The year is rapidly drawing to a close, and activity here has dwindled to a trickle. The world outside continues to undergo sundry shocks and transformations, while life in the basement has become more inward.
After all the excitement and anxiety of the presidential campaign, Barack Obama is off to a solid start. He has already disappointed some of his most ardent supporters in choosing Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. I sympathize with those who are angry at this apparent betrayal, but if this is the worst decision Obama makes in his presidency, we should all be very happy indeed.
What I want from Obama are three things: implementation of a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine; universal health care; and a reversal of the US policy of projecting its military might around the globe. He can have Howdy Doody give an invocation for all I care, if it offers the possibility of fruitful dialogue between progressives and puppets.
I’ll note in passing a story that has pretty much been ignored in the mainstream press: the sudden death of a person with a key role in the alternate (nongovernmental) e-mail system used by Karl Rove and other White House operatives to evade official archiving and other inconvenient things. The news knocked loose a memory of blogging by Thomas Nephew on the subject back in April 2007. And a chain of clicks led me to Larisa Alexandrovna, who intends to stay on the story, since the deceased had been a major source for an investigation she has been conducting.
But let’s end on a happy note, shall we? Back in September the president of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, paid a visit to Armenia to watch a soccer match. Although his route to the stadium was lined with protesters, Gül said he was pleased with the reception. This incipient thaw in relations between Armenia and Turkey is very welcome indeed.
Recently a petition has appeared on the web, initiated by a group of Turkish intellectuals, apologizing for the Armenian genocide (without actually using the word “genocide”). The petition reads: “My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathise with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers. I apologise to them.” Some Turks immediately took umbrage, and others probably made more of the petition than it could logically bear. It was as much about the Turkish government’s attempt to control debate as it was about the Armenian genocide per se. According to Hürriyet Daily News, Cengiz Aktar, widely considered the architect behind the petition, said the petition was not “a campaign about the genocide debate.”
“This is about private individuals, citizens, acting according to the voice of their conscience, and apologizing for the last 90 years this topic was not even discussed,” said Aktar, a Bahçeşehir University academic. Pointing out that the topic had always been a taboo, but still so far 13,500 signatories have broken it, he said. “It has never been discussed like this before. Next time it comes up, everybody should take into account the 13,500 people who feel this way.”
Providing an odd cherry on top of this delightful confection, a member of the Turkish parliament has declared that President Gül’s maternal grandmother is of Armenian descent (making him a “crypto-Armenian,” as a Turkish journalist sarcastically put it), and that’s why he’s “supporting the Armenians.” What makes this delicious to me is that the Turkish word gül (“rose”) is part of my wife’s name, along with the Turkish word for “white.” I guess that makes my Armenian “white rose” a crypto-Turk!
