being recep tayyip erdoğan for a day
since i am on your screen, let's dream together. let's be recep... mr. recep tayyip erdogan for a day. let's wake up or sleep wherever our imagination takes us. are you ready to come with me? it doesn't matter whether you are ready or not, i will take you wherever i want against your will anyway because i am mr. recep tayyip erdogan.
it's five in the morning. you woke up for the morning prayer. the sun rises at five fifty-eight. the imsak says so. i don't know if imsak means sunrise or if it has another conservative meaning. you want to leave it to the last minute. there is no excitement left in your life. let there be a little excitement, you start praying at fifty-six past. your advisors also object within the framework of respect. with the excuse that "a muslim warns a muslim". you have one hour. in that one hour, you will fill a notebook with the things you want to do until this year ends.
you write a few items and get bored. change the constitution, make a deal with pkk members, open a hospital here, blah blah. you write "whateveeeer". then you get up and try to do pull-ups. one-two. if you do three, your arms will ache all day. you go to the kitchen with a defeated feeling. you drink turkish coffee in a french press. then ethnic jokes come to your mind about france and the kurds. while smiling, you push down the filter.
after drinking the coffee, you take a leak before making wudu. you need to take forty steps. you go to the security guard. you chat a bit. the security guard's eyes sparkle, thinking "he's treating me like a person and asking how i am." thirty or forty years from now relevantly or (mostly) irrelevantly he will show off saying "mr. erdogan told me such and such and my advice to you on this matter is..." in fact, one of his nephews will try to show off by mentioning to his friends about how close his uncle was to you a few times when your name comes up, but after trying a couple of times and seeing it doesn't stick, he won't mention it again and will feel a little ashamed when he remembers mentioning it. you aren't even aware of his happiness; if you were, you would get jealous and say something to upset him, but you aren't. actually, you are waiting for it to drip while pretending to listen to him. he doesn't know this. this is what politics is.
wudu. prayer. they bring the suit you will wear that day. gray stripes, grayer background, as usual. but there is one problem. your stylist has an ostrich-patterned tie in their hand. you wonder what they are going to do with it. it doesn't cross your mind that they will give it to you. you think the president or king of ethiopia or whatever is coming. you say to yourself i wonder if they brought it for me to gift to him, but when they attempt to give it to you, you say hu... hop... with hand gestures, asking what that is. the girl who picked the tie starts crying. she apologizes and leaves the room. then they bring a navy no a red tie.
they invited the president of tasmania to breakfast, you had no idea he was even here. you get mad at your right-hand man. you chew him out, saying do you know what would happen if i stayed over at other presidents' houses and they didn't know. your right-hand man complains to his inner circle that he always gets chewed out by you, but his close circle has told him things in the past along the lines of "these things happen between you and the president, that man runs a country, of course he will get a little mad at you. if he doesn't get mad at you, he will get mad at the greeks and a war will break out" he tries to comfort himself by remembering what they told him. you get distracted. you want your right-hand man to research whether the name of the monster in the tasmanian devil cartoon is the tasmanian devil all over the world too. you are going to crack a joke.
before breakfast, while looking at your watch, you get an idea. what if one second was two seconds. what if one day becomes 12 hours. citizens complain a lot about speeding tickets, you think it would be a solution to that too. plus, when looking at the clock, you wouldn't waste time thinking is it nine in the morning or nine in the evening. you write in the whatsapp group saying let's write a decree immediately. plus they will think we raised the minimum wage, says the minister of economy. the minister of labor leaves a thumbs-up emoji to this message. you rejoice, saying i found something to do today too.
they call you to breakfast but the table is always empty. you say why do they do this. you wonder why it is like this when it's not actually ready, when everything is still frying, when everything hasn't been chopped yet, when there are only forks and knives on the table. your right-hand man says the internet got cut off, i couldn't look. and you get very angry. how can it get cut off, only i can cut off the internet, you yell. remembering that the president of tasmania is sitting across the table you lower your voice, you make harsh sst... pss.. sounds. "you humiliated me to the tasmania."
then you tell them to gift the tie to the tasmanian president. just as he is about to start eating, they bring the tie and give it to the man. his translator has diarrhea and isn't there. president thanks you in their language again and again for an uncomfortable amount of time. you keep pressing your lips together and bowing your head constantly to say you're welcome with your body. when he starts eating, not knowing what to do, he puts his ostrich-patterned tie next to the boiled egg. the smell of chicken egg permeates the tie.
after seeing off the president of tasmania, you say damn it i am bored of being the president. you say i am not recep tayyip erdogan. my life is awful but i want to go back, you say. to your age, your body, your lack of position. all the dated clocks in the country will become garbage. the collective anger caused by this is already on you because you are not recep tayyip erdogan. you want to learn what happened to your old life. you wave for the driver. when the driver comes you say never mind, i forgot i had a helicopter.
//you get close to the pilot's ear and say devrek. the pilot, in order to remind you that getting close to his ear serves no purpose because you communicate via microphone, he pulls his head away, holds the microphone, and says okay.
in your previous life you work at an air conditioning service in devrek. you are an alcoholic. you are a misogynist and ashik veysel is your favorite artist. you like eating corn and solving problems. your father was a huge man and he died recently. when you first came to devrek, people would come to your house to see him. as people only knew you by your father's greatness, you shrank and shrank. everyone cared about you as much as you cared about them so they didn't care. every time you aged you said how fast the days passed and nothing got better. you played games here and there, in coffeehouses, you lost games you won games but it felt like you always lost. the men you played with lost games won games, it felt like they always won. they all had children and you saw them here and there.
the pilot couldn't make sense of what you talk about. when he asked, did the real recep tayyip erdogan become your old self now? you understood that he couldn't make sense of it. but now you didn't know either.
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