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Year 2016

Entries 5 Total

Wild West Outlaw, Ike Gravelle

Aug 5, ’16 1:29 AM

Here’s an outlaw story about Helena, Montana that I’d never heard before.

This Ike character took on the railroad company and hatched a plan to hold the rail lines around Helena ransom. Pay up or they blow up. Of course the rail companies didn’t pay up. So Ike here started to blast the tracks in random places, trying to be taken seriously. Well, they did take him seriously. But they didn’t ever pay him.

He was a one man operation and so was always going to be near the scene of the crime. The law caught up to him. He was spotted preparing to lay another bomb by a rail worker who followed him home.

IkeGravelle

Upon being detained, the suspect was indignant, insisting that he was an honest rancher named “J.H. Plummer.” The suspect was brought to the Lewis and Clarke County Jail, where he was positively identified as Issac “Ike” Gravelle, a criminal well-known in Helena. Defiant as ever, Gravelle denied his identity even in the face of his former penitentiary warden, a Mr. McTague, who wasn’t one bit fooled.

Someone stashed a gun for him in the courthouse and shot his way out into the street, but he didn’t make it very far. He either killed himself while cornered or he bled out from another man’s bullet.

Either way, it was a violent end to a violent man’s life.

I’m reading so much about violence in the world these days and I find myself moved to outrage by modern tales of horror. Reading about Ike Gravelle made me wonder if through the lens of time, all violence can be transformed into something romantic or quaint. Is violence always a part of a founding mythology of a place? Why do I get excited to read that this happened in my home town? Wild West mythology fascinates me but on its face it’s actually horrible! If this happened last week wouldn’t I feel only fear and outrage?

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What if We’re Wrong

Jul 30, ’16 10:25 AM

I had to wait for a few weeks for the audiobook of Chuck Klosterman’s new book, What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past to come out. I read a little preview and the title grabbed me. I knew I wanted to get into it as soon as possible.

werewrong

It’s not a predictive book about the future and it’s not scientific, it’s a loose exploration of the theme: think about the present as if it were the past, and it’s fascinating

In some ways I’ve been thinking about his idea since I was a little Kevin. There is a kid’s book written from the perspective of some future archeologist discovering artifacts from today. The archeologist interpreted everything wrong of course, the toilet was a religious alter I think. But that’s not the point. The point is it’s a fun thought experiment.

Attitudes change over time, and eventually the change becomes what’s normal. Once that happens it’s hard to imagine how anyone could have lived any differently. Think about old folks’ attitude toward race. Some happy conversation will all of the sudden turn taboo. And the young ones will blush and think, “how can he say such a thing?”

But the thought experiment is for the young one to figure out what belief HE holds that will make HIS grandkids uncomfortable.

It’s not easy. What do I hold true today that I will look back on knowing it’s wrong? The fun part of the thought experiment is that everything that you think you’ll think is wrong in the future isn’t something you think is true today.

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I’m In Love With Your Nightingale

Jul 27, ’16 12:13 AM

These days I’ve been filling my head with the bad news from Turkey. I shouldn’t do it because the desire to understand never leads to a better picture of what’s going on, it just makes me nervous and gloomy. Plus because I’m not there I can’t feel the normalcy of everyday life in Istanbul which makes it worse. Lucky for me Ilgaz posted this video of people dancing in Kadıköy (my old neighborhood) showing the spirit of the Turks that I knew best. Something open hearted, joyful and goofy.

Facebook translate is bad

The video is great but I had get her to translate her comment on it for me because Facebook translate does a terrible job of Facebook translating. The message she wrote under the video when she posted it translated like this:

Blow Ohal or something, right in the head. Actually you all interim Boyle, right? Come on guys admit it :) Not quite the azcik watch, would you rather:

Thank’s for nothing Facebook translate. Here is a better translation of her comment:

OK, OK there’s a coup, a state of emergency and everything. But admit that this feeling is inside all of your heads.
If do don’t feel it, just take a look and you will find joy again.

Much better. Then I asked her to translate the song which doesn’t quite flow in English the way it does in Turkish. But who cares, let’s dance!

I resent my destiny, it didn’t hurt again
I swore to my destiny, the black night
This strange heart, I’m in love with your nightingale

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Mike Collins Behind the Moon

Jul 22, ’16 12:30 PM

Apollo 11 astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin at the Kennedy Space Center in July, 1969. Just a few days before that Saturn V rocket in the background took them to the moon.

Astronauts

Neil on the left was the first on the moon. He was the one who said, “one giant leap for Mankind.” Buzz, on the right was number two stomping around on the moon. Mike Collins, looking so cool and humble in the middle never walked on the moon. Never even landed on it. He was the one who ran the Command Module, the craft that orbited around the so called dark side of the moon as the mission on it’s surface took place. Then he went home, never to return.

I’ve always felt bad for Mike Collins. To get so close and not to walk or land or anything. I felt bad for him until I read this paragraph from his autobiography, which gives a good perspective on how he felt about his unique mission.

“Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much a part of what is taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two. I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.” – Michael Collins

Unrelated to the mission, the photograph reminds me that I need a haircut. I’ve got another style of 1969 haircut right now, less lunar mission, more Sonny Bono.

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Turkey Today

Jul 21, ’16 12:13 PM

 What is going on in Turkey?

The answer is not entirely clear. But the stakes are high. Watching the attempted coup unfold from my laptop in Ljubljana last Friday was unsettling. I lived in Istanbul for about two years and never felt directly threatened by anybody. But as the frequency of violent news increased I had a harder and harder time being able to call home and honestly say that I felt safe. The time came to leave for a few reasons, one of the main ones was the rising level of background stress just got to be too much.

coup

During my time in Istanbul I never tried to shrug off my yabancı status. I never learned the language, never stopped dressing a little funny, never got asked directions. I always felt like an outsider, protected as a foreigner. Ilgaz warned me about this from time to time, she could see what I couldn’t. She saw that there were good reasons to avoid this or that neighborhood and worried about my walking home alone after midnight.

So reading about this coup attempt gave me some mixed feelings: relief, that I’m not there to feel the rising tension in the air generated by chants of protestors, sirens and a rare whiff of tear gas. But also some kind of masochistic nostalgia, I should be in Istanbul talking with friends about what it feels like to be in the midst of a nation in transition.

coup_02

So what do I make of what’s going on?

As the days pass, the English language news channels have been covering the changes that have been taking place post coup attempt. I should say that I don’t trust anything being said about the source of the coup. It’s all too speculative, fingers pointing one way and another: it’s the parallel state, it’s the CIA, he did it to himself! Maybe in 10 or 15 years the victors will write the history of the events of the past week. But that’s all too hard to parse out for now so I suspend my desire to know.

Something that is clear is that the response to the coup was swift and powerful, reaching not just into the military but all aspects of civil life in Turkey. As I said there are a lot of English language news sources reporting on this, but the scale of the changes didn’t hit home for me until I saw all those headlines rounded up and organized into the table below. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of any of the items below, I got it from Reddit after all, but it is a compelling list of “measures taken after the coup: dismissals, suspensions, media closures, travel bans.”

Travel Bans

  • 3,000,000 civil servants banned from exiting the country s
  • All university professors banned from exiting the country s

Media

  • 24 TV and Radio stations close to the Gülen movement had their licenses revoked s
  • Unknown number of newspapers close to the Gülen movement stopped publishing
  • Leman (satyrical, leftist, unrelated to Gülen) magazine’s last issue banneds
Institution Supended, dismissed or arrested
Ministry of the Interior 8777 s 7,899 policemen of them 3,021 high ranking, 30 province governors, 92 vice province-governors, 41 district governors and others
Judges and prosecutors 2745 s
Energy Ministry 300 s
Defence Ministry 262 military judges and prosecutors s
Education Ministry 15200 suspended, 21000 private teacher licenses revoked s, 1577 university deans ordered to resign s
President’s office 257 s
Intelligence Service (MİT) 180 s
Religious affairs directorate 492 s 3 province mufti, 31 district mufti, 1 minister advisor etc
Economy Ministry 1500 s
Family and Social ministry 393 s
Istanbul University 95 professors s
Parliament 5 high ranking administrators arrested s
Universities 4 university rectors dismissed Dicle, Gazi, Yıldız Teknik ve Yalova üniversitesi s
Ministry of Customs and Trade 184 s
Energy Market regulator 25 s
Capital Markets Board 7 s

UPDATE:

Just read another article and wanted to add it. The Turkish government has suspended all 3213 national ham radio licenses.

“The HF radio in Turkey is now silent. No transmissions are allowed. … Who’s transmitting outside turkey without licence should be considered a pirate – said Mr Erdogan.” Source

It might not seem too big. But amateur radio is an essential part of disaster recovery especially when other modes of communication are down. To quote W. Graig Fugate, administrator of FEMA and Dept. Homeland Security, “Amateur Radio often times is our last line of defense…When you need amateur radio, you really need them.”

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