Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Secularism *(But Were Afraid to Ask)
My three tenets of Turkey are as follows:
- Doner
- Efes
- Ataturk
It’s 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning and I’m craving all three when our tour guide[1] drags me and thirty-five other bleary-eyed law students to “best leather makers in all of Turkey!”
Upon exiting the bus, we’re ushered into a dimly lit room with what appears to be a runway platform running down the center of the room.[2] What happens next is pretty much indicative of our experience with these tour guide fucks. According to Turkish legend, underneath the leather factory, which is really just a retail outlet, is the tomb of the founder of Members Only. A well-dressed man, probably the tour guide’s brother, walks out with the smile of a salesman and gives us the stock diatribe that we’ve heard from the porcelain factory to the rug warehouse to the assless chaps megastore:
“Hello, my name is ________, and it is my pleasure to have you all here to-day. First off, can I offer you some refreshment? Some apple tea perhaps.[3] Okay, thank you for coming and I’m happy to show you our insert lame and overpriced Turkish object here. Our products are of the finest quality, blah, handmade, bullshit, fuck you, stop talking, get me the fuck out of here, in the world and although you’re not obligated to buy anything, fuck you, we’d like to put on a demonstration for you all. Blow me.”
The lights dim and pink, green, blue, and yellow strobes flash across the stage. From stage right emerges eight Turkish “models” sporting leather wares of the finest quality. Cue the terrible techno music….NOW!
It takes a few minutes to settle in and I feel dirty enough to shower for the second time in thirty minutes. I glare at Captain Kickback who seems to be having a grand ole time as he claps along with the models as they strut to the thumping beat. It’s 8:30 in the morning, they’re in Southwest Turkey, and modeling $300 hot pants for 35 poor and hungover-as-fuck law students. The models look sad and I probably want it to end more for their sake than my own. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so…actually it was still pretty funny; like if your friend’s grandmother fell down a flight of stairs. Yeah, you would still go and help her but let’s face it, it’s not YOUR GRANDMA! Feel free to laugh afterwards.
My peers and I all have the same look on our faces, the one I anticipate having when my future son shows me his first finger painting.
“Oh, that’s nice,” I will say. “Honey, we have the next Van Gogh, should I cut his ear off now or should I wait a few years?”
It’s been five minutes and the speakers continue to blare the same backbeat. Finally, the models come to attention and the lights dim down once again. The music stops. Sweet fancy Moses, it’s finally over.
Nope, the backbeat kicks in again and things go from worse to please shoot me in the face right now. Suddenly, they begin looking to the crowd and I avert my eyes to the horror. Please, not me, not me, not me, not…sweet they picked someone else.
Throughout the models’ performance I put on one of my own, maintaining a perpetual grin that is half-restraining-a-cringe-laugh and half-“I-empathize-with-your-job” grimace. I look like someone who just got a really bad lap dance, although this time I’m paying Turkish tuition instead of a semester at Hopkins for someone who works near BWI:[4]
“No, I swear miss, I definitely got a boner from that…No, I’m not just saying that to make you feel better. Seriously, thank you…Yes, I definitely feel a lot better about myself now…No, I would not like another lap dance…Tessekular.[5]”
Even still there’s something weirder going on that I can’t quite figure out. Something about that chick, the one escorting my classmate out to the runway…It’s hitting me like someone’s huge…O dear lord. Now I know why they called it The Crying Game.
I wince to think that I’ve broken my golden rule: no trannies before noon. Damn. Mulligan on that one.
Guess what, for the first time since Ottoman rule everything was 50%. No one buys anything and we get back on the bus. All of us vow never to speak of the event ever again.
[1] Whom I’ve unofficially dubbed Captain Kickback.
[2]More like a landing strip.
[3] Apple tea has a notoriously horrible taste.
[4] Kitty O’Shea’s
[5] Turkish for Thank You.
________________________________________
Speaking of tranny whores, let’s talk about Ataturk for a little bit. As previously mentioned, his face is FUCKING EVERYWHERE, looming ominously on the wall like the moving eyes in an episode of Scooby Doo. Walk into someone’s office, there’s Ataturk; back of the bus, there’s Ataturk; the side of the mountain, Ataturk; condom wrapper,[1] well you get the gist.[2]
I too must admit that I’ve developed an affinity for the dead bastard. He brought secularism to Turkey and separated religious law from state practice, in effect modernizing Turkey. I even bought a sweet necktie that prominently features our fearless leader smoking a cigarette and doing his best impression of Humphrey Bogart. For another 10 lira, I was given 12 different posters of Ataturk which now adorn my bedroom walls. I can’t even take a piss without looking at Ataturk. I never need to think of a waterfall ever again.
With all this being said, secularism isn’t really all that it’s cracked up to be. To put it bluntly, replacing Islamic law with secularism is kind of like replacing the Bubonic plague with a cholera epidemic. While it’s certainly better, it’s not quite there just yet.
It’s been almost a month now and our pretensions have morphed into perceptions. Although we’ve had relatively sparse interaction with our Turkish counterparts, I will say that the ones we’ve met have been largely helpful, informative, and ultimately pleasant. The best way to learn about a new place is meeting the people, not taking photos of the relics.
With regards to the latter matter we’ve come across some doozies. At the palace in Istanbul include David’s sword, Moses’ rod, and Muhammad’s beard.[3] As ridiculous as that sounds, it goes a long way to illustrate the main gripe most of us have with our stay in Triptophania. Like any country with a strong sense of nationalism, if an object, person, or event presents the nation in a favorable light, it will be heralded as a national symbol of greatness. What makes Turkey different from say, the United States, would be how the country seems to deal with its mistakes.
On several occasions we have brought up the Armenian incident, including a former Prime Minister who referred to it as the “Armenian Problem,” seeming to analogize the affair with other trivial “problems” like 2 times 2…or a bad case of hemorrhoids. We have discussed this subject with learned academics, tour guides, students, and government officials. Four out of five dentists agree that the Armenian genocide did not occur.[4] The former Prime Minister was quick to cite the United States’ operation of Japanese Internment Camps during WWII, a poor comparison for several reasons in that a.) the U.S. recognizes how fucked up it was, and b.) paid reparations. As one friend aptly put it, “Turkey’s stance on the Armenian genocide is like the United States saying “Yeah, the Trail of Tears really wasn’t all that bad, and it wasn’t our fault at all, they really wanted to hang out in Oklahoma.” [5]
It turns out that there are legal ramifications for this one-sided viewpoint that have me submitting this article four weeks and seven thousand miles away from Turkish soil. Article 301 of the Turkish criminal code makes it illegal for any citizen to “insult Turkishness.”[6] One of the offending uses is regarding the Armenian problem as a “genocide.”
The thing to take away from everything is this: you can’t take all the credit without acknowledging at least some culpability.
Really though, “Who gives a flying Atafuck?!” I’m back in the U.S.A. bitch, and although I’ve just broken Article 301, I’m really not that worried about catching a train on the Midnight Express to a Turkish prison. They couldn’t extradite my left nut. Shit! What’s that knock on the…Oh no! Looks like I gotta go. Cue the slippery soap, cold shower and someone else’s doner kebab. Just don’t cue the bad techno music.
[1] Called Atafucks.
[2] One of these examples is fictional. It may not be the one you think.
[3] Praise be his name, peace be upon him.
[4] To belay our genocide argument, said foreign minister drew our attention to a 1915 Census that was taken before the actual republic was put into place as evidence that there weren’t enough Armenians living in Turkey to justify claims that 1.5 million people were killed. Really? That’s the evidence? A ninety-four year old census from a defunct, financially strapped, and currently at war Ottoman Empire. Are you even listening to what you’re saying?
[5] Again, unlike our counterparts, we recognized the mistake and have attempted to rectify it to some degree…we gave them sweet casinos!
[6] Recent studies have actually found that you would only be insulting 4% of the country’s population if you were to indeed “insult Turkishness” as this is the actual demographic of Turks residing in Turkey.
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