SNOW

I've been thinking a lot about SNOW lately, and not just because Cincinnati has been inundated in the past couple of weeks. No I've been thinking about SNOW and Turkey. Thanks to Nobel Prize Winning writer Orhan Pamuk's novel SNOW, that lovely white stuff has become a metaphor for me, a metaphor for how the ugly things in a country and culture can be hidden in a lovely coat of Secular Democracy; how people and institutions can get stuck, immobilized by the enormous weight of that pure, crystalline blanket of a politcal construct.

When I visited Istanbul, I flippantly stated that it was San Franciso with minarets, but of course the differences are more striking, and let's hope they remain so. As we watch journalists outing their sources and capitulating to the Executive Branch in the Libby Trial. As we learn of newspaers burying stories as they did in Clevelnad, because they cannot afford the expense of a court battle even if they won, I worry about the future of our democracy. Are we becoming like Turkey, a nation based on a strong Secular Democracy, only so long as the government is not brought to task?