Metro.us, NY
Oct 19 2007
America & Turkey: Best Friends 4-Never
my view by elliott kalan
The world is kind of like America’s family. England is our stern
mother, Canada’s our goody two-shoes little sister, Russia is the
scary uncle whose house smells weird, and our best bud would have to
be Turkey. America’s bond with Turkey is legendary. Turkey helped us
move our stuff after the Louisiana Purchase. We were the best man at
Turkey’s wedding. And we commemorate this friendship every third
Thursday of November by devouring the bird that bears Turkey’s name.
Well, maybe we’ll be eating penguin this year, because things are
pretty tense with Turkey right now. You see, our relationship is
built on a foundation of fratboyish needs. Turkey lets us crash on
their couch when we’re in the Middle East, and we don’t tell anybody
about its embarrassing youthful shenanigans, specifically the
Armenian Genocide of 1915. Turkey’s still pretty touchy about that,
so we pretend it didn’t happen. That’s what friends are for.
But Congress has no friends, so it doesn’t realize how dorky it’s
being by proposing a resolution condemning Turkey’s actions. Now
Turkey’s mad at all of us, even though we didn’t do anything. It’s
like the time your friend Chad said Sheila was a slut, so Sheila got
mad at you, because even though you didn’t agree with Chad, you still
didn’t stick up for her, which was a lame move on your part, by the
way. The only difference here is that instead of Sheila being a slut,
Turkey killed 1.5 million people. I admit it’s not a great analogy.
Now, since we broke our blood-brother oath, Turkey won’t let us use
its airbases. Plus, it’s planning to invade Northern Iraq, home of
the Kurds, a.k.a. the only Iraqis we don’t have a problem with right
now. This would be disastrous, removing the center of conflict to an
area where we have few troops, and forcing our enemies to disengage
from us in order to repel Turkey, which is really insulting. What,
suddenly we’re not good enough to be insurged against?
Wait. Hold on. Is this all an elaborate plot to get Turkey involved
in Iraq, allowing us to tiptoe out whistling nonchalantly? That’s
brilliant! Heck, it’s worth losing a meaningful international
friendship to get out of there. After all, we lost so many meaningful
international friendships going in, what’s one more? Nice move,
Congress! I knew there was a reason we kept you around.
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