By: Jesse Stewart, Staff Writer
Osman Hamdi Bey, "The Tortoise Trainer" (1906), oil on canvas
Just before his death, Osman Hamdi Bey painted a portrait of an old man attempting to train tortoises and succeeded in indirectly depicting the inherent deficiencies of a dying government. Bey was the preeminent artist during the Tanzimat, a time when the Ottoman Empire was struggling to adopt the technological innovations of Europe while preserving their sense of identity and culture. In his 1906 painting, The Tortoise Trainer, Bey displays the simple scene of an elder (who bears a resemblance to the painter himself) using a flute and vegetables to train the tortoises at his feet.
The image is a satirical one; regardless of who the man and the reptiles are meant to represent, he is an antiquated figure in antiquated garb and using antiquated techniques to coach creatures for a pointless purpose (tortoises were once used as living decorations but certainly no longer by 1906), rendering this entire moment an anachronism: there is no reform or action that the Ottoman government can take to salvage itself, as the political structures by which it operates are the very nooses slowly tightening around its neck.
You can look at The Tortoise Trainer and think of the Ottoman Empire, ‘destined’ to fall and fracture after World War One, but I see the United States in every brushstroke, a comparison quite evident not just by the candidates of the 2020 election but attitude of its voters.
In November of 2016, citizens saw the election of Donald Trump as an event that signaled either a potential collapse of the American identity or a partial restoration of its virtues. The attitude and demeanor of the average person either plummeted or was driven to elation. Now they beat the drums again, for the ‘most important election in history’, as if such a thing were true and as if this mindset weren’t rooted in a mania brought on by impatience, ignorance, and some measure of ideological insanity.
Let’s look closer at the trainer and their turtles, shall we?
The average American voter is very intelligent, routinely consuming a diet of facts, figures, statistics, and historical precedents so that they can feel and appear superior to one another. The average American voter is woefully unwise, completely unable to divorce their ego from their conclusions and unable to accept a reality that may rob them of any autonomy they assume to possess. The average American voter is catastrophically insecure and more than willing to take this out on anyone around them in the form of angry ignorance, "Look, the candidate isn't my first choice but it's better than the alternative."
Wearing an ugly yellow sweater because it's the only warm top that goes well with my boots isn't my 'first choice' and 'better than the alternative' of wearing nothing at all, but this is a vote I make in my closet, that has an impact of one day at the most, and really only affects me. Stepping into a voting booth and punching the ballot for a specific party has an impact of four years at the very least, and at that point the concept of a 'lesser evil' is less of a call for pragmatism and more of a diffusion of responsibility.
America is very young in that it has only ever had one dominant political system. In fact, it's really the only current country in the world that has maintained the same general system of government for the last two centuries. This inexperience means that even its most politically-minded citizens don't quite understand the concept of a 'mandate.' For example, the Chinese dynasties operated under a 'mandate of heaven' for about three thousand years, justifying the emperor's rule over the people as an assertion that he was the 'son of heaven' and therefore entitled to lead them. Regardless of whether or not it was believed, this mandate was only as good as the happiness of the people. If infrastructure decayed or too many wars were lost, "How could this man be the son of heaven?" might be the reaction, giving another faction the opportunity to seize the people’s mandate and establish a new government. This has happened many times, in some form or another, in basically every country that exists...other than the United States.
Richard Nixon is not well-regarded today, but he is emblematic of Republican platform during his tenure in the same way that John F. Kennedy is viewed by most Democrats as being one of their best executive representatives at the time. They may have been in office a half-century ago, but the artificial discrepancies between their parties remain to this day.
Place yourself in the shoes of the member of a small fishing village in 1960s Indochina. A well-meaning American eight thousand miles away votes for Nixon (a man that will later wipe your community from the face of the earth) because of the candidate's proposal to give tax incentives to minority-owned businesses and housing; a noble idea but paid with your blood. Not even a decade before that, another well-meaning American eight thousand miles away votes for and then eulogizes Kennedy (a man that defied the Geneva Conventions by authorizing the use of the chemical weapon Agent Orange to begin a genocide of your people in name of self-defense) because of the candidate's calls for a peaceful and prosperous America for people of all colors; again a noble concept, with your scars as a receipt.
Given the trajectory of the last seventy-five years, the Republican and Democratic Party have long lost their mandate to govern and a vote for either party is willful ignorance as to how the machinery of government operates. This is not a statement of opinion. This is not some revolutionary or radical stance. This is the simple reality that exists outside the crumbling window that the trainer and their tortoises would rather not acknowledge.
When you vote, you’re granting legitimacy to the party and people you’re endorsing. In a democracy of any variation, there is no such thing as a ‘lesser of two evils.’ You can vote for Joe Biden or Donald Trump out of protest to the other, and a ‘win’ might feel good for about a week or two, but the political reality is that you’re elevating a group of people to a level where they possess dominion over three hundred million citizens and there exists very little recourse in holding them accountable. A ‘vote’ is not a statement of support or agreement; it is a certificate of irrevocable trust, one that Americans are woefully opulent in giving.
Due to our population size and surface area, we require a government centralized to a degree that both betrays the ‘individualism’ of our foundation and cannot possibly be filled competently; the citizenry see themselves as possessing autonomy over the political decisions of the nation while accepting no culpability for its faults. Had we put it to a direct vote in 2003, the United States would still have found itself mired in Middle Eastern warfare. Had Hilary Clinton been elected in 2016, the United States would still have a six-figure death count from COVID-19. The United States is fundamentally at odds with itself in regards to accepting the responsibilities and consequences for its identity in a way that only the Ottomans can relate to.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and we Americans have a very warped view of what constitutes ‘history’. Our nation isn’t even three hundred years old, so most of us may see anything occurring before the mid-1700s as so long ago that it isn’t even relevant to what we’re experiencing today. Wrong.
The Ottoman Empire was arguably the first nation in history to be both definitively multicultural and revered for its strong economic vitality. Sound familiar? For six hundred years it presided as the center of trade between the empires of Europe and Asia, occupying a vast territory now belonging to most of the Middle East, Northern Africa, and stretching all the way up into Central Europe. Imagine telling one of its citizens that in less than three generations it’d go from ‘experiencing some minor governmental inefficiencies’ to ‘so non-existent that most of the world will have forgotten it ever was.’
As an American, imagine being visited by a tourist from the future. “Oh, the United States? I think that sounds familiar....” While they sifted through their history book, imagine asking them just how many centuries they had traveled to reach 2020. “Almost two.” Only two hundred years? How could that be possible? Your grandchildren could still be alive at that point! Imagine asking them what you could do today to prevent this fate from befalling your homeland, what political action you could take to not only improve the present but ensure a future. “You can’t just untangle…well, let’s just say that the US doesn’t have a knot, you are the knot.”
In industrial sociology (how people interact with their working environments) there exists a phenomenon called the System Accident (or Normal Accident), where the unanticipated connection of multiple failures in a complex system cannot be slowed or stopped by any further interaction. Think of the Chernobyl disaster or the 2008 financial crisis; an inherent need is attached to a system that is overwhelmingly complex due to the efficiency/profit it can generate, to the point where multiple operators are required for it to function. Each of these operators may be incredibly competent in regards to their specific field, but the mechanism itself is nothing more than a series of dominos, where an operator can be only realistically be responsible for their single domino. If a single one manages to fall in an unexpected way and causes another domino to pivot in a way that cannot be predicted, there isn’t an operator that could possibly be so all-seeing as to prevent the entire chain from tumbling.
The federal government of the United States is experiencing a System Accident; the complexity of its governance, inherent at the founding and exacerbated for centuries, has rendered not only its citizens politically illiterate but its leaders as well when facing the multitude of existential threats that the country faces. Issues of education, the environment, immigration, economic inequality, and healthcare (among a plethora of others) have all reached critical mass, to such a degree that no one candidate or even series of successful candidates could possibly ‘solve’ them before one, some, most, or all aspects of American life collapse. ‘American Exceptionalism’ is real in that we are on the precipice of an exceptionally-elaborate demise; a noose tied with a Gordian knot that no drone strike can cut.
One can argue as to when the dominoes began falling, but the fact remains that the alarms are buzzing, the lights are flashing, and our elected operators are staring at their manuals, dumb-founded, “Maybe if we shove more votes into it?” And any attempts to reform the machine itself become paradoxical: installing an elected official into an apparatus where they, their family, and all of their peers benefit from the status quo and yet expecting them to follow through on their campaign promises is literally an exercise in insanity. But still, the cries of empty madness echo between the ears of those pushing you to the polling place, "You just gotta vote."
At some point in the life of an American voter they are faced with a conundrum: either the president is directly responsible for the trajectory of the country during their time in office or that the position has far little authority when compared to the overall inertia of 'American interests' and the figure serves as nothing more than a ceremonial scapegoat. A rational individual might conclude that the truth lies in the middle, but this inconvenience is too complicated for the voter to consider, as their political consciousness has been reduced to not only a binary mindset but a race to find the most pedantic, politically-expedient, and laziest opinions possible.
There isn’t a single American who whole-heartedly approves of our two-party system, yet nearly all calls for reforming the structure are woefully ignorant of the complexity of the knot they seek to untangle. You can implement Ranked Choice voting, you can abolish the Electoral College, and you can promote the existence of third parties but none of these will rectify the situation as long as the Senate exists. The highest legislative body in the country will always favor the two largest parties so long as membership to its ranks is limited too so few seats per state. You could possibly amend the Constitution to dissolve the Senate into the House of Representatives and give us a unicameral legislature (which would make it easier for a fascist party to take over, by the way) but how could such a proposal ever pass? What legislative body is going to pass a measure that restricts its own powers? And to abolish the Senate would require such a comprehensive rewriting of the Constitution that it (the document that our entire government is based on) would bear no resemblance to its former self:
We don’t have a knot, we are the knot; each new major-party president that you vote into the Oval Office is nudging the stool from under our feet.
Every Republican and Democratic president of the modern era (1945 - now) has put this country three steps forward at most, and four steps backward at least. The idea that change can only be implemented incrementally and four years at a time as being integral to the fabric of governance has doomed the country that was handed the literal world at its feet in the 1950s only to regress to its former state: a swath of lawyers, sharecroppers, and slaves convincing themselves that they are so much more enlightened than the rest of the world simply because they raise their hands twice a decade for a war criminal and slap a crude 'I Voted!' decal on their chest. "Do the people of China get a sticker like me? I think not! Feast your eyes on me, an intellectual, as confirmed by my shiny sticker!"
I was in Hong Kong in 2019 when the people stood up and said, "Enough. We’ve been voting for pro-Hong Kong candidates for two decades, but they can only exist in a legislature ultimately beholden to Beijing. Time to burn down the banks and take back our mandate." I was back in America by June of 2020, when the people realized, "Enough. Look how big the politicians' eyes get when we actually do something instead of pretending like the ballot will fix a four-hundred-year-old problem. Time to burn down the banks and find a mandate." I was incredibly proud to be an American in June of 2020. But now it is the fall, just before an election, and I look to my compatriots who have defanged and declawed themselves, tying the leash of their hopes and dreams around the first-past-the-post, "Well, you see, voting is actually the MOST important thing you can do to alter the trajectory of this country, as evident by all those wars, bail-outs, and other catastrophes that they never put on the ballot."
At this time in history, it's incredibly spoiled, selfish, and maniacal to behave as if the platform and values that you vote for aren’t paid for with others’ blood. Every single president in the last seventy-five years has waged war against civilian men, women, and children in places 'unfortunate-enough' not to be inside American borders, and yet each of these leaders still maintain some small cult of personality to this day. Loyal Republicans and Democrats sing their praises in regards to the virtuous deeds they've done for the American people while dismissing any light shone on the grotesque exploits they've rendered unto those 'unfortunate-enough' to not be born American. Look at the war crimes of Obama and Bush and the benign image these two men been rehabilitated toward; were it to happen in any other nation we'd refer to it as 'grooming' of the people and idolatry of the State, as if we didn't all grow up pledging allegiance to the flag of a government that not-so-subtly implied that our actions were an extension of God's will.
The Declaration of Independence's most famous phrase is in its opening, "We hold these truths to be self-evident"; though it is not a legal document, this statement does imply a fundamental position that the value of human life is integral to the foundation of our government, meaning that this right extends to any person, regardless of race, creed, religion, sex, and -especially- nationality. Imagine a perfect candidate that not only promises several wonderful improvements to the American way of life but can absolutely guarantee their implementation…though the only catch is that they will kill innocent civilians eight thousand miles away during their time in office. Considering that Donald Trump and Joe Biden have no such promises, with no avenue to actually pass anything through Congress, and are already both responsible for a multitude of deaths during their time in government, maybe take a moment to consider the ludicrous degree that one would have to abandon every form of ethics in order to punch the ballot for either of them and the audacity required to brow-beat others into accepting voting as an actual gesture of positive political change.
There is no Republican or Democratic platform that does not involve the unjustifiable deaths of citizens in countries too small to respond with a declaration of war, and there is no argument that an American life is worth more than another’s. You can vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and claim that you're doing so "for human rights," but both candidates will respond to a softly-spoken briefing from Pentagon officials with the same answer: "Do it." And they won't think twice, because they've never lost votes over 'collateral damage'; Americans simply grab their self-righteous teddy bear named 'better than the other candidate' and doze off to sleep.
Osman Hamdi Bey painted The Tortoise Trainer not as a statement of pessimism or from a jaded outlook on the state of politics. The man was instrumental in helping the Ottoman Empire define itself through times of great change and strife, granting a sense of identity to a nation struggling to adapt to the global stage. But, by the end of his life, he saw the State of an empire for what it was: a machine which could weave strands of culture, economy, science, and diplomacy into a beautiful tapestry but instead chooses to fashion these threads into a noose which it is too arrogant to believe could ever be its own.
When filling out your ballot, in this or any year, begin at the very bottom. Your vote is most important for city, county, and state elections. But as you ascend the mostly-binary choices, understand that your actual voice diminishes with each new selection. And when that fateful day arrives and the winners are announced, understand that it is no great tragedy or triumph, as the sun will set no slower than it already is and that you have your specific tortoises to tend to before it gets dark. And, unlike those who promise to fix your crumbling walls yet can't seem to find the time between doomed wars, you can sleep at night knowing that you don’t whip your tortoises into submission ("Vote!") but educate them to perform by the art of the flute and nutrients of the vegetable; maybe someday an empire will rise which understands this, but it'd be the first. Vote, but don’t punch any holes large enough for your hopes and dreams to fit through, lest you once again hang yourself from the ballot.