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America: Omnipresent, Omniscient Super-Villain

charles — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:32:19 +0000

As an English teacher in Turkey I have met many Turks, and through the lessons you come to talk about a vast array of topics; here is a small assortment I’ve collected regarding the perception of America. In fact, at this point I need to disclaim that I’m an American and that my English roommate, Steve, who is also and English teacher, is the source of many of these jewels; apparently the Turks are bashful about mentioning some of the following nuggets to my face, and after reading, I think you’ll understand why.

First, everyone thinks I’m in the CIA. I’m not, for the record. In fact, whenever anyone brings in up, jokingly or not, I vehemently deny it. The last thing I want is to be dragged out of my house in the middle of the night because I’m a suspected spy. Again, I’m not in the CIA.

“What do Americans think of Ataturk?” is a common question. Ataturk, or Mustafa Kemal, for those of you who don’t know, is the founder of the modern Turkish republic and continuing object of affection for millions of Turks. He is of the utmost importance in Turkish political and cultural life. There is a statue of him in every single Turkish town and city; being a statue maker in Turkey must be a lucrative gig. The truthful answer is that Americans, by large, do not know who Ataturk is. I rarely give this answer, however, and try to diplomatically navigate between insulting Turks by insinuating their hero is a peripheral figure of world history, and portraying the American people as ignorant to other people’s histories, which, actually, many of us are.

Ok, let’s get to the meaty part. According to our students, China will not rise to power because America won’t let them. The U.S. will destroy the Chinese economy through unspecified means and continue to lord over the world indefinitely. Also, the U.S. released and caused the HIV virus in Africa and plans to do the same in Turkey. The U.S. apparently will also release some microorganism that is vague in its description but ominous nonetheless. America is completely controlled by Jews. America is completely controlled by Armenians. America is completely controlled by the Saudis. America is controlled by five powerful families. And so forth. Although many Turks like him, some have expressed distrust of President Obama because he is black-skinned, and are surprised that I support him because I am white-skinned. And, my personal favorite, is the accusation that there are sharks in the Mediterranean and Aegean seas because the Americans brought them across the Atlantic in submarines to kill Turks….which is a shame, I rather like Turks.

Of course, the truth regarding these topics probably contains some shades of gray: America will likely try to inhibit, probably unsuccessfully, China’s rise to power. The U.S. could do tremendously more to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Competing interest groups have disproportionate influence over the American political system. Racism still exists in America. And, well, the last one about the sharks is completely true; we did do that.

Most of these are not commonly held beliefs here in Turkey, but by specific individuals, and should be appropriately placed in the ‘crazy’ category and laughed at. Indeed, when I reflect on what I would hear in the U.S. if I had similarly gathered information I imagine it would be equally or more outlandish, hilarious, and depressing.

-Charles P. Pearson

First Argentinian Dupes

Luke — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:42:22 +0000

While traveling around Europe, our group coined the term ‘dupe’ which is basically to be tricked. Dupes happen all the time especially in a foreign country where you do not speak the language. Thus far I have been rather lucky and I have only been duped twice. Here they are…

DUPE #1: Shower Door Attacked Me

I am well happy with my shower. It takes a moment for the water to heat up but I got pressure like the pee stream of a horse, the shower is large enough for all sorts of activities, and the shower head is well above my head so I do not need to duck down. To enter the shower you step over an 18 inch rise in the floor which acts as the basin for the shower. On this rise are two standard glass shower doors. I was aware that one of the doors was liable to come off its track, which it did a few times, but with caution it was not a problem. Well one day the maid had moved my toothpaste, so I had to open up the other door. Basically she broke my routine and this is what happens when you break routines. I open up the door to get the toothpaste because I like getting nice and sloppy in the shower while I brush my teeth. While I am openeing the door, the thing falls out of it’s track and the entire weight of the glass door fell the 18 inches and landed square on my left big toe. I yelped but held in any more noise as I waited the two or three seconds for the pain to reach my brain. The pain flowed through my nerves and hit my brain like a fat couple having amazing sex. I had to stay in the shower for about 20 minutes while I let the blood flow down the drain.

It has been almost a month now and the nail refuses to come off. It definately hurts and causes me to wake up in the night when it gets caught on a sheet or something. When it does finally come off I plan on sending it to my friend Ken in an unmarked envelope filled with shreds of paper to hide the contents.

DUPE #2: Bought a bike on mercadolibre.com

One of my plans to work on down here in South America was something along these lines in no particular order:

Befriend bikeshop and get deals and sponsorships and free bike tune ups and shoot the shit with them and learn spanish. (COMPLETED)
Buy a bike to fix up and replace the track bike I had built back home that was stolen. Use this bike as main form of transportation to avoid having race bike stolen.
Train hard and go on an Andean bike trip so I can continue to disgrace Xavier at cycling.
Enter races and dominate Argentine cycling scene

Well I went on mercadolibre.com which is the south american ebay (in fact I think it is owned by ebay). I find this bike that fits all my criteria that I needed. A side note here. All the bikes that people ride around here are old ladies mountain bikes with fat wheels likely to accomodate for the random streets that are still cobblestone. So the bike is 600 pesos (almost $200) but I figure it has eveything that I want and this is going to come home with me anyways to the states. I communicate with the guy on MSN messenger in spanish regarding the bike and where to meet up. I meet him in the slum part of BsAs at the train station which is very far from me. This is on December 31st at 6pm by the way and fortunately I had Parv there to support me. I inspect the bike, realize that there were some thigns wrong but figured my trusty bike shop could fix it up for me. Make the exchange, find out that the train wont let me on so we had to find a tax that would let me put this damn bike in which was not easy. So that added to the cost. Bike shop is closed for holidays so I have to wait a week until i can drop it off. In the mean time I purchase some paint stripper and sand paper and plan on removing all the paint so I can have it prepped for a classic Luke paint job even though i wouldn’t have crazy neighbor Mark to do most of the work like on the last bike. More cost added. Drop the bike off at the bike shop, come back to find out that they cannot fix it because the frame has been so badly damaged that the parts just do not exist that can fit the bottom bracket. So basically I am left with a fucked bike that if fixed would be a danger to whoever rides it. My plan is to resell it or part it, hopefully back to the same evil bastard that sold it to me. All together, I am out $200 bucks on this expedition, another example of my love for bikes.

An Uninformed Campaign Reform Suggestion

Luke — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:21:00 +0000

It has become clear during this election that the populace has started to consider two notions that I have not been exposed to before.

I am sure this has been prevalent for many years but the concept of having a two party system is pissing people off. This comes from the fact that both options do not exactly get you to jump out of your chair and wave a hockey mom sign.
This idea that “I will vote for Obama just to make sure McCain does not get in even though I dont really like McCain either.” (This example works in both directions of course.) Another extension of the two party system because people are beginning to realize that their party does not do everything for them but due to the lack of options, they stick to its side. What better way to do this than to vote against the perceived opposition.

Humans throughout time have had difficulty keeping track of anything more than some form of dualism. Good or bad. Light or dark. Rich or poor. Liberal or conservative. etc. In all of these examples there are of course grey areas but these tend to be overlooked by the qualitative extremes. Our political system does just this but instead of having starkly polar politcal opposites to choose from, we have decided to set our political compass in the grey and have chosen two poles that are very similar. The grey areas become the extremes (which should be the poles) and the grey areas occupy only a small percentage of the populace mostly due to the idea that you will be ostracized to leave the afety of the heterogenous political middle.

Two parties have an incredible sum of money at their disposal to promote their party. Any other party that wishes to compete on the equivalent political stage will require an election that proves they can aquire 5% of the vote and then they can receive more funding. This we know would still be only a small step to matching the financial contributions being given to the two major parties. So due to the media financing one of the two major parties only and giving no time/money to any other options that would represent more of a correction to the political system due to its distance from the political middle.

Without even the possibility of a large standard deviation, what we have today will be able to last for a very long time. Any correction in either direction will only make small insignificant changes to the average.

I suggest we reform our political election process to promote equality to all possible political ideas so that they public can make a totally informed decision as to how they want to live their lives as opposed to giving them only two choices, sometimes only one.

Install a campaign funding cap for all parties. If a party raises more than X dollars then the overflow will be evenly distributed to the other qualifying parties that have demonstrated themselves to the nation in the past. This will force parties to focus on political ideas and not spin tactics since their money can only go so far. This will also encourage the reduction of corporate sponsorships of our candidates. Candidates will be forced to develop political answers and not spin tactics to make sure that there message will be heard across the nation. The overflow idea will also grow a change in the American population. Instead of raising money to vote for candidate John, money will be raised to be able to hear new options come from the population, and other candidates. Excess money will be used to indicate to the nation that what you are hearing at the time is not enough and we want more options.

This article explains how McCain pushed for a campaign contribution limit. This was done to make sure that the government could monitor more of the money going into campaigns which is funny since this means that McCain is advocating a bigger government.

And so it goes.