Walter Williams - Deep State

Dagmar couldn’t decide whether to laugh or express outrage. She ended up saying nothing.

Judy took an olive from a plate, bit it, grimaced, and swallowed. Apparently her palate wasn’t ready for olives for breakfast.

“Put some Nutella on it,” Dagmar advised.

“He’s not your father, is my point,” Judy said. “He’s here to do a job, and if getting it done means treating you like a favorite daughter, then that’s what he’ll do. But if the job called for it, he could be someone else’s daddy tomorrow.”

“Our relationship,” said Dagmar, “is professional.”

“That’s for the best,” Judy said, her tone skeptical. “Because Lincoln isn’t just some eccentric old geezer with a game fixation, he’s a general trying to start a revolution. And that means he’s going to get people killed.”

“He’s not bloodthirsty,” Dagmar protested. “He’s not sending out assassins.”

“No,” Judy said, “not that we know about, anyway. It’s our own people that are going to get killed if these demos go wrong. It’s Lincoln who’s decided to accept that loss, if it happens.”

So have I, Dagmar thought. Instead she just repeated what Lincoln had said on that last day in Istanbul.

“That would be the fault of the bastards who kill them.”

Judy shrugged her inked shoulders.

“I’d say there’s enough responsibility to go around.”

Dagmar looked at Judy, her eyes narrow.

“And your responsibility?” she asked.

A tremor crossed Judy’s face. “I’m complicit,” she said. “I got carried away by the sheer coolness of it all.”

“Well.” Dagmar rose and reached for the teapot. “From this point on, I’m going to be heavily invested in keeping my boyfriend alive.”

Judy looked at her with bleak sleepy eyes.

“May you succeed,” she said, “in all your endeavors.”

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There was Rafet, his brilliant yellow hair covered by a sun hat, dancing at the head of several thousand people. He was holding a double-ended drum and was banging away and jumping up and down and everyone around him was singing.

Ecstatic drumming indeed, Dagmar thought.

The new anti-government action was under way. It was ten A.M. on Saturday, and the demo had been swollen by thousands who had the day off.

The action was taking place in Karaaliolu Park, in Antalya, Turkey’s largest city on its Mediterranean coast. The park was blessed with a spectacular location, perched on a cliff above the sea, so every video on Dagmar’s array of flatscreens showed a spectacular view of ocean, cliff, clouds, rows of palm trees, sailboats, fountains, the ochre-colored walls of a castle, all dominated by the Tauros Mountains, snowcapped even this early in autumn. There was also some of the oddest public art Dagmar had ever seen-a statue of a bellicose mustached man with Popeye arms and what looked like a baseball cap tilted back on his head; an ancient spear-carrying warrior with a flat helmet, Don Quixote perhaps as conceived by Picasso; something that resembled in silhouette a two-horned Maurice Sendak monster; and strangest of all a huge groping hand apparently called Blessing Agriculture, Geology, Earth, Ground, Land, Soil, probably every synonym available in a Turkish thesaurus for dirt.

Maybe the Turks just hadn’t gotten the hang of statues yet. Ataturk had imposed statues on his nation, which had previously adhered to the Islamic ban on human representation-and so the newly liberated citizens had started off by planting statues of Ataturk everywhere, which no doubt earned the Gazi’s approval. Since then they seemed to have gone a bit off the rails.

Maybe, Dagmar thought charitably, they all made better sense in context.

The crowds had been told to bring DVDs and towels, and they did. The DVDs were held high, glittering in the sun, and Dagmar caught glimpses of packages bearing the images of Rocky, Celine Dion, Sean Connery, ABBA, and Cuneyt Arkyn, the actor who had achieved a kind of international infamy as the Turkish Luke Skywalker… The towels, mostly huge beach towels striped green and yellow and pink, were wrapped around faces to conceal identities. Brilliant color danced in the morning light.

“It looks like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy convention,” Dagmar said.

“I was just thinking that,” said Richard.

Signs with bloodred letters waved against the blue sky. The crowd sang. The Star and Crescent flapped in the sea breeze. The video jerked and wobbled.

In Istanbul the cameras has been concealed in hotel rooms across the street from the demo. Here there was no way to hide them, so Rafet’s crew of support techs wandered amid the crowd. Some carried cameras, others wore sunglasses with video and audio pickups, and they lacked the motion-inhibiting qualities of camera tripods. These did their best to stand still and pan the scene, but every so often they’d get jogged by a member of the crowd or have to move from one setup to another or just get carried away and start dancing. More video came in from the drones of the Anatolian Skunk Works.

Oh well. Dagmar knew they could stabilize the video in postproduction.

Still rapping on his drum, Rafet led the group of dancers away from the cliff, somewhat to Dagmar’s relief. Her imagination, the one that obsessed on every conceivable thing that could go wrong, had foreseen a line of bayonet-wielding soldiers driving the protestors over the cliff into the sea.

But, Tuna and Lincoln had pointed out, there would be a lot of foreigners in the park. Foreigners provided a measure of protection: even Bozbeyli would see the disadvantage of conducting a bayonet charge where foreign visitors would be caught up in it. The bad headlines he’d gotten from the hippodrome riot should have been an object lesson to him.

So far Tuna and Lincoln had been proved right: the watchers on the local police stations hadn’t reported any movement at all. Maybe no one had even called the police or the army.

Rafet danced along the path, the tails of his towel floating out behind him. He was wearing video shades, but the image he broadcast was a hopeless bouncy blur-looking at it was like jabbing needles into Dagmar’s eyeballs. The audio feed delivered a complex series of drumbeats, Rafet’s panting breath, and the sound of shoes crunching on gravel.

Rafet led the group past a round fountain that shot a tall spear of foam into the sky, then into the square in front of the Antalya City Hall. The place was a tidy white structure with balconies and a portico and looked as if it had been put up by some European power’s Colonial Office-even though Antalya hadn’t been colonized since the Turks themselves had done it a thousand years ago, they had somehow locked into the colonial style perfectly well.

It was the weekend and no one was inside the building-the place wasn’t even guarded-but that didn’t matter as far as the audience for the video was concerned. What the pictures would show would be thousands of demonstrators waving their banners in front of the center of local power… and they would also see no response from the authorities.

The demonstrators began a new song, a triumphalist slow march. Sonorous chords boomed out. Turkish flags waved. Everyone stood still for the song, even Rafet.

Dagmar looked over her shoulder at Ismet. “This would be the national anthem?”

“Yes. ‘I-stiklal Mars?i.’ ”

Dagmar nodded. “It just sounds like a national anthem.”

The song came to a resounding conclusion after two stanzas. Then Rafet rapped for attention on his drum. The sunglass-cameras resolutely pointed away from him: no solid image of the dancing dervish would make it into any of the Lincoln Brigade’s videos. Rafet shouted out in Turkish, and the crowd responded. They made the same sort of spontaneous art made at the other demo in Istanbul, DVDs laid out in patterns on the square, stacked in interesting ways, layered on the town hall steps, or set winking in the windows. Enterprising young men scaled the pillars supporting the portico and draped towels off the portico rail. More towels were hung from the rail that topped the wings of the building. Anti-government banners were raised on the town hall’s three flagstaffs.