The 18th Brumaire of Donald Bonaparte

I just looked it up on an online French Republican Calendar converter (of course it exists) and this upcoming election day is in fact going to be 18 Brumaire CCXXV! The parallels of The Donald to Louis Bonaparte as described by Marx, a buffoon with a ubiquitous name who gained the support of the rural underclass and the lumpenproletariat by entertaining them and playing to their prejudices, seem amazingly relevant but I have only found 1 article on the interweb that mentions the similarity: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/197905/brand-awareness
I think I'm the first to realize that Trump may be elected on the 18th Brumaire and should reread Marx and write an article about it.

5 years later

I’m in Tehran. I wrote this a few days ago but haven't been able to post it because this website is blocked and the Iranian authorities (and maybe Google, which continues to block gmail business accounts despite sanctions relief) have upgraded their anti-anti-filtering technology since last I was here. Tor browser no longer works and it seems people now have to use paid VPN services--paying for which would have been a hassle if I didn't have someone to pay for me from the US.

In the 5+ years since I’ve been here (see tehran09.blogspot.com) things have changed, and what pops out at me in rough order of how much I care:

1) high speed internet: Anything faster than 56kb/s dial-up speed internet was unavailable to the general public back in 2009, the authorities’ answer to the threat of “cultural invasion”. Now there are cafes everywhere advertising free wi-fi and I got a prepaid 4G SIM card with 1gb of data and plenty of talk and text credit for under $20.

2) inflation: The largest bill when I was last here was 50,000 rials, confusingly referred to at 5,000 tomans, which are not official currency but what everyone talks in. Now there is a banksnote printed 100,000 rials (referred to as 10,000 [tomans]) and notes called “Iran cheque” that are not officially currency but are treated as such and, just to add to confusion, are printed in big letters with their unofficial toman values of of 50 and 100 (thousand) and not their official rial values (i.e. 500,000 and 1,000,000 rials, respectively). After some early confusion I tried not to buy anything yesterday until I had a chance to spread all the bills out on a table and figure them out, for fear that I would accidentally pay 10x the price.

Along with economic inflation has gone physical inflation of the bills. The notes that are valuable enough (worth more than 30 US cents) to carry around are all too big to fit in my wallet. I guess I should just carry them loose in a dedicated jacket pocket. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPB59bVSbck

3) EZ PAY cards: I will also carry around the cards they finally introduced as a unified form of metro and bus credit (about 10 cents per ride). Before you had to get one kind of (almost free) paper ticket for 1 kind of bus, pay cash on other buses, and use a different kind of cardboard ticket for the metro, which then only had 2 lines forming a cross. Now things are easier, though I still managed to screw up and not pay by swiping my card at a bus station before boarding the women’s area at the front of the bus. Having public transit divided between women-only and co-ed sections seems like not a terrible pragmatic choice to me; certainly doesn’t fix the root cause behind sexual harassment, but lets women do their commute without the constant threat of it.

The buses going north and south on Valiasr street have dedicated lanes (which I think they were just pissing people off by piloting 5 years ago) but seems to come by infrequently enough that every one is crammed to the gills. It is the same with Istanbul’s metrobus system and a source of much confusion to me: why go through the engineering feat of building a huge system of elevated roads across Istanbul only to send 1 bus down it every 12 minutes? My guess is that when I pose this to Istanbulites (I haven’t yet) their stock response will be corruption, but can’t corrupt companies profit from bus production and operation just as they can from construction? Maybe it’s just that whatever planners are calculating how frequently buses need to come are looking at maximum physical capacity rather than quality of passenger’s lives. Because on Istanbul metrobuses especially, every time I have ridden, whether rush hour or a weird off hour, I have been smushed.

Pollution and traffic seem about the same despite improvements in public transportation.

4) outlet stores: A lot of stores have popped up that look exactly like official outlet stores of companies like Nike, Adidas, Asus etc. complete with the sparse, carefully laid out floorplans of downtown NYC and Dubai shopping mall outlets, but I don’t think they are actually outlets. They all seem to have instagram pages and websites that aren’t actually connected to the corporations they claim to represent (Iran hasn’t signed the international intellectual property agreement that would make this illegal). For example http://filairan.com/ looks pretty legit but isn’t listed on the “Country Select” of the http://www.fila.com/ mother page.

Hasankeyf

They say humans have been living in the cave dwellings here for more than 10,000 years. Next year much of the area will be under water, part of the reservoir of a dam being built on the Tigris river.



The Byzantine-era citadel:

The remains of a 12th century bridge:

It was 105 degrees in the shade but inside caves I would guess 30-40 degrees cooler, so I had plenty of spots to sit and recover between bits of hiking.

Some caves are now used as lounging areas, others to feed livestock.

Local yokels gawk at me:

cash is king

In Istanbul, when you try to break a 100 lira note for a purchase of under 20 liras, they sigh heavily and send a loitering boy to another shop to get change. For reasons I have yet to understand, nobody has any problem breaking large bills here, as everyone seems to carry a thick wad of money. I put down a hundred note to pay for my kadayif with goat-milk ice cream this evening and the kadayifci produced first a wad of hundreds and fifties from his front right pocket, then fifties and twenties from front left, and then tens and fives from back right. Each wad looked about as thick as could be fit into a pocket.
Maybe people don't trust banks here. I will inquire at the tourist bureau, full of twenty- and thirty-somethings with nothing to do because no tourists are here (actually I saw my first obvious group today, Scandinavian women), where I have started hanging out whenever I also have nothing to do.

Every night, usually starting a bit after the evening call to prayer, comes the pop pop pop of fireworks thrown at police stations and armored vehicles and of tear gas canisters fired in retaliation. My second night in town, I was in a back seat of a packed minibus when pop pop pop sounded loud and close and then fireworks were exploding on the street few down the street, in front of a police station. The driver slammed on the breaks and standing passengers fell into a heap. He paused a moment then said, It's just fireworks, nothing will happen, and started forward again. Then two exploded very close to the bus and standing passengers tumbled forward again and seated passengers frantically jiggled windows closed. As the driver reversed toward a back street and alternative route, I caught sight of the insurgent, a skinny kid in skinny jeans and a black shirt. Then as we turned away he ran away and an armored police vehicle, nicked up as they all are from hurled rocks, passed us to give chase. I wonder what they do to fireworks to make them more grenade-like; I suppose there is a part of the firework that makes it fly before exploding that you can remove.

theories

The case of Turkey is a problem for the theories of Robert Putnam, Jurgen Habermas et al. who say that the key to everything good in democratic politics is for people to sit around chatting together. There are an incredible, unbelievable number of associations and unions and NGOs and school clubs, and much free time across the age spectrum is spent sitting in cafes or parks arguing. Twitter and Facebook are extremely popular (some charts here and here). And this vibrant public sphere is an echo chamber of bullshit.
The default logic is to look at a global event, figure how it can been seen by some stretch of the imagine to benefit one global power or another, and then leap to certainty that the event was entirely orchestrated by that global power. This is the logic used across the political spectrum, and lends itself to some remarkably creative theories, putting to shame even the contortions of a cleric explaining how nasty things are also God's will.
The only explanation for the rise/popularity/survival of one's political opponent, be it the AKP, HDP, ISIS, or Bashar al-Assad, is that they are a pawn of the US, UK, and/or Israel. Last night a friend explained to me how from the time of the first Gulf War the US had planned the rise of ISIS by stirring up Shiite opposition but then not deposing Saddam so he would crush them. The US then let sectarianism fester for a decade and then invaded knowing that a few years [and a few thousand US military deaths] down the road ISIS would emerge.
Nobody believes me that the US government is incompetent and bumbling about the world with little foresight, with political and corporate actors certainly taking advantage of opportunities presented to them but controlling very little. And when I point to ideological changes creating policies that are not consistent over time, e.g. the change from a realist Bush I administration that didn't depose Saddam to  a neo-con Bush II administration with dreams of democratization, I am met with knowing winks that whatever ideology outwardly appears to be, there is always a deep state within that state that remains constant and really orchestrates everything. (NB one need only go into a wikipedia wormhole clicking on links leading from the Susurluk scandal article to see that there have indeed long been crazy connections in Turkey between drug trafficking, pope shooting, cold war special forces training, Kurdish inter-tribal conflict.... which makes global conspiracy theories seem less fetched)
At any rate, the idea of disunity and inconsistency within world powers clashes unacceptably with the belief in their deity-like powers. Yesterday's friend and others, both Kurds and nationalist Turks, have told me with absolute confidence that if the US wanted to it could crush ISIS in a day, and so ISIS's survival must be part of an American plan. Of course there remains the problem of why the US would want ISIS to thrive. Sources vary in this regard: the US may want an excuse to properly conquer the oil-producing bits of Iraq and Syria. Or it wants to sell more arms to everyone in the region. Or it is afraid that a strong Turkey would undermine American regional influence and so is stirring up shit on Turkey's doorstep.

Certainly a skepticism toward official explanations is healthy and often lacking when you talk politics with Americans, but a public sphere that breeds an understanding of politics based fundamentally in conspiracy theories (substantiated only by retrospective rationalizations of how the powerful might conceivably have wanted events to happen) seems not so much better than culture of complacent fear of whomever your national media tells you is coming for you.

It's been a while since I've used a squat toilet

Diyarbakir is a different kind of hot than Istanbul. The city has one of those little airports, at least the civilian side of it is little, where you climb down a staircase and then walk to the terminal and I had soaked through my shirt by the time I reached the baggage claim. Military planes making sorties to bomb the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan take off from the same base and scream over the city. I'm the only one who stops and looks up like they're something noteworthy and I will try to break that habit.
The taxi driver cursed a double parker in Turkish and Kurdish and told me that such behavior made life unlivable and then blew through a red light to cut off a whole line of cars a few blocks later. He dropped me off in front of the municipality, which is BDP-run and so Kurdish language newspapers and calendar commemorating Kobani resistance are everywhere. A friend of a friend at the municipality sat with me and I was so happy to be speaking Turkish in a real conversation for a change that I blathered on my thoughts about ISIS and Obamacare  to excess but he liked me and he and his municipality coworker seemed to have nothing better to do that afternoon. Then we drove around and picked up fresh milk in a plastic bag and picked up and dropped off one of his 10 siblings and then he dropped me off with my host, Giyas.
I had forgotten how incredibly hospitable people are here--like Iranians except they don't spoil it by constantly talking about how hospitable they are. Actually I feel deeply uncomfortable with hospitality from poor people who refuse to take rent in a way that I didn't used to when I traveled and blithely took whatever I was offered as if by birthright. Over tea and nuts in the evening Giyas and his sister told me all about how hard life is for them and how she wanted to move to Canada with her husband.
I feel the kind of numb discomfort toward these stories and requests for help with migration or education or whatever that white bourgeois New Yorkers feel toward homeless people. I used to be genuinely interested and try to make friends but the gross inequality creates an inevitability  that he will write me on facebook in 6 months and ask again about migration or other help and I will send him a useless NGO or university link if I respond at all and just not want to deal because I have moved on and know it is a pipe dream for him anyway. Money exchange makes things cleaner. Maybe I will move to a cheap hotel with an internet connection and a shower that isn't just a faucet on the wall at waist level. spoiled

drums of war

Thank goodness despite my prediction there have been no terror attacks in Istanbul despite warning by Turkish intelligence that mass transit might be targeted. My suspicion is that this is because the tacit agreement not to escalate hostilities hasn't entirely broken down between Turkey and the Islamic State, since after a token attack on ISIS Turkey has focused most of its military strikes and police raids on anti-ISIS Kurds.
Since June elections has been a hung parliament, with the AKP having the most but not a majority of MPs, largely because of the success of the leftist pro-Kurdish HDP party, which had been mediating a cease-fire and peace process between Turkey and the PKK. If a coalition is not formed, there will be an early election called this fall. I think with an eye on this next election and adopting the old "if you can't beat 'em, disenfranchise 'em and round up their leaders" strategy, Erdogan, who would very much like a return to one-party AKP rule and a majority strong enough to rewrite the constitution to make his presidency even more powerful, has been ramping up nationalist rhetoric against the HDP. Erdogan demanded that HDP MPs' parliamentary immunity revoked, after which to be badass HDP leader Demirtas announced that the HDP would submit a bill to lift their own immunity and encouraged all other parties to do the same in the name of accountability (not happening). The rumors are now that a legal case will be opened soon to shut down the HDP (as happened to its predecessor Kurdish-left parties: HEP > DEP > HADEP > DTP).
Meanwhile in eastern Turkey violence is ramping back up. The PKK launched a suicide tractor attack on a Turkish police station the other day, numerous areas in the east have been re-designated "military zones", and even opposition Turkish newspapers are equating the PKK and ISIS and stirring up anxiety among genteel White Turks.