Write This Down

 

I was listening to to 99.5 FM, The Wolf. Exactly a few seconds after i started thinking about writing this post, i heard the first tunes of the song above. I am not that versed in country so i had to wait a few seconds until i heard the first words.

Write this down. George Strait. (one guy who should not monopolize the straightness of all guys named George, i said it long time ago). So i decided to write this down. It's gone take some pain. First i have to bring here Dimitrie Cantemir, one of the greatest writers and historians that lived in Europe during the Ottoman Empire. He actually lived a large part of his adult life in Istanbul, Turkey. He knew a lot about Ottomans. He wrote a lot about their history in a work called History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire whose manuscripts were part of the Romanian Treasure transferred by the Romanian government to Moscow in 1916.

But this is not what i had in mind to write down today.

I was thinking how little we know about the history of a people that spans over 1000 years that lived and thrived in the middle East, parts of Europe, Asia, Africa.

One thing i know for sure. From a video i saw on youtube. Their leaders where absolute. Their entire existence was based on this one constant. The leader could not be contested. (I remember i read somewhere that their rules of succession were so tough that at the moment o taking power the sultan was killing all his brothers for everybody's assurance that he will not be challenged - here: "the practice of fratricide, first employed by Mehmed II, soon became widespread.[2] Both Murad III and his son Mehmed III had their half-brothers murdered. The killing of all the new sultan's brothers and half-brothers (which were usually quite numerous) was traditionally done by manual strangling with a silk cord." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_of_succession_to_the_former_Ottoman_throne). After all, absolute leadership is the most natural type of social organization known to humankind but that doesn't mean that in time this type of society does not become advanced or sophisticated.

I bet there was a big competition for gaining sultan's favor and trying to influence him. Probably part of this was straight advising, when asked for. But i bet another part of this was guessing his mood and suggestioning. I never read anything about but it is my guess.

But i don't think it was such a far fetched assumption if i considered that they might have brought this to an art level. Both guessing his mood and making subtle suggestions. Could they have gotten at the level where could have been embedded them in the songs he was listening?

I was getting ready to read a book i took from the library, "The Last Sultan, The Live and Times of Ahmet Ertegun" by Robert Greenfield. Ahmet Ertegun. The ambassador's son. The media mogul. The man who changed the face of American music. (or maybe not only music). Never had time to. But i think all that anybody needs to read from that book is in the picture below.

And judging only by the title of the book and the passage i already read online, the fact that he in the Atlantic files “had every disc jockey in the United States’s shoe size, hat size, preference in women and drugs of choice” make me think he might have introduced us, unknowingly, to the not forgotten practices of those times of the Ottoman Empire, so familiar to those that come from communist countries, (and this is not a coincidence, i wrote in other posts about the possible connection) things that don't have anything to do with democracy and Declaration of Independence. Click on the picture to can actually read that in the book, on the lower left page.

If a dictator or sultan can be influenced by embedded words in his music, why a democracy couldn't? Provided you have the means to reach everyone.(And that is already history).

Imagine a guy like that with knowledges like those in the today's internet and supercomputers' world.

And by the way, i thought i spotted his ghost yesterday in a beige, older Volvo driven by a beautiful, not so old, smiling woman.

http://performa.web.ua.pt/pdf/actas2011/EminSoydas.pdf