Why the Ottomans do not matter to us

By Ottoman I do not mean a piece of furniture. The Ottoman Turks gave us far more than the name of a piece of furniture, which is an interior-design question best relegated to an IQ test where class and privilege matter.

The Ottoman Empire lasted far longer and became far more powerful than, say, the British, and yet the average adult and above average school student know nothing about them.

From the 15th century up until the 20th, up until the the births of of my grandparents, the Ottomans ruled that part of the world which included many of our cradles of civilization: Egypt and parts of northern Africa, southern Europe and what we now call the Balkans, and onward into what we now call - thanks to the British - the Middle East.

They made numerous contributions, all of which we think - like our civil and human liberties - fall from on high, graciously: deus ex machina or el rex le veult.

But I don't want to write a history of the Ottoman Empire. Many sources exist already, never classified, easily excavated at your local public library; and the best education is self directed.

I do want to make a note on why the Ottomans have been wiped from our historical lexicon, why we can name the Romans and the Greeks; then the French and its Sun King, Marie and her cake; the British and its majestic white kings and queens, which we are still very fond of, which is really creepy given their incessant inbreeding and bloodshed.

A fringe of us can even add the US empire to this random list, exterminating natives, stealing foreign territory, wars of foreign conquest.

But nearly 500 years of the Ottoman Empire, and a whole lot of real estate along with literary and scientific achievement, is nowhere to be found among our historical mishmash of propaganda.

Why?

Without the Ottomans the various occupations in the Middle East become humanitarian interventions. Without the Ottomans, a certain rogue apartheid racist state can be invented and an all-out land grab ensue. Without the Ottomans, the political boundaries drawn up by the British take on an ancient, timeless flavor and so are beyond scrutiny.

Without the Ottomans, the House of Saud is an ancient dynasty when it is nothing more than a West Asian Kardashian drama, and the kingdom of Jordan an episode of "Keeping Up Appearances."

The Ottomans do not matter to us because they cannot. The narrative the West needs us to believe breaks down if the Ottomans are allowed to intrude, then questions are asked, fresh options explored - like, if Humpty Dumpty Germany can be put back together, why not the Ottomans? This question cannot be asked because of "our enduring friendship with Israel" and, basically, oil, which, like the slave trade of recent times is a necessary evil the West is thoroughly willing to suffer upon others for its conglomeration called civilization.

Removing the Ottomans from our thoughts is like removing the indigenous civilizations from our history books. We are left with an untamed wilderness ripe for exploit by the Europeans and their bankers.

And before you offer a Survival of the Fittest argument for the Allies victory over the Axis Powers [Germany and the Ottomans], know that it was not British might that brought the Turks to defeat. It was monogamy.

In another blow against traditional marriage, a certain sultan broke with longstanding Ottoman custom and became a one-woman kind of guy - we are told this was "true love" - thus messing up the pool of heirs and causing discord. Before this, the sultan in charge had had several wives who bore many children, and the sultan could chose which male[sic] child was best to succeed. This provided a steady pool of qualified aspirants.

With monogamy, the one wife had to produce the one male heir, and he could have been brilliant as easily as have had no temperament for colossal rule. He might have preferred painting. He might have been an imbecile. Just look at the British.

Narratives are important, hence Bible citations and morality tales rammed down our throats. Narratives are important not only to teach lessons but as in this instance to avoid learning any altogether. Once upon a time, the West tried to fix the Middle East - not, how it was intentionally broken in the first place. And, the gods help us, the West will kill them trying.

A Shavian Pope?

First, a disclaimer: while I somewhat embarrassingly call myself an anarchist, I don't put much stock in the label or those who wear it. It is an emblem like any other in a swamp of emblems, like DKNY or Gucci, that say something, but not enough, about a person. Also, I have fierce awe and respect for those anarchists who got their hands dirty and broke things - as opposed to those who climb academic ladders for PhD degrees and marginal think-tanks or those who busy themselves telling us why others are not real anarchists while they build nothing at all. Or those who plod out blog entries!! My thoughts on Pope Francis, like my already published [and scorned] thoughts on Charles Windsor, aka, Prince Charles of the UK, are not written as a thesis defense for that panel of self-appointed, self-righteous radicals who pretend among themselves they care. I simply do not give a damn about them.

No, Francis is not a bomb thrower, but he is causing quite the stir. He is doing the unexpected and the undesired, and this always impresses me. He said, "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?"

I did not start as a blogger but as a fiction writer. Short stories read after lunch to Mrs Herbert's third grade class - stories I had written in the library during lunch rather than play on the play ground. So character interests me. Many writers do character better than others, like people, who hide their bad character worse than others. I suppose how you respond to character is like how you like your steak cooked.

Anyway, Agatha Christie's characters and Poirot's judgement of them started as my favorite. That was high school.

Then there's Shaw. George Bernard Shaw. Anyone who claims to know me well has heard me quote Shaw. He was a character in himself. When I encounter Prince Charles or Pope Francis I think of Shaw's king in The Apple Cart or the doctor in A Doctor's Dilemma. I think of Candida in the play of that name. I think of St. Joan: "Oh, Lord, when will the world be ready for thy saints?"

I think of the Black girl in his novelette A Black Girl in Search of Her God.

Shavian? I can best define this adjective with a description of the referred-to novelette: the Black girl isn't really in search of God as she is in exposing the lies and hypocrisies in all of them. My Tennessee grandmother might call a Shavian character "contrary" - meaning contentious, irreverent, curmudgeon.

That is Shavian; that is George Bernard Shaw.

Pope Francis is a character ripe for Shaw's hand. He's leaving no false idol unhinged from its base. He's doing the unexpected and not playing to that choir of do-gooders who pretend to care about the poor but want absolutely nothing done.

And he doesn't give a damn about detractors.

To give a little contrast, I've made no secret of my respect for Fidel Castro. But he's not a Shavian character. Maybe he's a Cervantesian Don Quixote. But not Shaw. Fidel did what was expected of him, even if it shocked the sensible people of the US, even if it shocked many Cubans. He meant to do what he said he was going to do, so maybe - just maybe - it's a cautionary tale of be careful what you wish for.

If there were a sequel to The Apple Cart, Charles Windsor would be the central character. In this play, Magnus threatens to abdicate his throne rather than being hog-tied by his prime minister by constitutional niceties, then run as a private citizen in an election against said prime minister. Magnus wants to do something meaningful with his life, not just be a symbol - or a cudgel - used by political parties. Prince Charles wants to do something, and I don't believe a minute in the retraction made recently that he compared becoming king to a prison sentence.

The pope's role in a Shaw play remains to be seen after some more careful simmering. He could be Ceasar in Shaw's Ceasar and Cleopatra, or the vast theme behind Back to Methuselah, where Shaw indicts modern society its pretensions and its technological prowess in the face of such poverty and brutality as was witnessed after World War I.

But Pope Francis is Shaw, that famous writer and social activist who refused the Nobel Prize, declined a knighthood from the king and declined twice induction into the king's Order of Merit, stating that merit was a thing bestowed by history, not kings. The no-nonsense Shaw who wrote in a tiny shack and had his ashes spread as fertilizer in his garden. That is Shaw: taking a little and giving as much back as possible.

"I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security," he wrote.


I will argue to the death those who say you can change institutions from within - institutions, especially government types, are insular and conservative and can if so empowered resort to violence to prove their purity. This not only explains governments of the present and past but also those self-appointed committees I am so bored with. But when I see someone on the inside, as it were, breaking up some of the foundation stones I cannot help but admire the handiwork.

The AIDS Ponzie Scheme Carnival Continues another Year

If HIV AIDS is not a ponzie scheme, aren't we justified in thinking it might be?

Right now, a killer fungus threatens to destroy our stock of [Cavendish] bananas, that most common brand of banana in our local stores. An earlier fungus outbreak spread in the 50's. Scientists are more confident than the farmers, reports indicate. Scientists assure us some-such-something will be developed to kill once again this fungal pandemic; they say we've learned a lot since the 50's.

Farming practices, to put it carefully and cautiously, have evolved. Yields have increased. Various pestilences have been mitigated. Now, the ways these things have been done should sometimes make you sick, and they do. The Monsantos of this world have engineered resistant seeds that can withstand all kinds of onslaught, but the effect on the body is besides the point to our business morality. But organic and commercial farmers have also learned new techniques to deal with encroachments onto their crops that have nothing to do with Monsanto.

Medical science has continued to make - again, to put it cautiously - strides. Antibiotics and vaccines have done much to mitigate the side effects of civilization. When curable diseases became least profitable, yuppie drugs, like for hair growth or restlessness or to supplement your ineffective anti-depressants, were developed.

The point is not to laud these achievements as such. Aside from the clear controversies in these so-called advances, science cannot be said to have stopped and stood still over the last 50 or 100 years.

And yet, in the so-called HIV-AIDS field, we have gone from potent poisons like AZT, which killed people in the 80's and 90's, maimed others by destroying their livers and other vital organs, to less potent poisons which have a slower corrosive effect on the body is purported to save. People are still dying, moneys are still being spent on a variety of activities - from the pharmaceuticals inventing another brand of Coca-Cola to the HIV bureaucracy of "counselors" and research "assistants."

But where has this budget produced an advancement except in pharmaceutical companies? Why hasn't anyone convened a congressional inquiry into the fraud of billions spent and very little to show for it? Why are World AIDS Day festivities and "Get Tested" promotionals become our obsession rather than good, old fashioned scientific discovery and cures?

Why 30 years of bullshit?

The disturbing writing on the wall is while HIV drugs are profitable for the drug companies, these drugs are also prohibitively expensive: without insurance not even a middle income person could afford them, let alone the growing numbers of working-class and poor: and I am referring to the working class and poor in the global North, the so-called First World.

As our middle income and mid professional jobs disappear in favor of low-wage service industry and underemployment, who will pay for these drug companies to continue to reap profits with these expensive medications? Will ObamaCare pay for HIV meds for an underpaid WalMart or fast-food worker?

Since we have no functioning civil society in our opulent countries, the nexus of this debate will happen not in a public square but on Wall Street, and, as always, they will construct the message and the morality which will not want to address this mystery virus at all, will blame its victims - the gays, Africans, you know - and no inquiry will be made into the heart of this so-called epidemic - viz, who caused it, why it fails so many established scientific theories, why the Reagan administration unilaterally chose one HIV theory over any others while the scientific community was busy with several hypotheses, etc.