From a Spaniard, in Turkey, to An American: The Basic Question

The Situation: Ankara, Turkey, December 2004
The moment keeps arriving in my mind like it was yesterday, because it said so much in so few words.

There we were in Ankara, Turkey, in December 2004. Just about a month had gone by since the re-election, so to speak--if you want to call his original election legitimate, which many, including this observer, certainly do not--of George W. Bush as the 43rd president. Much had happened in his first term that would propel my nation on a disastrous course, the whirlwind of which we presently reap.

Nine-eleven, first of all, the horrible day and its ill-directed aftermath: The victory of the conservative mind-meld and media machines in somehow obscuring the ultimate blame on the ultimate breach of airport security and internal intelligence that would allow a full 19 saboteurs the opportunity to hijack four major-sized airliners and fly them to their deaths and the deaths of several hundred others--thereby slaughtering nearly three thousand people in a matter of a few hours. No one has ever, fully taken Dubya to task for this heretofore unthinkably ridiculous betrayal of national trust. Had Al Gore been actually elected in 2000, the way he should have been had all the votes been counted, would the Republicans allowed him to slide by amidst a sudden but cat-quickly temporary descent into hand-holding, we're-all-in-this-together national unity, numbed as we were by the shock of the tragedy? Or, having very recently conjured a reason to legally unleash their hate upon the previous, Democrat president, just re-started their impeachment engine and picked up where they left off with charges of incompetence and even (and you can bet the ultra-conservative wags would have touted this accusation) treason?

No matter: Not only was our attention diverted successfully (sound familiar?), but 43 then embarked on an incredible, even deeper diversion of attention--to implicitly blame Saddam Hussein for the attack, when there was never any solid or even pursuable evidence of it, by the utilization of that ace of smearing and vague but portentious negativity, his veep, Dick Cheney (whose blame has also never been completely established, either, in the national consciousness, though the recent film, Veep, gets as close as anything that's been attempted). The national announcement of the initial attack upon Hussein's Iraq is notable not for what was said by 43, but what was left out: any reference to the weapons of mass destruction that were misleadingly touted, especially by Cheney, to stir up so much public sentiment that major media perusal and potential objection was muted and diminished.

That was in March, 2003. We have already observed the 15th anniversary of our ill-fated, ill-advised, ill-managed and unsolicited invasion of Iraq. We still have military people there, and every so often, a few are killed in explosions and ambushes. Still.

But 21 months later, several of us were sitting in a hotel meeting room in Ankara, chatting amongst ourselves in a getting-to-know-you way. Yours Truly, as a member of the national Executive Committee of the National Education Association, representing more than three million members, had been named to join them in a conference connected to the meeting of the Turkish National Teachers' Union, Egitim Sen. We were mostly from Western Europe and, of course, the U.S., ostensibly to support Egitim Sen's efforts to resist the nation's Supreme Court, in a matter very much connected to the very invasion my country had initiated. Like it or not, I was thrust into an international quagmire that had bubbled to the surface, and what I said might either be touted or utilized into an international cause celebre' by opponents near and far.

Wars may be fought within national boundaries, but their effects are never self-contained. So, too, it was with Iraq, from which hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled from their normal enclaves in northwestern Iraq. The closest border to those enclaves was that with Turkey, so the refugees streamed into it, trying to find another peaceful place.

Well and good, but Turkey was now stuck with dealing with them. The Turks have a history dotted with their own set of tragedies, not the least of which was the century-old international accusation which, in a 45-ish sense of non-reality, they endlessly deny: The annihilation of about a million Armenians during World War I, as part of the Ottoman Empire. Not even the U.S. government can make public statements recognizing that genocide, lest it lose the support of not only a traditional ally against Russia (which, since then, has now frayed), but at that particular moment, a potential addition to the European Union.

Though the Ottoman Empire fought on the losing side of The Great War, the Versailles Treaty saved the Turks' general territory and culture, and the people, who began a new democracy, continued a fierce nationalistic streak amidst a combination of mostly Islamic religious observance (prayers were sung from loudspeakers at the appointed times throughout Ankara) and secular government. Such a balance is endlessly delicate, and depends upon stability in other aspects of national culture.

The Kurds threatened to dislodge that balance by their simple existence as a refugee surge. Those families, too, have kids, and those parents, too, want them to enroll in the schools. But, as American teachers have had to ask again and again: What do you do with thousands of kids who don't know the language?

In the United States, that's something of a philosophical issue, the results of which have been legislated in the many ways in which state governments deal with public education. But the consensus is that some time must be allowed for the kids to understand some of the language--the natural process of cultural assimilation combining with teachers' skills to create new citizens out of wandering urchins.

Not in Turkey, though. Adherence to the national language is embedded in the Turkish constitution. Article 42, in fact, states specifically that children taught in Turkish schools learn their lessons in Turkish. Period.

The National Teachers' Union objected. The kids would be sitting in classes operated in a completely different language, as different to them as, perhaps, Japanese would be to American children (and vice versa, as I learned myself upon the inclusion of a very nice, sweet Japanese girl in my U.S. History class. She would write essays by starting out in American English, but her mind couldn't keep up and would fall back on her comfort zone and shift into Japanese--which, of course, I knew nothing about.). With typical compassion, they demonstrated and made collective statements of resistance. Who the heck was the government to deny reality and demand teaching that kids couldn't possibly understand, with no time allotment to learn the new language through actual teaching or osmosis or exposure to classmates who, in fact, might actually teach them better than anyone else could?

They appealed to the national Supreme Court, which, like ours, has a veneer of balanced and deeply considered jurisprudence, but is also greatly politicized. At that particular moment, Egitim Sen's appeal was pending, but it called upon other national teachers' unions for their support--which we quickly rushed to provide.

So there we were, huddled in that hotel meeting room. Being the dumb American and knowing just my own language fluently--everyone else knew at least two and some three or four--I quickly connected with a Spaniard, Jose', who had been an AFS student in Iowa during the '70s. His American English was outstanding, and his diction went as fast as any American I had ever known. Not only did he know the language, but having been there a year, he knew America and Americans better than the others in the room.

So the Question Was (and still is):
The Europeans had reeled upon 43's re-election (as the NEA had; we had worked like mad for John Kerry, and our sense of disappointment was palpable and nearly desperate). His reputation for being less than an intellectual certainly did not help, and though Britain had quickly come to America's support in Iraq, there were significant pockets of resistance to the wars throughout the continent.

This was visited upon me by a glance at Turkish newspapers. I hadn't the foggiest notion of how to translate, but the banner headlines veritably shouted at readers that 43 had, once again, ruined their lives with an unnecessary war next-door. The photographs were insulting. My Turkish welcomers did so with something of a smile that was at once a semi-sneer.

Teachers tend to give each other the benefit of the doubt, but not this time. Jose' turned to me and, in a voice that could be heard by the rest, asked regarding what appeared to be the '04 election's improbability, "Mark, how could you [Americans] have been so stupid?"

He said it drawn out, as in stu-u-u-u-upid, with a hand clawed upwards to try to capture the depth of his utter disgust. I was caught unawares, but I shouldn't have been; back home, we were trying to figure out the same thing.

I offered that Americans like the image of the cowboys for their independence and saying little but doing a lot. That seemed to be the image that Dubya managed to portray, if for no other reason than that saying very much normally got him ridiculed at best. But in a circumstance in which 9-11 still hung over us like a dark cloud, the Republicans did a great job in capitalizing on that sentiment.

That's about all I could offer on short notice. As I wasn't challenged about that the rest of my 5-day stay in Ankara, it had to do enough good for me to skate by.

But that question lingers, because we have to ask it again: Why were so many people stupid enough to vote for this abomination of a president? Having elected someone with very average intelligence who managed to mess up not one but two wars, at least he watched one of them so that he bailed out our efforts to avoid catastrophe. This guy, 45, learns nothing and cares to learn nothing. He has infuriated our NATO allies and ended treaties with Iran and Russia, both of which now have opportunities to expand their arsenals to unprecedented levels.

He put it all on display during his campaign, too. People thought it was all just for show. Thing is, they were right: It was, but they thought he actually knew what he was doing. He didn't. He doesn't. He won't. And the vagaries of the Electoral College remain such that there's a chance we may have this disaster in the making for another four years.

How could we have been so stupid? Why are we so stupid now? Why, no matter what he does and does it so poorly, does his approval rating fail to fall below 35 percent? What are these people looking at?

That deserves some examination. It'll happen here.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark