What if Kılıçdaroğlu has merely gone missing, how would you know?

CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu's visit to the USA, full of oddities from beginning to end, has turned into an unfortunate event for him. It is very clear that it was a very badly planned visit for him, even badly thought out in terms of timing and appropriateness. He must be secretly seething at those who persuaded him into such a visit and put him in such a bad position during it.

His meetings with government circles would have been somewhat difficult anyway as the leader of an opposition party, but at least he could have met with a number of think tanks, a number of civil society organizations and larger Turkish communities.

After all, there are in the USA communities made up of a significant number of citizens of the Republic of Türkiye who will vote in the parliamentary and presidential elections. Holding meetings with them to lay out his election vision would have been customary, and in fact no one could have criticized him for it. It would have been far more meaningful and acceptable than seeking, through the search for American politicians, the legitimate seal of approval he could not find among the Turks from the most improbable American politicians. But those who organized the affair could not manage even that.

Let alone all this, they could not even prevent the cancellation of a previously planned meeting with a leftist American politician, Bernie Sanders. And that is not all: the story of an 8-hour journey arranged by canceling an air ticket that had been bought and skipping the journalists has become the main story of the whole trip, which was already unfortunate. That 8 hours of disappearing from sight turned into a news item and was leaked to the press is the aspect of the matter that should concern Kılıçdaroğlu more.

All of this shows that a serious conspiracy mechanism is working against him inside, that there is a serious effort to discredit him. It is understood that a more important problem than his Table of Six friends, whom he cannot manage to persuade about the candidacy, is inside his own party. Let Kılıçdaroğlu go on calculating that.

Now everyone is rightly demanding an account of these 8 hours in which he was lost in the USA, and is not giving credit to Kılıçdaroğlu's efforts at explanation, is that not so? Whatever he says, a great many scenarios to be attributed to his disappearance come into play.

A friend reminded me of a story I had told earlier about similar situations. Perhaps this story could be of some use to Kılıçdaroğlu in expressing himself. Let this much support be from us too:

Sometimes, in order to see the facts before our eyes, we may need to set aside our theories, our concepts, even the impressions we have gained from past experiences. For often nothing but these explanatory theories and concepts prevents us from seeing the facts. They come between reality and our eyes like a curtain, showing us what we see in a different way.

You know, a group of social scientists from different branches went to Erzurum to do social science in the field. As a requirement of the training they have had, everyone will explain whatever they encounter on the basis of the theories they learned and memorized within their own scientific discipline.

A cold Erzurum winter day. Outside, snow, winter, apocalypse. Our social scientists drop in at a house with smoke rising from its chimney. The host bids them welcome, they go in. The first thing that attracts everyone's attention the moment they enter: There is a stove in the middle and the stove has been set up quite high, with supports placed under it. As soon as they warm up a little, all of them at once voice this strange situation that has caught their attention and set about explaining it each in his own way. The situation is strange because the heat loss caused by raising the stove is something everyone knows.

The one who is a sociologist explains that Erzurum, because of its geographical proximity to Iran, is historically and culturally under its influence, and that therefore keeping the fire high is an expression of sanctification, as a mark of respect for fire. Since there is in Islamic culture too a habit of keeping what is sacred up high, it is quite a logical explanation.

The one who is an anthropologist, while granting this view, explains that people develop the culture most suited to their situation through their interaction with nature, and that there is a harmony between the building material used here and the use of fire. For that reason, he explains, we should not get hung up on the stove use or heating habits we are used to from other cultures.

Of course, while the historian of religions says one thing and the economist offers another explanation, the host looks, now at one, now at another, in astonishment. For some reason it occurs to someone to ask him, and he asks on what tradition this way of setting up a stove is based. The host, in a voice wavering in hesitation and timidly before these very familiar explanations of so many scientists, says: "Sir, I won't lie, listening to you I got very confused about why I did this this way. But truth be told, when I was setting up the stove, the pipe fell short. So I put a support under it."

Of course this is an example that expresses in the funniest way the situation that all theoretical, or here conspiratorial, explanations can fall into at times. Sometimes truly the pipe has just fallen short. The reason things come about is that simple and that obvious.

Kılıçdaroğlu may truly and only have lost his way. His road may have grown longer than necessary because of some mishap, he may have gotten into a long chat about the homeland with someone he met at the hamburger place he stopped at. Especially if the subject of Erdoğan came up, he may not have been able to restrain himself and talked for hours, or perhaps the person or persons with whom he got into a deep chat on the road or at the hamburger place were even fuller, even more talkative than he, and told him a great many things.

So in short, perhaps the pipe just fell short, or Kılıçdaroğlu really did get lost and spent all those hours trying to find his way. How would you know?

THE MATTER OF FATE

The expressions I used in my last article on fate are the most basic information of a normal-sound Islamic creed of fate. One cannot think otherwise on precaution and fate. But certain people, as is well known, took these words of mine as an objection to what the esteemed President said about "fate." But to be able to do this, they must have either skipped what came before my words or what followed Erdoğan's words. Yet to say that our esteemed President, when saying "fate," skipped "precaution" or "responsibility," only a malicious and distorting political intelligence suffices. The concepts of fate, human agency, responsibility and precaution give rise to a great many words, but of course not in such a way as to be squandered in this market of political malice.