want to get bludgeoned or tear gassed or killed by a stray rock. It’s the embassy. My family’s been killed by ostriches. Oh, God. That’s it. They’re all dead, their eyes pecked out by the big gangly motherfuckers, probably honking the entire time. Oh, God. I should pick it up. I should just press the button, say “Efendim,” and get it over with.

Obama in Ankara

Front pages of Turkey's major daily newspapers, Nov. 6, 2008

I picked up copies of a few Turkish newspapers the day after the presidential election, including a couple high circulation tabloids, the papers of record for left- and right-wing Turks, and one of Turkey’s two major English dailies. I’m still not so great at reading beyond the headlines, but one thing is clear: Turkish photo editors dig the Arringatore look. Closeups of each front page with headline translations after the jump.

Breakfast

Fresh orange juice, cheese omelettes, home fries, grilled tomatoes. After twelve hours spent guzzling fake suspense, shiny hyperbole, and black coffee, a few of the survivors seriously considered skipping the beginning of Obama’s victory speech to hit up the buffet. But as the crowd in Chicago started screaming and the Kenyans started dancing and the Americans around me started crying, I couldn’t help but get caught up too. That’s right: even I was teary and proud and full of hope, and I kind of liked it. I’m still cynical about an Obama presidency, but tonight (today, tomorrow? I have lost my sense of time) the Senator earned the election and accomplished something great.

We watched both McCain’s concession and Obama’s victory address in sleep-deprived silence. Both were elegant, fitting bits of rhetoric. Both were also foreboding. Watching McCain choke back emotion and exit gracefully among the jeers of a hateful crowd was painful and frightening. So were Obama’s words about a “new spirit of service” and “new spirit of sacrifice”—and the sight of my friends and colleagues eagerly cheering them on. But all this was outweighed by the joy of knowing that this endless election is over.

At 7am, I headed back to the auditorium for a conference call with former Ambassador Marc Grossman. I managed to spew up an incoherent question on the magnitude of Obama’s soft power bump in Turkey, and got an interesting answer: “I don’t really like the term ’soft power.’ I prefer smart power.” He defused another question, regarding a potential Armenian resolution, with diplomatic delicacy: Turks, Grossman argued, should accept that Obama’s support for a resolution as fact, and work on improving relations with modern Armenia. Fair enough—but he downplayed the destructive impact of such a measure.

On my way out of the auditorium, I grabbed a quick cup of coffee before running out the door. After 25 wakeful hours of incessant election coverage, I had to get to class. An hour ago, I turned in my Turkish final.

What Obama means for Turkey

The networks just called Pennsylvania for Obama, garnering another 21 electoral votes and a round of cheers from the 30 hardy souls still holding vigil around the shiny tinny cacophony of CNN. Looks like other networks are calling Ohio. It’s been over for two months, but now it’s really over. Let the Wednesday morning quarterbacking begin.

So, what will happen after the unicorn rainbow hope-o-rama fades? And how will the Obama administration affect Turkey? I can think of a few ways, which I’ll elaborate on further when I get a few moments of decaffeinated peace after the Blitzer blitz:

1. “The Armenian Question.” This is the big one. In a statement released last week, Sen. Obama again emphasized his belief that “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” The great majority of Turks disagree. If an Obama administration approaches this problem with diplomatic discretion, there’s a chance that the “question” might finally be answered for good. But this seems rather unlikely: it would require a big change of heart from the Turkish government, and as the Democrats keep picking up Senators this evening, the probability of a bullheaded genocide resolution from Congress and the nasty fallout that might ensue continues to increase.
2. Soft power surge. The world is painted blue, but only twelve percent of Turks currently hold a favorable view of the United States, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey. Despite the Armenian hangup, tonight’s Obama win should soften anti-American attitudes among the Turkish public. Whether it will also affect the Kemalist general staff or the Turkish government is less clear.
3. More attention towards Turkey. The Obama campaign specifically cites “restoring the strategic partnership with Turkey” as an administration goal in one of its foreign policy papers. Thanks to Iraq, the United States has paid plenty of attention to the Turkish military, but this indicates that we may start paying more attention to Turkey’s government, too.
4. Pullout and PKK. Obama understands well the importance that Turks attach to Kurdish terrorism in the southeast. Negotiations between Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish leaders and eventual troop withdrawals of the sort Obama has proposed could mitigate the PKK threat, which would do a great deal to restore the rather tense Turkish-American relationship of late.
5. Strengthening “strategic depth.” Obama’s willingness to talk with the governments of nations like Iran and Syria would reinforce Turkey’s current policy of open dialogue with its turbulent neighbors. Turkey might also become an important mediator for American overtures to these untouchables.

And in the time it took me to pull together this post, the election’s been called for Sen. Obama. Let the euphoria begin.

Tonight’s most interesting observation

Courtesy of Dr. Ted Kohn of Bilkent University, who delivered a concise summary of the 2008 horserace at a panel discussion earlier this evening:

“The Obama campaign has been very adept at using YouTube, which didn’t even exist four years ago. And, as Ersin Bey [the moderator] reminds me, it doesn’t exist for you in Turkey, either.”

YouTube came up again, during a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s 3am phone call ad. It’s hard to tell just how pervasive those sneezing pandas are until they’re banned by the government.