It is borne out of necessity of the Turkish (and other non-western) people’s yearning for emulating the ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous,’ as well as the inferiority brought on by the ’success’ of economic and political structure supposedly enjoyed by the superpowers as compared to those that once had it.

Due to the lack of quality, as well as substantive content, along with the absence of creativity, and even if those all existed, lack of big budgets or viewer choices and support, and maybe both, usually leads to looking elsewhere for similar content of ‘crap,’ that at least is packaged in a glitzy and an appealing way and then digested as the displaying of the deficiencies in the western culture.

At least, here in the U.S., we have a choice between being served delicious crap versus nutricious but yet not as tasty programming. We are also a nation of readers, and common sense researchers and applicators, whereas in countries like Turkey, the general populace seems to be resigned to the opinion that their voices are not heard anyway and feel helpless by way of the ‘If you can’t beat’em, join’em attitude.’

Secretly, the ones who are critical, are probably the ones displaying their infatuation with the same programming they consider as destroying the Turkish culture. What about the attitude of copying the same non-cultural or non-family values methods and generating ratings within the movie and music industry of Turkey being short of unique and dependent on cultural background.

We need to look within ourselves first and understand our needs before we declare others guilty of force feeding us the pleasures of cultural submission!

Maybe we can stop the cultural assimilation by taking the matter into our own hands, instead of hoping that one day those damn Americans will finally understand more of our culture and what makes us great, so they can repackage it and send it to us for our viewing or listening pleasure.