Category Archives: coup

Thinking & Feeling

July 20, 2016 – 2:16 pm

This essay is written as a distraction from current events, though I make some reference to them. I am prompted by questions of analogy provoked by

  1. the similes of Homer and
  2. a recent theater review in Harper’s that mentions the parables of Jesus.

With sea in the background, on the sand of a beach sits Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, the cover featuring a 16th-century Flemish tapestry (framed by a circle), Scene from Roman History, showing a number of men, the one in the middle armored; a horse is in the foreground

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, Collingwood, Education, Harper’s, History, Homer, Language, Mathematics, Maugham, Midgley, Nature, Nesin Mathematics Village, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Principles of Art | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (6)

War Continues

July 16, 2016 – 6:30 pm

Earthquakes have aftershocks. In 2011 in Van, after the quake of October 23, a Japanese relief worker called Atsushi Miyazaki was killed when his hotel collapsed under the force of the quake of November 9.

Along with everybody we know, my spouse and I survived yesterday’s coup attempt in Turkey. This is happy news, but not, I think, surprising. A coup is not supposed to harm civilians, it is supposed to be supported by civilians. The main danger lies in the aftermath. At least that is what I understand from the 1980 military coup here, when hundreds of thousands of dissidents were rounded up. Many of these were tortured, and this is why an American friend of mine (some ten years my senior) used to ask me to resolve a paradox: how could this torture happen in a country whose citizens, in his experience, were the kindest people he had ever met? The point for now is that the arrests following the coup could not have happened with the suddenness of an earthquake, but were perpetrated over time (the military government sat for some three years).

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By David Pierce | Also posted in History, Nesin Mathematics Village, Turkey | Tagged | Comments (10)

Life in Wartime

June 29, 2016 – 12:22 pm

Turkey has given me a lot. My spouse would be enough; but life in Turkey offers various pleasures, and—for me at least—time to enjoy them. Hard work may be considered a virtue in the United States. Not so in Turkey. I am still driven to do things here, but perhaps only in the way that Thoreau was driven. He was driven to do what he wanted to do. One thing he wanted to do was write as follows.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses!

For how many Americans is the highest duty to go to work to pay for the car that they drive to work?

We suffer in Turkey from the delusion that one head is better than two or more, at least when that one head belongs to the man who is driven to be president-for-life. We also suffer in Turkey from terror attacks, like the one last night at Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Facebook, Istanbul, Nesin Mathematics Village, Turkey | Tagged | Comments (5)