"There is something wrong with you," -- a Turkish liberator in New Jersey masquerading as a backgammon player during failed phone sex
Not to get too self-referential about this account, (who cares?) but my page view data sometimes amazes me. Why do the former Warsaw Pact Poles read my posts? I've written absolutely nothing about Lech Walesa as a precursor to the fall of Soviet hegemony. Yet my muted appreciation of Orhan Pamuk's ability to dissect the tension between fundamentalism and secularization draws 30 page views from the fine, if beleaguered, citizens of Turkey. I am quite free to break the Turkish law on the books about mocking Turkish citizens if I please, but such a law was evidently written to be mocked for its very existence. It is a silly law, telegraphing to Muslims and Christians alike an inferiority complex.
I am interested, if a Turkish viewer cares to respond, in what has drawn these 30 views? Pamuk is a fine writer; that unfortunate Turkish family with its hand walking children speaks to the global problems of outcasts among outcasts, and Erdogan, whatever his aspirations, and political corruption, will not reconstitute the Ottoman Empire-- but beyond this there are limits to what (Westernized) multi-culturalism can hope to achieve. Turkey is in a highbrow third world status? How does this earn my commiseration when I have been a lifelong American untouchable whose educators led her to believe she could achieve self-sufficiency? Is it the policing of chronic conditions and poverty as a criminal act which interests you? Snow is a rich novel, full of taupe-skinned romanticism, inadequacy, with a poignant dose of irony and Chekhovian tendencies to exaggerate foibles. I will finish it with pleasure, and remain delighted that I was able to actually pay attention to a foreigner on Charlie Rose, but I wouldn't be caught dead in Istanbul. Midnight Express still informs the popular culture about Turkish predilections for rough play. More than one can insinuate gently.
Or maybe its ISIS? Not to worry. Certain levels of militancy are still of American manufacture, super-sized.
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