Erdogan’s Qatar

By Sail A’non

“[Today] Turkey won a measure of international support in its increasingly tense standoff with the United States when Qatar offered a relatively small but symbolically important financial lifeline.” [Jack Ewing and Carlotta Gall, August 15, 2018]

While the promise of investment was touted as a victory for Mr. Erdogan, the support amount is insignificant, $15 billion, in international aid terms. It is only a small fraction of what is needed to pay its international debts or prop up its economic decline.

The agreement was announced following a lunch in Ankara between President R. T. Erdogan and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar. It is instructive, in particular for Mr. Erdogan to recall that “in 1871, the ruling Al Thani tribe of Qatar [represented today by Sheikh al-Thani] had submitted to Ottoman rule due to military and political pressure from Midhat Pasha, the governor of the Ottoman Vilayet [province] of Baghdad.” [Anscombe, 1997].

Erdogan, who is depicted, these days, with the coat of arms of the Ottoman Empire, calls New Turkey a synthesis of Islamic nationalism, Ottoman nostalgia and the last days of Kemalist Turkey. Ottoman’s relationship with Qatar is a sorted affair; they were on again off again due to conflicts of taxes, tariffs, and independence. Finally, parting ways for good after Qatar’s Jassim bin Mohammed defeated Ottoman Mehmed Hafiz Pasha forcing the Ottomans’ concession of defeat and a treaty that would later form the basis of Qatar’s emerging as an autonomous country within the empire.

Erdogan has made an agreement with Qatar, a vassal of the mighty Ottomans, to receive monetary crumbs to save his hide, exhibiting not even the shadow of the power and pride that the Ottoman’s possessed.

The Talking Man

By Sail Anon

“Kick the habit and join the unhooked generation!” is a decades old slogan that took a lot of concerted effort by researchers, politicians, health care officials and individuals to make work. In the end, it helped wean most Americans from a smoke sucking habit, possibly beyond anyone’s expectation. Today, the only way you can see smokers is as if they are members of an endangered species. You need to go to special smoke sucking spots called “designated areas.” Most buildings are smoke free. Even restaurants and bars are declared “clean” zones. Unless you smoke in your home, there are precious few options for regular smokers to consume in comfort.

For a while, doorways and building entrances became outdoor smoking dens. These were the easiest to reach spaces outside of the official smoke banned area. And smokers took almost a defiant pleasure to blow smoke, literally, in everyone’s face as they entered and exited buildings. Especially in inclement weather, smokers wrapped themselves inside their trench-coats and clouds of smoke and tried to stay warm for at least five minutes, even though it takes about seven at a leisurely pace to absorb enough nicotine to last till the next smoke break.

Non-smokers hurried through the plumes and huddling bodies so that they would inhale no more second-hand smoke than they had to. The visual image of a smoker is indelibly ingrained in the minds of all passers-by, whether through the smoke filled entrance or a nearby zone. The human figure with one hand stuck to the mouth became a symbol of regression into habits that looked and felt an awful lot like thumb-sucking. (Surely there must be some Freudian explanation for this.) In any event, this image of man, or woman, satisfying his, or her, most basic desires in broad daylight and under the guise of addiction, has been a most convenient excuse for a most unacceptable behavior: sucking in public.

Rodin’s Thinking Man, on the other hand, has been the uplifting iconic image of humankind that befits our loftiest ambitions. In this case, the athletic male body made from bronze, resting his manly chin against his masculine fist propped up by his equally muscular arm gracefully resting on his knee, is engaged in deep though, presumably responding to his profound urge to think. He is satisfying his deep desire to figure things out, solve the never ending mysteries of curiosity. It has been a downer if not plain angst to have to think that, in the span of less than a century; we have descended from the pedestal of thinking to covering under eaves.

Yet, change is ever present. We have a new evolutionary phase today. Before, during, and after any event or assembly that requires an attendee’s uninterrupted attention, people take breaks to talk. Now their hand is neither glued to their chin to think, nor their lips to smoke, it is glued to an ear to prop up a cellphone. We demonstrate an incredible desire to talk, to whomever we want, at whatever time or place, about anything at all, with no regard for those around us, anywhere, anytime, anyhow. When did this desire exhibit itself in our past? Is it the neighborly chats around the fence gate, hanging around the local drugstore, or gathering around the cooler at work? No, this is a brand new addiction. We have very little interest in what is going on around us when get that all important call from a co-worker, business deal, or someone in an emergency.

But wait, most cellphone calls are not those types of calls. We want to ask mom if this outfit I found at Macy’s looks good on me. Quick, snap a picture, I can do it with my cellphone, which has grown into a multi-functional device. I need to remember that ingredient in the recipe which I left on the kitchen table; can someone read it for me? I am too lazy to go upstairs to talk to you, oh I’ll call you. And true story: I am too busy talking to you on the phone, so I cannot stop and chat with you even though I see you walking towards me. Since cellphones took over our lives, say about a decade ago – incidentally, a little blimp in the evolutionary scale of humankind — our hands have been glued to our ears and our lips do not stop chirping.

You may wonder what happened to the emergency call which was the primary pretext for people buying cellphones. It turns out most 911 call stations are designed for land lines. “Darlene struggled to speak as she called 911 from her cellphone. She could barely tell the operator her address: 602 Wales Drive. The operator, trying to understand her, sent an ambulance to Wells Street in Atlanta — 28 miles from her apartment in Johns Creek, a suburb north of the city.” We are still waiting for that technical glitch to be solved. If you do not want to suffer Darlene’s predicament, you better find a landline at least until this technical problem is resolved, which should take another decade or so. As to the business call, it still survives among the plethora of unwanted commercial calls that each cellphone is inundated by and the increasing number of “National Do Not Call Registries” to which you must subscribe. But no sweat, just dial it on your cell.

It should be humbling to note that since Rodin made his thinking man in 1902, we have experienced at least two earthshaking evolutionary developments: the sucking man and the talking man, both of which brought out our innermost addictive tendencies to daylight. It is sobering to note that the modern cigarette was made popular at the turn of the 20th century while the cellphone at the turn of the 21st. It took almost a century for cigarettes to be retired from our daily lives. The safety of cellphones is a matter of debate these days. It may take a decade or two for the definitive findings to see the light of day since the phone industry would not relent until they develop the “safer” improved versions before conclusive findings would be available.

Just think about that!

Erdogan the Magnificent

By Sail A’non, August 1, 2018

Most Western news organizations paid little or no attention to R.T. Erdogan’s ‘imperial’ festivities. These recent boastful demonstrations in Istanbul that were commemorating the conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet II, on March 19, 1453, did not elude A.R. Khan of MacLean’s Magazine. Purportedly Khan is “on the ground” in Turkey and observes that R.T.’s aggrandizement of the 562^nd anniversary of the illustrious conquest on the Bosporus through a number of events including dressing up Turkish soldiers in Ottoman garb and decorating the sky with colorful exhaust emitted by Turkish air force craft.

All of this is reminiscent of a slogan like “Make US Strong Again” adapted to its Turkish case by onlookers: “Resurrection [and] Rising Again” [Yeniden dirilis, yeniden yukselis]. Khan writes “For outsiders, the audacious display might seem over the top. But in Turkey, it’s fast becoming the norm.” Professor of political history at Istanbul University Mehmet Alkan states: “This is where the Ottoman symbolism is important. Erdogan, like the Ottomans before him, sees Turkey as the vanguard of [territories] from the Caucuses to the Middle East and North Africa.” [https://www.macleans.ca/news/]. Akan is correct in principle but his Geographic boundary is far too modest.

Another Christian city which has been coveted by many aspiring conquerors is Vienna. Suleiman the Magnificent (Lawgiver) the third sultan in succession to Mehmet the II^nd tried to do a one-over Mehmet’s historical accomplishment by conquering Vienna. He sieged the city with massive military forces and artillery in 1529, 1532 and 1566, each time cutting off potential goods and military aid from the outside. Each time he was frustrated; in fact, during the final siege, at the ripe old age of 72, he died on the battle field.

So what does this have to do with R.T.’s posturing? Sometimes, perceptions can be as powerful as reality.

Due to the repeated sieges of Vienna by the Turks, many city centers in close proximity to Vienna were politically and culturally paralyzed due to an impending Ottoman attack. Prague for one delayed its architectural transition from Baroque to Renaissance, in the time span from mid-16^th to mid-17^th Century; ceased all activities towards rebuilding important edifices or building new ones.

Let’s hope that R.T.’s reach does not stifle any forward looking innovators in the EU. In particular, the immigrant invasion that started on Turkey’s boarder with Syria is more than likely to hamstring politicians. Bloomberg reports that elected officials in the EU are in favor of “restricting immigration and being tough on crime … but are opposed on social issues (including gay rights) and whether the state should intervene in the economy.”