Erkin Koray Music Politics & People Saliha Enzenauer

Corona & The Reign of Old People (or: Learning to Cough With Erkin Koray)

Saliha Enzenauer
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“It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.” 

Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

September 2020: Corona and the endless rule & policy insanities connected it are still going strong in Germany and many other countries across the globe. In what seems to be a sharp paradigm change towards Huxley’s “Civilization is Sterilization”, many governments emptied this beautiful thing called life of all pleasures of social interaction & culture, and reduced it to breathing and consuming („Buy! Buy to beat this crisis!“). Public and social life has been paralyzed in order to ‘flatten the curve’ first, and then to eliminate and / or live with the virus, depending on the industry and public sector concerned.

Although on September 2nd Germany’s Federal Minister of Health admitted that the lockdown had been an unnecessary, ruinous measure that they wouldn’t impose again with the knowledge they have about the virus today, the reality in Germany shows itself like this: schools closed, stores and bordellos open (with bureaucratic guidelines as to which positions are allowed). Billion €€€ bailouts for banks, businesses and the industry, zero compensations for students who had job- or earning losses during the shutdown. Concerts and night clubs shut down, while f.e. public baths with 3000 persons gathering in two pools are open. For the first time since Uncle Adolf’s wrathful reign, culture and art are suspended and at the very bottom of the list of all things that are “system-relevant“ !

One can call the coronavirus policies contradictory and irrational, and get caught up in crazy conspiracies like it happens more intensely these days, when 50000 right-wing extremists and Yoga-esoterics team up as natural allies in Berlin to storm the Reichstag, hysterically waving Reichsflags in front of it. Or one can face the truth and distill the one common denominator behind these political, sociological, and economical decisions: we are ruled by old people, and that won’t change anytime soon. Welcome to the reign of ancient dinosaurs, where a thing called youth or future does not exist!

Most old people’s reactions to the massive lockdowns and measures is a positive and very supportive one in Germany, following the motto „Education, job, money, culture, parties, concerts- I’ve had all of that and don’t need it anymore.“ Some also seem to feel one last excitement and glow because they finally get some attention after most were deported to inhumane nursery homes by their kids, or will be in the near future. And some of them simply have fallen back into the good old, warm lap of the authoritarian and fascist rule. Isn’t it nice to exercise in indignation and punish a bit? To order around and play police for a bit? Especially Germans are flooded by a warm, nostalgic feeling and good vibrations when thinking about it.

Fascinating observations can be made these days- calls and actions for alcohol bans in public spaces are not coming from Muslim or communist countries, but from the so-called “free democracies“ like Germany. Because around 80% of all elderly people here demand it, and the parliamentarians making politics for these elderly class implement it. Our senior citizens complain about hedonistic young people gathering in public spaces for open air drinks after they suffered through months of still-stand and an ongoing night-life lockdown. They identify their “hedonism” as the main problem in the entire pandemic. At the same time, most of these outraged old people are in Summer holidays right now, traveling across Germany and Europe. Because apparently, torturing kids and young people by shutting down schools and culture for half a year in order to save lives is okay and reasonable, but don’t you dare to take away the bourgeois German’s well-deserved holidays, not even for one Summer!

My parents told me to respect the elderly, and while in terms of their vulnerability I strongly agree with this, respect for me is nothing you deserve, but something that you earn. A Nazi that was 25 years old at the end of WW2 in 1945, was 6o years old in 1980, 70 years old in 1990, and 80 years old in 2000- these were my childhood and youth years, and these were the older people I was expected to respect. They were full of shit and evil.

Not much has changed, really. Representatives of the ‘old = automatically ‘responsible’ generation’ are typically individuals that not once opposed an imperial war in their lifetimes- that’s why we had and continue to have so many of them. They usually never spoke out against capitalism’s system of global injustice and oppression, or bothered about core-issues such as the occupation of Palestine and the horrible ongoing lockdown and torture of the country’s people. Most of them are persons who reserve no more than 24 hours of their attention to nuclear-style explosions in Beirut or the global hunger crisis triggered by the corona policies, before moving back to balancing questions about the virus, health, and their entitlement to a long life of prosperity.

Our prospects look grim. Only Italy is aging more unhealthily than Germany, with women having less and less and children. In addition, some portions of the middle-aged and garden-gnomed class are born old so that we must count them into the old class, which makes the reactionary rule only more powerful. While they statistically have an average of 1,37 children in their families, their helicopter mentalities help them appreciate a new reality without dangers and risks. Many rearranged their lives comfortably in a new “Corona-Bourgeoise“, showing off about how well they handle the crisis economically and psychologically, making lemonade out of the lemon, babbling about spending more time in the garden and consciously cutting down on consumption- something you can only do if you actually have something.

I wonder if not all youth is wasted, and not all liberation and emancipation is actually for the garbage, if you are doomed to be surrounded by a majority of very old people from the cradle to the coffin. People who will vote for the concerns of old people, and for parties that make politics for old people. Fuck me: 16 years of Helmut Kohl and another 16 years of Angela Merkel just during my lifetime- I’m 40. How is it that nobody calls this out as an autocracy of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, our ruling party which excludes all but Christians from the democratic process with their name?

It seems like we have no chance.

My humble opinion is that a nice, juvenile „Fuck you!“ as an uprising of the new No-Future Generation of Corona in all of this would be great as a starting point. These days my heart opens up whenever I see young people gathering at night in the streets of Cologne, because they want to LIVE. Their laughter and vibrant glow is filling the streets again, inducing life to all things. They are being dragged away by the police every evening, and they go with little protest or resistance- but they come back the next evening.

Good.

I want to see a youth that denies responsibilities if not given any chances, a youth that insists on its right to take risks, a youth that doesn’t eternally turn the other cheek like good sheep. A youth that mocks, a youth that provokes. A youth that confronts and challenges, a youth that accuses and rejects when it has to be. A youth in the progressive spirit of punk and psychedelic. We need a minority rule of a juvenile spirit.

There are countless examples of young, loud and snotty people who forced their ideas into the stiff dinosaur oligarchies, and as a result changed discourse and culture against all odds. One of them is the Turkish psychedelic and arabesk guitar legend Erkin Koray, who played the first rock’n’roll concert in Turkey aged 15, and stubbornly penetrated the Turk’s ear and mind with the progressive new music, stubbornly changing the country’s cultural course. In 1983, Koray recorded an amazingly tripped-out and funky track called “Öksürük – The Cough“, where he turns health-panic and warning into detached boredom and makes his guitar cough like a neutered cat.

So, the next time when a hypocritical elderly citizen lectures on your hedonism and orders you to do away with your life and future in order to become a fascist health Puritan with no joy or education, then you have to remember Erkin Koray’s “Öksürük – The Cough”.
It is ideal for politely coughing aerosols into the required direction.

by Saliha Enzenauer
(whose 90-year old grandfather is currently sick with the coronavirus)

It is coming
Smirkingly
Like a two-faced buffoon
It comes
Wiggly
Like a fake bimbo
Without a warning
Without a noise
Like a ghost
Like a bogey
Mercilessly
Without any remorse
It comes again
To rub off on me
To hug my throat
It comes again
The cough comes
Öhö öhö öhö öhö öhö 
Fucking cough cough
Öhö öhö ...
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