I'm a one-man stand

Column writing is a young man's game.

In honour of Kaidence the newest Kardashian and the rest of the knocked-up, knuckle-dragging KK Klan I was planning to write this entire column exclusively in words beginning with K, but formal experimentation takes nerve and stamina and I'd have had to rely over-much on words like "knickers" and "knockers" and "knob", and cheated with "knitwit" and "knumbskull", and I'd have probably spelt "column" as "kolumn".

Plus many of you would have pretended you don't know what a krimmer-wearing kulak is, or a kenspeckle kinkajou, or indeed a Kardashian, so instead - for there is life in the old dog yet - I shall ignore the Kardashians entirely and write this column while standing up.

This week Erdem Gunduz proved that, like stand-up comedy, becoming a protest-celebrity is all about timing. Gunduz is better known in Turkey as duran adam, and outside it as The Standing Man. At 6pm on Monday night he stood in Istanbul's empty Taksim Square, hands in pockets, iPod in ears, staring at a large banner of Kemal Attaturk, the man who secularised and modernised Turkey at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Soon his photograph and hashtag spread across the social networks, and a small group of 300 people - who I like to call The Stander Gang - were standing with him.

Gunduz's long stand to freedom has since spread to Ankara and Izmir and Anatolia in a series of copycat stand-offs. He is called a new icon of non-violent civil resistance; news services compare him to Tiananmen Square's Tank Man or to Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk who set himself afire in Saigon in 1963 to protest the oppression of Buddhists.

Gunduz gave the media a name and face for the Turkish protests. Previously they only had "Girl in a red dress" or "Woman in denim skirt getting maced".

Before becoming an internet sensation Gunduz was a dancer and a performance artist.

On Tuesday he was described by friends as "not very political". By Wednesday he had become "a left-leaning Kemalist". Even the Turkish government thinks he's a good example to other protesters.

On Wednesday night Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc gave standing the thumbs-up as a mode of dissent. "It's pleasing to the eye," said Arinc approvingly.

If I were one of the protesters who spent days in Taksim being water-cannoned and pepper-sprayed, I might slightly resent Erdem Gunduz becoming the icon of my struggle.

Without the tens of thousands who protested in ways the government didn't find pleasing to the eye, Gunduz would just be a weird bloke with good posture standing in a square. He didn't even stand very long: his long ordeal was from 6pm till around 2am. In Cape Town that's the queue at Burger King.

When the police arrived on Tuesday morning, 10 of the 300 citizens standing by their man refused to leave and were arrested. The Standing Man was not among them. He slipped away, not to go stand somewhere else like some sedentary pimpernel, but to go home and become the Sitting On The Sofa With A Beer Man. It's not exactly self-immolation. It might be the least demanding form of protest since John Lennon and Yoko Ono declared breakfast in bed to be a call for world peace.

I don't slight Erdem Gunduz for not protesting more vigorously, or even for choosing a form of protest that marginalises paraplegics and St Vitus Dance sufferers.

Standing still for a couple of hours mightn't be much, but it's more than I've ever done. Besides, I'm still not entirely clear what the Turks are protesting.

It doesn't appear to be poverty or service delivery, nor corruption, nor electoral illegitimacy.

So far as I can tell, and I'm no young Turk, it appears to be a predominantly middle-class dissatisfaction with Erdogan's style of communication.

The Standing Man is a perfect icon of resistance for the social media: he's photogenic and unthreatening and easy to understand. It feels vaguely poetic and inspiringly Gandhi-ish and makes you click "Like".

"Within hours," said a newspaper report, "Twitter was filled with photographs of people standing still." If that sounds like a dull session for Twitter, it also sounds like planking, owling and tea-potting.

It's a cheerful, uplifting form of political protest - activism as internet meme.

Pockets of people standing still, not frightening the horses, is what the international media likes: a story with a sellable face, something that works nicely on a page with news of the Kardashian baby. Erdem Gunduz is a very comforting icon for a very middle-class protest. In places around the world where people are more desperate than in Turkey, and have more to be desperate about, the face of protest won't look like Erdem Gunduz, and it won't stand still for long.