By Yusuf Kanli
Excluding calendars or agenda books, civil servants cannot be offered any gifts! Three-year imprisonment sought for "meatball bribe!" We are in first place for watching TV but last in the book reading scale! Film on the prime minister's life story! Deputy premier looking for the New Turkish Lira! Turkish TV's are occupied with serials on 'good people' being assisted by long-dead 'good people.' Do you need more oddities?
Many people in Turkey are preoccupied nowadays with the developments on and about the prospects of Turkey getting a date from the European Union on Dec. 17 for the start of accession talks while ordinary life in the typical "a la Turca" fashion naturally continues.
I gave myself a break on Saturday and tried to avoid focusing on any serious subject. Soon I figured out that I was indulging on a challenging venture.
According to a report from the "National Education Ministry" -- for what reason I have difficulty to understand why two ministries, education and defense, has the "national" description in front of their names -- Turkey has successfully covered a huge distance in converting its population into a "soap opera watcher-crowd" while book reading in the country has become a virtue worth thousands of praise. According to the report an average Turk was spending around four hours a day watching TV and thus reaching the same level as the United States in this field.
The same report stresses however that while an average American was spending $45 per year on buying books, a Turk was allocating only $0.45 a year to buy books and one in every six Turks read a book per year while an average French person reads seven books a year.
But, this is a very serious issue, why did I concentrate on such a nasty report? Old habits die hard.
What about a report on Deputy Prime Minister Abdullatif Sener's conference in Kocaeli to promote the New Turkish Lira (YTL)? "Our country has come to a point from where it cannot continue with banknotes with so many zeroes on them. Writing off the zeroes on our banknotes, if applied together with a stable (economic) program, will produce positive results," the minister said and turned to his aides to get some fresh-printed YTL notes to show to the Kocaeli businessmen ... Fiasco, the new banknotes were left in Ankara.
Oh my God, still a serious subject...
Upset with liberal reports prepared and persistently leaked to the press by a Prime Ministry human rights board, Foreign Minister Gul declared that he has not asked the board to prepare any such report. The minister further stressed that he should not been expected to waste the night reading the report to see whether the changes required to make it "a more acceptable one" were really done.
There had to be something comic in this, but I could not find. Still I managed to grin.
Yeah I got it finally. Three-year imprisonment asked for a conductor who was accused of receiving a "meatball bribe" and allowing a mobile meatball seller to travel over the past year between an Istanbul suburb and the city center. Bribery is a serious crime and people involved must be punished heavily ... This was a good story, but a tragi-comedy, I felt pity for the conductor and plunged into deep thoughts how difficult it ought to be for him to make the end of the month with the meager salary the state has been paying him ... Otherwise, why should he accept a "meatball bribe?"
Finally, a headline: "Greece to participate in the Oscars with a Turkish film." How nice, after so many decades of tension and backbiting in the same alliance, our countries have raproached so much over the past few years that now Greece is participating in an international contest with a Turkish film ... Disillusionment again. Apparently Turks failed to apply for the Oscars on time, but Greece will be participating with a Turkish-Greek co-production: "A pinch of spices."
Yeah, but here is the great news: Oktay Kaynarca, the actor who had successfully played the "Cakir" mafia boss role in the "Valley of Wolves" serial on the state-business-mafia triangle, will be starring in a new serial -- "The Great Eagle" -- concerning the life of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to speculation, "The Man From Kasimpasa" was first considered for the film, but eventually "The Great Eagle" was preferred. Some deputies and ministers would reportedly be offered roles in the film, while Oktay Kaynarca would play the role of Erdogan. Who knows, perhaps the film makes more business!
Well, I finally got a comical story. I understood why Turkish people were fond of TV so much. With different names, the same scenario was available on almost every channel: Some "long-dead good people" helping some well-intentioned, poor and practicing Muslim "good people" to overcome their difficulties. Those long-dead good people were even offering cash in leather or plastic bags, donating blood, and even making gifts of sacks of gold.
Upset with consecutive fiascos in attempts to avoid concentrating on anything substantive, I decided to spend the remaining few idle hours of Saturday locked in my study room, reading and writing.