Let's just stop abusing Atatürk!

As I walked down Kıbrıs Şehitleri Caddesi, İzmir's mini-version of Istanbul's İstiklal Avenue, a man who had the signature of Atatürk tattooed on his forehead passed by. I was too shocked to take photos or ask him if the tattoo was a permanent one. Friends told me that there were more than a few people with Atatürk's signature tattooed on their faces in İzmir, the city that sees itself as the fortress of liberal Turkey.

Symbols related to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkey's founder and, for many Turks, the undying figure of modernization, Western direction and Turkey's secular and parliamentary democracy, pop up in unlikely places. Atatürk's signature - a linear, simple crawl that showed the Turkish leader's determination to replace the Arabic script of the Ottoman Empire with the Latin alphabet - is used abundantly on the rear windows of cars, sometimes leading to a strange juxtaposition between suggestive slogans ("I am not a psychiatrist but so many are crazy about me" on top and Atatürk's signature at the bottom) or Atatürk's signature followed by the evil eye. The same signature may also appear on the wrist of your barista as he serves you coffee. A young man pushes postcards featuring his signature in your face as you walk down the shopping arcade. One of the IT specialists in an international company I worked for used Atatürk's signature in his emails. It gave me jitters in all our exchanges: "I cannot reach my archive files. Can you be here in five minutes?" "Yes ma'am (signed Atatürk)." Blissfully, after he sent one email too many to our U.K. partners, the company told him to stick to the corporate signature format and use his own name.

While it is hardly surprising that many Turks have clung to the Kemalist symbols in the last 10 years, there...