“Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it.The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
Red Smith
New York Herald Tribune, October 4, 1951
I wish I had written those above words, now so perfect these days for Turkey, poor, suffering, betrayed Turkey.
Eleven-years-old, I leapt from the sofa screaming. The New York Giants, my New York baseball Giants, had just won the National League championship. A miraculous second ago, the Giants had done the unimaginable. If only you had been there! Bobby Thomson hit a homerun and the Giants were champs. And Red Smith wrote about it. And I, screaming-happy, punched the hell out of the air. And I loved everyone and everything and no one that I knew had ever died.
Enter my mother: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! What happened?” she screamed back to me, “And your hand! What happened to your hand?”
It seems I had punched more than just air. I had shattered the glass lampshade and was bleeding, spraying the carpet like a garden hose. And so off to the hospital with my mother I went. No more Bobby Thomson and New York Giants. Reality had strangled euphoria.
Today, in Turkey, seventy-six years since Atatürk’s death, reality strangled hope. And today I feel like punching a hell of a lot more than air and lampshades.
A religious nonentity with a nearly unpronounceable religious name was selected as an election candidate by the so-called secular, so-called political opposition parties. He will try to lead them (and us) to victory in the coming presidential election. Laboring like a constipated elephant for weeks, interviews, meetings and discussions, yesterday they again sat and strained and sat and strained and finally…Eureka! Out came the candidate. Finally, they eked out someone named Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, another “pious” Muslim. May Allah please save Turkey from “pious” Muslims!
In any other country, the toxic reputation of Turkey’s ruling religious party scoundrels would rule out any candidate even admitting to being a Muslim. Even atheism would be a winner. But not in Turkey. Corruption, stealing, murder and any and all destruction done in the name of religious piety sells well here. I always wonder if their all-knowing Allah knows this.
Ekmeleddin’s opponent? None other than the “pious” war-mongering, war criminal, man-of-43%-of-the-people, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His “piety” is well-known. He is “beloved” among the Turkish young people for his Gezi Park gassings, blindings, beatings and other “pious” brutalities including murder. He also excels in defiling his dead victims, all young. Provoking his adoringly ignorant crowds to demean the grieving mothers of his victims is another of his sicker stunts. A real sweetheart of a guy, wouldn’t you agree? And when hundreds of coal miners died because of his government’s corruption he and his brutal police beat the mourners after the funerals. His piety is well-known internationally. He and his friend in Washington, the one with the rancid Nobel Prize, entertain their fellow believers by funding Sunni terrorist killers in Syria, and now Iraq.
What, you might ask, is the matter with the Turkish opposition parties? How can they be so stupid? Well, stupidity seems to come easy for them. In fact, they have been collaborating for years to bring these religious nitwits into power. The former head of CHP, Deniz Baykal, himself a fully disgraced adulterer but still a member of parliament, approved a parliamentary deal that allowed a legally ineligible Erdoğan to come to office. Baykal never said he was sorry, even though his party has been trounced in every election since. His successor party head, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, has been similarly inept. The MHP, the other opposition party, headed by a fossil named Devlet Bahçeli, is equally treacherous, having voted for the AKP religious fascist Abdullah Gül to serve as president. Sold-out to America is the best describer of the political opposition.
But it seems weirdly natural for these so-called secular parties to betray their followers and pander for religious votes. A few elections ago Baykal and his CHP had a brilliant idea about gaining the votes of covered women. These geniuses decided that women who wear the oppressively black, total-body drapery called a charshaf would look good with a CHP rosette pinned there upon. They pinned a few to no avail. In another election, the size of wristwatches prevailed. And in another the debate raged about villas. Losers all. Killing hope is their speciality.
So it was and so it will ever be. The secular, democratic idealism that defined the founding of Turkey has been defiled and cheapened through the generations. Imagine a so-called Muslim nation that slaughters its fellow Muslims, the sin of sins in the Koran? Imagine a secular, democratic nation with no functioning democratic institutions ruled by Islamo-fascist gangsters? Imagine a supposedly sovereign nation whose police and military forces are under the control of a foreign power? Imagine an Islamic nation who continually votes its approval of one of the most corrupt, violent regimes in history? Imagine an election campaign between and among religious ignoramuses, fossils and artifacts that determines the fate of tens of millions of young, secular, intelligent, energetic young people? Imagine a government and a prime minister that defames the founder of Turkey, a man, Atatürk, widely considered to be one of the geniuses of any country in any age?
Today’s Turkey is a den of thieves and liars and worse. Today’s Turkey is a mockery of sovereignty, inextricably linked to America, its war criminal government and its morally degenerate CIA.
So what matters? Recep Tayyip Erdoğan? Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu? Elections? Disloyal opposition parties? Obama? The CIA? The answer? None of them! The nation that was Turkey is dead. The Turkish people have strangled it. They should have burned their identification cards with their Islam religious designation years ago. Turkish people, America has strangled you with your Islamic identification ID cards. They brought the traitors to power in your country and now it is too late. The fiction of religion has murdered your country.
So now what is possible? Truth? Virtue? Independence? Trust? Peace at home? Peace in the world? Not a chance! Idealism? The open-faced smiling optimism of youth? Don’t be naïve. Don’t be stupid. Now it is done! Finished!
For Turkey, only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again. Now the story ends.
James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul
17 June 2014