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.
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.
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.
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:
“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.
Soft power surge. The world is paintedblue, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
It’s currently 2:20 AM in Turkey, and I’m watching election results from a party sponsored by the U.S. embassy and the Turkish-American Association. There’s free coffee, reliable internet, and a big screen streaming CNN, so I’ll be spasmodically blogging into the wee hours.
With a full zero percent of precints reporting, I’m calling Turkey and awarding its zero electoral votes to Barack Obama. The crowd here is about 60 strong, split between Turks of all sorts, Anglophile expats, and college kids, huddled like Wright’s philosophers around a projector throwing the fleeting, frantic visage of Wolf Blitzer up on a big screen. Everyone cheered moments ago when the networks called Vermont for Obama, but for a better barometer of the mood here, see the above image. John McCain buttons have gone untouched all night, save for a few foreign service officers wearing one of each in the spirit of professional nonpartisanship. As for the Obama buttons, a staffer just refilled the basket and folks are passing them around for the second time.
Of course, there’s no Barr, Nader, or McKinney schwag, but I did get a chance to stuff a Bob Barr ballot into the party’s mock election box. I am much more likely to cast the marginal vote, but in the end, my fake vote will doubtless have as much significance as my real one.
I did it. It took two trips to the consular section and a couple months of apprehensive faith in the Pima County Recorder and the Turkish postal system, but this morning, I irrationaly exercised my “most important right” as an American citizen by voting in my first presidential election.
I try to take seriously the economic and mathematical realityof voting, and moral and philosophical arguments for not voting, not voting badly, and voluntarilyvoting. Although this year’s Presidential election is a Crest-Colgate matchup as usual, several Arizona initiatives persuaded me to participate. I find this interesting: ballot initiatives are essentially an unbundled set of policies, which, at least in this case, increased my perceived utility from voting because I could more precisely express my preferences. But they are also the sort of direct democracy our constitution was rightly designed to curtail.
I don’t find the argument that voting legitimizes the rules of an unfair game very persuasive, but neither do I see it as a civic duty. I try not to vote strategically, or for lesser evils, but simply to reflect my policy preferences as accurately as possible. Admittedly, this left a quite a few blank spots on the ballot this year. I’ll echo my friend Evan’s praise for absentee ballots, which allow for informed consideration and lower the opportunity cost of casting a vote (at least, if you don’t have to drag it down to the U.S. embassy and wait in line for an hour to mail it). Plus, even though my brain is pickled in the dismal truths of public choice, I still kind of like filling in the bubbles. I even put on the little sticker in the privacy of my own room.
What about Turkey? According to Gallup, 70 percent of Turks are indifferent regarding the Presidential election, but those who have a preference favor Obama by almost three to one. As far as I can tell, this is pretty accurate, though I think the Turkish threshold for rational ignorance is much higher than the American one. Few Turks are aware of Obama’s position on the issue they euphemistically call “the Armenian question,” and I’ve twice been asked to explain Obama’s religious beliefs. My summaries left both interlocutors puzzled and frustrated, but I think it’s very probable that this is just because my Turkish is hopeless, especially when it comes to theology.[1]
Among American students abroad, the question is not whether one will vote for Obama, but how emphatically one will. When I let slip to one friend that my Presidential vote was a toss-up between Bob Barr, “lumberjacks,” and Paris-Rihanna, I got the kind of concerned-and-horrified look a mother gives when her son tells her he has “something very important” to share. To refuse to pick a side, especially this year, is to sit out a great momentous Miltonian War in Heaven, doomed to suffer all the eternal bummers of the neutral angels.[2]
Well, suffer I will. But I plan to minimize it by spending the next week with a bottle of rakı and a copy of “Calculus of Consent,” as far from the last few days of delirious campaign coverage as possible. I’ll see you on November 5th.
[Back] ¹Although one evening at the dinner table, I did manage to explain the Great Schism via the art of mime.
[Back] ²Okay, fine. Milton doesn’t have neutral angels, but “The Inferno” does, and boy howdy did Virgil make their fate sound sucky: “they have no hope of death / and so abject is their blind life / that they are envious of every other lot. / The world suffers no report of them to live. / Pity and justice despise them” (III: 46-50).
The Turkish government has censored over a thousand websites since May 2007, when the parliament passed Law No. 5651, which banned sites containing criminal content, violating Turkish law, or “infringing on the personal rights” of Turkish citizens. It also gave the state Telecommunications Board power to directly ban sites it deems obscene and offensive, and censor others with a judge’s approval.
Since the law went into effect, the board has received 24,598 ban proposals from the public, automatically censored 861 sites, and blocked 251 more by court order. Tayfun Acarer, president of the Telecommunications Board, explained the ban to daily newspaper Today’s Zaman earlier this month: “The duty of the state is to protect its citizens and warn them against harmful Internet content.”
[Back] There might have been one more entry here, were it not for an amusing typo on the part of the censors. The website “imbd.com” has been blocked since last April, which prevents access to a parked linkfarm rather than the Internet Movie Database.
Connor: “In Turkish language, is there idiom ‘this is fish-thing?’”
Begüm: “I don’t know this expression. I’ve never heard it.”
Connor: “It means like ’something here is false’ or ‘there is an untrue thing’ or ‘it rotted.’ Does Turkish language similar phrase there is?”
Begüm: “No, I don’t think so. I suppose you could say ‘liar.’”
Connor: “No, not like liar. ‘There is a rottenness, a fish-thing in the Danish government.’”[1]
Begüm: …
Connor: “Never mind.”
[Back] ¹ According to Sour Times, the Turkish equivalent of Urban Dictionary, the phrase I was looking for was “çürümüş bir şeyler var danimarka krallığı’nda,” or “there is something rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark.” This is not even remotely close to the mangled phrase I actually uttered.
I am sitting in a stiff chair in the back of the church, squinting at a golden reef that grows all the way to the ceiling. The ikonostasis is a swarm of shining ornaments inlaid with dark images of dour saints. Two priests wearing black robes, curious flat-topped hats, and stern beards stand in front of it, singing solemn lines from the Orthodox liturgy.
Another steps out from behind the wall, carrying a silver orb dangling from a coiled chain. He faces one of the icons, throws forward his arm, and swings the incense burner inches in front of an ancient portrait of Mary, one of the largest images near the center of the screen. The chain clanks terribly. He tugs it back and forth four times, each swing closer to the peeling portrait than the last. I flinch in the back. I’m the kind of guy who still shoves his hands in his pockets around porcelain figurines of Santa Claus and cheap Wal-Mart flatware. Flailing a fiery silver softball around these relics is a job too terrible to comprehend. But as I inhale the perfume, the first good smog I’ve smelled in weeks, and listen to the clerics’ chant, all vowels and strange scales, the nervous thought subsides and I take a deep breath.
A different noise shakes me from this moment of peace, a soaring wail that starts like an old lawnmower. The müezzinat a nearby mosque is calling adhan, but unlike the Orthodox priests, he is blessed with the near-divine power of electronic amplification. He stumbles like a bluesman across the quartertones of the Islamic scale, and for a few minutes, the Muslim call to prayer plays counterpoint to the quiet chant of the priests. The lofty stacatto of the müezzin drowns out the steady Christian chant, then blends with it and breaks again. It’s a thrilling moment. I sit up, smile, and steal a glance at the other students (we’re the only ones here besides the clergy). My friends are lost in thought.
Suddenly, the müezzin cuts out, an abrupt fortepiano that leaves behind only the murmur of the priests. I’m still thrilled, but I also feel a little embarrassed. Did that really just happen? It’s straight out of the notebook of a hack. Muslim-prayer-call-over-Christian-ritual-combining-in-unanticipated-harmony is the sort of trite extended metaphor an amateur travel writer or a clueless journalist might craft to describe Turkey as a “land of contrast where East meets West” or a “crossroads in the quest for identity.” But it really did just unfold before my ears.
I have been living in Turkey for nearly two months now, and I am getting used to moments like this—times when tired clichés suddenly become quite vivid. Another one struck a few weeks ago, as I stood under the dome of Ayasofia—the greatest structure in the world in the time of the Byzantines, later conquered by the Ottoman army of Fatih Sultan Mehmet, and overrun today by Konica-toting German tourists. Yet another before that, while I was peering at Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s silk pajamas, enshrined for posterity in a glass case at Anit Kabir, geographic epicenter of the personality cult that follows the leader to this day.
I am living in Ankara, Turkey’s capital. From the air, the city is a sea of drab tan apartments, interrupted by the occasional megamall, mosque dome, or bureaucratic building. From the ground, it is more vital: a dusty and crowded and noisy and hot and alive city that seems to have sprouted fully formed from the ground no earlier than 1930. A look last week at a fading photo album of early Republican Ankara confirmed my suspicion—despite the succession of civilizations that have inhabited Ankara, from Hatti to Hittites to Phrygians to Romans to Selcuks to Ottomans and on, in modern times the city began as a collection of official offices surrounded, more or less, by dirt and desolation.
Now, things couldn’t be more different. Ankara still feels artificial, since it is sopped in the presence of the Turkish state. But it’s also colorful, modern, and filled some of the friendliest folks I’ve ever met. This has made living in a foreign country easier than I expected—in many ways, Ankara is just like home.
In many other ways, it will never be. I am often an American insect crawling on another culture, and as hard as I may try to be a student or a traveler, in my heart and head I know I will be leaving soon. I am a tourist. I know that I will never be able to express myself in Turkish as precisely as I’d like, and fear that I will always be a polite, dumb toddler occupying the body of a 20-year-old. All this combines in an ineffable feeling of aloneness—a persistent awareness that I am a stranger, whether or not I am in a strange land.
For the rest of this year, I’ll be trying to understand this place, to stumble through clichés and stave off solitude by writing here. I hope I’ll be able to share a bit of it with you.
I managed to grab my voice recorder and capture a couple minutes of the call to prayer over the Vespers service. Click above to listen.
