The Olympics Are Here! The Olympics Are Here!

A year before I began this blog, I had the experience of a lifetime when I attended the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  Few moments in my life have included so many of the things I love the most – a combination of sport, spectacle, travel, history and geography.  With Vancouver so fresh in my mind, even four years later, I’ve been anticipating the games in Sochi.  With that, I have my memories of the trip but some thoughts as the 23^rd Winter Olympic Games begin in Russia.

Being in Vancouver in 2010 was like being in a walking Benetton commercial as I saw and interacted with people from all over the world.  I spoke to people from countries I had no experience with such as Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus.  Because it is the Olympics, every person seemed to revel in the colors of their country.  The orange-clad Dutch, the red soaked Swiss, the red, white and blue of the Brits and the Russians and the white and blue of the Finns and Koreans.  My wife spoke with various people in French and I tried communicating with people in German.  With everyone I met, I asked question after question about their lives and their countries.  It seems a bit dorky but this is not an opportunity one gets every day. 

I loved the sports – particularly, those sports not prevalent in the United States.  We had tickets to see the American women’s curling team, the U.S. men’s hockey team and the ski jump.  Here are where the colors are at their brightest and most fervent.  Given that I’m a patriotic individual, I really love to see expressions of patriotism in other people.  One can hear chants, songs and cries of devotion.  Over the next couple of weeks, I will be doing as I did four years earlier – checking out sports like the luge, figure skating (my wife’s influence) and cross-country skiing.  I will see the stands or the routes dotted with brilliant colors worn by people shouting their loudest for their fellow countrymen.  In particular, it will be fun to see the Russians cheer on their own in one sport after another. 

Now, as much as I love the Olympics, there are a couple of observations and thoughts that I have going into the games in Sochi.  First of all, there is likely no other country that has had the string of bad opening ceremony uniforms like the Americans.  The American contingent, time after time, have been guilty of over thinking what the uniform should be.  From berets to sweaters that should be a part of an ugly sweater party, our society lacks the understanding that sometimes, more is just more.  When one compares the American gilding to the simplicity of the Greeks, the Turks or the Spanish, the U.S. stands alone in garishness.  Of course, we were not the only ones as equally guilty of overthinking were the rainbow Germans and Pollock-like coats of the Liechtenstein athletes.  I know the Germans were likely making a statement but can you do it with more fashion sense?

My last thought is that there needs to be some tightening up of who can and cannot represent one country or another.  This was most evident in 2004 when the Greeks, as hosts requiring to field all matter of teams, recruited people from all over the world with even the scantest of genetic connections.  Third and fourth generation athletes with no knowledge of the home language are really stretching the definition of who is actually competing.  There are the American figure skating siblings, Chris and Cathy Reed, skating for Japan,  Singapore-born and British-raised Vanessa-Mae Vanakorn Nicholson skiing for Thailand, and German Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe who will be taking to the slalom course for Mexico.  Now, to various degrees, these people do have connections but some are so thin, it is a wonder they can be seen in the snow of Sochi.   

Still, for all of the cattiness of some of my comments, this is my favorite time of the year.  Granted, the Olympics have never been the bastion of apolitical, peaceful coexistence that it champions itself to be.  However, they always try and the idea that people think there is a place for such an attempt makes me think we are not has far-gone as others fear.  My one final, parting wish is that there is no 2014 version of the pouty, petulant Mckayla Maroney – particularly representing the U.S.  The original was bad enough.

Read All About It

The whole problem with news on television comes down to this:  all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on one page of a newspaper.  And the world cannot be understood in one page. 

Neil Postman

In a recent article in The Economist, a 2008-2012 study demonstrated that the daily circulation of newspapers per 1,000 people in the U.S. dropped by nearly 15%.  Meanwhile, there is an increased usage of twenty-four hour networks and online sources for news.  A few newspapers in the country remain stalwarts of print journalism but even papers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times have faced a drop in readership.  Some newspapers folded altogether, a trend that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the idea of two or three newspaper towns disappeared nearly altogether.  Others have retreated into the ambiguous world of the information superhighway, such as Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer.  The decline has much to do with cultural changes and its impact is despairing. 

There is a cause and effect relationship occurring at the same time with newspapers and has been witnessed over the last fifty years.  The presentation of news coverage on television introduced an entertainment element that was evident but not prevailing in newspapers prior.  As television and the internet have developed, the nature of news has changed radically in two particular ways. First, what is classified as news has altered beyond a point where journalists of old would recognize.  The nature of twenty-four hour news networks and the omnipresent internet have too much time and space to occupy with what is genuinely news.  Therefore, what serves as news is progressively superfluous.  The news personas of today are talking about jail house confessions, sensational trials that hold no societal relevance and celebrity-generated ballyhoos.  The desire and the need to fill time and space has broaden the concept of not only what is news but what is germane.  Today, no one thinks anything of a “serious news program” devoting time to a woman who killed or may not have killed her boyfriend.  From a societal point of view and not an individual perception where it could have more importance, is this relevant or even note-worthy?  I would dare say not.    

Second, in conjunction with the dispensing of the irrelevant, the news that is delivered is increasingly and perhaps irrevocably simplified.  Today, news channels and websites are occupying themselves to answer the question, “what happened?”  However, no thought is given to explain why.  Throughout the popular mass media outlets today, they may discuss the riots in Turkey but little mention, if any, of secular Turks’ concern over Prime Minister Erdogan’s crackdown of earlier protests.  The average American knows nothing of why the protests began, why the Turkish government responded as it did and the ramifications that such measures might have in Turkey, the future of the country as a secular one, its consequences on U.S. policy in the Middle East and how such actions by Mr. Erdogan might affect Turkey’s constant search to draw closer to Europe.  The news channels and websites are focusing on “five ways to know he is lying to you.”  The content is available but media outlets determined and the public approved through ratings and hits that they are not concern.  Those who want to know are out of luck without time on their hands.

What is the effect?  It is amazing that in this age of the “information superhighway”, our students are no more capable of telling you when the American Civil War was, who the prime minister of Turkey is or why it should even matter than an earlier generation.  At a time when we are constantly bombarded with the positive impacts of computers at every level and we have an unprecedented access to information, we seem to know less.  At every level, the knowledge that some seek is truncated by a mass media that favors brevity over breadth and revolvs around the capriciousness of popular tastes and whims rather than on the demands of their profession. 

Newspapers are a potentially brilliant resource in that its limited canvas ensures that only that which is truly news can be presented but the space also allows for examination and elaboration on both the facts and the reasons why.  If newspapers are to survive at all, it is likely they need to go in the opposite direction of the “less is more” concept they are currently embracing.  By seeing their limitations, compared with television and the internet, as the positive that it is and not concerned with what they can’t do, they can see a possible future.  It was once said that people did not believe it unless they read it in the newspaper.  In the face of all that is wrong with television and internet news, people can learn to believe so again.    

The Need for a New (Albeit Modified) Ataturk

In the wake of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was wiped from the pages of history for its supporting role of the Central Powers. As a result, the Allies sought their own piece of the Turkish dinosaur. France and Great Britain carved up the old Fertile Crescent along the lines of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), with the British overseeing much of Iraq, Jordan and Palestine and the French overseeing Syria and Lebanon, as well as portions of modern-day Turkey. Meanwhile, the Italians and Greeks made a grab for land around Constantinople. However, from the Turkish military sector emerged a skilled commander named Mustafa Kemal, known in history as Ataturk.

Throughout the early 1920s, Ataturk pushed back the Greek forces, including ethnic Greeks who had settled in Turkish territories. He then pushed through a series of reforms that were considered fairly radical. He implemented a new Latin alphabet and allowed women to have the right to vote. But, his most daring set of reforms was the secularization of Turkey. He went after religious orders and nationalized property held by religious organizations. In the schools of the new country, a secular curriculum was put in place and Sharia law was replaced with one modeled after Western Europe. Islam was delegitimized as a governing force and symbols of the faith, notably the veil, were outlawed. In his efforts, Ataturk was brutal and unrelenting, particularly towards the Kurds, but he was able to reverse centuries of historical precedent to bring stability and democracy to a country possessing little experience with either. In the aftermath, Ataturk, who died in 1938, became a national hero.

Today, Turkey has Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A far cry from Ataturk (except, sadly, his attitude towards the Kurds), he has recently brought Turkey to the point of conflict at various levels. He seems to be going out of his way to destabilize the region. First, he is operating under the false impression that he does not need Europe – saying the continent needs him more. This is seen in the widening gulf between the European Union and Turkey over admission of the latter into the former. Turkey’s economy is extraordinary but I wonder what would happen if some European countries revoked the guest worker program and forced hundreds of thousands of unemployed Turkish nationals to their native land (there are two million in Germany alone)? I don’t foresee countries doing that but I can see an end to the program. This would be a new weight on the Turkish economy that could undermine Mr. Erdogan’s policies.

Second, Mr. Erdogan is pursuing policies that could endanger the fragile stability in the entire region with two cases in particular – Cyprus and Israel. Of concern to the EU is his refusal of any Greek-Cypriot ships to enter Turkish waters or ports. Perhaps, Mr. Erdogan feels his country’s economy does not need their products but the actions seem to be based more on purposefully antagonizing Greek Cyprus on simply historical grounds. The resulting increase in tensions is avoidable. Yet, as problematic as the Cyprus situation is, it does not measure up to his stance on Israel.

The prime minister was the former mayor of Istanbul and is the head of the Justice and Development Party (AK), an Islamist party that has led some to fear, particularly when he came to power in 2003, of an ebbing of Turkey’s secular traditions. While his rule has not suggested an obliteration of said traditions, his stance with Israel seems a ploy to cater to his base. Israel has the right to protect its borders and inspect anything coming into its territorial waters. The fact that the flotilla advocates, a group attempting to run the blockade Israel has on shipments to Gaza, refuse to have their cargo inspected suggests the worst and has nothing to do with the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians. They are the ploy and the flotilla, a Trojan horse. While the U.S. has encouraged Mr. Erdogan to ease back on the stance with regards to Israel, he has escalated by suggesting the next flotilla attempt would be protected by Turkish ships. Whether or not this is bluster, (the New York Times once referred to him as a “hothead,”) the implications are the same.

Ataturk, while progressive at home, was aware of the importance of good relations with his neighbors. His active role within the League of Nations (a precursor to the United Nations), his partnership within the Balkan Entente (1934) and his non-aggression agreement with Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan in the Saadabad Pact (1937) shows his understanding of the importance of regional stability. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has shown the opposite. While conditions within the country have ameliorated since his ascension to the prime ministership, the same cannot be said beyond. Let us hope he is a student of history. If not, I fear for the region.