This nation cannot stomach this controversy

An interesting incident was experienced in Istanbul’s Sabancı Museum last week. Somebody close to a very important individual called the museum officials and told them that the person in question wanted to visit the Joan Miro exhibition with his wife. But they first had a request.

This request was that no special measures would be taken for this visit. In other words, they would visit the exhibition like two ordinary citizens, and afterward the couple would eat the special menu meal at the Changa Restaurant inside the museum.

The two people who were to visit the museum were the 11th President of the Republic of Turkey Abdullah Gül and his wife Hayrünisa Gül.

They came quietly, visited the museum and went. I learned about this in Hürriyet writer Kanat Atkaya’s column, which I have been reading with particular pleasure these days.

The moment I read it, I remembered the trouble I experienced at a reception the other day, during a scuffle created by a Cabinet minister's army of bodyguards.

The same Abdullah Gül went to the courthouse the other day to make his statement before the public prosecutors in a case involving himself.

These are good acts. These are elegant acts that we have forgotten in the heavy, conservative atmosphere of rudeness and the hurricane of hubris.

These are meaningful acts at a time when politicians are squeezed between shoe boxes and suit bags with their extremely full pockets; at a time when businessmen, who we had not even heard of yesterday, send millions of dollars to Ankara and thumb their nose at justice.

These acts not only earn honor for those who did them. They are also acts that bring honor to democracy and a civilized society.

After Bülent...