Turkey in 2012 - TLC 88

Lucky Foot-notes:

In 2008 at TLC in Bursa, Noor, a personal tutor told him about Trabzon on the Black Sea near Georgia. I was born there and it’s beautiful.

In the summer of 2012 he applied for a Teaching English Foreign Language (TEFL) job in Trabzon. They needed native barbarians with clear pronunciation.

Let’s see the terrain, said Omar. Reconnect with Z, meet diverse people, make images, write about it and analyze the situation with diamond mind wisdom. Go on an adventure.

He arrived in September.

My Beautiful Surprise - 51 days in TURNKEY

Lucky scribbled make it new day by day make it new.

Get it down now and make sense of it later, said Other Muse.

Giresun and Black Sea. BS.

Write a simple declarative sentence. Telegraph. Stop.

I travel my life. If I stay too long in a place I go blind.

Economics 101. Opportunity cost. Cost-benefit ratio. ROI.

Probation is a 2-way business arrangement. Trust and verify.

If you want to play you pay with time/money.

Trade your time for a handful of dimes.

You play the game or the game plays you. Roll the dice.

Theme: Deterioration of Turkish educational quality and FEAR. Citizens choose religious fundamentalism or nationalism with totalitarian leadership. Emulate idiotic TV soap opera programs.

Blind Turkish citizens are worried about money and personal appearance.

Turkish women laughing in public are shamed, arrested and exiled.

Consumerism: Phones, watches, clothing, cars, guns. Artificial empowerment is achieved by buying things. Economic development. Greed is a hungry insatiable animal.

Insecurity and ego love the chaos. Embrace your fear.

Gun culture. Emasculated.

Repressed aggression.

The Language Company

Myths became stories - TLC 38

Zeynep said, “I am a rose thorn and Winter Hawk. Wings instinct and heart. My razor talon tears meat from bones to feed my creative Hunger Angel.”

“I am a cognitive psycho-neurolinguist,” said a gravedigger. “My specialty is languages. Lost tongues. Wandering deep in the Tarim Basin following the Silk Road through Central Asia I discovered the 4,000 year old Tocharian language and Afansievo culture. It was a proto-Indo European language with Celtic and Indian connections established by trade caravans and explorers. I suspect it is Qarasahr or IA based on an Iranian dialect.”

Mircea Eliade, a historian of religions said, “Myths tell what really happened. Myths suggest a reality that cannot be seen and examined. Myth is truth trying to escape from reality. A myth is a story of unknown origins, sacred stories based on fear and belief containing archetypical universal truths. They are in every place and no particular place.”

History became legend.

Legend became myth.

Myth became story.

This anthropological fact accompanied Lucky wandering among unfinished construction projects and abandoned manuscripts in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

He joined millions of emaciated migrant refugees passing shattered bricks, broken hopes and strangling dangling cables connected to nothing in particular.

Shoddy incomplete dust dreams and quick profit schemes thrived where political thugs disguised as beauticians, missionaries and NGO social workers living in penthouses and driving Land Rovers exploited villages stealing land, rivers, mountains, children. Extorting money.

Their rule of law was a truncheon named GREED.

* 

Sophisticated command and control procedures thrived. Corruption stole millions. Substandard schools pancaked 10,000+ children from one-child families in a Sichuan earthquake.

Garment factories in Dhaka crushed wage slave workers stitching designer labels at a discount.

In May 2014 an inefficient unregulated profit-oriented private coalmine in Soma, Turkey caught fire, exploded, burned and collapsed killing 301 miners.

The angry Teflon Prime Minister visited the disaster. “This is a fact of life for poor illiterate underpaid miner slaves. It happened in Britain in the 19th century,” he said to widows and families. An angry miner booed him. He slapped the miner. “If you boo the Prime Minister you get slapped.”

His aide, a frustrated soccer player wearing a suit of armor kicked a miner on the ground being held by police. Aide screamed, “Dissent is TERRORISM!”

The ruling AKP Justice and Development party said it was all a mistake: the mine explosion, slap and penalty kick.

Violence, denial and repression are a way of life here, said Zeynep the younger creating a myth.

The Language Company

writing, sex and censorship #301

A Chinese computer science professor received a 3.5 year sentence for "crowd licentiousness."  This is vague government wordage. It covers crowds. It covers licenses. It means a crowd gets together and applies for a license. In this case with broad overtones they applied for a license to swap identities.

He led informal swinger clubs for partner swapping. He pleaded innocent. "I had nothing to do with the North Korean submarine attack in an apartment with eighteen people. I was only the middleman. I was formatting my hard drive and downloading data."

He was charged under Criminal Law 301. 

A Chinese academic said...“I feel that the thought process of the Chinese authorities is always to try to manage and control the population, the people. Beyond prosecuting criminal activities, they feel they have to control or manage people to their standards.” read more...

Turkey also has an infamous Article 301 law. This law makes it illegal to insult Turkey, Turkish ethnicity or Turkish government institutions.

Turkey's imprisoned 49 journalists, Iran 45 and China 32 as of December 2012.

Writers Orhan Pamuk, Noam Chomsky, Elif Safak, among others have been charged under this article. All the cases were either dropped or acquitted.

A spoiled young girl in Ankara was recently arrested and charged under Article 301 for insulting her mother's cooking.

"I hate Turkish food. Too many tomatoes. I don't want black olives. I don't want fresh salad. I don't want fresh seafood from the Marmara Sea. I want Italian pizza with extra cheese please squeeze." 

Her mother said, "Eat what I give you. Hurry up. I'm late for my wife swapping seminal seminary with binary logic."

It was thrown out for lack of evidence.

Number 301 is very popular. The number of words mating and swapping with other words is increasing. Words remove an article of clothing like a, an, the.

Burma
 

China

China

Turkey

Tibetan Pain

Inside Drapchi prison near Lhasa, Chinese guards beat Tibetan nuns and monks with rubber hoses filled with sand.

They applied electric cattle prods to their bodies, sending wire cranked juice through skeletons, extracting screams. Denounce the Dalai Lama, screamed one soldier, a young lackey from Human Province. He tightened metal screws around a woman’s wrists, bending them back at a horrendous angle until she screamed from pain, Never!

He wiped her blood off his broken glasses and increased the pressure. It was a job.

I am doing my DUTY, he screamed.

Save my face, sang a Chinese girl, an innocent victim of the national genocide one-child policy wringing out a mop made of spider webs inside water rainbows.

She languished in a large bland cavern classroom at a private business university in Fujian. It was private because all the students had failed higher level exams for more prestigious universities. They settled for this prison. She cleaned crumbling uneven cement floors with strands doing her Duty.

Beijing operatic actors fashioned death masks for their performance in a funeral formula. 

More...

sorrow

Greetings,

"People who cause you difficulties you should think of them as very, very valuable teachers because they provide us with the opportunity to develop patience."

I'm a mercenary of the false disguise inside poverty's domain.

The land of fairytales inside lost childhood contains historical perspectives. 

Forgiveness and trust dance with passionate ambivalence. 

People here practice saying the I'M SORRY syndrome in the present continuous sentence structure. They say I am sorry from morning to night. When you ask them, "Why are you sorry?" they have absolutely no answer. They stare at you in pure dumb amazement. They know three little words. Their eyes and heart are blinded by fear, doubt and uncertainty. 

They repeat. I'm sorry. Perhaps this sorrow, this feeling of regret and loss and contrition and sadness is history speaking. Does history have a voice? Does history whisper or shout? 

Do genetic structures speak? How do new generations adapt, adjust and evolve with their ingrained, deep rooted genetic and cultural and historical lives of suffering? 1.7 million humans suffered and died between 1975-1979. The older generation teaches, by example and action how to be silent. I am sorry is acceptable.

Nuth is 10. She has parents. The other young people at the NGO supported cafe are orphans. We are all orphans sooner or later. They have a safe place to stay with their friends and learn practical job skills like cooking, customer service and basic cafe operations.

Nuth and I hang out, drawing, practicing English and sharing food. One day, no matter what I said, Nuth said, "I am sorry." I asked her what she was sorry about. She couldn't or wouldn't say. There was no context.

In a sense she was merely miming the older girls. Someone taught her. She heard. She repeated. Everyone here has paid the price of sorrow. It is endemic. They wear their perpetual sadness like a shroud. Their eyes and heart cannot hide their deep fear.

They are easily distracted, unfocused and always looking over their shoulder.

Before someone kills you say I am sorry. I am sorry for everything. I am the cause of all suffering.

Metta.