Compare/Contrast

It has been a while since I wrote about Turkey. A few weeks ago a friend of mine here made the point that my written observations have tended to focus on the sorts of oddities that stand out to the foreign eye: the strange, the sensational, the disturbing. I have been thinking about that and wanting to find a way to penetrate beyond satirizing Turkey’s technological inferiority or innocence in relation to the United States. This is not to say that I withdraw my earlier comments or consider them misguided or wrong, but rather that they represent first impressions—surface impressions that don’t paint a complete picture of the reality of modern Turkey, even in the eyes of an foreign observer.

During the time when my family was visiting, I noticed that many of the same kinds of oddities caught their attention: the poor condition of roads and sidewalks. The lack of bright yellow lines warning you not to trip over obstructions. The taxi drivers going at incredible speeds and seeming only narrowly to avoid destroying other taxis or running over pedestrians. Roosters crowing at sunrise, dogs barking all night long, the Muezzin caterwauling the call to prayer five times a day in scales alien to Western ears. In particular my grandmother (an intelligent, well traveled, and for the most part a very open-minded person) seemed to be unable to understand why “breakfast” in Turkey does not include scrambled eggs, toast, bacon and sausage, but instead consists of small plates of tomatoes, cheese, olives and borek (a kind of savory pastry with cheese). “In America,” she would say, incredulously, each morning, “there would be toast, maybe eggs, orange juice and coffee. That would be what we call breakfast.”

Workmen suspended in high places with dubious safety equipment. A guy welding or power-sanding metal without goggles. A guy on top of a glass awning, cleaning it, his full weight pressing down on the curved glass plate. A helmetless woman on a scooter with her two helmetless infants. Street dogs. Street cats. And so on.

These are the things that catch the attention of an alert American observer. I’ve started to realize, however, and to think about the fact that my initial default reaction to these differences was a kind of bemused, supercilious superiority. No shame in that—it is what it is. But I’ve been thinking about it. About how to get beneath it.

Last night we were taking a sick friend to the hospital. Nothing deadly—but a painful kidney infection requiring antibiotics. The taxi driver, catching wind of the situation, became an ambulance driver: honking at everybody to get out of the way, running red lights, driving at incredible speeds, often in the oncoming lane, sometimes scaring the shit out of us but obviously with the intention of getting the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible.

Not only can I not imagine a taxi driver doing such a thing spontaneously in New York—even if one tried to, the police would immediately intervene to restore civil order—which is most likely why he wouldn’t risk it in the first place. Am I glad that taxi drivers are not careening insanely down the streets of New York? Yes. Am I sad that what happened last night could never happen in New York? Yes. Very sad. On the way back from the hospital, my friends were discussing the possibility of getting dinner out at that late hour. The taxi driver (a different one) recommended and took us to a 24 hour sandwich place. Again—I just can’t see it happening in New York. Another taxi driver, last week, gave my family a spontaneous, deeply informative (and free) historical tour of Istanbul on the way to the Hagia Sophia.

There are fruit and vegetable trucks all over Istanbul. They drive around and a guy yells through a megaphone: Tomatoes! Beans! Onions! Corn! The loud, affectless announcement sounds like an air raid warning to me: “GET INTO YOUR HOUSES! DO NOT COME OUTSIDE! THE ENEMY IS APPROACHING!” People come out and buy the produce, which is local, fresh and delicious. And incredibly cheap. And it comes to you! There is always one of these trucks coming around, wherever you are.

People, when you approach them, are friendly here. There is an assumption of common humanity that simply does not exist in modern, multi-fragmented-mosaic America. You are not an “other” here: you are “brother,” “sister,” “uncle,” “aunt.” You are not “who the hell are you?” You are not “whatchoo want?” You are not “I don’t owe you shit.” People are humane to each other. They have time for each other. I’m not saying it’s a utopia. I’m not saying there aren’t horrible, godforsaken sons-of-bitches here because undoubtedly there are—but what I’m saying holds true overall.

Partly, I think, this is because Turkey holds onto a concept of Turkishness, in spite of its ethnically and religiously diverse population. This has been called into question by the Kurdish separatist movement: in the far East of Turkey, the Kurds, one of Turkey’s many ethnically distinct minorities (possibly the poorest) has been agitating for recognition as a separate entity for the past decade or so. The Turkish government, fearing a loss of Turkish national unity, and of land and resources should the Kurds found a separate nation, and of total fragmentation should other ethnic minorities follow the Kurdish lead, has responded quite harshly at times, destroying villages and civilian lives in an effort to break the back of the movement. So Turkish unity does not come without its cost.

But in a sense, this idea of Turkishness that unites many of the ethnic and religious groups that comprise this nation into a people who can call each other “brother,” “sister,” and so on, is reminiscent of the old American “Melting Pot” idea which has vanished with the late Twentieth/Early 21st Century’s emphasis upon ethnic and individual difference, on “roots,” on being a “mosaic” or a “tossed salad” rather than a homogeneous, Europeanized mass.

Where the thinking goes from here is into a trite “with every gain there is a loss and with every loss there is a gain” kind of formula. For example: much of the heightened public awareness and concern about safety in America is the result of 1) a judicial system in which people can efficiently file and win lawsuits and 2) a federal government that is responsive to the demands of special interest groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Neither of these things exists in Turkey, thus life here is both freer and potentially more dangerous than life in America. IN TURKEY--Plus: Freedom. Minus: Danger. IN AMERICA--Plus: Safety. Minus: Rules and Regulations.

Boring, Sidney, Boring.

The two countries don’t really match up, and to hold them side by side is to diminish both. Still, I can’t stop thinking, since I came here—partly because of the obvious cultural contrasts and partly because of the reading I’ve been doing—about how fucking uptight the America is in which I have lived most of my adult life. “Conservatives” of various stripes on one side ready to jump at any impropriety or deviation from whatever their particular branch of Conservatism’s definition of Normality happens to be. “Liberals” on the other side with their knives aimed at the throats of anybody who says anything that doesn’t sound ultra-tolerant and pluralistic and multi-whateverthefuck.

I’m starting to sense, to understand, to become increasingly outraged by the kinds of rhetorical and ideological fetters I and my countrymen and women have chosen to flail about in for the past twenty or thirty years—the rhetoric (both “Liberal” and “Conservative”) that has taken the place of thought and dialogue for so much of my parents’ and my generation.

And because the rhetorical formulas that have particularly tended to restrain and define me are the “Liberal” ones I have osmotically absorbed from friends and colleagues and movies and songs—orthodoxies that fit under the umbrella of what my father’s generation calls “P.C.,” the lion’s share of my contempt I reserve for them. Because they masquerade, insidiously, as righteousness, when, in fact, they are merely another form of automatic thinking: of letting platitudes substitute for independent thought.

What I’m trying to do, gradually, awkwardly, is to recognize and disentangle myself from as many assumptions as possible, particularly those that disguise themselves as well-meaning and humanitarian, so as to be better able to see things as they are—and to think about, question and say what I want without fear of being labeled one way or another. It’s not the labeling I want to eradicate—someone will always be there to label you the moment you open your mouth--it’s the fear.

So let me take aim at one constraint I find particularly vexing and characteristically Present-Day-American: the near-total eclipse, in “correct” pedagogical and social thinking, of notions of collective humanity by notions of difference. File this under “When we gain X, we lose Y,” with the subtitle: “Does it always have to go this way?”

Let’s face it: There is a lot of hypocrisy and stupidity in our modern American celebrations of individual and cultural identity. For one thing, there has been a devastating simultaneous rejection of a sense of common humanity—of the fact that wisdom and knowledge are not isolated cultural products, relevant only to particular ethnic or cultural groups. That the history of ideas and aesthetics is not simply and solely the history of the domination and oppression of certain groups’ ideologies and values by others. There is an assumption that one must make a choice between completely ignoring the differences between individuals and groups and seeing absolutely everything as a function of those differences.

Shakespeare is:

1) A writer who used the English language (and, when necessary, re-created it) with greater fluidity, range, and subtlety than just about anybody else, ever. Who presented a vast range of human behaviors, motivations and emotions that arguably cover most of human experience, regardless of social and historical circumstance. A hugely popular entertainer whose plays were beloved, in his time, by all strata of English society, from the Queen to the peasantry.

2) a White, Male, European playwright steeped in the hierarchical class-based worldview of his time. Who speaks in an antiquated, pretentious language that is inaccessible to the common man.

And I am as sad and righteously angry that many, maybe most people in my generation will only ever know definition #2 of Shakespeare, as others have, quite rightly, felt about the fact that brilliant Latino, African American, Female, Asian and other voices have been left out of various Western curricula for so long.

Should we not listen to Wagner because his music was later appropriated by Nazis (thanks to Liza for the historical correction on this one...)? Do we have nothing to learn from reading Freud because his ideas are “old fashioned?” When, during the French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution in China, the rioting masses lopped off the heads and destroyed the cultural products (books, art, architecture) of the “Bourgeoisie” in the name of progress, did China, France and the world gain more than we lost?

We should read and listen to EVERYTHING, shouldn’t we? We should be brave enough to do that, I think, without fear of being corrupted by something that contradicts what we already believe.

All of this has very little to do with Turkey. Turkey has its own problems—very different ones—to deal with at the moment. And I have enough of a task in sorting out America and my place in it without trying to take Turkey on as well. Perhaps the best I can do is to collect a few impressions and try to share them with you without diminishing them by easy comparison.

In the bedroom in Istanbul in which I am writing this, light is flooding in through faintly yellow, white and pink colored curtains. Outside there is the noise of grey doves cooing in the walnut tree and children playing (this is an idyllic moment—often these same children are knocking each other down and crying). My brother-in-law and his girlfriend are lying on the livingroom couch, him with back pain, her with the kidney infection, but both recovering slowly, slowly. Next to me on the bed is a little, handmade white dress with red and black flies crocheted on the front of it: a present for the child, to be delivered next Monday, of one of my oldest friends. In the next room there is the sound of a creaking spring (not what you’re thinking). Haven’t heard the rooster in a few days. Is he gone? Dead? The crows aren’t around either: their huge, solidly constructed nest sits empty in the top of the walnut tree. I’m thinking that this time is the best time possible—free as I am to read and write and think whatever I want, to divide up the time or let it pass however I choose. I refuse to see this as privilege—as a vacation from the Real World. This IS the real world. This is as real as it gets.