Sıcak Fuzz

“Why do the police carry machine guns?”

It’s true. If you see a police officer on patrol in Istanbul, Turkey, it’s quite likely that at his side (I’ve never seen a female police officer) there will be an MP5 sub-machine gun.

Now, if someone were to shoot a woman in front of a policeman, I imagine the officer wouldn’t be able to use that weapon, for fear of also shredding the dozens of civilians that occupy just about any street in Istanbul. They’d have to chase on foot, which is probably harder to do with an MP5 slung on your shoulder.

It’s also odd that police officers in Turkey don’t patrol the streets as much as they guard the police station—a more militaristic, bunker approach. If you were mugged on Istiklal Caddesi (Istanbul’s busiest street—probably in the top ten worldwide), you might be able to find a police officer to help you. But walk a hundred meters down a particular side-street, and you’ll run into the police station, most likely with half a dozen heavily armed police officers standing outside of it. A Turkish friend of mine assures me that police stations are a common target of terrorist attacks, so these battle formations are necessary, but I have been unable to find any news reports of it myself.

My first five months in Turkey, I managed to avoid police officers altogether. In the last month and a half, I have been less lucky.

When my back pack was stolen in Antalya in early February, I was at a police station within the hour. I didn’t have any illusions that my backpack would be recovered, but I supposedly needed to file a police report to get a new passport from the US Consulate.

Kafka wrote about days like this. Of the ten or so police officers in the station at this time, everyone was busy, but no one was working. Walk around. Check on things. Shuffle some papers. Talk to someone waiting to make a police report. Smoking break. Drink çay. Bam—you’re a police officer, and you even get to carry a machine gun.

The long wait was on account of a translator since my Turkish wasn’t good enough to fully explain what happened.

“I can call a friend who speaks Turkish and she can translate,” I said.

“No. We’ll have a translator.”

An older man with bloodshot eyes, a fat lip, and a gash on his forehead tells the officers he has a friend who knows some English.

“No. We have a translator.”

For three hours thereafter I waited for the translator, whose arrival was as mysterious and elusive as the messiah’s. At various times I was told:

“The translator is coming.”

“The translator will be here in a half hour.”

“There is no translator.”

Finally, the officers advised me to leave my phone number with them; they’d call me when the translator arrived. I was mostly relieved when that call never came. And luckily the US Consulate never asked for my police report.

I interacted with Turkish police again this past weekend when I was renewing my tourist visa. The process is shady—take a bus from Istanbul to the border, cross the border, turn around, and buy a new visa. My sense is that it’s frowned upon but too common for officers to prevent it.

There’s also a nuance in the geography of the border. First there’s the gate to leave Turkey. A kilometer or so away is the gate to enter Bulgaria. In between is a complex that includes a police station.

The last time I executed this immigration maneuver I simply exited Turkey, went through the police station, and re-entered Turkey, without ever officially entering Bulgaria. This time a police officer said I had to go into Bulgaria. It was snowing outside with a strong wind that blew the icy rain into your face, and my feet were already frozen.

“I did this before and I didn’t have to go all the way to Bulgaria.”

“The rules changed.”

Anyone who believes the police officer at this point in the story should never travel. Rules clearly didn't matter to this person. When I entered the room he and his co-worker had been surfing YouTube, which is illegal in Turkey. Unable to articulate my skepticism and discontent in Turkish, I made the walk, and twenty minutes later I had a new visa.

These are the extent of my own experiences with Turkish police officers, but another story I heard was less innocent. While bumming free internet at the hostel where a friend of mine works, I overheard a German woman in her mid-fifties retelling the woes of her last few days. This woman had a Turkish boyfriend who was usually “nice,” except when he beat her up.

On this occasion her boyfriend had beaten her—I didn’t catch why—and she went to the police station. Her boyfriend came too. She doesn’t speak much Turkish, so the police asked her boyfriend what happened. They decided it was a personal matter and that the two of them should just go home. The German woman said that if they don’t arrest her boyfriend he would beat her again. That’s exactly what happened.

A few minutes from the police station, he continued to beat her in the middle of the street. He broke her teeth and pulled out clumps of her hair (I could see the patches left of it on her head), but pedestrians also treated this as a personal matter. Finally two Western European young men stopped her boyfriend, and brought her back to the police station.

After this second beating in the same day, the police told the German woman they would arrest her boyfriend and keep him locked up for the night so she could leave the city, and country, without him trying to stop her. Five minutes after she had left the police station, her boyfriend called her. He had been let go by the police immediately and was now following her on the street.

This woman’s experience was horrifying of course, but it’s important we don’t exclusively blame Turkish or Muslim culture. Three of my friends have a remarkably similar story from their travels in Greece. A pregnant woman was being beaten by her husband in a public place. Here also the police and bystanders all agreed it was a personal matter.

Importantly, I don’t mean to demonize Turkish police. For example, last weekend after I received my new visa, two police officers offered to give me a ride back to the bus station in their police car. I didn’t ask for this favor, nor was there a compelling reason for them to offer it, but it saved me from waiting for public transportation in the cold. They gave me recommendations of the best places to eat, and dropped me in front of a restaurant they liked.

On the whole, however, I hope I don’t have to deal with Turkish police again before I leave.

Where Do Rights Come From?

I recently started my second semester at Boğaziçi University, and this term I have classes that are narrowly targeted to my interest in global development. One such class is the Politics of Developing Countries. In our second week, one of the articles I read was Charles Tilly’s “Where Do Rights Come From?” Of the two dozen or so articles I’ve read through the first weeks of school, this gets my prizes for least painful reading experience and most provocative content.

Charles Tilly (1929-2008), an American Ivy-League professor, argues in his essay that civil, political, and social rights developed in Europe as a result of international and intra-national struggle. Tilly explains that the pre-18^th century preference of European regimes to use mercenaries was becoming increasingly expensive and unreliable in the 1700s, necessitating the conscription of national militaries. However, using a nationally conscripted military carries several problems to a society: able-bodied men are removed from the economy; fathers and husbands leave their families for long and uncertain amounts of time; and a new layer of taxes has to be permanently levied on the population. With all these drawbacks, it’s obvious why empires (including mine) have opted to use mercenaries when possible.

To assuage unrest from new taxes and divided families, rulers needed a carrot for the population—like rights. According to Tilly, rulers negotiated away political rights and freedoms to keep the populace cooperative.

A significant variable in each country was the sector of society with which rulers negotiated. If rulers only had to bargain with feudal lords or large landowners to get their peasantry to fight, then those lords would gain increased liberties, but the public at large would remain fairly repressed—Russia is an example. In Sweden, by contrast, rulers bargained at the village level, forcing them to confer more rights unto the population than other European states did.

In this way, he argues, citizens’ rights resulted from—of all things—war.

Written in between the lines of this essay is a centuries-old conflict of paradigms—society evolving as a result of class struggle versus society progressing through the evolution of ideas. Of course, I was raised to understand that rights were the natural product of the Enlightenment and the natural rights philosophers.

If we take Tilly’s argument as true, then we should accept that the effects of these negotiations three hundred years ago have been extraordinarily persistent. For example, people in Scandinavian countries—where rulers had to bargain with village elders rather than regional lords—continue to be the most free in the world. In The Economist’s 2008 Democracy Index, the six most democratic countries were Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland.

Likewise, if Russia’s slow expansion of rights is the result of the ability of rulers to “coopt well-established regional power holders,” rather than a generic cultural temperament, it also continues today. Indeed, Russian leaders Dmitri Medvedev and Vldimir Putin each have approval ratings around 70% even though 95% of Russians feel they don’t have a say in their country’s policies. Perhaps that’s because 43% say the country should be ruled with an “iron fist.” This could all be the legacy of how Russia militarized, or it could be a reflection of something deeper and longer lasting within Russian culture. Further still it could be Russia’s geographic distance from the Enlightenment.

Ultimately, proving the point one way or the other is difficult. But while Tilly effectively makes a case that the creation of national militaries could have led to the empowerment of Europe’s citizenries, I don’t see an argument for why it couldn’t have been a result of Enlightenment thinking, or some combination of the two.

I think we can see how Tilly’s thesis could be flawed by taking a look at the devolution of civil and social rights to African Americans in the United States. Imagine being a historian two hundred years from now explaining the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It actually makes a lot of sense, sitting at the desk of this future-historian, to look at the 1960s and see that two decades earlier African Americans fought and died in World War II just as white Americans did. This contribution to society would have given African Americans some bargaining power to attain equal social rights. Particularly on the eve of a new war in Vietnam, the rulers of the United States could no longer withhold rights from a major part of their conscripted military force without creating massive unrest within the society—our cause and effect is impressive, no?

However, such a view excludes more than a hundred years of ideological and economic progress that preceded the Civil Rights Movement, all the way from abolitionism to the Great Migration and the assimilation of African Americans in northern cities.

From my view it would seem that the Civil Rights Movement was a significant achievement resulting from centuries of cultural transformation and internal struggle, a transformation that was influenced—but not caused—by the presence of African Americans in the United States’ conscripted military.

Admittedly, I have done much less in my effort to contradict Charles Tilly than he did to argue his thesis in the first place. Nevertheless, my sense of history tells me that the devolution of civil, political, and social rights in Europe was probably—like the American Civil Rights Movement—a larger cultural process that also included intra-state power struggles.

False Consciousness of the American Narrative

Narratives are important to people. Most obviously humanity uses mythologies to explain creation and our grand purpose, but we also rely on narratives to define much more—family values, religion, and the country we live in. Through the songs we sing, idioms we know, and shared interpretations of history, societies develop culture. And predictably over time this culture changes, but the narratives remain largely the same.

I think becoming an adult is largely a process of discovering the falsity of our narratives and designing new ones that we want to live by. This occurs for most individuals, but it’s antithetical to the nature of a country or nation.

The narrative of the United States that I was raised to believe in had two parts:

America is a benevolent super-power in the world that has a responsibility to root out evil globally.

In America, you can believe anything you want and behave however you like, as long as you and your ideology don’t physically harm anybody.

The Iraq War has severely weakened any argument that the United States is a benevolent power internationally. In the eyes of seemingly every non-American I’ve talked to, the Iraq War was started by George W. Bush to change politics in the Middle East and gain control of more oil. The price for this has been hundreds of thousands of civilian lives (the vast majority not actually killed by American soldiers of course).

I think this analysis of the Iraq War is too simple, but I think it’s closer to the truth than, say, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In this time, the idea that the United States has a global responsibility has also lost support. According to Pew Global Research’s December 3, 2009 article, 49% of Americans think the US should “mind its own business” in international affairs, up from 30% in 2002. People like Thomas Friedman are arguing for “nation-building at home.” Obama had to appease this shift in public opinion with his Afghanistan strategy. His escalation of troop levels was packaged with a promise that they would come home in less than two years.

And while America has never been as welcoming to immigrants as our mythology would lead us to believe, I am still shocked when I read statements like that of former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo in his message to a convention of Tea-Partiers:

“People who could not even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House, [and his] name is Barack Hussein Obama.”

I suppose it’s a relief that Tom Tancredo didn’t include homosexuals in his hate message.

Our narrative is very far from reality. For me this creates something of a quagmire because I was quite a fan of the country I was raised to believe in, which increasingly puts me at odds with the country I actually was raised in. I’m a sort of patriot without a nation.

I wish America were a more benevolent global power, the kind that would be investing in education and scientific research instead of invading foreign countries. I wish we used whatever mandate of global responsibility we possessed more selectively, and with more wisdom. And I wish that fewer people in my country were xenophobic, racist, and hostile to other faiths and worldviews.

The narrative we wrote for ourselves was morally ambitious and naïve; no country on earth could achieve it. Still, it’s sad that the reality is so far from the fiction, and too few people even see the difference.

Super Bowl XLIV Reflection

Monday was one of the best days of my life. At around 5am I witnessed my hometown New Orleans Saints execute a complete victory over the favored Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. I trace the game’s outcome to an essential strategic difference between the two teams, in a game that reflects how the NFL has changed in the last generation.

First, the Colts coaching staff managed the clock poorly. With two minutes left in the first half, the Colts successfully stopped a Saints scoring drive and gave the ball back to the MVP, Peyton Manning. Up 10-3, the Colts could have gone for a two-minute drill to make a ten or fourteen point lead at the half. Instead, they chose to run out the clock, even though the Saints had all three timeouts remaining. The result is that the Colts ended up giving the ball back to the Saints with excellent field position. The Saints took advantage and went into the half with three more points and newfound momentum.

Peyton Manning made a similar management error late in the game. Down two scores and with two minutes remaining, the Colts quarterback called a time out that he immediately wished he had back (really, he tried to pretend he hadn’t signaled for it). The timeout meant that if the Saints ever got the ball back, the Colts wouldn’t be able to stop the clock for all three downs, so a successful onside kick was now absolutely necessary. The Colts’ chances at 31-17 weren’t that good, but Manning’s error basically cut them in half.

By contrast, the Saints won because of an aggressive, attacking strategy. With two minutes left in the first half and down by seven points, Saints coach Sean Payton elected to go for it on fourth down, even though the Saints really could have used the three points from a chip-shot field goal. To start the second half, the Saints attempted an onside kick, and they got it—probably the biggest play of the game. Compare that to the Colts’ aforementioned choice to run out the clock in the first half and Coach Caldwell’s decision to send Matt Stover for a failed 51-yard field goal, rather than let Peyton Manning go for it on fourth down. Colts coach Jim Caldwell had so much faith in his team that he didn’t think he needed to take risks, but really he should have believed that his team could succeed at those risks.

This game also solidified Drew Brees as an elite quarterback in the NFL. Drew Brees’ statistics over the last four years have been as good or better than Peyton Manning’s and Tom Brady’s in almost every category, but he still lacked a championship. Now Brees has as many rings as Peyton Manning (and one fewer loss). His 114 quarterback rating was the best by any winning quarterback in a Super Bowl in fifteen years. In his three playoff games this season, he threw for eight touchdowns with no interceptions, recording a quarterback rating over 100 in all three contests. Only hall of fame quarterbacks have had postseasons as good.

I expect that next year people will discuss the NFL as having three “best” quarterbacks: Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees, in an order that will be debated endlessly around water coolers and across dinner tables. And if next year, Brees’ production is as good as it was this year, I expect that he’ll finally be rewarded with an MVP trophy.

Finally, Super Bowl XLIV strikes me as a flashpoint in NFL strategy and personnel. The tired axiom of football is that a good running game and good defense wins championships. Now all you need is a Pro Bowl quarterback. Neither the Colts nor the Saints had a thousand yard rusher this season. They didn’t have Top-5 defenses either.

One can see this in football over the last ten years. Every year sports writers choose the best players from the NFL for the All-Pro team. This team includes two running backs, but only one quarterback. Of the last eighteen All-Pro running backs (nine years), only two have been on teams that went to the Super Bowl. In the same time period, four of the nine quarterbacks selected to the All-Pro team have made it to the Super Bowl. Algebraically speaking, quarterbacks appear to be four times more important than a running game in getting to the championship.

Unfortunately, this trend is decreasing the number of ways to win in the NFL. As a result, the league is becoming less versatile, less competitive, and more hierarchical. Teams with an elite quarterback can win the Super Bowl, and everyone else is just waiting until they can draft an elite quarterback. It seems to me that the NFL usually has around ten good quarterbacks at any given time, which means 2/3 of the league doesn’t have much of a chance—I think that’s a bad thing.

It’s unfair, but more importantly, it undercuts the strength of the NFL: competitiveness. In the Premier English Soccer League and in the Turkish Soccer League, there are only a handful of teams who are guaranteed success every year because of their large pocketbooks. Everyone else is competing for fifth place. The NFL is becoming that way because of the pre-eminence of quarterback play.

That said, if quarterbacks are what matter most in today’s NFL, then I’m damn glad my New Orleans Saints have one—that and a Vince Lombardi trophy.