Buckville

Letter to Obama

2009-08-13T15:07:00.001-07:00

Dear President Obama,

Watching your web address last weekend, I could not help but notice your struggle to stay patient with the message of fairness and accuracy in facts relating to the health care debate. Thank-you for your patience with our obstinate nation. Thank-you for your humbleness even in the face of deeply prideful attacks. Thank-you for your equanimity in the midst of seemingly constant crisis. You have embodied these noble traits admirably in your first months as President, as you did throughout your campaign.

It is precisely that embodiment which makes me cry out to you, "You know better!" You are not only in a position to bring deeper change to this country than anyone else, you are eminently capable of doing so. That makes every passing week when you do not all the more frustrating for me as a fellow reformer. Based on the work of Peter Dunlap, I would like to provide a context for you to do the important work of helping to elevate our national consciousness. You are in a unique position to perform this work, based both on your position of power and your special, highly developed level of emotional intelligence.

Dunlap writes in "Awakening Our Faith in the Future" that a progressive political leader is most effective when he realizes his "capacity for destiny". He defines capacity for destiny as the process in which a felt sense of the future transforms a leader's experience from a passively lived experience of that future into an actively created one. Your autobiography indicates that your time as a community organizer helped you to realize your own capacity for destiny. During and since that time you have brought into the political arena an awareness of and commitment to the notion that we live in a society which places too much emphasis on individual liberty and too little on collective responsibility to each other. Your policies have been based on a commitment to fairness and equality that invoke that belief from taxes to health care to international relations. Your first day in office you placed our nation's morality on a pedestal where we could be proud of it by beginning the process of closing Guantanamo Bay. I have hope that you will continue to both guide us in a more moral direction, one which brings more people into the sphere of freedom and privilege which modernity has granted many in our country, and to make us aware of what that direction is.

You have, to a greater extent than your predecessors, gone through this discernment process already. Dunlap quotes Stephen Daedalus in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in describing this process as one during which: "Within the smithy of my soul I create the uncreated future of my soul." It is apparent that you have undergone such a process in your own soul. That apparency gives me hope and expectation that you will carry the lessons forged in your soul outward to the rest of the nation. The capabilities and awarenesses that you have gained by submitting your soul to this forging process have given you an emotional intelligence previously seen only in Abraham Lincoln among American Presidents.

That emotional intelligence also gives you a greater responsibility in dealing with the problems you encounter as a leader. It compels you to transcend the status quo in reaching for transformative solutions. Because of your capacity for analyzing the psyche of America on a deeper level than previous Presidents you have and must make use of that enhanced capacity by enacting policies that will be in line with the highest ideals of that psyche. Simultaneously you must engage the public in a dialog about the process in a way that will support and cultivate a heightened awareness on the part of the electorate. These are immense challenges, but as I have noted, there is reason to have confidence in your abilities. Americans associate your election most closely with the word "hope", which contradicts the conventional wisdom that politics is the art of the possible, and suggests we can achieve such lofty goals with your leadership.

Do you need a starting point from which to begin this challenging national dialog? I suggest a poem that Dunlap quotes by Rainer Marie Rilke in passing along the wisdom that:

"You must give birth to your images

They are the future waiting to be born.

Fear not the strangeness you feel

The future must enter into you long before it happens

Just wait for the birth, for the hour of new clarity." (2007)

You have the capacity to act as midwife for the images of a nation, the embodied ideals that we have only dared glimpse in our minds. Right now, however, you are demonstrating a great fear of the strangeness you feel. You are allowing the strictures of conventional wisdom to fetter both your policies and your messages. The strangeness that you felt towards advocating for a single-payer health care system got in the way of that proposal. The strangeness crept in once again when it came to releasing photos of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan and you placed priority on appeasement over justice. Now is the time to step up and put those fears aside, to engage the nation in genuine, honest and progressive dialog about what is truly necessary for us to embody the generosity and balance that our era requires from us.

"Kairos" is a Greek word meaning "right moment", classically the right moment for a metamorphosis of the goals and fundamental principles and symbols by which we live. Your Presidency represents a kairos for America to move from a conventional morality based around recognition of the other only within our own traditional spheres of self-definition to a post-conventional morality that embraces a broader definition of the other and extends inclusivity and integration to a worldwide point of view. Within the framework of Kohlberg's levels of moral development, this would represent a transition from the fourth to the fifth level. We have glimpsed this transition at certain historical points, but we are still a fundamentally conventional nation. With your leadership, we can become a fundamentally post-conventional nation in our morality.

You revealed that you are aware of the way in which some people in this country are scared and on the defensive by alluding to gun-toting pick-up truck drivers derogatorily in a speech in San Francisco. This showed that you know many people in this country have not yet attained the awareness necessary for making the transition to a higher level of consciousness. Unfortunately it also showed that you are susceptible to the same impatience with that fact we all are. If you promote a genuine and honest dialog based on your awareness and capacity for giving birth to new images, this can indeed be the kairos for transformation.

According to Peter Dunlap, Eric Erikson "describes how visionary leaders go through a process of 'identity' formation in which they submit their personal identities to the collective forces of their time, and, as a result, have some new piece of knowledge and leadership to bring to the world." This, he posits, is the process whereby Gandhi and Martin Luther came by their capacities for transforming the future. I am optimistic that you have gone through such a process for reasons I described above, but it also seems that you are becoming too identified with the "collective forces of the time", and have yet to integrate them as fully with your personal identity and the moral probity thereof as you might. By stepping out of the fear of strangeness that has characterized some decisions in your Presidency so far, you could enhance our nation's collective capacity for destiny.

The window for implementing this kind of change is still very much open. Ian Bremmer, noted scholar of international politics, recently stated on a Planet Money podcast that "There is no Obama Doctrine," right now. Observers of the international political scene are unsure of how you would react to a new situation arising in that realm, what principles you would apply. By taking this opportunity to lay out a foreign policy that is line with the valance of generosity and care for the other that has at times characterized your domestic policy, you could simultaneously achieve two important goals. You could give assurance to such observers as Bremmer that, indeed your reactions will be based on coherent principles. At the same time you could help to give birth to the highest ideals of our nation's vision for achieving a more peaceful world. You have the intellectual and emotional foundation for such steps within you, as you showed in writing about nuclear disarmament as an undergrad at Columbia. Now the stage is yours, and bold, decisive leadership could deliver the goals that you and I have long envisioned.

You can help make the necessary process of transformation more explicit for the American people by having an honest, trusting dialog about the areas in which we need to grow. When it comes time to make the case for a public option in the health care reform bill this fall, do so based on an ethos of generosity and caring for the other. You will help Americans to have faith in the images within them of a world based on those important and necessary values. It will give progressives footing on which to establish a new generation of confident and successful politicians and policies. My Facebook account is littered every day with postings about necessary health care reforms from friends in their 20's. They would erupt with passion and joy if you were to give them a moral basis and argument for implementing such changes because it is a way in which we can live up to our highest ideals as progressives. Thank-you again for all your courage and humility up to this point in your Presidency. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on what the smithy of America's soul has created for its uncreated future.

Many blessings,

Bucky Rogers

Podcast post

2009-08-12T12:23:00.000-07:00

The conversation-starter "So I was listening this This American Life podcast..." is now ranked second in my life, behind "Do you think Michelle Bachmann is secretly employed by the Colbert Report?" More impressively, the This American Life podcast is the highest-ranked podcast on iTunes. Coming in second is the Adam Carolla Podcast. To me, these rankings represent a hopeful trend.

This American Life is, to my listening, a morally post-conventional radio show. By that I mean that it is integrative of an array of different worldviews. It is integrally aperspectival. It does so in a more flat-land, morally neutral way than I personally agree with much of the time, but it nonetheless epitomizes the integrated diversity public radio listeners so nobly crave. For example, a recent episode chronicled a House subcommittee hearing on rescission in the health insurance industry. The fact that they covered a little-heralded hearing in which health insurance CEOs were lambasted for instances in which their companies rescinded the coverage of patients needing expensive care was laudable enough in and of itself. Hearing one CEO getting hung out to dry by not knowing conditions mentioned on his own company's policy application form provided sufficient satisfaction to justify the segment.

But then, This American Life played clips of the CEOs responding. Particularly, it emphasized their statements that that their "rescission" of policies was not illegal under state laws, and that therefore they wouldn't pledge not to do it in the future. You could almost hear in their beleaguered exasperation a plea to MAKE IT illegal for them to pull such immoral shenanigans. A plea to give them an incentive to NOT commit those kinds of indecencies against fellow human beings for the sake of their shareholders, as they are currently obligated to do. In so doing, they revealed the duplicity of law-makers who grandstand in these kind of hearings yet refuse to introduce or even support legislation to change the underlying conditions that are fundamental to the situations which they decry. And it implicitly indicted the listeners, we constituents who fail to make our voices heard loudly enough by our elected representatives that they will support such necessarily transformative legislation.

In contrast to the achingly insightful and nuanced reporting of TAL, The Adam Carolla Podcast provides hours of solidly nationalistic, racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. humor. The AceMan, as Carolla calls himself, recently bragged that the US Army is so bad-ass, we have incurred more friendly-fire casualties in recent engagements than we have suffered casualties inflicted by the enemy. Carolla recognizes the other only in his own in-group of white, heterosexual, American males, and as such is (at best) quintessentially conventional in his morality.

The fact that TAL is currently ranked ahead of the AceMan shows me that for the first time in our civilization, we have an emerging media form in which the popularity of a post-conventional entity within that form outstrips that of its conventional counterparts. We are looking, of course, at a very skewed segment of the media-consuming population when considering only podcast downloaders, and the overall number of downloads for conventional podcasts still probably exceeds those of the post-conventional ones. But next time you are toasting, raise one to Ira Glass and Adam Beckwith and the team at TAL for helping to propel the popularity of morally post-conventional media.

Patience

2009-05-04T00:17:00.000-07:00

"Patience is the greatest of all virtues"- Cato the Elder

"Argh! Argh! Argh! Argh!!!!!!"-John Lennon

Impatience is one of the most difficult emotions to be aware of. Its existence in the psyche is particularly nebulous. The degree to which it is tied up with other emotions is on a par with that of overly-leveraged debt in AIG's books. And it can be just as toxic. Just as many financial companies have been brought to their knees by debt-leverage ratios close to the odds on this year's Kentucky Derby winner, many a soul has been crippled and twisted by chronic impatience.

Look at the fidgeting going on in the room next time you are in a group meeting. As each person is consumed with impatience for his turn to speak or her next appointment, knuckles are pulled, fingernails are scraped and pens are tapped. So rarely does one return to his or her center to find calmness in a day-to-day context that when it happens it is seen in an epiphanic light. And such moments of inner peace should be upheld as miraculous and insightful. But you cannot just wait for them to come; you have to make a habit of returning to a continually cultivated core of patience and awareness.

Awareness makes patience simultaneously more difficult and more necessary. As a society we are having a harder time than ever being patient because of global warming and related threats like population growth and creating a green economy. Yet without having patience with each other globally (all other nations, we in the US who are not employing the ostrich strategy these days thank you for your patience) no solution can reach its potential in terms of comprehensiveness and appropriacy.

On an individual level, increased awareness makes patience exponentially more difficult. When you have twice as many things to worry about, they interact and overlap and create stress, fear and anxiety not at twice the rate of the smaller amount of worries, but at a SQUARED rate. A tidal wave of impatience in the face of such escalations is entirely understandable and, to live a responsible adult life, in some sense necessary. The response to such impatience should not be repression or melodramatic outburst, but rather a mindful moment-to-moment appreciation for the present. A healthy confidence in your own future self to be as concerned and capable as you are is helpful and reassuring as well. But that is a topic for future Bucky to muse on.

Twitter postings

2009-03-12T14:48:00.001-07:00

A few quick hits here from my Twitter feed before I go back to being productive on the one precious day I have in the office here this week:

Steele sounds sensible, or steps in it, depending on vantage: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2009/03/steele_steps_in_it_again.html (from The Fix, one of my favorite politics blogs, by Chris Cillizza of the WashPost)

Michael Pollan would be proud: http://tinyurl.com/bsdwxg

Almost set to gain "aspirant" ministerial status :)

Still riding the high from the Activist Right There concert at UCB. Brwn Bflo, K'Salaam, Bambu and Los Rakas worth a listen!

following Shaq on Twitter is like driving by a car crash- it's awful but I can't look away.

Sign of the apocalypse: The Economist agreeing with SSDP- http://tinyurl.com/d7zz46

Well if you hate the genie so much explain why one of our kids is blue! http://tinyurl.com/a8eyrc

museum guy: we have bugs and dinosaurs! (Bucky gets excited) museum guy: well, dinosaur bones... (Bucky gets let down...again...)

So, yeah, the primary advantages of Twitter are for sharing links and one-liners. A lot of media attention has focused on the vapid "status" updates, which I try to avoid. I stopped following Shaq because he got annoying, but he did offer free tickets at one point for a game to anyone who could locate him on Miami Beach while he was eating lunch, thought that was pretty cool. At any rate, that's something that I'm doing with my life at the moment so I thought I would share.

Recognizing and Valuing Our Own Contributions

2009-03-05T15:25:00.000-08:00

Another quick hit from a day when transcribing last week's Torah study session has sparked a few thoughts: "Teruma", the gifts people brought in building the tabernacle in Exodus 25, was translated in the context of our group's session as "free will offering". Each person in the group was asked to ponder their own free will offerings to the world. Several people said they were proud of the time they had contributed to Beyt Tikkun and found that to have been most rewarding for them in different ways.

Students, like the retirees more broadly represented in our synagogue, are generally in a position to better contribute time than money as well. Our brains and enthusiasm cannot be overestimated in their importance to creating and sustaining movements to transform the world. Even lending our mere presence to burgeoning groups an have its own meliorative impact, letting organizers and those tentative about their own participation know that there are more people out there who care enough to spend time in meetings about a cause. So often I have heard the question, explicitly or implicitly, "OK you're going to a meeting for sds, but what are you going to DO?" And I have come to realize that if there were more of an emphasis on incorporating BEING into our DOING we could enhance both.

The Quaker meeting style exemplifies this well, linking the importance of silently being with one another in worship, and practical, logistical and political stuff that gets worked out in the same setting. I witnessed this both at Friends Camp and at the Berkeley Friends Meeting on MLK.

My own contributions to groups that I am proud to have participate in have often been modest, but I feel that even humble contributions are significant in small group organizing and am proud of the little things I have been able to do. Sports coaches often laud the indispensibility of players who "do the little things well", like hitting the cut-off man (less violent than it sounds, Will) or filling the lane on a fast break (on the basketball court, not in the bedroom). Movement organizers should recognize this and promote it as a theme of their groups as well, because such contributions really are integral to activist communities.

Holy Speech and Humor

2009-03-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

In reading Exodus 23:1, "Thou shalt not raise a false report; put not thy hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness" (sorry that was the only translation at hand here as I write this) last Shabbat (Mishpatim got read along with Teruma due to schedule re-arrangements), one of our congregants called us out collectively on having made a joke about Rod Blagojevich right after, and thus having violated the spirit of the commandment by speaking ill of someone when they were not there. Another person present made the case that holy speech should include humor and laughter.

I agree that humor must be included in the realm of holy speech, that it is an integral part of the balance we each require in maintaining a healthy emotional and spiritual state for knowing the world. When we cannot laugh at ourselves or at others, we create a situation in which it is much more difficult to overcome the obstacles of tension and fear that stand between us and the world we want to create. Just as there are moments when it is difficult or impossible to explicitly preserve joy or optimism there are times when humor finds itself an unwelcome guest; but we run as much risk to our long-term capabilities for creating transformation in banishing humor as we would for banishing joy or optimism or other indispensable aspects of our communities and ourselves that we must actively maintain in order to persevere effectively.

Besides, if Blaggy wants to contribute positively to the public sphere at this point, his options are pretty much either do it as the butt of some jokes or as a human mop. And I'm guessing he prefers the former.

Why settle for a national electronic health database?

2009-02-12T11:14:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure what other ways the case for universal single-payer health care in the US needs to be made. My personal favorites are the historical/economic perspective Malcolm Gladwell provides in his 2006 piece for the New Yorker that remains one of my favorite non-fiction works of this decade (you know, the only one in which I've been able to drive so far and stuff), and Michael Moore's documentary SiCKO (which I feel OK plugging on Facebook because taking pot shots at the Flint haruspex has reached the level where he, like Manny Ramirez, has become unfairly undervalued as a contributor to our society). The human rights aspect of the discussion is self-evident. And yet, the best that Obama and his highly touted if not entirely novel National Coordinator of Health Information Technology have given us is promises of establishing a national electronic records system.

Even my beloved Progress Report never mentions the promised land of universal single-payer in its on-going coverage of the struggle to get a national electronic records system. Instead, they are focusing on the duplicity of right-wingers like Elizabeth McCaughey. Come on, that's so 2003 even Al Franken and I have moved on! Where are the prophetic voices continually calling out for this much-needed change? They are not on the fringe, yet they are not in the MSM. They are lost in the realm of ideas that are acknowledged to be valuable but "unrealistic", like evolving past the electoral college, legalizing marijuana, and getting rid of the designated hitter.

I leave you with another set of prophetic words, from the great Walter Sobchek: "Hey dude, don't go away man. Come on, this affects all of us man. Our basic freedoms! I'm staying. I'm finishing my coffee. Enjoying my coffee."

The Plague of Darkness

2009-02-05T11:40:00.000-08:00

An excerpt from my comments on one of the commentary compilations from this morning:

Listening to a conversation with Mary Doria Russell, sci-fi author and convert to Judaism in the process of a popular series starting with "The Sparrow" this morning on a "Faith Matters" podcast, she brought up the commandment to always study Torah with someone else, so there is always another view, another way of looking at a parasha besides your own. URJ (Union for Reform Judaism) online is the only source I have seen that consistently gives a "Divrei Torah", and I appreciated it more in the context of that mention.

Each of us enters this sanctuary with a different need.

Some hearts are full of gratitude and joy:
They are overflowing with the happiness of love and the joy of life; they are eager to confront the day, to make the world more fair; they are recovering from illness or have escaped misfortune.
And we rejoice with them.

Some hearts ache with sorrow:
Disappointments weigh heavily upon them, and they have tasted despair; families have been broken; loved ones lie on a bed of pain; death has taken those whom they cherished.
May our presence and sympathy bring them comfort. . . .
( Gates of Prayer for Shabbat and Weekdays , ed. Chaim Stern [New York: CCAR, 1994], p. 103)

This meditation by Rabbi Stern resonated with me because I so often feel not just elements of both those states of heart, but so often it feels like there is an imbalance and one of them defines me as a person and will never change, despite what experience and belief tell me. There have been times in my life when I walked or sat with a heart "overflowing with the happiness of love and the joy of life" and was certain and satisfied that I had encountered a state where I could contentedly live the rest of my life. Other times, more often, or maybe it just seems like that, I haven't kept track (except for a brief experiment involving a chart on my dorm wall senior year), my heart feels that "Disappointments weigh heavily upon (it)" and this despair also seems permanent and how my life will always be lived. I am blessed with people to share both these states with, and feel buoyed by gratitude for that whichever direction my balance drifts.

Oh, the qualms of being liberal!

2009-01-16T09:57:00.000-08:00

One of the classes I am substituing for this morning is watching "Oliver Twist", the Roman Polansky version (which I recommend, and would do so more highly if I could picture ever being in the mood to see it of my own volition). My favorite quote comes after Oliver has been thrown in the coal shed at Mrs. Sowerberry's. Mr. Bumble tells her he never would have behaved violently (after his mother was called a whore) if she hadn't fed him meat. "Oh," she exclaims "the qualms of being liberal!" Because I helped this poor boy, she is moaning, he had the strength to rebel against me and cause me trouble!

The spirit of open-heartedness and generosity that should pervade the helping of other people is still often missing in today's society. Republican cries we have heard this week that an economic stimulus package that relies on the creation of jobs will be ultimately ineffective reeks of this same timidity in extending oneself. "We want to help poor people, we just think the best way to do it is to decrease the taxes on all the short-selling I've been doing in the stock market this year." Um, yeah. (Really, Bucky, your idea for a blog post was to compare Republicans to a Dickensian antagonist? Has it been that slow a week? Are you that bitter for not having known about short-selling ETF's yourself at the beginning of the year? Let's see where this goes...)

I have confidence and faith in the benefits of generosity and forgiveness because I have been the recipient of so much of both in my life. I'll have paid off my Perkins loans long before I can hope to have returned even a fraction of the love and care I have received to the the world. But the small ways in which I have been able to taste these ineffable emotions sustain and uplift me when I feel overwhelmed by the pervasive messages of our society about the money, power and comfort that successful people "should" be focusing on. Benjamin Franklin wrote early on in his experiments with patronage that someone is more likely to help you out after they have had one opportunity to give you assistance than if they owe you a favor for a kindness done to them. He recognized that people got more of a lift from lending him a book than from having him do something they needed for him.

This same sentiment expresses itself so fundamentally in all the cultures that I have lived in. Mo Zi wrote that our human instinct to help others manifests itself in the natural reaction to save a baby teetering on the edge of a well. Nasreddin Hoca tales in Turkey highlight the astute cleverness of helping your neighbors and the ways in which it benefits you in the long-term with stories about borrowed pots that "magically" reproduce while in his possession. This combination of noetic and cultural knowledge fills me with hope, and is sustaining.

Obama's Cons

2009-01-01T15:39:00.000-08:00

While the term "Obamacon" has become a self-congratulatory term for liberal pundits to refer to conservative intellectuals who have "come over to their side" and voiced support for President-elect Obama, a more needed reference at this point is to "Obama's Cons"- the conventional Cabinet members Obama has appointed. Obama has done a superb job of assembling a capable and experienced group of individuals to help the US recover from a historically harrowing year. However, in doing so he has disappointed many of the progressives who helped to jump-start his campaign in its early stages. Predictably, his early emphasis on stoking the enthusiasms of college students and grass-roots activists has given way to corporate and establishment pandering.

But the foreseeable shift from focusing on empowering a grass-roots campaign in hopes of toppling Hillary to searching for experienced high-level officials did not have to take as heinously conventional a form as it did. Authority and validity in our political system are deeply enough tied to institutional experience and conventional forms of praise and reward that many people felt it would have been irresponsible not to seek such traits in Cabinet members. Obama's lack of imagination and courage in bending those expectations was frustrating though. His method of finding and hiring the biggest names that would give his fan base reason for recognition and support was more Brian Cashman than it was Theo Epstein (Theo would have had the courage to drag along some of the in-house organizers and difference-makers that gave us hope early on, taunts of crony-ism be damned [and if there's one area we can easily link Theo to Obama, it's how much the media loves them]). It was more (deep breath...you can write it, Bucky...just get it over with...SOUL WRITHING IN ANGUISH!!!) Al Davis (sea creature-esque owner of the Raiders who perennially ruins his franchise's chances by signing mediocre big-name players) than Scott Pioli (savvy personnel architect of the Patriots dynasty.

So far, things have been more The Best and the Brightest than Team of Rivals. There is no good way to mean that, unless you are putting together a Trivia Bowl team- so maybe we can just hand Summers his t-shirt, mug, gift-certificate etc. and send him on his merry way? Didn't think so.

The most striking example of the "Obama's Cons" phenomenon has to be Robert Gates being retained as Secretary of Defense. Did I miss the part during those huge campaign rallies where Obama pledged to shift our national security efforts away from the draining, unpopular occupation of Iraq by...retaining one of the men Bush chose to run the war? Was there a mistranslation that had crowds in Germany waving their lighters at the thought of a hold-over running the department responsible for one of the most fundamental changes everyone was asked to believe in? There should be a hue and of outcry over the pure slap-in-the-face symbolism of this decision to the majority of the country that has at least in opinion joined the anti-Iraq-war movement. The lack thereof just shows to what an extent we have come to accept the logic of the status-quo and thereby disempower ourselves as believers in the possibility of transformative change in our country.

...And for the sake of ending on a more upbeat note, check out this courageous and inspiring link to a story in BusinessWeek (of all places) about an act of creative disruption at which I am still marveling: http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D958H33G1.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_news+++analysis

False Optimism in Liberal Theology and Hyper-Globalism

2008-12-01T10:27:00.000-08:00

"...Niebuhr's great contribution to theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of the Protestant liberalism."- MLKJ

The above quote in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. is applicable far beyond the context of a 1950's seminarian's studies. It resonates for me today on personal, and societal levels, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. I have fallen victim to such false optimism. We experience its secular successor in forms of rationalization for our society's actions. Contemplative awareness at different levels of mental activity is more complete, mature and effective when we engage in it with realistic acceptance and equanimity.

King refers to "false optimism" in the context of his personal path to non-violent resistance as a way of characterizing the view of positive social change of which Niebuhr disabused him. King goes on to explain "the pacifist would have a greater appeal if he did not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas that the Christian non-pacifist confronts." Pacifism, Dude, is not something to hide behind. Pacifism that puts its faith in a natural benignity of mankind, that believes the course of human events will right itself merely by our efforts to avoid evil, that adheres solely to the definition which makes it synonymous with passivity may provides little more than a comforting self-righteousness for its adherents.

In order to effectively work for social change, non-violent activists must critically engage the same moral dilemmas that face those who see violence as an acceptable path. I have accepted the doctrine of non-violence with little critical thought and continue to make arguments based on relatively unexamined beliefs. Having faith in non-violence does not mean blind acceptance of it as a method but an on-going and in-depth consideration and contemplation of its merits, weaknesses, applicability and dynamicism.

We as a society, like every epoch, have constructed elaborate rationalizations for our collective injustices. When Thomas Friedman was pied at Brown this spring, the protesters were attempting to shed light on Friedman's complicity with hyper-globalism's false optimism. Although I disagree with the method of humiliation and disrespect that the protesters used, they brought attention to Friedman's role as a false optimist. In the context of our current global environmental, economic and moral crises, standing up to advocate continued participation in the structures of militaristic, technology-worshipping globalism the way Friedman has is as bad as giving in to negative, cynical, hopeless despair. Friedman is not as uncritical of global capitalism as he could be, and has put forward good ideas, like the $4/gal minimum gas price to encourage fuel conservation. But if he carried his insights farther and engaged them more fearlessly, he would transcend false optimism and write from a position acknowledging the realistic need for broader change. There is still time.

What does this have to do with pacifism? I found myself picking on Friedman because no examples come to mind on the national scene of pacifism being advocated in the mainstream. In our attempts as a society to weed out naivety and uncritical pacifism, we have removed all mention of non-violence as a societal strategy from public discourse. So while non-violent individuals and communities must continually participate in self-examination, we must not allow that vital engagement to prevent a greater dissemination of pacifist ideals.

Electoral Disappointments

2008-11-11T16:39:00.000-08:00

While we're waiting to see whether Norm Coleman and Ted Stevens or their opponents/replacements will be the old white men of choice in the Senate as of the swearing in of the 111th Congress in 2009, here are a couple sobering tidbits from the last week:

Darcy Burner- One of the reasons I was so excited to move to the West Coast a couple months ago was the liberal atmosphere, and I have found that in abundance. Peace Action West has helped me keep up on a lot of the progressive campaigns out here that I haven't had time to be personally involved in. One of my favorites was that of Darcy Burner, a strongly anti-war, "practical progressive" (OK, that appellation churns my stomach a little bit) candidate. She was running against a former sheriff in Washington's 8th congressional district and lost narrowly. Like a good Red Sox fan, I let myself get excited by the joyous potential (another strong ally in the congressional battle to end the occupation of Iraq, a cause even more morally righteous than keeping the Yankees from an AL East crown [speaking of which see Dave Zirin's piece on the new Yankee Stadium in the latest issue of The Progressive on newsstands or at your school/local library]) only to witness a jarring late-season collapse and loss of lead.

The Passage of CA's Gay Marriage Ban- on the political "scale of losing", this one ranked somewhere between Bush's re-election and the Corrupt Bargain in terms of pain for its supporters. Seeing my gay friends morosely ponder life in Massachusetts as the results came in took a lot of the edge off of Obama's victory speech. Those of us living in the Bay Area can luckily still attend the on-going "No on 8" rallies and protests, gatherings which now, more so even than usual, can mark collective spiritual togetherness and uplift as one of their primary positives. In the week before the election, our house received material from the "Yes on 8" campaign prominently featuring Obama and Biden, and their quotes about opposing gay marriage. Obama's 200-point electoral victory would not have been jeopardized by speaking out firmly against constitutional bans on gay marriage. This is one area where greater courage and leadership from him during the campaign could have made a concrete difference in national politics beyond his own race. His appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as chief of staff makes me wary that more such cautious decisions will become the norm from the President-elect. However, that he is considering John Podesta, CEO of the Center for American Progress for a Cabinet position as well is a hopeful sign. While not the most liberal voice at CAP, Podesta would nevertheless represent an important counter-balance to Emmanuel's dogmatic centrism.

In other news, check out the new issue of Tikkun, available at tikkun.org!

High Holidays

2008-10-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

Happy New Year's 5769 everybody!

High Holidays this year kicked off in a fashion with Selichot Sept. 20. "But," ye well-informed protest, "Rosh Hashanah wasn't until Oct. 1, why the extra week?" Normally, Selichot would come on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, it's true; but this year that would not have left enough time to prepare to repair and repent to God and on earth. So this year, when even the folks who were fired because they wouldn't stop saying "Merry Christmas" at Kmart were scratching their heads and saying "Mid-September Selichot?", candles were being lit and passed and professions of sins sung and chanted across the world. Here, we had the first go-around of the ashamnu, my favorite song from the machzor, singing: "Who are we? We're light and truth/ And infinite wisdom, eternal goodness/ Yet we've abused, we've betrayed/ We've been cruel, yes, we've destroyed...Wipe it out! Clean it out!/ Yes, throw it all out!" It's like the Jewish Renewal movement managed to combine the Catholic acknowledgement of guilt with the Unitarian forgiveness and acceptance...um, and then travel back in time hundreds of years to claim them in their own rituals.

By Rosh Hashanah (if you are reading this out loud, you get style points for putting the emphasis on the last syllable in most cases with the Hebrew words), the observant folks have a big jump on the "twice-a-year Jews" who don't start coming until the Erev or day of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. However, "twice-a-year" Jews are a different breed than their Christian counterparts. Aside from, in most cases, having to give up a day at work to come to synagogue, we are talking about marathon worship services complete with dancing, singing and fasting. If you show up early and stay late to help, you can get in as many hours on those two days as people in many denominations rack up in six months; throw in the Erev services and you've got a year's worth of summer-skipping Unitarian attendance lined up there. I remember as a child sitting in church and looking at Mom's watch so I could think to myself, "Sweet, only fifteen minutes to go until I can listen to the Pats pregame show" (for more on this check out Things Bucky Didn't Put on His Divinity School Application, Volume XII: When Spirit and Sports Collide.) Now, I go to church and mistake the Postlude for a landmark that there's only 10 hours left until the potluck.

About 3/4 of the way through Kol Nidre/Erev Yom Kippur (or 11/4 of my original estimation of the time), Rabbi Lerner followed my favorite machzor song, "To Dwell in the House of the Lord", with an explanation that to acknowledge our sins and ask for forgiveness was the true meaning of living in the Lord's house. He preached that not just a general prayer of atonement, but rather in-depth, specific contemplation of ways to be better people in our communities and our lives was what it meant to come closer to God (whatever one's conception Thereof may be). He enjoined each of us present to spend the time before sundown the next day praying in a very specific manner of examining our shortcomings and planning ways to do better by those around us. And to help those of us who get that "who, me?!" look every time sin is brought up, there was a list of things we as a community could atone for. These ranged from "for not helping singles we know to navigate the marketplace of relationships" (Will and I, in charge of passing out the forms, took a highlighter to this one in advance and wrote down his and Dan's phone numbers next to it), to "for not speaking out against the continued occupation of Iraq as effectively as we could have" (ditto- gotta cover all your bases).

Will and I finally stumbled home in the wee hours, he burdened with enough left-over salad greens to cleanse the collective GI tracts of the greater Milwaukee area, I with the beginnings of an upper respiratory infection. Still to come, however, was the Sukkot. Marvin, the Beyt Tikkun carpenter and guitarist, and others put together the outdoor dwelling, roofed with tree branches to let in the rain and a clear view of the sky, and hung with fruits and vegetables representing the harvest and the myriad ways that God provides. Ironically, the one day during which you are not supposed to come together in it during the week-long celebration is Shabbat, right when we did it; however, that injunction is based on the assumption that people will be carrying their esrogs to the Sukkot (carrying is one of the forms of work prohibited on Shabbat), and since Rabbi Lerner was clever enough to know none was actually going to bring an esrog we went ahead with it anyways (I mean, they're basically lemons that can cost up to $60, come on!)

But next year ought to be easier- High Holidays start yet another week earlier, so there will be less to atone for.

Glide Methodist Church Celebrations

2008-10-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

A few blocks from Powell St. BART stop in San Francisco, in the "Tenderloin" district of the city, stands the Glide Church. On most days, it is noticeable for its height and grandeur- four or five stories of impressive rock complete with a prow-like steeple. Sunday mornings, however, you tend to notice the line of people outside the door, stretching to the end of the block, who are waiting to get into a service. You could be forgiven for thinking the queue-ers awaited service from a barista; the only place I've seen a line with that many young people in California so far during my limited was outside a BK getting their morning coffee on Rosh Hoshashanah. There may have been as many couples in their 20's and 30's waiting to go into Glide on Sunday as there were attending all the UU services in the Clara Barton District. From the perspective of a prospective UU minister, I was perspirational with aspiration for such demographic comeliness in a congregation.

Inside, greeters Les and Erly had shook everyone's hand by the time they got to a pew. Chairs had been set up on the end of each row to accommodate overflow (not because it was the week of Rosh Hashanah). The choir, band (yes, BAND, replete with five professional musicians) and congregation were as a whole about half white. It seemed like slightly more whites from where we were sitting because there were more blacks sitting in the front. The service began not with centering words from the baritone Reverend Cecil but a wicked sax-piano duet. That got people's attention and applause erupted immediately. Then came the first "hymn" (the service was called a "celebration"; I'm not sure what the analogous synonym was for the hymns- "ballads" perhaps?) Throughout the pre-celebration period, band intro and foot-stomping, hand-clapping choir number a projector was sending huge slides onto the back wall. Announcements were mingled with inspirational photos of members in calm or triumphant poses. Now, the slides showed the lyrics for people who wanted to sing along, alongside with worldwide images of the love and gratification being extolled.

Between songs, Rev. Cecil would rise to share words of encouragement to each other's highest goals and ideals. After several songs an early middle-aged congregant got up to talk about how "the worst is not the end". In the context of his mother dealing with her fourth bout of cancer and him having lost over 300 pounds in the last few years, it was a powerful reminder.

I will always appreciate the slow, contemplative wisdom of UU churches and Quaker meetings for worship. But getting lost in the exuberant clapping and singing of close to a thousand people was cleansing and inspiring as well. As the folks who've ever sat near me in church know, having music loud enough that it overpowers my own efforts is not a negative. I did not agree with everything said from the pulpit, but 98% of it worked for me, and multiplying that by the coefficient of inspiration made for a quantitatively up-lifting experience. As I told Will and David once we left: "I might not come here every week of my life, but knowing it is here and that the celebrations go on every week is a really positive thing to remember."

The Transformative Power of the Universe

2008-09-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

The first time I heard Rabbi Michael Lerner speak was at the Anti-war March on Washington in January 2007. At an ecumenical service hosted by the All Souls UU Church, he spoke about the Hebrew God as depicted in the Torah. Though traditionally this deity is called "YAHWEH" in English, Rabbi Lerner pointed out that there are no vowels in the Hebrew writing of it, making it "YHVH"- or "yud hey vav hey" if you are going to spell it out so people know what you are talking about. But, if you are just going to say it, it sounds like a whisper, like mere breath crossing your lips, since there are no vowels to make it pronounceable for us. Hence, any time someone spoke in any language, the breath crossing their lips was the name of God. We could come together from different faith traditions to oppose war as spiritual beings and effortlessly give God the same name. "YHVH" became the founding member of my list of favorite names for God; at Torah study sessions it is my favorite translation to use for the concept of God.

In transcribing older Torah study sessions for Rabbi Lerner, the translation of "YHVH" as "The Transformative Power of the Universe" has emerged as another member of that list. Examining the stories of Exodus, in particular, one can hardly fail to appreciate the radicalness of actions undertaken by Moses and the Jews fleeing from the Pharaoh. 80% of the Jews didn't even leave Egypt, but stayed as slaves- where did the others find the courage to strike out into the desert?! The divine support and inspiration for these events is aptly captured by the term "The Transformative Power of the Universe".

For example, in the mishnah traditionally translated as involving "crossing the Red Sea", the Jews could also be read to have crossed a very marshy area; it was not necessarily the traditional wall of water we picture that allowed them to miraculously escape the Egyptian armies. In reading it as a marshy area, the hardest step for them would have been entering the water and having it rise before they were actually able to walk across it. The bravery that was required to take this step was rewarded- a great transformation in the status and history of the Jews ensued. If we see divine inspiration in that act of bravery, then that divine power is one of transformation. It is the universe acting through Moses to create a more free and just order for the Israelites.

Viewing God as "The Transformative Power of the Universe" makes Her more accessible to the Left today as well. If we can see our efforts as supported not just by science and morality, but a broad, righteous arc of justice being helped and pushed by a Transformative Force, we will have more faith and hence more sustainability in our movements for social justice and peace and equality. There are many "spiritual but not religious" and overtly religious people in the movement of the Left that looking down on speaking about God in progressively positive terms will alienate. Talking about God (in inclusive terms that are respectful to atheists, "spiritual but not religious" people and members of ALL religions), especially as The Transformative Power of the Universe, will strengthen not only the breadth of liberalism's appeal in the US, it will deepen and anchor the movement for individuals and communities.

For on-going analysis based on a view promoting the hopeful and generous aspects of spirituality and religiosity, please check out Tikkun and The Network of Spiritual Progressives, and consider subscribing to TikkunMail (free) or Tikkun Magazine (paid- available online or in the mail).

People's Park, Berkeley

2008-09-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

These days, People's Park is part lawn, part garden, part rec center and part drug clinic. No one is going to mistake the lawn for College Green in their wanderings, but it is lush and sizable. On a sunny day recently, couples and groups sat and laid in patches around it. When the Food Not Bombs people arrived to serve food at 3pm, groups of homeless people congregated or circled on the grass to talk while they eat.

There is a guy named Will who sells copies of Street Spirit (I'll do a posting about this publication soon) at the Haste St. entrance to the park. He wasn't sure he would have enough momey for another meal after the 3pm FNB visit, but if he sold a few more Street Spirits he would get there. He spoke very highly of the quality of the FNB meal, a well-balanced, flavorful vegetarian offering worthy of praise.

Next to the lawn there was a basketball court with rims that had that practical but annoying double strip of iron to make them sturdier. I saw about as much diversity on the court in half an hour there as I did during twelve years of roundball in Maine. College students came and went from using the facility, and it seemed that UC Berkeley has a much more authentic claim to the term urban campus than Brown.

The drug clinic was bright and welcoming, unidentifiable until the brochures were in sight. Farther down the park, another form of therapy was available in the form of the community garden. Will told me that everyone is welcome to take stuff from it, that he would himself if he had a kitchen to prepare things in. Some of the herbs were in perfect form and I picked some mint to carry. The peppers and tomatoes were still pretty small and green, perhaps because so much of the garden was shady. At the end of the walkway were more benches with folks sleeping on them, and some younger counter-culture couples walking around as well, waiting for FNB to come.

The Park remains an inspirational location, symbolic of the grand capacity members of communities have for supporting each other, when they commit to it. Increasing social services and creating an accepting culture in the area has shown itself to be a sustainable strategy there for decades now, and one that area residents are and should be proud of. I am grateful to live near it, and I hope the Park's spirit will travel with me when I come back East.

Taraf

2008-07-10T05:03:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year a new newspaper was started in Istanbul called Taraf, a liberal daily that has been and continues to be at the forefront of some very tumultuous political happenings here in Turkey. "Taraf" literally means "side" as in "taking sides". The Turkish Daily News ran a front-page feature about them earlier this week, complete with a clever Samuel Beckett allusion. Basically a bunch of people from a Marxist Turkish daily, Evrensel, and a left-leaning news magazine, Nokta, left to create this newspaper, and have been courageously pushing the boundaries of journalistic freedom here for the last four months. For example, they published military documents revealing the potential failure of officials to prepare for an attack on the Dağlıca army base that resulted in the deaths of 13 soldiers and the kidnapping of an additional 8.

Taraf even has its own Facebook group (which for some reason I can't join, but how many daily papers can say that in the first place?) The group links to other youth and radical social change organizations, so even if you can't understand everything there, that's worth checking out as well. A news editor is quoted at the end of the feature as saying "A raid on our offices may be legally legitimate, but it doesn't mean we can't object to the fact that such things are happening in a democratic country." I find the fact that liberal media outlets in any coutnry are challenging not just restrictions on the freedom of speech but the legality of the regulations themselves to be encouraging. Even more so in Turkey, where the lack of public discourse about such issues can at times be maddening.

The Gülenist Movement

2008-07-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

Often, when peace activists discuss the traditions of non-violent thought in Western religions, they are eager to cite Jesus' Sermon on the Mount or Rabbi Hillel's patience and love of peace, but more vague about Islamic sources. One Muslim theologian and scholar who contributes to peace in a meaningful way is Fethullah Gülen. I have stumbled across his name several times this year, first in The Economist and more recently in a Turkish Daily News article discussing a conference on the "Kurdish Question".

The TDN article refers to a conference in Abant supported by the Journalists and Writers Foundation, a group started by Gülen in 1994 to "promote dialoge and tolerance among all strata of society." At a time when having constructive dialogue around issues involving terrorism is something that most countries struggle with mightily, having created a group that can bring together a conference like this is quite an accomplishment. Gülen is probably the most important voice in the public sphere right now for maintaining the image of Turkey as a moderate nation of Muslims that can play a unique and constructive role in inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. He describes those who resort to violence as "intellectually bankrupt" and Democracy as "the only viable political system, and people should strive to modernize and consolidate democratic institutions in order to build a society where individual rights and freedoms are respected and protected, where equal opportunity for all is more than a dream." This is the kind of rhetoric the next president should seize on and emphasize in building bridges with the Islamic world. When I get to the NSP, I hope to foster a connection with his organization as well.

So why does he remain relatively obscure to those of us living in the US? The main reason is that, in addition to all the things listed above, he can also be accurately described as a Muslim evangelist. The introduction to his biography of Muhammad has sections like "Muhammad as the most beloved of hearts" and "Mhammad describes the meaning of creation". However much emphasis he might place on peace and inter-cultural dialogue, it is hard to picture Americans, especially in this day and age, responding positively to such one-sided praise. The genuine love and fervor that he conveys are uplifting and inspiring, but to my mind they over-emphasize the singularness of Muhammad. I prefer to understand the theological aspects of Islam through the lense of Mevlana Rumi, but the contemporary geo-political and cultural issues of the religion receive a sizable boost from the teachings of Fethullah Bey.

Another Reason I'm Pumped to Move to the Bay Area

2008-06-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

Another Reason I'm Pumped to Move to the Bay Area

Peace Action West announced on its Groundswell blog the beginning of its "No Soldier Left Behind" campaign kick-off on Thursday. This campaign has several impressive aspects. Their mission statement declares that: "Peace Action West advocates for a foreign policy that embodies the best values of the American people. As a membership organization, we foster broad-based civic activism to create a strong voice for peaceful and pragmatic solutions to global problems." As someone who has been involved in the writing of more than one anti-war mission statement, I have to admire the concision they have going there. Having the embodiment of the best values of the American people as a goal reflects not just an increased reclaiming of patriotic language by the left, but also a renewed confidence in American values as potential methods for finding solutions.

The Peace Action West (headquartered on Adeline St. in Berkeley- is that near the NSP, Will?) website also lists methods for effective letter writing, lobbying, bird-dogging and other important actions people can take to influence their legislators. The section marked "Activist Toolkit" in the "No Soldier Left Behind" part of the site highlights a few of the myriad stages and options for non-violent resistance to a bellicose and immoral government. Calvin and Hobbes once made fun of real-world methods for solving problems, where the stuffed tiger sarcastically proclaims "TO THE BATFAX!" But even Bruce Wayne's Batman toolkit doesn't have anything near the dozens or hundreds of methods employed by Gandhi alone in social justice movements. Peace Action West combines the top ten or so methods most readily available to citizens in the contemporary United States in a way that all activist groups should present them to their members.

I was disappointed by the lack of specific legislative goals on the Groundswell blog. Their main political reason for optimism was listed as the new voters and energy generated by the presidential election. But since the same post acknowledges that Obama's current plan for Iraq involves tens of thousands of troops staying in the country, at least in the medium-term, the general election doesn't seem to provide much hope for those wishing to end the occupation. According to Truthout, the House approved another $162 bn for the war, extending its funding through next June last week. The current round of funding came closer than any previous discussion to generating a firm deadline for troop withdrawal, with Rep. Pelosi's "bridge" representing an imperfect but positive step. If the pressure is maintained throughout the next year, there is a very good shot that next summer could mark the beginning of total troop withdrawals. All indications are that more favorable executive leadership will be in place, but the impetus, we know from history, must be provided by the citizenry.

I still recommend pressuring Congressional representatives to sign onto HR 1078 as co-sponsors. Currently it has nine co-sponsors, only 151 behind a resolution calling on Bush to place a naval blockade on Iran. It is in the House Foreign Affairs Committee right now. This is the legislation introduced by Keith Ellison that would go a long way in advancing the Global Marshall Plan by giving it the support of the US House for implementation. So, wherever you are, keep being pesky, and we'll get there eventually!

Father's Day-themed Update

2008-06-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

Father's Day-themed Update

Why is this a Father's Day-themed update? Didn't you say we were getting more on Uzunöl? You're right to ask these questions- in fact, I'm flattered you were paying that much attention. The fact remains though that I still don't have any pictures to post and I've already milked May 17-20 for two long blog posts, so I think it's time to move on. More importantly, this particular theme allows me to honor the man who has always preached good writing as one of the fundamental skills in life, alongside defense and a solid wood-splitting technique: my father, Jonathan G. Rogers. To this end, I'll be writing each section with the heading of a question I wanted to ask Dad at one point or another in my life and later found out the answer to.

"Why are you driving me all the way to work when you could make more money billing someone for that time than I'll make all day potting plants and pulling weeds?"
-I came across a quote in Gandhi's autopbiography last week that resonated with where I feel like I am in life vocationally right now: "I am here to do anything that is not beyond my capacity." This was his response to a secretary in the office of the Indian National Congress who said he could give him only clerical work upon his return to India. The secretary did not know his qualificactions (over a decade at the bar at that point, not to mention the South African Satyagraha up to then) and later was ashamed to have given him that work, but Gandhi was happy to have been able to help in any way. How much less am I qualified than him, so why should I agitate for an important and prestigious post? Doing a lot of work on a farm in high school gave me a good background for gratitude and perseverence in the work sector of life, and as I try to find my place in the world of social justice, politics and religion, it is comforting to know that I can handle different kinds of work and that greater people than I have done menial work in the past.

"Why don't more people admire John McCain's b'donk-a-donk?"
-It turns out, they do! (scroll up to the 7:30 mark for the good stuff)

"Why does that football team keep running the ball right into the middle of the other team's defense?"
-I remember asking this once during a game, and on the next play they actually did run an end-around or something different, and it got like 5 yards. In a metaphorical sense, this question goes to the Democratic party, with the answer being Obama. Seeing that picture of he and Michelle up on stage on the front of the NYT website one morning was almost as anticlimactic as updating the gamecast to find out the RedSox had won the World Series, but it was awesome nonetheless. Lost in all the hype about his gang sign/terrorist fist-jab (although no one seemed to mind when Jordan and Dr. Cox did it on Scrubs last season [check out episode 15 and send me a good x-word puzzle site STAT]) was just how much he went through to get that nomination. I mean, Andy Dufresne went throught less crap getting out of Shawshank than Obama did getting the nomination. Who can't wait for the next Chapelle's Show race draft?! And while we're here, I thought David Denby's comment that "Don't Mess with the Zohan" was destined to be seen as un texte Obamiste was a bit hors de la piste. Just thought I'd drop that in there.

"Why is it so important to give something back in better shape than it was lent to you?"
-I love the people I live with here, but chasing folks down to get something back from them an be a pain in the ass. Very few things that I've lent out this year (and judging by the massive amount of emails with headings like "my dvd collection?" or "who's got the kidney I let Bucky borrow?", this holds true for other residents as well) have come back in a timely manner. While I wouldn't list this as one of the ten most stressful things about my life in the past year, I feel its definitely had an effect on the overall level of trust and mutual cooperation in the lojman. Long story short- Patrick, make sure I get my library copy of "Children of Men" back by tomorrow morning.

"Why does Ireland produce so many good writers?"
-Actually, gonna have to wait another couple months on this one, I won't be there until July, but the point is, I WILL BE THERE IN JULY!!! And in preparation, I'm tackling Ulysses, which so far makes about as much sense as McCain's plan to balance the budget by eliminating earmarks (ZING!), but I'm enjoying it nonetheless.

"Why has the anti-war movement pretty much folded just because we are electing a new president?"
-Again, not sure on this one yet, but a less-definite time frame for the answer, so you tell me. But seriously, check out that Daily Show link about McCain's derriere.

From the (other) Aya Sofia to Uzungöl

2008-06-03T12:12:00.000-07:00

From the (other) Aya Sofia to Uzungöl

About three km west of the town center in Trabzon, the local Aya Sofia perches on the edge of the hills that overlook the city and give it its distinctive defensibility. Today, that means it looms over a strip of highway, a local intersection and some under-construction wharfs of stone. The cathedral and narthex of the Aya Sofia have even more preserved frescoes than the Sumela Monastery. My favorite is one of Jesus walking on water while an apostle rows between him and the shore. It depicts cliffs and whitewater, through the surf of which Christ is walking, with part of his legs actually covered. The angels and the Virgin Mary are very evocatively painted as well- be sure to check out the pictures on Mike's facebook page as soon as he puts them up, to make it worth the several weeks worth of degradation to the artwork we caused with the flash.

Another advantage of the Aya Sofia is the relative absence of crowds. When Mike and I decided to read the explanatory sign in funny voices, we only got strange looks from one family, plus a random little girl who offered us unripe sour plums (which were about as pleasant as they sound). Even on a cool, spring Sunday afternoon you might only see a couple dozen Turks taking pictures, enjoying the sea-view, resting in the tea garden or laughing at the yabancılar.

Even though mini-busses run frequently out in the direction of the Aya Sofia through the suburbs, when time and the weather are relative non-issues it can be quite a nice walk back to the city center. For example, you will pass the Trabzonspor football stadium on your left. And even though the Superlig football season will be over by mid-May, you might be fortunate enough to amble by as the third-league championship match is about to begin. And, if you manage to combine an ability to communicate with the gate-keeper in Turkish and that look of fascinated mystification that comes so naturally to enthusiastic young travellers, you might get invited into the luxury box for tea, chocolate, and a good view of the match.

That is how Mike and I found ourselves toasting our good fortune amongst a small group of late middle-aged Turkish men at around 6pm, just after kick-off of the match that would determine who got promoted to the second league. The luxury box was about as full as the stadium, that is to say about 5-10%, but outside there was, incredibly, almost a hundred very hard-core fans present to support one of the sides, chanting for all the world like it was the UEFA semi-finals, bless their rabid green-and-white hearts. The overall quality of play was a little difficult to judge from such a small and charged sampling, but let's just say I never thought I'd see a man making a living playing soccer who reminded me more of the friar from the animated Robin Hood than the fox. The match was decided by a goal in the 78th minute, and whatever differences there may have been in the quality of play, the winning celebrations afterwards were reminiscent of Manchester United's a few days later.

If there's any downside to getting a free invite to a soccer match in Trabzon, it is that you might actually have a hard time finding a restaurant open afterwards. By the time we made it back towards the city center, the hour was nearing nine. On a Sunday evening in a conservative Turkish city, that limits ones options. Fortunately, a couple of university students running a small köfte restaurant had only packed away their meat spit, not the frialator when we happened past. So, while the Turkish version of "24" was on the TV, we had a big salad and the best meat balls I've had so far here. Not that I've gone out of my way to try very many, but as someone who subsists almost entirely on plant matter, I was impressed by the nuance of flavor and evenness of texture that our host produced. The meatballs were like a cross between a really good breakfast sausage and a delicious, well-done hamburger.

And as you savor that thought, I'll sign off, to return later this week with tales of the güzel Uzungöl, as well as Hakan, the curious seat-mate.

The Ups and Downs of May 18th and Beyond

2008-05-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

The Ups and Downs of May 18th and Beyond

Up- By around 2:05pm the clouds rolling in over Altıntepe Valley had created an even more mystical atmosphere, providing a roof over the walls of fir trees that descended precipitously to the river.

Down- The bus definitely wasn't coming by that point, and the walk back to the parking lot was a lot less fun with the prospect of procuring transport the 46 km back to Trabzon hanging over my head.

Up- Some Turks mistook me for a local about half-way down and asked me how much farther up to the Monastery; if I had caught on to the question a little sooner I would have told them they were about 1/10 of the way there, but by the time I understood they had realized I was a yabancı.

Down- I mentally calculated how much a taxi was going to cost, then added the roundtrip fare I had already paid- it was more than Jake Barnes spent on one day of liquor in "The Sun Also Rises" (not adjusted for inflation).

Up- A yellow Mercedes mini-bus stopped for traffic next to Mike and I (still on the road down the mountain); the driver's confused glance obviously meant "Hop right in, partner!" He was still confused as he pulled away as he pulled away with Mike, the hiking stick I'd picked up in the woods behind the toilets, and me flopped down in his back benches; I cleared some of the confusion with his friend sitting next to me and he nodded reassuringly- sure enough, in the parking lot the driver kindly began to flag down passing passenger vehicles to ask if they were going to Trabzon. After three straight rejections, I set aside the hiking stick, since it wasn't doing us any favors for getting picked up. After about ten minutes, a gray Toyota with two young-ish men in leather jackets stopped.

Down- The driver lifted his head a little exhasperatedly at the minibus fellow's request.

Up- Leather jacket's kinder instincts overcame him and he cleared room in the back seat for Mike and I to sit down. He didn't even realized I spoke any Turkish until we were almost in Trabzon and trying to figure out where to get dropped off, so the awkward attempts at conversation were mostly avoided- score.

Down- Mike and I challenged the neighborhood kids to a game of pick-up basketball on the way to lunch back in town and they made us admit that Hedo Turkoglu is better than Larry Bird. OK, I made that up, not much went wrong on the way home, it ended up being almost the same amount of time and money I had originally planned on, and Mike sure didn't let his blood pressure climb because of it.

Up- A jovial, pink-cheeked pideci made us some cheese pide, basically flatbread with toppings, and it was quite delicious. Between that meal and the pide we had just before getting on the bus home, I decided that being reincarnated as a Trabzon pideci wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, for sure.

So now you know how I got home and ate lunch; since it's eleven here and I have an observation in class tomorrow, you'll have to wait until this weekend to find out the rest!

Trabzon'a gittek: AŞTİ-Sümela

2008-05-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

Trabzon'a gittik: AŞTİ-Sümela (We went to Trabzon [pt. 1]: Ankara bus station to Sumela Monastery)

The 19th of May here in Turkey is officially Youth and Sports Day, a holiday which fortuitously combined with my work schedule to provide the four-day weekend necessary for visiting Trabzon by bus. It was my second trip to the Black Sea here, but if you check out a map, you'll see that it's quite a bit farther east than Amasra, where I went back in September. This time around I also had the special pleasure of being joined by he with whom I share more genes and inside jokes than anyone else on the planet, my brother Mike, whose travelling style is so laid back it makes cooked spaghetti seem unyielding.

But who am I to critique travelling styles? I left for the bus station an hour early on Friday evening, only to discover once I got there that I had left my ticket on the table at home after I took it out to check and make sure I had it in my bag.... There wasn't enough time to go back home and pick it up so I asked the man at the desk if I could replace it. The poor fellow was being harried by so many people looking for tickets to places that were sold out it seemed like the water crisis must have come early to Ankara this year, but he still found time to tell me it wasn't a problem to board the bus without a ticket, since my name would be on their list. Inşallah. There was just barely not enough time to make it home and back for the ticket so I sat nervously in the waiting area for forty-five minutes. Thankfully, the benches for that are on a large, open-air platform elevated in the terminal, almost like a second floor with no walls. It made it feel like I was still there and waiting, but removed from the bustle and chaos enough to take off some of the stress. At any rate, I got on the bus fine and pretended the people outside were waving to me as we pulled off (guess who can't wait to get back to Maine and have people wave at him!). As I rummaged for my iPod, I realized that in the process of packing I had pushed my ticket down to the bottom where I couldn't see it, and it was there after all. The lesson, as always, is that I'm an idiot.

The 12-hour bus ride was normal and fairly restful, but I forgot the neck pillow that I got on the not-Cyprus trip, so I ended up with another case of RiceKrispy neck. For the last hour or so of the trip it was light enough to see the coast with its mostly industrial or retail activity- not quite as spectacular as the Mediterranean, but serene and mystical nonetheless. Once I was in the town center, the bread store next to the bus stop had, miracle of miracles, brown bread, which went nicely with the Chokokrem (Nutellas' cheap cousin) I toted half-way across Anatolia. The tea garden in the city square was the perfect spot to eat and watch people at 9:30 in the morning. About a block from the northeast corner of the square was Otel Can, where Mike and I had a nice, clean double room with breakfast for the weekend. After I slept for a couple hours, I ventured down to the sea-front park, complete with at least three competing tea gardens and some walking paths.

Coming in range of Turkey's northern neighbors once again (Trabzon is the first port of entry for most Russians coming to Turkey), there are again restaurants and clothing stores advertising themselves with the Cyrillic alphabet, some of which I could still understand. If you go far enoguh to the northwest or northeast here you'll run into that, but in between, besides Cappadochia (which has signs in every language from Korean to Spanish), there isn't much other than Turkish and English.

Once Mike arrived in the late afternoon (having taken a scenic detour into the mountains thanks to a dolmuş crazily headed AWAY from the city center), we ventured west across the city for eats. Most of the city is set up away from the shore, a relic of its establishment centering around the most easily defensible local geography. The narrow, stone, pedestrian-friendly streets interspersed small markets and restaurants for at least a kilometer stretching out towards the suburbs. Once the buildings became mostly one or two-story residences or convenience stores I admitted the best places to eat were already past and we doubled back towards the center.

The next day at ten, our hotel owner reserved us a spot on a mini-bus heading to Sumela Monastery, the biggest historical draw in the Trabzon region. It takes about an hour to get there, via the town of Maçka. At Maçka, you start ascending into the mountains alongside the Altıntepe River, which cuts through the fir forrests very quickly and mystically. Most aspects of the Sumela site had an unmissable air of mysticism surrounding them. Approaching the cliffs into which the monastery was carved, there is enough natural beauty to justify a big trip itself. The vastness of the forrest all of a sudden seemed seal the area off in tandem with the dark, imposing clouds to create a feeling of seclusion even amongst thousands of visitors. You have to hand it the Greek Orthodox, they sure know how to pick real estate for a religious site.

At one point, the frescoes on and in the chapel of the monastery probably rivalled the natural beauty of the site. Unfortunately, those on the outside had been mostly scraped away or carved with graffiti; Mike and I were appalled- when we wrote "Jeter swallows", it was in really small letters. In addition to the vandalism, most of the faces had been erased, I believe by those during the Ottoman or Republican periods who weren't big fans of iconism, unfortunately. Inside, even my untrained eye could tell that this was where some of the best medieval depictions of Christ and some saints might be found. I'm not being modest when I call myself untrained- even after 8 months of going to places like this, sometimes accompanied by a woman with a master's in art history, the most insightful thing I could come up with to say to Mike was "you can see the regional influences in the art here on the size of his nose". It was a honker.

There are trails going up higher on the mountain and a stone staircase leading down to the main parking lot at the site, so to kill time before we met the bus at 2, Mike and I did a bit of hiking. This is the perfect time of year to be exploring places of nature and beauty in Turkey since the rainy season is coming to an end and the weather is getting very hot again. Flowers were thrusting and insects were active everywhere, despite the mostly overcast sky. The rain started coming down off and on as we tested out the staircase, but luckily that is covered gorgeously by yet more trees in most places. Finally, after we waited at one of the out-lying chapels estimating the odds of being able to jump from it into the river without hitting the bank 500 feet below for about half an hour, it was time to head back to the bus.

"Bucky, are you sure they said two o'clock?" Mike asked, when no one from our tour group was in sight.

"Well, you saw the guy hold up two fingers to us, what do you think it meant? Wait, then he said the word for hour. Maybe he meant two hours. That was at eleven..."

"Dang, if only I could remember the modular arithmetic Gates taught us for math team."

And so, from about 1:55 to 2:10 on Sunday afternoon we stood at the scenic overlook where we'd been dropped off, pretty much alone, doing our best to stay positive that the bus and everyone we came with was on its way up to get us. It wasn't. The view was gorgeous, but the roiling clouds increasingly came to symbolize my stomach as I calculated how long it would take to walk 46 kilometers back to Trabzon.

Coming soon:
-How Bucky and Mike made it back to the city, photos of the monastery, narrative and photos of Uzungöl, and the best köfte and pide I've had in Turkey. Maybe I'll change the name of this blog to "When It Rains It Pours"; I really ought to be more consistent with the output next year.

2008-04-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Taşucu/Alanya

Sometimes, trips don't unfold the way you had pictured them. The original blueprint for this week's vacation centered around the island of Cyprus. We were going to take a ferry from the small coastal town of Taşucu to Girne, approximately two hours away on Cyprus. About 10pm on Saturday, almost mid-way between Antalya and Taşucu, my knowledgeable classicist travelling companion and I discovered we were short one passport. Unsure whether this would be an insurmountable obstacle to completing our travels- Turks can travel between the two countries with only an ID card- we completed the journey to Taşucu. A tanned, 30-year-old tourist boat captain and silver jewellery salesman from Manavga named Mehmet sitting next to me on the bus predicted that we could make the trip with just a residence permit, then offered me a job on the basis of my being able to speak English. 500 euros a month plus hosuing working on a tour boat, hmmm.... Finally we stepped off the bus at 4am. Luckily, it was just about the easiest place to navigate around I have been in since FunTown USA theme park. The only restaurant open on the main street was Dilek Lokantasa, a tiny diner occupied by a fisherman-looking guy with a vest and a baseball cap and the university-aged fellow filling the roles of maitre'd, sommelier, waiter, cook and busboy. While sipping tea and eating bread dipped in lentil soup, I found the Jazz-Rockets playoff game on TV. A tiny village sustained by fishing and domestic tourism, on the fringe of the Turkey, in the middle of the night, had an NBA game on its satellite feed- ah, the joys of globalization.

Once the ferry terminal office opened up, the ticket seller managed to explain to us that it was impossible for foreigners to get to Cyprus without passports, but hey, since we only lived in Ankara if we caught the next bus out of town and travelled contantly for additional entire day, we might make it back in time for the ferry the next day. He wasn't even kidding. At any rate, Plan B was NOT to go spend another $100 and 20 hours travelling, but rather to explore the charms of Taşucu. And I'm very glad we did. After napping for several hours, I discovered that not only was the harbor clean and adorned by the little tea garden-park I had watched the sunrise from, but there was a beach beyond it. The beach was several hundred meters long (do you have the metric system yet back home?) and set against a promenade tiled in white and red concrete. The height of the waves rolling in never deviated more than about 6 inches over the course of a day, and the harbor was perpetually ruffled only by a wind between 5-10 knots. In the evening, families in various decades of togetherness speed-walked, tottered, waddled or strolled with the comfort of the tiles and the relaxation of the waves, occasionally interruped by motor-scooter riders of a more predictable age and gender weaving amongst them. It may have been one of the few settings from the last eight months where my wearing of shorts was not unique, but I managed to distinguish myself as the only person giving someone a piggy-back ride.

Sevgi Lokantasa was a family-run restaurant whose seating capacity quintupled (and whose kitchen capacity doubled) when the weather was suitable for outdoors dining. It was as charming as a place can be where Nasim the unshaven cook who weighs twice as much as you do takes your order himself. He had an excellent way with otherwise simple and common foods; his chicken döner was to normal street döner what a homemade cheeseburger with sauteed toppings is to McDonald's, and one of the salads had a sweet pomegranate dressing. Basically, after having eaten rest-stop cuisine for a whole day, this felt like we had ended up at the Moosewood Restaurant. The waitress was one of the most Mediterranean-looking women I have met, her skin being a very few microshades away from the color of good olive oil. She flirted with the four other young men in the restaurant good-naturedly, but wasn't strikingly beautiful to the point where I was tempted to read anything into it when she asked me later where my girlfriend was when I came back for tea in the afternoon.

Randomly, the fisherman guy who was in Dilek Lokantasi that morning was also in Sevgi Lokantasi when we went in for lunch- I think by that point he thought we were stalking him. I even ran into him a third time coming back from the beach to take the aforementioned tea, and that time he actually had a fishing pole and tackle box with him.

There were definitely elements of small-town, middle to eastern Turkey in the way the family at the restaurant operated and interacted. The women ran the kitchen for the most part, aside from Nasim grilling the meat, and the men relayed orders to them every time a customer needed something. Similarly, the surrounding cafes had only men loitering in and around them, the women being almost completely out of sight on the main street. The beach and harbor were a different story, however. There were a few bikini sightings along the sand as well as girls in shorts and t-shirts chasing and wrestling with male companions. In the tea garden, couples held hands and snuggled (although I have to say, it was very modest compared to some of the PDA we get on the green here at Bilkent, I've had to start bringing a squirt gun to ultimate games in case people get too distracted). Overall, it was a fitting metaphor for Turkey- the traditional groups and families on the inland side of things with the younger, more modern demographic facing the outside world along the coast, interspersed with ATM's instead of apron pockets, motor scooters instead of prayer beads. Don't worry Phillip Morris, cigarettes are still integral to life on both sides here.

When we went back to Sevgi Lokantasi for dinner, Nasim's cousin, Nihat, was there. Nihat gets his own section. He was 38 years old, but seemed to have no problem being friendly and energetic with those of us a decade and a half his juniors. He was a computer teacher and airline steward, and spoke Farsi, Hindi, Arabic, Kurdish, English and Turkish. He'd been working out of Saudi Arabia for an airline for a few years and had come home to teach for a while, but his next goal was to go to American and train to be an airline pilot. We didn't go into the potential problems for someone from the Middle East studying flight in the US, I couldn't bear to dampen his enthusiasm. Eventually we talked about non-verbal communication and after I gave him the finger as an example, he took his middle finger and pulled down his lower eyelid. Ah, the glories of internationalism. Nihat offered to take us out for beers, so we borrowed his cousin's car and went down to the water (it took about as much time as it would have to drive, but now I can say I've ridden in a Toros, which is very different from a Taurus). 4/20, the first full day of Passover, and a full moon all at once- what more could you ask for drinking Efes and watching the waves roll in off a brightly glinting harbor. Nihat's wife even added some comedy by calling and yelling at him for leaving her with the three kids while he was out carousing with foreigners. I tried to help by talking to her on speaker phone, but she didn't believe an American would be speaking Turkish and thought I was just one of his friends pretending to be bad at Turkish. Poor Nihat.

The next morning, I officially nominated the day as Best Monday of the Year. After a traditional breakfast whose deliciousness was amplified by TWO helpings of butter and honey (that was pretty much enough to seal the award right there), I slung my hotel towel over my shoulder and headed down the promenade. The birds were flirting noisily and flitting from one palm tree to the next- they didn't know it was Monday; they never know it's Monday. The bushes lining the walkway had the color and fragrance of a natural candy store (I don't use this metaphor lightly, a candy store or a UU Church are the only things I would be OK with them tearing down Fenway Park for at this point), with a teasingly light scent on the orange and yellow ones and a deep, satisfying sweetness lying on the pink and purple set. A little girl, accompanied in the playground by her grandfather watched admiringly as I did pull-ups on the swingset WITH MY BACKPACK ON! (Eat your heart out, Dan Hartmann.)

Even on the best Mondays, something has to go wrong (but this was NOT a case of the Mondays). I haven't really been sunburned in at least five years; that's why it seemed like maybe I could lie on a Mediterranean beach from 11-2 and not bother with suscreen. And there was a breeze, I never really felt that hot. Nothing like days and days of subsequent soreness and fragility to remind you that, David Ortiz aside, some people do burn up in April.

Leaving for Alanya, we took a dolmuş down the coast a little farther to Silifke, where there was a bigger otogar, as had been suggested by our hostess at breakfast. Ironically, once we made it on an inter-city bus coming back west, the bus made a pick-up in Taşucu- right across from the hotel we had left that morning. D'OH! On the trip to Alanya though there were an amazing amount of imagination-esque little fishing villages. Harbor after harbor of green Mediterranean water rolling over pebbly or stony beaches went by below us. These views were interrupted only by occasional inland excursions to take on passengers from farming communities, or get stopped for ID inspection by the police.

Alanya overall was not as cool as Taşucu, having about 100 times the population and being much more of a resort town. It was hard to argue with having more beach and promenade time though, and my knowledgeable classicist travelling companion noted that there was something very relaxing about being in a city full of tourists so that we didn't stick out as obviously as in most Turkish cities. I also ran into a university student from Ankara named Serkan (not a Bilkenter) while I was swimming, and we had a chance to talk about all the normal topics: how I liked Turkey, where I had been, if I sufficiently disliked Bush, etc.

Other highlights:

-Antalya had a beautiful, modern bus terminal, by far the nicest I have seen in Turkey. One of the stands inside sold freshly squeezed orange juice, and when I tried to buy two whole oranges to eat on the bus, they got confused about why someone would try to buy an entire orange instead of orange juice and just gave them to me for free. They were good oranges, too, firm and juicy.

-While we were watching basketball at 5am in Dilek Lokantasi three young men came in laughing and stumbling, obviously having been out drinking for the night. And I thought this only happened at Louis.

-The bathroom at Dilek Lokantasi was broken, so when I went out back to, um, inspect their recycling system, I could smell bread baking. Nothing says dawn in Turkey like rising bread on the first day of Passover.

2008-04-14T04:26:00.000-07:00

Update and Political/Religious Ponderances

-First off- you can make Bucky proctor a four-hour exam, but you can't stop him from using his water bottle as a musical instrument during important parts of the listening section.

-Frank Rich wrote this weekend about the utter dissolution of support for the Iraq war and its impending, long-overdue conclusion. Of the Petraeus-Crocker hearing, he writes: "...it accomplished little beyond certifying President Bush’s intention to kick the can to January 2009 so that the helicopters will vacate the Green Zone on the next president’s watch." But while the President is trying to ensure he doesn't have to be the one to withdraw the troops and end the occupation of Iraq, there is a lot that we can do to ensure he does. Defunding the occupation has been on the table for well over a year now, since the Democrats rolled into power, but so far with little success. But just because it didn't happen immediately doesn't mean it can't happen before Bush leaves office. He will have to ask for at least one more budget supplemental for the war this year, and if anti-occupation groups across the country keep the pressure on their senators and representatives in Washington, defunding the war and forcing Bush to withdraw the troops before he leaves office is possible. As the Petraeus-Crocker hearings showed, even Republican officials are getting fed up with the occupation and the circular logic of the administration's surge tactics. The anti-war movement has, through the sustained work of local groups like Waterville Area Bridges for Peace and Justice and national ones like Military Families Speak Out, convinced a majority of Americans that the war was and occupation is a bad idea. Now is the time to convert that public sentiment into effective action. There will be Tax-Day demonstrations and call-ins all over the country this week, raising awareness about the connection between people's federal tax dollars and the on-going atrocities that we are collectively responsible for. (If you do make a call about defunding the war, put in a plug for HR 1078, introduced by Minnesota's Keith Ellison, that would help implement the Global Marshall Plan). Very few officials are banging the defunding drum right now, but given the continuing shift in public opinion against the occupation, they should be, and are more likely to be successful at achieving redeployment with every passing month. If groups around the country maintain connections with their senators and representatives and keep them informed and pressured about the latest legislative possibilities for achieving that goal, it is much more likely to happen. The South-East New England Declaration of Peace group has done that with Senator Reed and Senator Whitehouse, men whose chief's of staff are now referred to by their first names in group emails on a regular basis. Rhode Island has it easier than most states when it comes to finding a sympathetic legislative ear for antioccupation sentiments, but groups nation-wide must be ready to jump on any opportunity for defunding by maintaining contact with and pressure on their elected officials.

-I accepted an offer of admission to Harvard Divinity School's Master of Divinity program this week. This, along with reading The Left Hand of God by Michael Lerner, has inspired me to think once again about envisioning ministry in more concrete terms. Harvard focuses on developing the "ministerial arts" in six areas: preaching, pastoral care, religious education, public leadership, denominational polity, and administration and program development. The three that I am most interested in right now are preaching, pastoral care and leadership, but really, it's like trying to choose between coarse and fine bulgar- they all look fulfilling and sustaining. I am most excited about public leadership as a category (full name "Public Leadership, Community Organizing, and Planning"), with courses like "Religion and American Public Life", "Public Narrative", "Religion, Development and Conflict", "Education for Liberation" AND "Ethical and Religious Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr." When I have difficulty envisioning how my broader work for social justice will manifest itself, it has been helpful to remind myself that MLKJ at age 22 hadn't heard of the Southern Christian Leadership Council yet. Granted, he was a minister at age 24 and co-counded the SCLC by age 26, but different life paths, different life paths. I CAN envision many of the methods of social justice work that will be part of my efforts with whatever congregation I have the privilege of leading, and those include teach-ins, political involvement, and civil disobedience to promote labor solidarity, civil rights, and local empowerment, among many other causes. Within the next month, I also plan to write about my broader goals for promoting a liberal spiritual awareness in America both socially and politically and my personal political goals in that context, as well as how my time in Turkey has shaped the above.

And finally...this week's moment that made me proud to be a Friends Camp counsellor: On Sunday morning, our Bilkent group visiting the orphanage tried to organize a series of relay races with the children in six groups. Even with a ratio of one Bilkenter for each child, it took them over five minutes to quiet the whole group, and even then the games never went quite right. I've seen counsellors outnumbered 12:1 make better stands in South China, and for that, I salute you fellow FC workers.

2008-04-11T04:26:00.000-07:00

More Political/Historical Thoughts

-One of the books I read last month for my on-going discussions with an American History prof here was on America in WWI called "America's Great War" by Robert Zieger. It covered political, military, and social history as comprehensively as any non-textbook I have read, so I would recommend it. Naturally, one of the themes was Woodrow Wilson's involvement and leadership. After reading it, I decided that if I had been Wilson, I would have made a stronger bid for both economic and naval neturality.

Despite its avowed neutrality in the beginning of the war, American banks basically financed the Allied war effort for the first several years. Greater pressure on Wall Street to adhere to a genuine policy of neutrality would have helped the US stay out of the conflict in 1918 by eliminating much of the economic incentive to try and see that the Allies didn't default on their loans. So much of the rhetoric of democracy and moral righteousness that Wilson used in justifying the war to Congress and the American people was just rationalization for his administration's failures to maintain that originally sacred neurtrality. By continuing to allow Americans on ships going inside the "war zone" that Germany had defined around Great Britain and that they enforced regularly, Wilson ignored the significant changes in what it meant to be navally neutral that were occuring.

Would taking a harder line on economic and naval neutrality have cost him the 1916 election? Good chance. The Wall Street elite that funded so much of the Democratic party's activity might have even prevented him from being re-nominated. But for him to place political success over such dearly held and widely-supported values as non-intervention in European military conflicts and the role of America as arbiter and peace-seeker is a heinous example of goal displacement. William Jennings Bryan recognized this and resigned as Secetary of State as soon as he saw that the adopted position towards Germany's naval policies would lead to conflict (more on him in a moment). And in a historical sense, look at how much was at stake for America in its decision about entering the war: the military industrial complex can trace its roots to the factories and housing units that were hastily erected and funded in 1917 and 1918 and the aforementioned role of America as the city-on-a-hill neutral was sacrificed as well. Ultimately, Wilson was probably fighting a losing battle anyways, but if he had fought it with the humility, diplomacy and sagacity of Abraham Lincoln, he would have given himself a much better opportunity to succeed. Lincoln was only narrowly renominated to run for his second term, in large part because he stood up for unpopular practices that he believed in and bravely continued to make the case for his point of view. When the time came for Wilson to do so, he allowed himself to be led down a path towards military intervention, and eventually was forced to rationalize the country's involvement because he had left himself no other choice.

-Bryan surfaced again in a much less favorable light in Edward Larson's "Summer for the Gods" about the Scopes Trial in 1925. By that time, his status as a populist leader had led him to the majoritarian cause of supporting fundamentalist evangelicals in their quest to pass laws against the teaching of evolution in public schools. In accounts of the trial and its lead-up, both Bryan and Clarence Darrow come off as aggressive ideologues. One of the most damning points levelled at both of them is the fact they allowed their social views to affect their ideas about scientific matters. Bryan was so strongly anti-authoritarian that he convinced himself populists had a duty to oppose the teachings of the cadre of scientific elites they saw as controlling public discourse on evolution. Darrow was no less biased in his view of the populists, and believed in evolution based more on that social alignment than informed study of the biological sciences. These tendencies came back to hurt both of them at different points in the legal process; though Darrow succeeded in humiliating Bryan on the stand when he called him as an expert witness, that treatment of a man who was a national hero to many people won him few followers (especially since Bryan died a few days later). Bryan actually tried to precent the prosecutions situation from the first by encouraging authors of Tennessee's antievoltuion law to not include a punishment, knowing it would be more effective for his cause to have teachers operating in public defiance of the law without a concrete mechanism for challenging it in court. However, the law was written with a fine as the penalty, and the rest is history. The lesson, as always: don't humiliate a hero because he might die on you, and don't be a jerk if you want people to agree with your point of view.

--I didn't know there was such a thing as fundamentalist secularism, but that's what we are seeing in Turkey. Instead of taking the literal words of a religious text as the basis for a conservative movement, it is the legacy of Ataturk that is being invoked. Legal proceedings began this month which would ban the AKP (Justice and Development Party), head of the current ruling coalition due to its having garnered 47% of the vote in last year's parliamentary elections. Unfortunately, banned parties are not uncommon in Turkey, with 26 of them having gone before the AKP. Of course, this is a large set-back for any remaining aspirations the country may have of joining the EU. The attempt to ban the AKP is largely due to the party's efforts to legalize the wearing of headscarves in universities. Many Turks see that as a violation of the legacy of secularism associated with President Ataturk. However, Ataturk was primarily a modernist, and his was from this point of view that his secularism sprung, not vice-versa. Therefore, the reactionary response of banning an entire political party with pluralistic support over the headscarf issue may be supported by some of Ataturk's words, but not by their overall spirit.

2008-04-09T04:09:00.000-07:00

BAŞKA Martın en iyisi! (MORE Best of March)

-Apparently, once you turn, like, 22, or something, it's not cool to brag about your mom. So I tried to leave her out of the Olympos account as much as possible. But I'm not gonna, lie it was awesome having her there, if for no other reason than that it made me feel smart for knowing the word for "soup" again (çorba). The Tuesday after that trip I had off from work, so after listening to the opening pitch for the Red Sox 2008 season in Tokyo at noon, Turkey time, we went downtown to shop for fabric and do some additional sightseeing.

My Mama may not have raised no fool (well, the jury's still out on Mike, ZING!), but she did raise at least one dope, as I evidenced by forgetting to look up the word for "fabric" (kumaş) before we left. Luckily, Mom had the presence of mind to draw some pants and a shirt in the process of being sewn together in a rather nifty version of real-life Pictionary, and a friend of the pharmacist whose store we stopped in led us to a fabric store. Score one for McKay. Unfortunately, one of the areas in which Turkey has failed to modernize rapidly enough is putting its fabric bolts out for people to feel like we do in the States, so no go on that one.

From there I tried to find the "Hal" market which went to back in September with Marion and Meredith and Laura. After only an hour of confused wandering around Ulus and one unfortunate side-trip down an alley full of pirated porn-vendors, we made it there. Even on a weekday afternoon, the market still radiated with a bustling sensuousness. The produce stalls had changed a few shades of green since the fall and the "HAMSI, IKI MILYON" ("ANCHOVIES, TWO MILLION" as in two million old Turkish Lira, the denomination in which a lot of people still give prices since they only switched a few years ago- one million old Turkish Lira equal one New Turkish Lira, the change having been made because of inflation; did I mention this is a currency that has out-performed the dollar most of the year until a recent political crisis involving the potential banning of Turkey's current plurality-holding party? I will now convert my life savings to soya beans) guy wasn't really hitting his stride yet at 2pm, but the density of human energy was still there. We bought a half kilo of strawberries and I borrowed a hose from one of the fish vendors to wash them off with so we could eat them while we walked around.

Navigating with only my street smarts, experience, the sun and a streetmap of Ankara, I next managed to successfully navigate us to a natural spices and herbs store in Kızılay. Between making our way there and then to Kocatepe Caddesi for the Kocatepe Mosque, I managed to turn a journey of a couple hundred yards into about forty minutes walking. If I had actually mapped the route on paper it would resemble a Family Circus cartoon of Billy's route home from his after-school job as a Wal-Mart greeter (I know, I already made a joke about those cartoons in the fall, but if Bill Keane can run them out every other month I say I get two per year, minimum). The spice store was like a cross between an herbal remedies place and a dried goods market, with a space heater and darkly varnished wood for all the shelves to give it an authentic aura. I think all we picked up was some coffee beans for Dad. By the way, how are the coffee beans, Dad?

The Kocatepe Mosque was the third-most amazing one that I have been in (out of maybe a dozen). It's very new and modern, as is the shopping center that it sits atop. Really, it's hard not to be in awe of the geometric splendor in a place like that. What Muslims lack in idolatry they certainly make up for in symmetry. The expansive beauty of the inside made me feel very reverential, but as always made me wonder how such aesthetic expressions could manifest themselves in a place that simultaneously represents a fearful and repressive gender inequality.

Afterwards, we went to an incredible iskender restaurant near the American embassy. Iskender is a veal kebap over sliced pita bread with a tomato sauce on top of yogurt covering it. At this particular place, they come out with the food and pour on sizzling butter during the presentation as well, with some fresh sauce. I made the sound Homer Simpson makes when he is thinking about donuts as this was happening. The other specialty is kunefe, a dessert shredded grain soaked in honey, with cheese in the middle, soaked with honey, served hot and soaked with honey. Again for this presentation they came out with the dish fresh and poured sizzling honey on it before we ate. More Homer Simpson noises, this time including squeals of delight.

2008-04-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

Martın en iyisi (The best of March)

As Will pointed out recently, March was a pretty dry month here in Buckville, the online home of my musings and narrations. Do I have anything to show for the time I could have spent posting here? Well, yes and no. The biggest internet time-wasters for me over the last month have been choosing my March Madness college basketball bracket and participating in three fantasy baseball drafts and managing my teams. So far, I'm in the 99% percentile nation-wide for the March Madness picks and in first place for two fantasy baseball leagues, so I've got that going for me. But if my memoirist calls someday to chat about my glory days, let's all agree to focus more on the following:

-My trip to Olympos was superb, in all aspects from weather to company (although the return could have been timed a little better; usually I like to try and turn in before 4:30am on worknights). I'll admit, even my Andy Dufresne going to Mexico-esque hope and anticipation for the voyage was waning a little bit as we waited in the smoky BK Lounge (our friendly local Burger King at the bottom of the hill) from ten to eleven on Friday night. It was raining harder than it did for everyone's favorite Shawshank escape during pretty much the exact interval it took us to walk down to the rendez-vous point. Once we got on the bus, there were two stops in the first half hour, one to buy cigarettes (I can only assume that's the reason we were at the gas station for twenty minutes without filling up) and one to smoke them. An anomaly? No, we pretty much stopped at least once an hour all the way to the coast for cigarettes. The driver was badly in need of a Skip Gates-style coffee thermos. Employing the help of some ear plugs, I made it there fairly well-rested but with a neck that made bubblewrap sounds every time I stretched it.

The coolest parts were definitely the ancient city, the beach, the chimera fire, the beach, and the boat tour, a.k.a. everything we did. Setting out from the tree-house hostel (we actually stayed in bungalows, but it was still really cool) in the late morning, we took a walking tour of the ancient Lycian city of Olympos that lay between us and the beach. We passed a group of mountain-climbers practicing on a rocky, over-hanging part of one of the hills, but they didn't return our waves, even with their dangling feet that obviously weren't being used for anything else. The necropoli in the hills were again one of the highlights of the site, and I gotta say, seeing so many of them surviving from the ancient world is making me think twice about the Donny Karamazov method for my interrment. As you can see in the one on the right, trees, grass and shrubs were coming up on a lot of these suckers, and most were covered by some form of plant growth not recently planted by loved ones.

After passing through the Roman theater (capacity about 1,000, no-smoking sign still intact), where I pretened to be playing a hard-core AC/DC solo (you're not hard-core unless you live hard-core) for a bunch of robed ancients in the stadium seating, we made it out to the beach. As you can see from the picture on the left, the scenery is even nicer than the Bilkent reservoir that my room looks out on. My only complaints were that it was more rocky than sandy and there were no bbq grills built-in, ala Winlslow Park, so Freeport is still safe in getting my vote for future family gatherings. The beach was also fed by a beautiful but frigid stream of fresh water that wound through the rocks and created a nice pond-sized pool just behind the water.

In the evening, we wound out way up through the hills to the Chimera fires, a place where natural gas seeping out through the rocks has created a permanent natural fire for thousands of years. It was a very picturesque spot at twilight, and was frequented by locals as well as us yabancılar, so I guess its appeal doesn't wear out too quick. We had to walk a kilometer up the hill when we got out of the bus (haha, take THAT smokers), so seeing the fires poke through the trees as we came up was a very revelatory way to encounter them. Walking up beyond where you see the fire in the background in the picture on the right, I was able to get a view of the whole area below, stretching a few kilometers out to the Mediterranean, with just a few lights from various houses and hostels along the roads.

Sunday we took a glass-bottomed boat tour of the ruins of another Lycean city whose remains are now ninety percent below water. Unfortunately, the water was a little too turbulent for getting a good look at the ruins, so the best part of that trip ended up being swimming off the boat for about twenty minutes during a break. Mark it as the first time I ever went swimming in the Mediterranean on Easter. Hey, Martin Luther King Jr. had the Penn Center, I've got Olympos.

Four of our coleagues here, Ananda, Colleen, Alex and Lauren are leaving after this course, so I'm off to say goodbye to them this evening. However, I'll write again soon about the highlights of March, including my trip around Ankara with Mom and some books I've been reading on history and the theology of MLK.

2008-03-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Kimsesizler Yurdu (The Orphanage)

This weekend, the number of Turkish students who were very happy to see me the first time we met increased from about 0.85 to a couple dozen. No, I didn't bring donuts to a study session. And I don't think it had much to do with my wearing a fez to class. The increase was because the kids down at the orphanage were apparently injected with 8 liters of Starbucks' Columbian Narino blend java right before we got there. No one is that enthusiastic about meeting me sober. It was well worth waking up for at 8am on a Sunday (which is saying something, since I never did that to get to Louis Diner).

How did I end up waking up at 8 on Sunday for a trip to an orphanage? It's a long story, beginning with the fact that us SSI's have been trying to latch on to community service projects at Bilkent for a few months now, and continuing with the fact that I couldn't really get to sleep Saturday night because I had a liter of Starbucks' Columbian Narino java in my veins. Last week, my friend Megan finally heard back from the student who runs the orphanage colunteer program, so she and my friend Jeremy and I gave it a trial run. Major success. First of all, I was impressed with the showing of Bilkent students, who managed to pack the full-sized school bus so that people were standing in the aisles on the way there, including some BUSEL students. Good work, team.

Originally we were slated to do some painting, but since it was raining we played inside with the kiddos for a while and then went out for a little bit of wet soccer. I did my best to entertain the attention-span challenged folks inside, busting out everything from the animal noises to showing them my home on a map. One of them, Osman, would have made Uncle Will some proud- he got me to look at my shirt three times so he could trip my nose. I'm tempted to insert a joke here about my out-of-proportion physical retaliation toward Osman on the soccer field, but that would be cruel, seeing as how he's an orphan and all. Instead, I just look at the toys on my desk that I stole from his room and laugh.

Actually, the orphanage was pretty well set for toys and books and furniture, from what I could see. It was pretty impressive. I had expected the dowdy women working there who looked like The Trunchbull, but the level of cleanliness and comfort was a little surprising and heartening for the lives of these youngsters. Granted, I'm glad I never had to sleep in dormitory-style bedrooms when I was a kid, but the furniture in the common areas was pretty sweet, there was a Nintendo (we almost left Jeremy behind because he wouldn't stop playing it), and the place was as clean as if Linda Woods was running it.

Many of the traits that set Turkish people apart- the lack of personal space, the talking really fast even though I obviously don't understand- were magnified in the children. Our old friend Ataturk of course was prominent on every wall. I met several students older than I am from main campus. Overall the experience was a great way to get beyond what I see of the world here on a daily basis, and I look forward to going back. I will do another posting at some point about things there, since we are planning on going back every week now.

2008-02-26T11:20:00.000-08:00

Life Update...Doors style! (Apologies to Jim Morrison for liberties taken)

Wow, only one post in February so far? Guess it's time to LIGHT MY FIRE...

Strange Days In My Stomach- "Really, Bucky, after you ate raw, spiced beef (çiğ köfte)?" Yup, it's true, I once again managed to give myself gastrointestinal sensations previously known only at the Skowhegan Fairgrounds and in Darien, Panama, before the cook stopped holding a grudge against me. From here on out, I am only eating baby food and cookies.

Love Him Madly- "We will remember that there is something happening in America, that we are not as divided as our politics suggest, that we are one people, that we are one nation, and that together we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea: YES WE CAN!" (Check out the Yes We Can remix by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas on YouTube, especially if this phrase isn't already stuck in your head)

Break On Through To The Third Course- I got moved up a level again to "Upper Intermediate" for the next eight weeks, and have some of my students from the first course again now. This time around most of them are much improved, so even though they have access to my (limited) facebook account, things are overall better in the classroom. My Friday classes illustrate the different types of students here pretty well: one of them is comprised of three scholarship students studying math and computer engineering, all of whom reminded me of different, awkward parts of myself in middle school and early high school. They were all obviously pretty smart, but we'll be doing a lot of work on eye-contact. I managed to get them all to laugh by the end of our second hour together, without even telling any jokes about how lumberjacks make good mathematicians because of their natural logarithms. The other Friday class has an econ student who plays for the TurkTelecom developmental basketball team and a law student who also plays basketball, along with a managment student with a girlfriend (not ugly) who hangs around outside class waiting for him, and a fourth fellow in internal design who keeps teasing him. They are very smooth and confident but attentive, intelligent and curious at the same time. Both groups are fun to work with and energize me at the end of the week, but in very different ways that have given me a new perspective on the school and hope for bringing away more positive memories of higher education in Turkey. More on the reasons to be cynical another time.

Waiting For The Sun No More- It's been almost months since the solstice, which means sometimes it's still light out when I get home! On the downside, the snow on those pine trees outside my window is a gone, which is a wonder, because they are so close to each other they are all shaded most of the day. Seriously, the landscaping here has some catching up to do with the transportation industry. If you know anyone who is looking to expand their landscaping business, this is the place to come. I've heard stories about trees being planted in the tea cans that they were sold in. Yes, that sounds like something I would do. It's not a good sign for the landscapers. I'm the fellow who worked at a flower farm for three years and still had to be reminded not to walk through the poison ivy to get the soil.

2008-02-15T04:48:00.000-08:00

Selçuk/Efes, Bergama/Pergamum and Smyrna/Izmir, aka "The Ruins Trip"

Almost exactly a week ago I left on a trip for the Aegean Coast. 4 trips into the Izmir bus station, 176 cute cats, 2 friendly hostel owners, and 912,387 marble columns later, I have seen plenty of evidence to convince me Trajan and Hardian and Eumenes were, in fact, real. At least as real as Zeus and Artemis, and they was some of the realest EVER. For real though, there's tablets and monuments and statues, and I've seen them, so either those history books got some stuff right, or the Turkish Culture and Tourism Bureau has quite a racket going. Where to start...

My Knowledgeable Classicist Travelling Companion and I actually spent our first day in the region getting soaked in Selçuk, since we decided to brave the precipitation and visit the Basilica of St. John and the Archaeological Museum, both of which I'm really glad I went to, now that I'm not shivering anymore (turns out cotton kills in the city, too). There wasn't much to see architecturally at St. John's Church, mostly just the lay-out and a few walls representing where the narthex and everything was back in the day. Since St. John and Mary are said to have lived out their lives after the death of Jesus in that region, the church had a lot of meaning as a place where they spent time. In fact, we saw the slab of marble that marks where he is buried. So for anyone keeping track at home, that makes one apostle's burial place I've visited now. Check back regularly for updates.

Even though I'm already on track to raise my lifetime average for archaeological museums visited to over 1 per year by August, the one in Selçuk deserves special mention. It is relatively small, but there were rooms dedicated especially to Artemis (Diana) and Bes that were very well done. Some of the sculptures from Ephesus had been taken there for viewing instead of left at the site. Do a Google image search for Bes to find out why he is so famous, a true precursor to Priapus.

The next morning, I was driven along with my Knowledgeable Classicist Travelling Companion the 5km up to the entrance for Ephesus, the ancient Roman city that is so vast and well-preserved it really lives up to its fame. On the way out of town, the driver, our host Tayfun, stopped in the middle of the road on the main street and hopped out to a little cart on the sidewalk. He jumped back into the car with three fresh little donuts with cinnamon on them, so divine. It was one of those fun little asides you don't expect when going somewhere for its attractions that make things more fun- nothing like starting a day of visiting ruins with a hot donut-and-a-half in your stomach.

The most impressive thing about Ephesus was really the extensiveness of the ruins. Part of the reason they were so well preserved seems to be that the mayor of the region wanted to move the city to Selçuk in the fourth century, and dammed up the city during some heavy rains to get people to shift. So that was a bummer, but it meant plenty of roads and columns and temples survived pretty well.

Me, in front of some Roman arches at Efes

Knowledgeable Classicist Travelling Companion standing in part of the Roman theater. This was actually the third-largest ancient theater I have seen in the last week, after another one at Ephesus and the one at Bergama. Apparently they used to have concerts here, until Sting exceeded the decibel limit and started literally rocking the house. Dad must be proud.
The Library of Celsus the Very Well-Read. Also notable are the statues of the goddesses representing the four virtues (partially obstructed by pillars)- from right to left: Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful and Doc

I also have some good shots of the Temple of Hadrian and the Marble Way. I don't want to take up too much space here, so just shoot me an email if you are interested.

The other great site in Selçuk was the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World. More importantly, it had free admission. (OK, so did all the other sites we went to; thank-you teacher ID cards!)

That little speck next to the column is me. Unfortunately this pillar is all that's left of the Temple of Artemis. It was burned down in antiquity by some guy who wanted to be famous. He was an ancestor of Harry Frazee.

On Monday, we took a bus back to Izmir, and then out to Bergama. The bus apparently couldn't decide if it was a local bus or an inter-city bus, because it was a big, touring Mercedes, but also stopped to drop people off and pick them up in every town between Izmir and Bergama. The scenery was as amazing as ever on the coastal rim, with lots of sparkling bays to glimpse and barren February fields and vineyards to ponder. In Bergama we stayed in a restored Greek guesthouse, similar to the Ottoman era houses that we saw earlier this year in Safranbolu. The owner, Ersin, had the best collection of late 20th century fiction and non-fiction books I've seen this side of my parents' house. Being in the old Greek nieghborhood was nice because the architecture was fascinating, and the town was small enough that even though the streets were winding in some places it was really easy to find our way around.

The first afternoon in Bergama, we undertook to visit the Asclepion, ancient home of Galen and his medical research and treatment. There was a blistering wind as we set off up the hill for what looked like the entrance, according to the Lonely Planet map. We found a promising-looking gate, but it was closed. If it hadn't been right next to a large military installation, I might have jumped it, but I wasn't looking to get all Tiananmen Sq. over the easiest way to enter a tourist site. So, we shivered back down the hill to a taxi stand and got a ride through town, and back up the hill, to a spot literally about a couple hundred yards from where we had just been. Apparently in the "low season" of tourist traffic, they only keep entrance open, and we had chosen wrong. C'est la vie. The site itself was very cool, featuring not just a building for medical practice that still had a ceiling (!), but also temples to Asclepius, the god of health.

Pillars from the Temple of Asclepius at the Asclepion, with the theater in the background

On Tuesday, after a delicious breakfast of kaymak (milk butter, sort of the consistency of really light cream cheese, but more flavorful, and quite divine when combined with honey to go on bread), olives and cheese, and tea, we started out at the Red Basilica, just down the street from our guesthouse. It was constructed in the 2nd century AD by the emperor Hadrian, and later converted into a Byzantine church. It was so big that after it was destroyed by Arab raiders in the 8th century, a new structure was built within the ruins.

The massive, partially restored walls of the Red Basilica. I think they'd make a nice complement to the Green Monster, personally.

After seeing the Red Basilica, we started to walk up the hill to the Acropolis (fortified city). It was easier to find than the Asclepion, but farther away (about 7km each way, according the taxi driver who tried to convince us to take a cab- he probably thinks we are still staggering down now). I'm not sure if the Asclepion covers a greater area than Efes, but it seemed like it did, because it was set on different elevations. The upper part featured the gate into the city and some well-restored temples, strategically placed to give the gods who were being worshipped a good view. And it worked well for that, you could see plains and fields for miles in every direction from the Acropolis. There were so many different types of marble and other stones among the ruins that I wish I been able to go with Arvid, so he could tell me which ones were part of the natural formations of the hill and which ones the unfortunate slaves carried up seven kilometers of road.

One of the most special parts of the upper Acropolis we didn't catch until the way out: the Temple of Zeus. Yeah, I almost walked by one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World without stopping to admire. Now, though, I can say I saw over a quarter of them in a three-day span. Between the Temple of Zeus and the Temple of Artemis at Efes, there was about enough stone left to carve out a championship trophy for the 2007 Patriots, but the mystique was still there. The greatest part about walking in and amongst the ruins was being able to disappear into different staircases and pop out of genuine ancient arches. I wish I had visited it as a kid, so that everything would have seemed even bigger and I could have jumped around more on the edifices without worrying about my knee. Another great thing about being there was that for some reason it was much less crowded than Efes, which made things seem much more haunted with the past.

Some of the arch-ways I would have liked to jump in and out of as a little kid.

We used the theater to get down to the lower level, walking down through the steep stadium seating. Since it was on such a steep hill, the builders decided to add altitude rather than width to it, making for a rather striking environment, especially for anyone with vertigo.

The Lower Acropolis had about a dozen terraced sections with excavations and ruins just laid out as part of the landscape. It was surreal to be able to just walk along the side of the hill and trudge past Roman columns and hugee slabs of engraved marble. Most of the terraces had arched caves cut slightly into them too, with the original brickwork often at least partially intact. It was great to see some relatively unrefined bits of masonry that obviously wouldn't have been restored to that state, that you knew had to have been put up like that a couple thousand years ago.

The terraced sections of the hill took us about half-way down towards where we had come from, but to use the proper exit (danged barb-wire) we had to go all the way back up to the top and out. One of the really nice souvenir stand guys lent Meredith a copy of the book they sold at the stands about the Acropolis to read while we were there, so she returned that and we had some çay up there before returning "home". That night we went to a cute little restaurant off the main street and had some mantı (roughly translates as "Turkish ravioli", but that doesn't do it justice because it's small and hand-rolled and served with yogurt and spices, mmmmm). Beautiful atmosphere, no foreigners to compete with, and it only cost about $4 each. Good times.

The two best parts of Izmir, indeed, our two reasons for going, were the bazaar and the "kordon" walkway along the bay. First we wound our way south for a couple kilometers until we found heard the loud, bustling, noises and fishy smells of a Turkish market and plunged in. The next time you find yourself annoyed by someone in a public setting, just picture them next to an over-anxious fish-merchant with the lungs of Pavarotti trying to clear his stall around 4:45 in the afternoon. The person might still be annoying, but it'll be a funny image.

We happened to be there on Valentine's Day Eve, so it seemed especially appropriate walk along the waterfront as the sun set over the bay, even if it was still a little chilly. Between the fortune-teller with the baby rabbit and the toothless guy with a cigarette selling roses, there was enough cuteness to power another year of Obama's campaign (I'm kidding, Obama's health care plan is far more substantial than bunnies and roses, it just still lags behind that of all the other industrialized nations and doesn't live up to the challenge that John Edwards kicked off the race with). It was a fitting close to the trip; so there you have it, and if you're still hungry for more, I'm always happy to rehash it over email or Skype or via carrier pigeon.

2008-01-21T04:57:00.000-08:00

Exam-taking in Turkey

Since exams are a big part of student life here (as you will see below), and I have now proctored (or as they say here, "invigilated") several of them, I thought I would do a blog entry about them. First off, it is important to understand that the students' presence or absence at univesrity is determined (academically, at least) entirely by one exam, the ÖSS. The ÖSS would be similar to the SAT's, only if the American version was harder, essays and grades didn't count for admissions in the US, and there was a cash prize for scoring well. I say cash prize, because getting a high enough score on the ÖSS gets you a free ride at pretty much any university you choose, including lodging. This has led some people to take the test repeatedly, so they can end up in a high enough bracket to spend a few years going to school for free. So, with this as a fundamental part of the Turkish education system, you can see why the testing itself is taken so seriously.

How seriously? This is the fun part. In BUSEL, students file in for exam days to find their desks about 25 feet away from anyone else's, because they have been spread out to prevent cheating. This liberal use of the classroom and all its corners creates a dilemma for the person monitoring the exam, namely that they are left trying to perch on a radiator or attempting to lean unobtrusively against the wall. But there has to be a way to make their lives harder, right? I know, we'll make it so MORE people have to watch the exam! Yup, 20 students, spread out to approximately the population density of the Dakotas, and you still need at least two people "invigilating". At least this gives the "invigilators" a chance to practice techniques they may have seen in John Cleese's "How to Annoy People". (Whistle "Camptown Racers" next to someone taking an exam the rest of their life depends on some time- high comedy!) Meanwhile, the Heads of Teaching Unit patrol the corridor with mace and attack dogs, in case anyone decides to make a run for it. All I'll say about those situations is: Poor Mehmet, he never had a chance.

And this all happens not once a semester, but six times per semester! In each 8-week course, there are two Course Achievement Tests, one End of Course Assessment, and an American Gladiators-style speaking exam. One of my favorite twists on the whole ordeal is that on main campus, where I invigilated a Faculty Academic English mid-term, you have to present your ID card and sign a sheet of paper. So essentially it's like taking the SAT's... every time you sit an exam. Well, you'll say, at least they have good incentives to study hard around the calendar! On that note, let me just mention that I am typing this in the computer lab, and there are enough people watching YouTube videos around me to single-handedly keep Google stock afloat no matter what the current recession does to the US economy.

BUSEL is in its relative infancy, having been around as an institution only a little over 20 years. Hence, I am optimistic that the reforms to the testing procedure which are mentioned at nearly every staff meeting will eventually help the process orient itself it more towards the learning needs of the students than the security paranoia of the administration. There are lots of smart teachers here who care about making the exams more effective in helping the students, and the students do a good job whining about it themselves. The school is also slow to implement new technology into the process, but once it does that will help as well. In the meantime, be glad that you don't have to undergo an optical scan to sit a final in the US, and that no one walks you to the bathroom.

2008-01-13T08:22:00.000-08:00

My Chat with Mike

First off, you may notice a couple new links off to the right, which are actually connected to each other. The first is for Tikkun.org, the website of a Jewish magazine that is the voice for the Network of Spiritual Progressives. The NSP is an inspiring interfaith movement with idealistic-yet-pragmatic goals such as creating a Global Marshall Plan. The NSP lists its Basic Tenets as:

-Foster a New Bottom Line of love, generosity & ecological sensitivity in our economy, education, media, & government.
-Foster a new global consciousness and solidarity.
-Promote awe, radical amazement, gratitude & developing an inner spiritual life.
-Challenge the misuse of God & religion by the Religious Right and religio-phobia on the Left.

I mention all this not just because I am listening to John Coltrane right now (the congregation dedicated to St. John Wil-i-am Coltrane and ordained in the African Orthodox Church is within a few zipcode numbers of the NSP headquarters, the greatest geographical confluence since Jorgensen's and the Waterville Opera House), but also because Will Pasley is applying to be Rabbi Michael Lerner's assistant right now (Rabbi Lerner is chairman and head of the NSP, edits Tikkun- basically he's the man, in a good way).

Rabbi Lerner is the fellow with the glasses and the yarmulkah behind the banner there.

So good luck to Will, that would be an amazing pairing of minds if he were to work with him. I also posted a link to Will's blog, for those of you in the mood for something more philosophically substantial and gramatically unpolished. Just throw me a pity comment once in a while to make me think people are still paying attention to the Dumbledork page.

And just when you thought I couldn't promote those around me any more shamelessly, we get to the more substantial part of the posting: a chat with my brother Mike. The aim here was to see if creating something blog-worthy in a chat or email format was really as easy as Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell made it seem (yes, I just compared us to two of the top five popular non-fiction writers in the country, I will now go a self-imposed month without using the word "humble", or any forms of it, in reference to myself), or if it was as hard as the Trudeau brothers made it seem in the BDH. The results are probably the only thing that has made Click and Clack's parents feel proud in the last 20 years. Enjoy!

7:05 PM me: Merhaba!

7:06 PM Mike: Buongiorno!

me: I just hit "pop out" for this sucker, cause I have some long questions. it's gonna be good. I hope you don't mind if I edit it for entertainment purposes before I post it on my blog

7:07 PM Mike: Not at all, though I might have to file a defamation suit.

me: You don't even have a tie, I'm not worried about your suit. *rimshot*

7:08 PM Mike: Real quick, do you think clemens juiced?

me: Well, we have the excuse of having been children when he left the Red Sox after going 40-39 his last four years here, so we couldn't have suspected anything when he turned BACK into Nolan Ryan versus Little Leaguers, but all the people saying he was just in better shape, or it was the national league hitters? Um.... The last two or three years I have thought he was juicing.

7:12 PM Mike: Well, he certainly did increase his work out intensity, but the telling statistic for me is when he started the season 6-6 with toronto, than was allegedly injected, and finished the season 14-0 with an era well under 3.

7:13 PM And the fact that Pettit admits he did lends a whole lot of validity to Macnamee.

7:14 PM me: I'm not sure why Clemens' word even adds much to the debate, haven't we known he was a scumbag for almost a decade now?

Mike: Yeah, and doesnt he have a whole lot more incentive to lie than his trainer?7:15 PM you know how he claims to have taken B-12? Well, B-12 is well known slang for steroids apparently (see Palmero's game of shadows)

7:16 PM me: Interesting, I did not know that.

Mike: It was so open, the trainers would jokingly call the steroid injections “B12 shots,” and soon the players had picked up on that little code name, too. You’d hear them saying it out loud in front of each other: “I need to go in and get a B12 shot,” a player would say, and everyone would laugh. (Of course, that was the kind of joke you really only made around other steroid users, because obviously they were in the same boat as you. What were they going to do, tell on you? Not hardly.)

7:17 PM me: I knew this chat would be more worthwhile than studying for my history final tomorrow :)

7:36 PM Mike: Ok, this is really more of statement and reaction from you but here it is: since october 18th, major Boston sports teams (Celts, Sox, and Pats for our purposes) have lost only three games.

7:38 PM me: Holy shnikies. I mean, that's a good way into LAST YEAR.

Mike: Do you think its fair to say that we have gone from one of the more tortured fan bases to by far the most privelaged over the last few years? While I love this more than pretty much any other aspect of my life, I dread the time when it will end, because it can't possibly continue at such a rate, it's just not possible.

7:42 PM me: Dude, if you had told me at the beginning of my sophomore year at school that (number of New England sports championships) - (number of quality intimate relationships for Bucky) in 2005-2008 would be 3, I would have punched holes in every condom I could find (that's assuming the Pats go on, knock on wood) (4 if the Celts do too...). As for enjoying sports when the inevitable NE decline comes, I remember being in elementary school and watching the old 49ers and Cowboys games, and that was almost as much fun as any Pats game I've ever watched, if less intense for me as a fan. There will always be good stuff to enjoy for sports. Just be glad you are in the country for it now

Mike: Hahaha.

me: Wait, what time are they playing? I guess that's been decided by now.

Mike: I think saturday at 8

me: D*****! Better than Sunday at 8... I meant to get up and watch them against the Giants but I slept straight through it. I quit! I'm coming home, meet me at the airport.

Mike: Certainly! I should shower first, but I can probably be out to pick you up from your 24 hour plane ride.

Mike: What is your next adventure?

me: At this point, it looks like Greece is the next country. My friend Laura lived there a couple years ago, so I think Mery and I are going with her there in February. First to Thessaloniki, and then down to some other places. We have nine days, so it should be doable on the bus

7:51 PM Mike: As my mid-eastern friend would say... very niiiiice

me: Haha, yeah, I would prefer I think to do it in warmer weather, but there will be lots of places to go in Turkey once it warms up, so I could never get everywhere I want to be anyways.

7:52 PM Mike: Fair enough. What is your next question?

me: Further evidence I had way too much time on my hands this morning/in general in my life: If you had the chance, would you take the two female stars of Godfather I and II, Diane Keaton and Talia Shire, and switch their OTHER famous roles from the 70's? Namely, make Keaton Rocky's sweetheart and put Shire in some Woody Allen movies? Frankly, I get giddy just thinking we might someday have the technology to try this; can you imagine Rocky with a better-looking, more expressive female lead? Or Woody Allen riffing to a squinty, introverted pepper pot who matches his realistic dating field better?

7:56 PM Mike: That's intriguing. I'm not sure anyone else could possibly not react to Sly's emoting on the beach when we learn that he's afraid.

7:57 PM me: True, a unique talent Or we could put Jimmy Fallon in there and watch him crack up while Sly is saying it, followed by his motivation shifting from Micky's death to kicking Fallon's rear... it's not too late to make that happen.

Mike: That i think is the best option.

me: I would probably wet myself if we could get Paulie to walk into Annie Hall halfway through and started bashing Woody Allen against the radiator.

Mike: Or just sub in Mickey for every character except Rocky

me: Including the cheerleaders when he is fighting Hulk Hogan?

8:00 PM Mike: Hell yeah. Wow, i had totally forgotten the scene where he fights Hulk. I need to re-watch those.

me: amen

8:05 PM So Will is reaing a book by Rabbi Michael Lerner called the Left Hand of God, about progressive religion in America, because he might going to work for Rabbi Lerner, which would be awesome.

Mike: check out Glen Davis' (big baby) picture for his profile and try to tell me there has been a worse one. http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/players/profile?playerId=3200

me: I plan on reading it as soon as I am home again.

Mike: I havent heard of Lerner.

8:06 PM me: Any recommendations on religious books you have come across in the last year I should try to find here? Lerner is with the Tikkun network, he spoke at the rally and ecumencial service in DC last January.

8:07 PM Mike: I'll look it up. Most of what i have read have been relatively text bookish, but Genisis by Bill Moyer was good. William James' stuff is a little old at this point, but he was very insightful

8:09 PM me: Sweet, I'll check it out. I'm not taking an MA class here for the spring, so I plan to do different topics on my own each week.

8:11 PM Mike: I'm taking some really intersting religion classes next semester, so i cna send along suggestions from those classes.

8:12 PM me: Excellent, what do you have lined up?

Mike: Religious perspectives on death and Sacred Sound

8:14 PM me: Music class? Death should be interesting too, that is basically where religion came from in the first place.

Mike: Yeah, I'm pumped about it. I have absolutely no idea what sacred sound is, but it sure resonates well.

me: Hey-oh! The Bill Walton podcast was excellent, he is a great talker, not just about sports but about life in general. However, I felt like he made a point that I hear too often amongst people of his/Mom and Dad's generation, which is that things are going downhill today and aren't as good as they were in his day in terms of social justice and societal change. But our generation is making great strides with the Iraq occupation and working on human rights in a variety of ways, with less participation from the over-50 crowd. I wish they would stop bad-mouthing us and start running for local office or re-joining the broader movement for change in different ways. Your thoughts? (And yes, if you're a Pistons fan looking at that Davis photo right now, you feel..ashamed. If you're a C's fan it's just funny)

8:19 PM Mike: I like the idea of the over 50 crowd getting involved again, I think they are in a position to help in the way that they wish their parent's generation had helped them. I think that they are making progress in many ways, but I'm also a little scared of the apathy that i see in many of my peers, and even myself occasionally. It's getting easier and easier for kids to focus on their video games rather than the issues going on in the real world. There is alot of passion, and alot of activism out there. I think that the image of activism in the previous generation might be overstated because it's one of the more notable parts of that period's history.

me: Yeah, disengagement, cynicism, apathy- they are difficult to fight.

8:25 PM Mike: I think it is unfair and a little rediculous of previous generations to claim that we are dropping the ball.

me: Definitely.

8:26 PM me: Can i ask one other favor? Would you go watch the IRONMAN trailer and send me a quick email with how you think it looks and a rating on a scale of 1-10?

Mike: Yeah! I saw an early one for it that was aired at a gamers con and it looked bad ass, but I'll check it out now. Ooooooooh, s***, this is the b****.

8:31 PM me: ?

Mike: That was a positive b****. That looks mucho awesome. I'd put it at around 8.5 -9 for potential.

8:32 PM me: Excellent. Good news. Appreciate the weighing-in.

Mike: No prob. Peace man, I gotta shower and run too, au revoir.

2008-01-06T11:52:00.000-08:00

Studying Turkish

4.5 months. 78 street döners. 17 kilograms of glazed of chickpeas. 120 students. 90 degrees difference in temperature extremes. 2 Ankaragücü matches. All ways to measure how long I have been here in Turkey. A busy period, you say. Indeed. So what has suffered in the face of all these new experiences? Frankly, my learning of the Turkish language.

One of my New Year's resolutions (in addition to being more regular about blog entries, replacing my shoulder stands with head stands, not drinking caffeine during the week and listening to more NPR) is to buckle down with the studying, and spend more time outside the two hours of weekly lessons we have outside the school cracking a book (or a loose collection of papers, as the case may be, since I was too cheap to pay the library to bind it when I had it photocopied). I'm not going to lie: one of the top three reasons that I am still hanging tough with the lessons themselves is pure loyalty to Özlem, the fabulous BUSEL Turkish teacher. Yes, she happens to be one of the most beautiful Turkish women I have met here, but she's also one of the most clever and dedicated, given how our numbers have dwindled this course. So we may not have much classroom time dedicated to learning Turkish, but at least it's enjoyable.

On the other hand, there's no advantage for learning a language like living in the country it's
spoken in. For example, anyone who comes to visit will notice the DISTINCT absence of several inches of dust on my floor- obviously I figured out at some point how to ask for a vacuum downstairs (OK, bad example, I still have to look up the word vacuum every time because I foret in between, but probably by June I'll have it memorized). So here I am, able to say "pomegranate" (nar) and "ghetto" (chin-chin), but not make simple comparisons or use the verb "to be able to". I look forward to expanding the repertoire of stock phrases and useful coabulary I use on a regular basis next semester; that's a big part of the goal.

But I also look forward to the sentences I will translate in my workbook, even though they are much less directly useful. That's because, for me, they represent the pure joy of learning a language for its own sake. Few things in the mental realm give me as much pleasure as getting those linguistic synapses to fire, especially when it's the correct ones in the correct order for creating comprehensive (but hey, that's optional, as anyone who has ever heard me try to finish a joke in person knows).

So a Happy New Year to all the dorks out there who join me in such endeavours, and look for another blog entry soon, featuring a new gimmick.

2007-12-25T10:27:00.000-08:00

българия (Bulgaria)

If I ever do end up becoming a travel writer, it probably won't be for a newspaper. You know those "36 Hours in ..." features that the New York Times travel section does? Well, if I wrote one, it would break down into major components of trying to find your hostel, sleeping, finding toilets you don't have to pay for and warming up at a cafe. I think the NYT likes you to focus more on cathedrals and strip clubs. Basically, if you want to know where I was that first afternoon in Sofya, take a map of the city and superimpose the latest installment of Family Circus where Billy runs all over the neighborhood. Then read the last 20 comics featuring "Grandma's Pearls of Wisdom" or whatever they are called to get an idea of the pain from the cold and weight of my backpack.

The coolest part about arriving in Sofya and walking around trying to find Hostel Mostel (worth the walking, more on this below), was trying to decipher the street signs in Bulgarian, because it uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and our guidebook map had the transliterated street names in English. Luckily, Meredith printed off a couple copies of the Cyrillic alphabet before we went, so we had something to go by. It was actually fun to see a sign and then mentally rearrange the sounds in my mind to figure out what it should look like in English and then try to find it on the map. For example, "Tsar" in a street name was common and looks like this: цар. I still can't speak any Bulgarian besides "please" - "моля" (molja) and "thank-you"- " благодаря", but it's fun to know that I can decipher things phonetically in a language with only 5 letters that have the same sound in English and Bulgarian. It was a true pleasure to try and learn something and then put it into such critical use right away, just the way learning should happen ideally. I will post thoughts on this with regards to learning Turkish in the near future.

Hostel Mostel was awesome because they had free tea and coffee all day, free pasta and beer in the evenings, and the guy running it while we were there, Todd, was really enthusiastic and helpful, and had a good sense of humor. Meredith and I both agreed that we wanted to be him and find jobs at hostels in America. The private apartment rooms were actually about four blocks up the street from the hostel, so we walked up to those with Todd and got settled in after the first round of tea and coffee. The room we got was nice and big, but the down side of that was that it was very difficult to keep warm. Meredith ended up napping with her head right next to the radiator the first afternoon for warmth. It was cute.

That evening we strolled on one of the streets south of the hostel apartment because it had festive snowflakes and candles in bright lights over the boulevard (do you still get these in America now with the war on Christmas?). We stopped at a classy chain coffeehouse called "Lavazza" for tea and coffee. The street also featured a school and a church; it was rather charming. The city as a whole could not rightly be described as charming, except maybe by someone on a bad acid trip who needed escape bright colors, but neither was it repulsively depressing. We'll settle for somewhere in between. I do know that I plan never to live there unless the lingerie models in the windows come to life and start doing the can-can in the streets (there were many of these).

Friday was nicer, because we got to walk around without the backpacks, the sun was out, and we could take time to admire the magnificent churches without Jack Frost chomping at our everythings. Unlike the mosques in Istanbul, the churches were still primarily places of worship for locals, not tourist attractions, so it was very nice to be there next to people who were lighting holiday candles for their loved ones while we admired the frescoes and golden altars. They were pretty picky about folks taking pictures in these suckers, so just imagine all the medieval saints you ever saw and thrown them on the walls with a bunch of gold at the front. At the Bania Boshi mosque, they made Meredith put on a green, hooded cloak. More cuteness. I was ready to don one in solidarity, but I wasn't sure if that would be taken the wrong way.

The archaeological museum was another highlight of the afternoon. The archaeo museums in this part of the world tend to be pretty stellar because it is so- relatively- easy to assemble artifacts from the major periods of civilizational development. It was thorough, well-organized, and WARM. That's all I ask. Then we had lunch at a terrific Indian restaurant, which was joyful enough because I haven't had Indian food since this summer, but it really was a quality set-up to boot. The waitress said "bless you" under her breath every time she served something, and it seemed pretty genuine, so that's always a plus. MORE of a plus however was the panir masala that I got. Almost worth the trip by itself. Worth walking across the city for at least.

Saturday morning we went to Rila Monastery, in the mountains to the south of the city. It felt great to finally escape an urban environment, and this was a pretty ideal way to do it. The ride out reminded me so much of Maine that I got deja vu from trips to Sugarloaf a couple times. The frosted pine trees on the sides of the mountains were an instant cure for whatever cynacism I had been starting to feel towards the country. The whole hour and a half that it took to get there after we left the city was beautiful. The monastery itself couldn't have been in a better spot for living a contemplative life, set in a valley high up in the mountains with streams and springs coming down from all directions. I enjoyed just walking around its courtyard and peeling an orange with the sun in my face. The frescoes in the church were very beautiful as well, and there was a monk outside breaking up the ice where water had melted off the roof and frozen on the steps, which gave a feeling of authenticity. After exploring the courtyard and the church, we walked up a path onto the hillside. We came to an uncrossable stream in about a half hour, but I took a nice swim at least before we went back. The water was slightly colder than at Winslow Park in April (note: if Meredith's blog reflects a different set of events at the stream, it's probably because she couldn't believe the cajoneness I displayed).

Highlights from the trip home:
-They couldn't sell us two train tickets at Sofya to Istanbul, so we took the train to Plovidv and got on the same train there. Gotta love public transport in Eastern Europe. I believe Mr. Magoo was just appointed to another three-year term as transport minister of Bulgaria.
-The sleeping car conductor hadn't slept in four days and started ranting about America when I tried to apologize for asking about the sleeper-car prices. I'm reporting him to Mr. Magoo.
-We stopped at Svalingrad (maybe the best name for a border town I have ever crossed at) at 3am for passport control. With a little foresight and hustle, Mery and I were second in line for people from the train to get inspected, meaning another 45 minutes in bed on the train, as opposed to in line wondering the last time the office's potpourri was replaced was.
-We had about 12 hours in Istanbul between when our train arrived and our bus left, so we went to the nice, modern Beyoglu region of the city, and cruised the upscale Istiklal Caddesi. It was a very nice way to spend the afternoon, because we were in Starbucks for a while and I got to read Patrick O'Brian. On the way back to the train station we stopped and watched a Galatasaray futbol match at a hookah bar in their part of town. Good baklava, but a scoreless game.
-It has never felt that good to come "home", when "home" was in a foreign country, because after 36 hours on the road I was really wiped. Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones :)

2007-12-17T13:10:00.000-08:00

Ankaragücü Part III

The big difference between the match that Meredith, Jeremy, Seccad, Osman and I went to last Saturday and the one in October was that we sat with crazy fans, instead of the rabidly insane fans. I have since found out that the group we sat with at the first match is known as the (ghetto) fans. When I tell my students that I sat with them at a match I hear how they are all violent hooligans, and I should watch out for my safety. One of the students also informed me I could buy a bomb in the chinchin part of town. It is mostly a class issue, since my students aren't really from the rough areas of Ankara.

At any rate, the Antiko fans we sat with were still as nutso as any you would find in America, even if they didn't have to take breaks from the constant jumping and running side to side. One middle-aged gentleman in particular, dressed in rather European fashion, was fun to stand near. Throughout the match he loudly disparaged the officials and the opposing team (if you've ever been to a Lawrence High School basketball match you can think of about a half dozen people he would remind you of), and each time I got to shout "I agree with him! I am also angry!" This made Meredith laugh, but I think she was also nervous that we weren't the only ones who understood English there.

After the game we went to Kızılay with Seccad and Jeremy for some kokoreç (sheep intestince sausages). Yup, you read that translation right, I ate sheep intestines! And they were spicy. When I mentioned this part of the trip in class, I got a mixture of horrified stares and approving nods, divided along gender lines. Anyway, the sheep innards were great, especially after a long day of cheering and walking across the city to get to them. However, around 1am I had to ask Meredith if I could steal some of her imported antacids; by 2am I realized that American antacids versus spicy Turkish sheep intestines was about as even as my immediate family playing the 2007 Patriots in pick-up football. I haven't seen someone sleep that poorly since one my Summer @ Brown students OD'ed on caffeine pills.

Since then things have been pretty normal, the GI system is slowly recovering and I made bulgur with stir-fried vegetables for Meredith and James and Melanie this Saturday. Wednesday we are leaving for Sofya, Bulgaria for most of Christmas break, although we will be back on campus the 25th because we are working the next day. So wish us luck on the next adventure, and be in touch!

2007-12-09T04:18:00.000-08:00

Ankaragucu (Ankara force) Part II

Last week I went to another Ankaragücü futbol match, and it was definitely worth another blog entry, so that's what's coming. In the meantime I have been bogged down with finishing my divinity school application to Harvard (should go out tomorrow), reading about the abolitionists, making gingerbread houses, and of course, teaching my butt off. I can't guarantee I'll get the whole entry in tonight but I'll try. In the meantime, let me just mention:

-The game ended in a 2-2 tie, again. All 8 goals I have seen scored at the Ulus Stadium have come on the same end of the field, the one where I sat with the crazy fans last time (more on them later).

-I bought an Ankaragücü hat and scarf at the match. They have been great conversation starters. Usually the conversations go something like this:
Ankara native: "Ah, you support Ankaragücü?!"
Me: "Yes!"

-My favorite story of the week (maybe the year so far) from class came when my students were telling me how some kids got suspended for throwing snowballs at the statue of the Rector. I said they should have just brought the kids in and let the Rector throw snowballs at them, but hen one of my students pointed out this would set a very difficult precedent for the ones who pissed on the statue.

2007-12-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

Leftover Istanbul Photos/Wishes for the Holidays

Below we have a few more pictures from last weekend that I didn't get a chance to put in before, but first I wanted to make a little list for anyone out there who might be wondering what to get me this Christmakkuh/Festivus season. (Don't worry, if you don't have the suction/dinero for any of these I'll always settle for a donation to Heifer International in my name). Without further ado, these things happening in the next month/year/whenever would just make me happy:

A major nation at least threatening to boycott the Beijing olympics. Peasant oppression is rising, the government is still violating the UN charter-granted rights of at least FOUR major regions to self-determination, the environmental maladies that affect mostly the rural poor are worsening, and the genocide in Darfur is being funded in large part by the sale of natural resources to...the Chinese. There has been nothing but lip service paid to these issues since promises of their melioration was made in order for China to secure its bid. So someone has to be making noise about this in the near future, right?
For Trent Lott to get the Barry Bonds treatment. I want George Mitchell (Central Maine, holler!) to hand in his report on steroids in baseball, then start digging on Lott. There's gotta be something there, right? We know the guy is a first-rate scumbag, potentially racist (I thought his remarks about Thurmond were interpreted pretty harshly and were mostly just ill-considered) and has dished out more sleazy pork in the last few decades than Jimmy Dean, but he must have crossed some lines in legality in there somewhere as well I would think. He makes the Nevada senator from Godfather II look like Gandhi. If he ends up riding into the sunset to make another fortune lobbying with his son after this I will be rankled. Rankled I tell you.
For Obama to become President. I know we need more woman leaders and role models in this country who wouldn't list "carpet bombing" as an interest in their personal ads. Hillary has an admirable amount of strength and resiliency. But she reminds me of Mrs. Coulter (not Anne, I mean Lyra's mom from the Golden Compass), she's just very jaded. Barack would give a huge infusion of the necessary hopefulness and reform that the country is begging for right now. But instead we are about three months from Obama going the way of Gov. Dean, because Hillary can raise money faster than a liquor salesman greeting sailors on shore leave. Please feel free to interpret points two and three as a plea for us all to work towards publicly financed elections.
A tax on carbon emissions. When the Economist is pushing for government regulation in a way that would inhibit commerce, it's usually for a good reason.
For the Patriots to scratch punter Chris Hanson for the Jets game, as proposed by the brilliant Bill Simmons. Please.

The shore of the Sea of Marmara on the southern side of the Golden Horn in Istanbul (the balloons were strung up as part of a circus-type game where you paid some kids who ran it to try and shoot the balloons with a bb gun, but I'm not sure if you won anything if you shot them [the balloons, not the kids])

The Topkapi Gate, entrance to the palace and the sultan's harem- the inscriptions on the sides there roughly translate to "I got 99 problems but a wife ain't one"

Me in front of the Bosphorus. I can't think of any jokes for this one, so I'd just like to thank Mom and Dad for the orthodontic work once again. Cheers!

2007-11-27T10:40:00.000-08:00

Istanbul, Part II

So yesterday I left you all at the Grand Bazaar. I would like to jump from there to starting out Sunday at the Basilica Cistern, but Chachan at our hostel requires mention first. He was very friendly and chatty, and even managed to persuade your curmudgeonly correspondent to eat at the hostel for dinner. He was Kurdish (as apparently are the majority of workers in that district of Istanbul as I later found out) and of course spoke like a half-dozen different languages. I wish I had a picture of Meredith and I with him, instead you'll have to settle for a (washed out) shot of the street the hostel was on, sorry.

The next day we set off bright and mid-morningish for the lovely streets of Sultanahmet (where no Westerner ever felt unloved by the tourist vendors) and the famed Basilica Cistern. This was also a project of the the emperor Justinian and quite an interesting space just to be in. It was underground of course, but it was very well set-up and reminded me of a huge indoor version of a pond in a park, at night. I thought they should put in little paddle boats that people could rent. None of my pictures came out that well except for the ones of the main archaeological attraction, the Medusa heads that served as pillar foundations. They reminded me a little too much of my boss. One was upside down and the other was sideways. This is actually why modern delivery boxes have the "THIS END UP" thing on them.

From the Cistern we headed east to the Topkapi Palace, former home of the sultan and his four hundred-plus wives. The grounds were fairly expansive for being in a city and pretty well-kept, so it was a very beautiful spot to walk around. The jewels on display were really impressive. In between bouts of retching at the level of unequal distribution of wealth it displayed I had to admire the craftsmen of that era and their skills. And the tones reflected in all the rubies and emeralds awed me near to silence before I remembered I was supposed to be disgusted by the decadence of it all. At least the guys had taste. Unfortunately they wouldn't let you take pictures of the bling, but trust me, it was pimpalicious. The picture on the left here is the entrance to the royal treasury.

The other room that really fascinated me was the one with all the guns. I'll admit that one of the reasons Ottoman history fascinates me is the way firearms were developed and used during that dynasty, especially by the imperial janissaries. The guns on display in Istanbul were certainly worth the cabinet space just for their designs and decorations, which were interesting and intricate. But the museum also got me thinking about what the origin of those firearms can tell us about their use in the world today. It is telling that they were used by the janissaries to guard the imperial palace and treasury, because those origins show that their first purpose was legitimation through force and the protection of power and accumulated wealth by the fear of force. On the right here we have the closest thing I could find to the Patrick Harper special.

the Archaeological Museum was also terribly fascinating, one of those places that I would take my kids and spend a week or two if I were homeschooling them here. I have to mention especially the Necropolis of Sidon which had some pretty impressive tomb engravings. All I can say is that when it's my time to go, someone had better carve some naked, partying Romans into my casket before I start pushing up petunias. There were also good rooms on Byzantium, other sarcophagi, Bronze Age sculptures and Famous Mothers, but by that time Mery and I were both suffering from acute fullness of the brain, so we took a walk in the tea gardens next door, which were quite pleasant in the falling dusk. Once we got to the far end there was a great view of the Bosphorus from some cliffs that produced the picture on the left. The big treat that night was that Mery and i ran into our fellow SSI Mirelle Phillips at the Metropolis Cafe on the way back from dinner. We ended up talking with her and the guys who worked at the cafe for over four hours, and the illustrious Paul Berry stopped by also with our mutual acquaintance Andrew Tobolowsky.

That pretty much concludes the visual part of the presentation. But I would like to share that with no particular plans for what time we would leave on a bus, Mery and I left the hostel around ten thirty and walked/took the metro to the bus station on the European side. It was easier to get to than the one on the Asian side but probably has fewer buses for Ankara. At any rate, we roll up at 11:50 and I said "I hope there's a 12 o'clock bus". Ask and ye shall receive! I love it when that happens. This anecdote is actually partly an excuse for me to share the story of coming back from DC to Providence last year that I have forgotten I told most of you. In that instance, I was trying to find a cheap way home from a weekend of protesting and lobbying and ended up taking the Chinatown bus to NY, then to Foxwoods Casino where I slept under a craps table for a couple hours, then to Boston where I got a free donut by begging the Krispy Kreme guy, and finally to Providence. I had a 9am Colonial History (which actually has nothing to do with anyone's colon, disappointingly) lecture from Nobel Laureate Gordon Wood to get to, and managed to walk in the doorway wrapping up a 17-hour trip at 8:58. Now that's timing for you.

2007-11-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

Istanbul, Part I

You're getting the Istanbul entry in (at least) two parts for three reasons: I didn't get around to writing an entry last week, so this will keep my average at one a week; I have fended off over three hundred thousand requests to purchase tourist novelties in the last couple days and am kinda exhausted; this was an epic tour that deserves extra space. Basically I want to get something written now while the trip is fresh in my mind, and if I wait until tomorrow morning the temptation to plagiarize the whole thing from Meredith's blog will be too great.

We got to take the train there, an 11:30 departure from Ankara called the Fatih Ekspresi. It was the best I have slept in transportation mode without having a sleeper car at least in a while. We got in around 8am and took the ferry across the still-misty Bosphorus onto the European side of Istanbul, having arrived on the Asian side. This was a teasing first glimpse at the city because everything was pretty much still concealed inland, but you could just make out enough the buildings lining the shore to get a feel for the architecture and beauty of it. Nothing says "Good Morning, Mehmet!" like minarets rising through the fog. (I didn't take any pictures until we got to the cool buildings, don't worry, they're coming).

Meredith and I had breakfast with Amari, one of our co-workers we were traveling with, at a börek restaurant next to the Galata Bridge. Then we crossed the bridge into the "Golden Horn" part of Istanbul and the Sultanahmet district. That's the relatively touristy part of town where, conveniently, a half-dozen or so of the major attractiosn are located within several blocks of each other. We walked up a long gradual hill with the Bosphorus at our backs, to the North, and came down the other side with the Marmara Sea in front to the South. After checking in at the the Sultan Hostel (they're big on the sultan theme for tourists there, I guess Suleyman the Magnificient [best name for a dynastic ruler in the last 2,200 years if you ask me] had a thing for overpriced beer and carpet shops), we (Meredith, Amari, co-worker Ted, Ted's random acquaintance Jeff and I) headed out to the Blue Mosque, about three blocks North of where we stayed.

Before going in, I got to take a picture for some Chinese tourists from Guangzhou who wanted to get Meredith in their shot as a token foreigner. The outside of the Blue Mosque was great not just for its design but also the way it dominated so much of the neighborhood where we stayed. it had a presence all out of proportion to its size because so much was built around it and there were always lights on it at night. It was a very cool thing to have the focus on.

(Feeling blue? Go to the mosque!)

The inside was spectacular primarily for its geometric designs, its stained glass windows, and the fact that it is still used several times a day for prayer. I was too busy to give a guest sermon, but I told them I'll be in town again sometime in the next few months.

Next we headed basically across the street, to the Hagia Sophia/Aya Sophia, the one built in 530-something by Justinian to be the greatest church in the world. When the Ottomans took the city they plastered over all the nice mosaics because that stuff's not allowed for Islam (and you guys thought I was a philistine). By the way since Saturday was Teacher's Day I got free or reduced admission everywhere and ended up saving like $30!

(The Virgin, the Baby, the pizza delivery Saints [hey, who feels like cooking after a virgin birth?])
(I'm there to remind them to pray in the direction of the thing behind me. Or was it the other way around? Some of the memories got knocked around when I was tackled by the security guard for trying to nab one of the tiles from the above mosaic as a souvenir. It wasn't even one of the big ones!)

We also went to the Grand Bazaar on Saturday. Basically it was a dressed-up version of the one in Cairo, which I liked much better. It seemed like the Mall of America, Middle Eastern style. You know, if the salespeople at the GAP harassed you with special prices as you went by.

OK, that's it for tonight, coming soon: parks, museums, cisterns, restaurants, good company and good timing!

2007-11-11T08:43:00.001-08:00

Random Catch-up Musings

-The students that I went to the football match in Ankara with traveled to Bursa last weekend for a match against their "brother team". The tradition is for each team's supporters to cheer for the other team during the game. This practice came about in memory of a student from Bursa who came to Ankara for university and had many friends in both places before he was killed in the military. So often sports is idiotically divisive, so I found this to be a refreshing and enlightened thing for them to do. I think it would be wonderful if high schools in the US and other countries had a similar tradition with their rivals. If you know of any that do exist, please let me know!

-Shimon Peres, President of Israel, received an honorary degree from Bilkent this afternoon. Among my favorite quotes from him: "If you want to serve the future, don't be afraid to be part of the minority." "
"When you win a war, your people are united and applaud you. When you make peace, your people are doubtful and resentful."
"If you serve a great cause you will be a great man."
"Unless you learn to be a teacher of yourself you will lose the flow of modernity."
Much as I disagree with the actions of the Israeli state during the time that Peres has been one of its leaders, I have to give credit to his efforts for peace and his optimism as a leader. At least his rhetoric was far more positive than most of the Israelis who spoke at Brown, even if that was mostly due to the respective locations and audiences of the speakers.

-It is a little surreal to be living in a country that President Bush is 1) trying to convince to NOT invade another country and 2) actually being listened to by. Lost in all the talk about Pakistan this week was the fact that Bush and Rice seem to have actually headed off a major invasion by Turkey, at least for the time being. Which is pretty amazing, if you think about it. This time last week I was resigned to another sequel to the spring of 2003, with a flag that had less blue on it. Now, there are tinglings of pride that we may have done something positive in the region through diplomatic intervention. Hostages were released by the PKK. Political tensions are declining. And there was far less bloodshed and ill-will than if a major military invasion had occurred. Stay tuned, we are still waiting for the other shoe to drop somewhere here.

-My new favorite game to play each morning as I scan the headlines is "Will This Make the 100 Worst Moments of the Bush Administration?" My friend Will emailed me the TrueMajority.org report on the first Bush veto that has been overridden, and at first I was sure that had to be in there. But Bush will have been in office for over 400 weeks by the January after next, meaning only about one event for month can make the top 100 list on average. Does the veto override get this month's nod? Probably, but crony-licious appointee Harriet Myers awarding a prize to a blatantly racist Halloween costume has to get consideration, right? And what about the depths of embarrassment we've seen as one of his key allies in the war on terror imposed "emergency rule" on Pakistan because the Supreme Court was in danger of ruling he couldn't be president and head of the military at the same time? Isn't this somewhat akin to talking up your boyfriend for years to your friends and then having to explain why the word "fryalator" appears prominently on his resume? Well not exactly, but you get the idea. Musharraf is shedding his final vestigial shards of legitimacy and Bush is just kind of awkwardly asking him to stop, with about the same effectiveness I would have defending Shaq in the low post. (High post is a different story, by the way.) So my proposal is for several 100 Worst Moments editions, like Foreign Policy, Emergency Relief, Failed Initiatives That Might Have Actually Been Good Ideas, The Patriot Act, and No Child Left Behind. Then we could combine them into The 1001 Worst Moments collection. Then of course librarians would have the difficulty of deciding whether to put it next to Stephen King or Gordon Wood, but I'll leave that question to Mike.

-Rev. Kendrick gave an excellent sermon this morning at First Unitarian Boston that I was able to catch thanks to the glories of streaming radio on the internet. One of his essential points was that only through silence can we answer the most important questions in our lives (he used the example of when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus "What is truth" and Jesus was silent). He cited Laozi also as a religious leader who acknowledged that since words cannot be used to answer the deepest questions, the greatest teachers dedicate themselves to service. And yet, UUism is a religion that calls for speaking out: against injustice, against oppressive power structures and against hatred and violence. How can we reconcile these teachings? As ever, I wish us all tranquility and perseverance as we embrace the paradox.

2007-10-29T13:41:00.000-07:00

National Day

In honor of today being Cummurhiyet Day in Turkey:

2007-10-29T13:10:00.000-07:00

The Staring Thing

(Note: I am a week behind now in my goal to do one entry every week. I may decide to have given myself a week off somewhere, or there may be a bonus post lurking somewhere. I've written three thousand words worth of Starr King application material in the last three days, and I have another couple pages to go, so bet on the former.)

Imagine you are walking through Times Square with no pants on. Eyes are on you from every direction. They follow you until their owners' heads twist off from their own curiosity. New ones sprout up continuously. They fix you with an unwavering gaze. Your skin, your hair, your clothes tingle with scrutiny. You begin to feel like Maddux at an Alice Sebold conference. You think you have morphed into Tipper Gore attending a Snoop Dogg concert. Oh, the stares.

Actually, this is not at all what getting stared at here is like for me. (I mostly included that last paragraph for the jokes). In fact, I'll admit, I revel in the attention. Take a moment to let that sink in, I know you're thinking "BUCKY! You're not a whore for attention! You've never once gone out of your way to get people to pay you notice!" Be that as it may, I do appreciate the looks here. This is the first time that good-looking college women have stared at me on a regular basis since my summer job distributing Haagen-Daas samples. This is the first time good-looking college men have stared at me since I learned to stop myself from singing "Oh Delilah" as I walked across the Colby campus. In short, everyone here seems to want to taste this eye candy, and I am soaking it in, like a Twinkie vendor at fat camp.

(How Bucky feels in Turkey)

2007-10-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

The Canakkale Trip (Cha NAK kal lay)

So Canakkale is a little further from Ankara than Mery and I had thought....by like about five hours. Much as I like bus rides, it's always a bummer to get to your city acfter dark- makes it harder to navigate, get one's bearings and get a sense for the liveliness of the places, since much of it is already shut down.

First, a note of tour buses (I omit the word "luxury" here only because there is no bathroom on most of the Turkish ones). That these have not become more widely used in the US is surely an indication of the degree to which individual vehicles are regarded as status symbols, because in addition to their economic and ecological advantages, public transport via these babies is incontrovertibly more luxurious. The fact that their use in the US is restricted to those too young, old or poor to drive themselves seems a phenomenon giving manifestation to the beatitudes. For example, the Concord Trailways buses that go from Portland to Boston (one of my fondest discoveries during college not involving the words 'hefeweizen' or 'P2P') is a cheaper, less ecologically-impactful method of transport that provides huge windows and seats orthy of a La-Z-Boy showroom. And in terms of safety, would you rather get rammed by a Hummer in your petite Peugeot or one of these mammoths? We can and should have a much stronger rail system in the US, but as long as we've arterialized our purple mountains and amber waves of grain with highways we should use that system in a more efficient, less stressful way by relying as much on fleets of these puppies for inter-city transport as countries like Turkey, China and Panama do.

The landscape as you leave Ankara in any direction is a a welcome mixture of agriculture and desert. While it might be called the Anatolian PLATEAU, the area before the coastal regions is actually moderately hilly, providing for an interesting variety in the topography and uncultivated flora you to look at. Both times that I have descended onto the coastal regions of the Black Sea and Marmara it has come as a welcome change in geography. The much-higher rainfall makes for greatly increased plant life both on lowland farms and tree-covered hillsides.

It was three hours before we took our first stop, but thereafter they occurred at least every hour to gain and dispatch shorter-distance riders and get lunch. Hence the 11-hour bus ride. At least the bus didn't break down...except on the ride back.

Canakkale itself is neatly aligned along the main streets Cummurhiyet (Republic) Bulvari and Ataturk Caddesi, to the great benefit of travelers arriving late and without maps. The hostel we wanted from the Lonely Planet guide was cheap, easy to find and well-located, but we moved the second night because there was a place nearby with breakfast and our own bathroom for only a little more. After dinner the first night we got in, we strolled along the waterfront, avoiding the casts of fishermen as we made our way to the big Trojan horse statue. On a patch of cement lowered slightly from the rest of the waterfront walkway there was a basketball cout with kids playing both nights we saw it, despite the cold and wind. The waterfront was pretty and nautically-oriented, without feeling fancy and inaccessible. It was well-lit and there were small fishing boats tied up along most of its distance.

The first day in Canakkale we wandered to the Naval Museum, then back to town through some less-touristy back streets (unless those roosters were tourists too), and to a tea salon. We waited for an unsuccessful half-hour at a bus stop to go to Guzelyali, a neighboring town purported to to have some actual beaches, and then stuck out for the archaeological museum at the southern end of Ataturk Caddesi. After passing a bunch of shoe and clothing stores, a bridge with the local bus depot underneath, more apparel stores, some schools and houses, and yet another set of manicans sporting the latest in cheap, Eastern European fashion. There were some ruinous-looking pillars and tablets visible through the fence, but since it was the bayram (holiay), the museum was closed. On the way back to town, we saw a bus labelled "Guzelyali"- unfortunately we got on in the wrong direction and the driver just dropped us in the middle of town again. Then we waited about another ten minutes at that stop, just for the hell of it, and were this time rewarded with another bus coming the other way to take us in the right direction.

Guzelyali is a small town with lots of modern-looking (but not fancy) apartments, a couple cafes and a mile or two of sandy beaches with clear Aegean water. It reminded me a little of Punta Chame in Panama, but with more development. The hotel staff that morning, who had obviously never been to Winslow Park in Freeport in April for a dip off the Harb Cottage dock, warned that we wouldn't be able to swim for the cold. I found it invigorating and enchanting. It was great to be reminded that you don't have to spring for an expensive resort in order to find someplace really nice to swim.

Dinner that evening warrants mention thanks to the mussel salad. It only had vinegar, olive oil, pickles, onions and mussels, but it redefined my horizons in terms of culinary possibilities for things with the word 'salad' in the title. Ne lezzetli!

Sunday we intended to visit Troy (Troia/Truva), but it was even colder and wetter than the day before, so we stopped to get a new coat and spend time in a simit bakery and drink coffee. Gotta survive in the wild somehow. the weather made me feel nostalgic for Maine more than I have been in Ankara because there was a true rawness to it and there were actual puddles threatening to remind me what frozen extremities are like. The bus terminal was another setback, because the guy at TRUVA BUSLINES said that no buses go to Troy, just taxis. Driven by his brother-in-law. Very cheap. Special price for you. Okay, I'm making those last three sentences up, but I didn't entirely believe him. A couple other people tried to tell us how to get there, but it didn't work out until someone at one of the other buslines knew the word for 'bridge', because we needed to go back to the local depot we had passed Saturday. Who knew.

The Troy archaeological sites provided ruins from the last four thousand years, many accompanied by apoligist plaques explaining the early (and damaging) excavations of Heinrich Schleimann. Apparently numbnuts there decided to dig straight through to the ruins of Homer's era, the rest of the strata be damned. Which is a bummer, because there are nice strata. These were caused by the fact that each time the city was abandoned, the new occupants had to knock down the old buildings made of crude brick and erect their own out of...crude brick. So only the rock walls and such were left standing. Meredith was the perfect person to visit the site with, because of her depth of knowledge and appreciation for the lore surrounding it. As we examined the millennia-old repmples and columns and walls, she gleefully recounted the literary fate of each of the Iliad's characters. The weather and parts of the scenery were still making me happily homesick, so all in all it was quite a splendid afternoon.

2007-10-11T01:39:00.000-07:00

Ankaragucu!! (pron. "Ankaragoojoo")

On Sunday, I went down into Ankara with one of my students (Seccad; he looks like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but is about a million times nicer) to see a football (real football) match between one of Ankara's four Turkish league teams, Ankaragucu, and Sivassport. Once we took the bus into town, the first thing we did was find the park where Seccad's brother works as a security guard...so that his brother could take Seccad's three and five-team teaser bets on this weekend's matches. Nothing like seeing a uniformed guard make change in the middle of his shift to remind you you're not in Maine anymore.

Next, we met up with Seccad's classmate, Osman, in the Kizilay district and found the gathering of Ankaragucu fans in the street there. Everyone was chanting ("ole oleoleoleole" and all that) and waving huge flags. At one point a fight broke out between a couple of the supporters and the "captain" of the fans (yes, they have a captain, more on him later) went over to help break things up. Then a guy went around handing out sparklers for us all to light, and if everyone wasn't already jumping around like their hair was on fire, making the metaphor literal certainly helped. (For those of you keeping track at home, so far we've had mass dancing and singing, with pyrotechnics, and this is BEFORE we started moving toward the stadium; it was a tiring day.)

Marching down the streets of Kizilay, and then through the main avenues leading to the Ulus district where the stadium is, the chanting and singing was joined by derogatory taunting of random opponents' owners and managers, as well as a confident disregard for traffic regulations. It was the first time since the protest at Textron that I have marched through the streets with a throng of people (no one got left behind and arrested this time, that I know of), and it was a similar energy. I think the difference between a political protest and a sports rally really boils down to the protest being cheaper to attend, but with the knowledge your team will certainly lose. So I guess the message to Cubs fans is.... (too early for Cubbies jokes? ok, too early).

Fast-forward two miles to the stadium: meat vendors all over the parking lot (though less so I expect than normal because we are nearing the end of Ramadan), brigades of police making formation outside the entrance gates, enough yellow and blue (Ankaragucu's colors) to satisfy an art teacher. Once inside (Seccad had promised the use of one of his season tickets, but we couldn't find his friend who had them there so he bought us each tickets for about $4 a pop), I discovered that part of the reason those suckers were so cheap is that you weren't paying for a SEAT so much as a place to stand and watch the game from. The hard pieces of plastic with numbers on them were so dirty and grimy that most people just perched on their backs until the match started (we were there an hour early, so half-way through I caved and sat down).

About ten or fifteen minutes before the match started, our fearless leader came angrily (he did everything angrily as far as I could tell, except kiss his friend on the cheek after match) marching along the inside of the fence separating the fans from the field and demanded one of the personnel to open the gate so he could climb up and direct our cheers. He stood next to a couple kids with huge drums (even for percussionists they were not particularly gifted musicians) and began orchestrating wildly our collective reactions to the announcements of the starting lineups. This part was basically hiss and whistle as loud as you can at the opposing team (my eardrums still hurt from that part) and chant things about the greatness of Ankaragucu while we take the field. I even missed the opening kick-off because I was trying to decipher this guy's hand gestures in relation where exactly I was supposed to be waving and chanting at the moment.

In fact, the action definitely took an overall backseat to the cheering for most of the match. It seemed that at any given moment, we were either shouting at one of the other groups of fans (there were actually two or three other sections like ours on either side of the field, ours being behind one of the nets) or inwardly focused on keeping time with the drummers and joining in the most recently begun jeers. The only times this was interrupted by action on the field was for injuries (booing the immoral fakers on Sivassport and cheering the fallen, heroic comrades of Ankaragucu) and goals (I was really impressed at the way the fans rallied around the home cause after they gave up a goal).

Did I mention that personal space is not a big thing here? Our section of the stadium resembled a mosh pit much more closely than any crowd of fans I have recently witnessed. The first few times that someone from behind put their full weight on my shoulder to stay standing during a chant that involved everyone jumping up and down in time it freaked me out, but I got comfortable very quickly with bracing myself against Seccad and the people in front of me. For about thirty-five minutes each half we did the whole jumping-waving-chanting routine and then the captain would call a rest where people went back to perching on their hard plastic chairs. It was not a relaxing spectator event, it was WORK to cheer there. It was thousands of has-been footballers channeling only slightly less energy than they would have used on the field into vocal and choreographic support. At one point in the second half, Seccad looked at me and said "Captain say, now we go down". I thought, we can't be leaving, there's fifteen minutes left! Turns out, he meant the group had decided to have an impromptu fitness test for my knee by combining the collective jumping routine with all moving down several rows of seats at the same time. Then back up. Then to the left and right. I still have no friggin' clue why that happened, but at least I survived with my ACL intact. Let's just say that I have a few more very close friends now than I did Sunday morning. And that "Eau de crazy Turkish football fan" will not be sweeping the world perfume markets any time soon.

As for the match itself, the end was much more thrilling than the beginning. Ankaragucu, despite the deep enthusiasm of its fans went down a goal in the first ten minutes and it was 2-0 at the end of the half, both of them on breakaways. The goalie of course was typically calm and classy about it, shouting at his defenders and pointing vigorously at who the manager should take out. Early in the second half our boys put one in on a header off a free kick a ways to the left of the penalty area, and tied it up a half hour later with another header on a cross from the left. A tie at home may not seem like a great outcome, but Sivassport is second in the league right now, and we were really giving it to them for most of the second half, so nothing to be ashamed of.

ANkara-gu-cu, AnKARa-gu-cu! ANkara-gu-cu, AnKARa-gu-cu!

2007-10-01T02:10:00.000-07:00

Dikkat! (Caution)

Yesterday going to the supermarket Real (and I mean SUPERmarket, in the sense of like Stop'n'Shop plus JC Penney plus Bed Bath'n'Beyond all in one [sorry, that's probably less remarkable to people from outside Maine]), I was almost run over in the maddeningly complex and pedestrian-unfriendly rotary/entrance. Once inside, I found myself boxed out of viewing the kefir collection, reached in front of at the cookie aisle and cut off at nearly every turn through the produce section by fellow shoppers with the willingness to accede the right of way equal to your average NFL defensive back. The most potentially aggravating setback was when I turned around to set my frozen vegetables in my cart and it was gone. Apparently someone else helped themselves to it because it was empty. (Mom, I know you are thinking "why on earth were you getting frozen stuff FIRST!". Another lesson learned, I promise.)

I recount all this not to carp about how difficult life is in a foreign country (I'm actually as happy here as I have ever been I think), where rude people with mustaches and B.O. could use a lesson in courtesy, but instead to say that I don't really care about any of it. People's perceptions of personal space and pedestrian rights are very different here than in the US, and I'm pretty much OK with that. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, the people you interact with on a regular basis are so nice that it's hard to take any of perceived "rudeness" in these situations personally (except for those guys that almost hit Meredith in your white sports car- I have your license plate number and a bag of sugar with your gas tank's name on it). It's a combination of "just getting used to it" and cultural awareness (mostly the first one, I would be giving myself toooo much credit to claim I was aware of much beyond the fact that Red Sox games happen during my best sleep cycles here and instead televised sports matches in prime time tend to feature at best three scores in an entire game, if you're lucky), where the 437th time someone turns their cart in front of you going towards the Chokella (a delicious, less healthy, cheaper version of Nutella) you just make sure to get close enough to them going through that the next person doesn't close you out also.

It's amazing what you can get used to.

2007-09-25T03:23:00.000-07:00

Benim Öğrenci!

This has been my first week with students, and so far I am very happy to be teaching them. They have names like Onur, Murat, Gökhan, Buse, Yuşra and Mehmet, and though about 90% are from Ankara and points west, there are some from all different parts of Turkey. They are also preparing to enter many different disciplines, though economics and engineering are by far the most popular. Most are very proud to be at Bilkent and widely regard it as the best university in Turkey. Basketball is the most popular American sport here, followed by baseball and football, though of course none of those compare to Turkish soccer. I have been delighted at their levels of enthusiasm and participation so far. Some have much better English than others, but the overall effort is encourgaing, and I believe the speaking skills program will truly improve BUSEL as an English prep program over the next year.

The students come to us once a week for two hours, and we see ten groups of 4-6 students. Right now I have introduced myself about 8 times and still have a couple more to go. Good times. I am so good at "2 truths and a lie" it's not fair anymore, like me versus a Friends Camper in rock, paper, scissors (for all the times I used that this summer, Allegra Atkinson was the only person to beat me). Luckily, the comprehension of the students is much better than their expressive abilities most of the time, so explaining worksheets and other activities is doable. Each class also usually has one or two students with very good comprehension who can explain things to their classmates when needed. I promise I won't actually use that strategy all semester.

Peace and leblebli (the sesame-covered chickpeas that are my favorite food here so far),
Bucky

2007-09-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

The four T's- Things Take Time in Turkey

According to the Fulbright advisor of one of my colleagues, that's an important mantra to keep in mind here. So far, I would have to agree. For example, one obvious and constant question for me since I arrived has been: "How do I register for my masters-level classes?" At various points in the last four weeks, I have been told I would have to visit the registrar, register with the department and register online. 0 for 3 on that one. Yesterday all the interns got emails saying the head of teacher services had sent our class info to the registrar's office, and we were all set. The hours I spent searching for those offices or the online registration system? Eh, mm, not so useful.

There are multiple examples of such frustrating and stressful logistical complications. The uncertainty of our living situation after the first three weeks, the mysterious five extra hours of contact time in our contacts that haven't been assigned, the internet connections in our current dorms, the date our passports will return to our possession...I could go on. It's enough to make the vein throb on a yoga master's forehead.

But here's the thing: the polychronic sense of time and laidback, helpful attitude is so pervasive in Turkey, you can't help but feel like if anything did go terribly wrong, it would get fixed. Last week I boarded a bus to head home from the gym because my knee was sore. The driver said he was going to middle campus, but when we came close to my street, he kept going to the music building. At the music center, everyone else on the bus got off, and I prepared to give the driver a nasty look for continuing after I said I needed to disembark. Instead, he motioned me to sit down, turned the huge touring bus around, and went back DOWN my street to drop me off. I'm still not entirely sure if this was on the actual route, but you have to love a city where the bus drivers remind you of the nice woman who took you to kindergarten your first day (or second day, sorry Mom, I can't remember if you drove me the first day).

Overall, at least 75% of people I come in contact with at Bilkent I would classify as "nice" or better on the personality scale. In contrast, working at a similar school in China it was definitely closer to 25-50%. Panama wouldn't be a fair comparison, but it's definitely the frontrunner for schools in foreign countries I have worked at (partly because I worked at an NGO there, not a school, and partly because the coolest guy I worked with was Costa Rican, not Panameno). There are good teachers anywhere you go (only in MSAD49, however, do they come close to outnumbering the also-ubiquitous mosquito). But in Ankara, the guy who makes the photocopies, the guys who serve you lunch, and the woman who tells you the police department isn't giving your passport back for another week are all very nice, too. Even the COMPUTER HELP DESK GUY was fairly painless to get help from Saturday!!

So, even if I can't properly subject myself to the masochistic fall ritual of watching the Sox fall apart or bump chests with anyone over the latest TD pass thrown by my favorite male model, at least there is a sense of security in the basic kindness of strangers that, in the long run, will probably account for more.

2007-09-11T08:31:00.001-07:00

Arkadash'ed!!

This will be brief for the moment, I have to go back to the dorm and let my roommate in because we only have one key right now. and no internet. honk if you love liminal periods in your life.

Highlights of my trip to Safranbolu and Amasra:
(Marion took some pictures, which can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/marionpenning/sets)
The pensiyon we stayed at in Safranbolu was owned by a wonderfully hospitable family that had bought an Ottoman-era house and made a pensiyon out of it. They had a baby named Effe (I'm not sure if it's spelled the same as the popular beer), who was the cutest baby since the kitten on the street. On Thursday, one of the sons from the family took us on a tour of Yokuk, a preserved Ottoman village nearby. The houses and streets and gave a wonderful feeling of the place's history through their materials, layout, and decoration. We toured a house from back in the day when the grandfather would have lived on the top floor and his son on the third floor and that guy's son on the second and the animals on the bottom floor, which was cool because you could see how it was possible for them to cook, bathe and sleep in one room. After the tour we were offered grapes and conversation by an out-going woman named Felis. She asked if we could get married so that she could come to America with me and I said that sounded fine, so now we are arkadash's (companions/spouses). You should mostly be receiving invitations shortly. Meredith is still first in my heart though.

Going from Safranbolu to Bartin (our connection to Amasra), we finally began to leave the Anatolian Plateau. Our surroundings resembled Maine- coniferously covered hills gave onto deciduous stream valleys. The sun even disappeared as we began descending into Amasra. In Amasra we stayed with another great family, folks named Hava and Zohar, a retired teacher and engineer with daughters teaching in Istanbul. Their house had romantic dark wooden windows looking straight down onto the Black Sea in all her strength and tumult. They brought us gozleme (a nan-esque stapleof turkish diets) and figs fresh from their gardens and drove us to the bus stop when it was raining Sunday morning. Amasra was a beautiful little town, small enough to see most of it and then walk back to the pensiyon, with a great beach for dipping in the Black Sea. I tried to explain to Hava that I want to be a UU minister while we were watching the Turkish national basketball team lose to Slovenia, and couldn't quite do it, but I managed to learn the words for Jesus and Moses (Isa and Musa) in the process, and made her laugh at the fact that we only have call to worship once a week usually in the US, but they do it five times a day in Turkey.

The last tidbit I would like to include for now (I hope to update this in the next couple days with more details) involves the Turkish custom of only accepting an offer after it has been made three times, in case the person doesn't really mean it. Like when Zohar let me have the only couch cushion while we watched women's volleyball, i forgot about this when i was asking him if he wanted it instead and only asked once, so of course he said no. But when Mery and I boarded the bus to head back to Ankara, a woman with a baby was sitting behind us, and one of our seats was stuck in the tilted-back position. After we figured this out, I had to insist several times to get the woman to switch with us, and she did.

Please post or email me if you want to hear more about anything that I am talking about, hope you are all enjoying my attempts at writing about the adventures here!

2007-09-02T09:08:00.000-07:00

Republican Turkish History and Kurdish Self-Determination

Article one, section two of the Charter of the United Nations states that the purposes of the UN include:

To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace;

Since the first Gulf War, US relations with Turkey have been occasionally strained. The principal issues causing tension have been those of Turkish cooperation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and US support for Kurdish nationals in northern Iraq. The creation of a Kurdish state in the ethnically Kurdish regions of Southeastern Turkey and Northern Iraq is quite clearly an issue of self-determination. Since the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, Kurds have been crying out for the right to form an independent and autonomous government. Those demands were originally "suppressed" by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and monolithic icon of the Turkish Republic. Today, they are suppressed by a lack of engagement of the issue by mainstream Turkey. Kurds are also essentially prevented from participating in parliament because the Kurdish Nationalist Party is incapable of garnering the 10% of the popular vote needed to be represented as a party. Because of its support for the creation of an independent Kurdish state, the friendly relations that the US is attempting to cultivate with Turkey right now, are, in fact, based on the principle of self-determination.

The government policy-makers in the US have formed the stance of supporting Kurdish nationalism through strategic calculations aiming towards creating stability in northern Iraq, but they have inadvertently taken the more morally justifiable stance. Even when it is merely coincidental, Washington deserves praise for taking a stance in line with the most noble aims of the United Nations.

To say that Kurds should be allowed their own state, one must base the argument on the principle of self-determination alone. This is because the PKK, the Kurdish Nationalist Party, has committed despicable acts of terrorism throughout its existence. When I have heard mainstream (non-Kurdish) Turks discuss the issue of a Kurdish state here in Ankara, they object with violent emotion to its creation because the PKK is seen as a terrorist organization. The Kurds need not conduct their quest for self-determination in such a fashion. For an example of a group being denied its right to self-determination that is keeping pressure on the relevant government without the use of violence, they need only look a thousand or so miles to the East, to the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India. The Tibetans get more and better press internationally than do the Kurds, partly because of the popularity of the Dali Lama, but also because of their strictly non-violent approach rooted in Buddhism. That exposure allows them to put more pressure on the Chinese government to accede to their demands of an independent and autonomous Tibet. Conversely, every time a PKK terrorist commits an act of terrorism, the Turkish government is only encouraged to dig in its heels and not be seen as giving in to terrorists.

2007-08-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

Mashallah!

Apparently there is a Turkish belief that if you are a male and you pass under a rainbow you become gay, and if you are a female you become lesbian. The tour bus with all us BUSEL (Bilkent University School of English Language) interns on in went under a rainbow on the way to Cappadochia (Kap-a-DOKE-ee-a), so I guess they don't have to worry about us making babies this year. Another widely-held belief that receives a greater level of genuine credulity here is that cell phones interfere with the brake systems of buses. Furthermore, if someone shows you a picture of their new-born baby, you are supposed to say "Mashallah!" (God watch over you/may this continue) and pit on it (I'm not sure yet if this applies when they bring in the actual kid), beacuse saying how beautiful the baby is is bad luck (you are giving it a potential arrogance that will have to be erased by something bad down the road). One way to ward off this bad luck is with the evil eye, which cancels out the effect with its own badness, or absorbs it. Those suckers are all over the place here. To review: please don't call my cell phone over here to tell me about your baby, because if it goes off while I'm on the bus and I say how cute it must be, I'm going to get a lethal dose of evil eyes and the school will end with gay Bucky kebab for lunch.
A parade of wedding cars went past us yesterday in Cappadochia and honked their horns while we all cheered. This morning another parade of festive vehicles passed us, and as we began to cheer, our guide said that it was actually in celebration of a circumcision, because "Mashallah!" was written on one of the cars. That helped explain why the guy in the tux was crying. Life here is interesting, but I miss you all like that guy misses his foreskin!

2006-11-01T07:35:00.000-08:00

Who To Blame for Obesity (the one-paragraph rant that would give my EL11 professor a stroke, or at least cause to bemusedly furrow his brow)

Yeah, I used to be all about blaming the fat people, but as long as we force kids to sit in one place all day doing things they hate for most of their childhood while stuffing them sweeties and soda (I mean, we got fucking frosted flakes and chocolate milk in my class when i was in 5th grade through the subsidized brekky program!!!), guess what, oops, they end up fat a lot of the time. so many factrors at work here... the companies that sell fatty and sugary foods get so much advertising time, have the most powerful lobbyists...people at the most risk of having a diet heavy in that stuff (the poor) don't get to hear from their physicians (much less nutritionists) often enough bc there's no universal healthcare...FOOTBALL is the most popular varsity sport among high school males, and that ENCOURAGES most of them to put on dozens of pounds each summer so they can push other kids around come fall (ultimate anyone?). And the kicker is that being a little overweight apparently DOES make you live longer, it's just the obesity that kills ya with heart disease and everything, but many of those of us who want to change this (myself included) have masochistic, puritanical ideals about absolutely staying at or below a healthy weight being the only way to be truly healthy. The encouraging thing is that most of the people I know and love who think about this issue have helped others in their own way, on an individual level, and that's where the change has to start.

2006-10-27T10:58:00.000-07:00

A Call for the Return of the Fairness Doctrine (Ben Franklin Would've Written this Under a Clever Pseudonym)

In 1987 The FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, a measure in existence since the inception of the Federal Radio Commission (an FCC precursor) and throughout the entire history of the FCC until that point. The Fairness Doctrine required, well, fairness, by mandating the expression of different viewpoints on any frequency licensed by the FCC, which is all of them. Not coincidentally, Rush Limbaugh came on the air in 1988, and the talk radio industry that has sprung up without the burden of fairness is at least 90% right-wing. So since over 80% of Americans get their news from talk radio and similarly uninhibited and biased cable news stations, we currently have a very uninformed electorate in the US (Statistics in this paragraph come via the speech Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave at Brown on Oct. 20th).

In 1731 Benjamin Franklin wrote in his "Apology for Printers" that printers should "chearfully serve all contending Writers". "Printers" he wrote "naturally acquire a vast Unconcernedness as to the right or wrong Opinions contain'd in what they print; regarding it only ast the Matter of their daily labour." I interpret this to mean whoever wants to get their material printed should be able to, regardless of the printer's personal opinion. That certainly isn't happening these days (in the news networks that are analogously responsible for disseminating information), especially since the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine. Like Thomas Jefferson said: "I would rather have a strong free press and no government than a strong government and no free press."

2006-10-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

CHARGES DROPPED!!

Yesterday the eleven of us who were arrested in Cranston at Sen. Reed's office (suggestions for catchy group nicknames currently being accepted) were arraigned at Kent County Courthouse in Warwick on QUAKER Lane. With the help of local attorneys Bob Mann and Andy Horwitz, as well as public defender Chris O'Connell we all decided to plead "not guilty" and ask for legal representation from the state as necesary. There was much discussion within the group as to the morality of pleading "not guilty" to something we intended to do all along, but based on advice from the lawyers mentioned and Dad, it seemed to me that pleading "no contest" would mean admitting that we did was a crime, and not the guided act of conscience that we intended it to be. Our enthusiastic defense team also had numerous ideas for ways we could the charges dismissed.

So, we all made our pleas and got a pre-trial date for 11/20. But, on the way out of the court room reporters from Channel 12 news and WPRO news radio asked if they could interview representatives from our group. The news guys had been there for a different stories but were intrigued by our continuing narrative. Several of our group including Noah Merrill, Rev. Lee Clasper-Torch (or Torch-Clasper as we like to call him) and Military Families Speak Out member Stephany Kern interviewed with them.

When the report was aired on the 5:30 news, it came with the message that Sen. Reed's office had dropped the trespassing charges against us! Apparently they didn't want any more press coverage than we had already got and werer unwilling to pursue the matter further. Things went from them saying the night we got arrested "Well, you guys should up and plead a 'nolo' and we'll file it" to "OK, not guilty, we just want to end this without any more harm to our image". I felt very encouraged and emboldened by the news, and am eager to pursue continued non-violent direct action on the RI political scene. I say feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, come on f/Friends it's PROTEST TIME!!

2006-10-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

Non-violent Resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist -Martin Luther King Jr., Principles of Non-Violent Resistance

On Monday, Sept. 25, I got arrested for misdemeanor willful trespass at the office of RI senator Jack Reed, along with 10 other members of the AFSC and Military Families Speak Out. We (the 11 of us driven to bear moral witness to the Declaration of Peace inside Sen. Reed's office, including Stephany Kurn, mother of a RI soldier who died in Iraq) left the Providence AFSC office at 9 for Cranston. Reed's office is in a shopping mall, basically, in a separate bulding from most of the retailers but shared with a mortgage place and Bank of America. We got into the office a little before ten and had a meeting with the senator's chief of staff promptly, who explained that the senator appreciated our witness and support and shared our views but would not be taking action on our "petition" today. When we met with the senator himself, Reed was very courteous in answering our questions and talking about his position but didn't seem to have read the declaration or our letters, though his correspondence with him suggested he had. Mrs. Kurn asked him directly what was keeping him from doing what he thought was right, since there were thousands of our soldiers dead there and the Iraqis obviously don't want us there anymore. He said that he was doing what he thought was right, and that he was confident in his approach and would talk with us again in October after his trip to Iraq to talk with the American commanders there. Mrs. Kurn expressed pessimism after he left about the prospects of the American officers sharing accurate assessments with him due to pressure from above in the ranks and from the Pentagon.

After the senator left things moved a little more slowly for a while, as in the next 7 and a half hours were spent in the waiting room, talking quietly with one another (one of the other guys there went to the GTU in Berkeley that Starr-King [the ministry school I'd like to go to] is part of and one of the support people outside is a minister at the Bell St. UU church and an S-K grad), reading from various academic and spiritual texts, and listening to his receptionist answer the phone (it was really funny and affirming at the end of the day when the chief of staff came back and asked us to leave to hear the answering machine click on in the background and have someone leave a message in support of the DOP).

At the end of the day (5:30), they informed us they were closing up shop and we were being asked to leave. When we told the chief of staff our intention was to stay until the DOP was signed he ended up calling the police (i felt bad for him, i'm sure he wanted to go home too) and they came and milled around for a while and tried to convince us it wasn't worth getting arrested and would take up too much of Cranston PD's manpower and eventually placed us all under arrest. They tried to convince us it would be just as symbolic to have one person arrested as 11, and we later found out that Reed's national office had called to try and pressure that outcome. Once we had made it clear we were all going to get arrested they frisked us and loaded us into paddywagons to go to the courthouse/police station. Since we weren't presenting any threat and had been really nice about it they let us hang out in the courtroom instead of in the cells, so that wasn't too bad. They also brought in Burger King for everyone and since there were a bunch of vegetarians I ended up having 4 hamburgers. They took everyone's info and fingerprinted us all and then gave us citations to appear on Oct. 18 and let us go.

Some people have asked why we were trying to persuade a Democrat who's been against the war since the beginning, instead of a pro-war Republican. Our reasoning was that Sen. Reed has a lot of clout in the senate as a veteran and member of the Armed Services Committee, and is already moving in the right direction. However, he has been riding the fact that he voted against the war in the first place and not taking the necessary but politically unpopular step of stating the need for a concrete timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Our goal was to support him in taking that step either in the form of signing the DOP or sponsoring legislation that would create such a timeline. Unfortunate he decided not to do take that step when we were there, so they had to arrest us to get us to leave. Further reasons for our witness were articulated by Ingrid O'Brien in a Brown Daily Herald column.

2006-09-07T21:58:00.000-07:00

Made It

At Friends Camp, every session ends with a bonfire around which all the staff and campers gather to share reflections on their time at camp. At the end of the session for the oldest campers, my friend Will got up to recount a story from when he was at a camp as a high schooler. He said that when a whole group of students that were part of a leadership camp asked what their fears were, everyone except a single person said "failure". Well, come summer of 2006, Will said he didn't have that fear anymore, because he knew that having given himself a loving and supportive network of friends and family, he had already succeeded. By defining success in terms of what is really important to having a happy human life, he had realized that cultivating a strong social support network had already ensured he would not be a failure.

Too often we worry about our ability to provide for ourselves or our families and use the level at which we provide as the barometer of success. Not that it isn't important for a family to have food and other basic necessities, but in our society the amount of comforts that go along with them are used to measure "success" more widely than they should be. Will's definition of success resonated with me very solidly. Since coming to Brown, my prospects for material wealth accumulation have dropped from what they were in high school, because I have changed what I want to do for a job. However, at the same time I have gained a significantly stronger network of social support and loving friendship and deepened my appreciation of the family ties that I am blessed with. In this way I consider myself wildly successful as a 21-year-old.

But success should not lead to complacency of thoughts or actions. On the contrary, to borrow an idea from Jonathan Schell, "the joy is in the struggle." For me, that means that I take action and put energy into changing the world because it brings me happiness. For example, I went to a rally for worker's and immigrant's rights on Labor Day that had me marching all over Providence on a gimpy knee, and I loved the energy and emotions of it all. It felt wonderful to know I was finally able to make a positive contribution to the working conditions of Brown food service employees and others around the city. Thursday afternoon I went to a rally for Seth Yurdin, a progressive city council candidate with a democratic primary next week. After meeting him and Jim Dean of Democracy for America I decided to work his phonebank that evening and met some more radical Brown students in the process. Both experiences were difficult and awkward at times, but in the end I felt much better about having gone and done them than I would have if I'd just spent the time in my dorm.

I'm not saying any of this to toot my own horn, because none of it amounts to a whole lot, but the point I'm trying to make is that activism shouldn't be a BURDEN. So many people I know want to change the world in a positive way but just don't feel like they have the time or the energy. My feeling is that if you put the energy in, you will be nourished by that effort and have the ability to continue more than you thought before. Obviously real-world limitations mean this can only be taken so far, but it's a very good reason to try moving forward if you haven't already and to keep doing so if you are an activist on a regular basis right now.