Feasts, Flags, and Fictions

“Rather Turkish Than Papist”

Of Orange Crowds, Thanksgiving Birds, and the Art of National Mythmaking and bullshit artist.

When I was a child, every April 30th, the Netherlands would dissolve into a sea of orange. Queen’s Koninginnedag was more than a holiday; it was a national permission slip for exuberance.

Streets became rivers of laughter, the air thick with the scent of spring and frying dough, concerts and games and the monarchy itself felt less like a relic and more like a ribbon tying together the patchwork of Dutch society.

For one day, the country remembered itself as a single story, never mind that the date was a careful political sidestep designed to keep our orange celebration safely away from the red banners of May 1st and its socialist undertones.

But Dutch history, like all history, is woven from pragmatism and myth. When the Spanish grip tightened in the 16th century, William of Orange did the unthinkable: he reached out to the Muslim Ottoman Empire for help. “Liever Turks dan Paaps”-Rather Turkish than Papist-became the rebels’ cry. Better to ally with the unknown than submit to the suffocating embrace of familiar tyranny.

The Ottomans responded not with sermons but with ships, harassing Spanish trade and giving the Dutch rebels the breathing room they desperately needed. It was a lesson in survival through pluralism, not purity- a willingness to make common cause with the “other” when the stakes demanded it.

Fast-forward to 2025 in America. There is no Queen’s Day, no ritual of orange unity, and no monarch to serve as a living symbol above the fray. Instead, there’s Thanksgiving, a day when the country gathers around a turkey, a bird with no real connection to Turkey the nation but every connection to the American appetite for mythmaking.

In a land without queens or kings (unless you count Snoop Dogg or Taylor Swift), Thanksgiving is their “Turkish Day”: a secular sacrament of gratitude, family, and a conveniently edited history. Like the Queen’s (now King’s) Day date, the turkey is a symbol chosen as much for what it isn’t as for what it is.

And then there’s the modern mythmaker-in-chief.

Who could forget the Italian translator’s astonishment when President Trump, with his signature bravado (read ignorance), declared America’s “thousands of years” of good relations with Italy? In that moment, centuries collapsed, Rome and Washington shook hands across the ages, and the myth was born anew, leaving translators and the rest of us somewhere between laughter and existential crisis.

Perhaps that’s the real tradition: not just the rituals themselves but our collective willingness to believe, laugh, and keep rewriting the story. Whether we’re waving orange flags, carving up a turkey, or tracing our “timeless alliances” all the way back to Caesar, we are, above all, a species of mythmakers. The Dutch taught me that unity is not sameness and that sometimes, the only way out of madness (read oppressor) or political monoculture (read Trumpness) is to open the door to the unexpected ally, the unfamiliar feast, the new story.

But before there can be feasting and dancing, before the turkey is carved and the myths are retold, America must face what’s festering beneath the tablecloth. There will be a time for parades and pie, unity rituals and viral memes, but not before the real work is done.

First, they’ll have to gather the jocks and the hillbillies, the rednecks and the Swifties, the gamers, the dreamers, the sceptics, the old-school and the new. You’ll need every shade of the American patchwork city and country, blue and red, every flavour of faith and doubt.

Only together can they sweep that old White House clean, not just of dust and laundry, but of the rot that’s crept in through years of neglect, division, and denial.

Only then, when the halls are truly swept and the house is ready for all, will it be time to feast and dance again, not in the name of myth, but in the spirit of honest reckoning and a future built by every hand in the land.

May Harmony find you,

Irena Phaedra

P.S. Green Day in 2004 and Heaven 17 in 1981, artists still tethered and uncrystallised, possess a knack for swinging open the seventh chakra, the door to wisdom.

Sieg Heil to the President Gasman

Bombs away is your punishment

Pulverize the Eiffel Towers

Who criticize your government

Bang-bang goes the broken glass, and

Kill all the fags that don’t agree

Trials by fire, settin’ fire

Is not a way that’s meant for me

Just ’cause (Hey, hey, hey, hey)

Just ’cause, because we’re outlaws, yeah (Hey, hey, hey, hey)

[Chorus]

I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies