Sunday, August 07, 2005
**********************************
BEFORE AND AFTER
***************************
Because by the age of fourteen I had read the 19th-century Russians, I thought I knew all I needed to know about human nature. I thought, like all Armenians, I was smart, sensitive, good, tolerant, blameless, and so on. Whenever evidence to the contrary presented itself, I thought I should make allowances for a people that have experienced an extensive array of misfortunes imposed on them by conditions, circumstances, and forces beyond their control.
*
My initial intentions might as well have been utopian. I was going to be kind with the uncivil and reasonable with the preposterous. I was not going to make any enemies. I went further: I propagandized with the propagandists, and I kissed posteriors with the brown-nosers. I compromised, or so I thought, in the hope that eventually common sense and decency would prevail.
*
I ignored the lessons of history because I operated in a dream world. I confused wishful thinking with hope, betrayal with concession, reality with Hollywood movies.
*
Disagreement and criticism I understand, insults and threats I don’t. One must be deaf, dumb, and asinine not to see that by insulting and threatening anonymously one exposes oneself as a coward and a bully.
*
I am not an elitist. I don’t feel the need to be for underdogs simply because I have always been one of them. As the offspring of Ottoman refugees I was born and raised in a Greek ghetto that looked like a gypsy encampment. Greeks used to call us “Turkish gypsies.” Southern rednecks would have called us white trash.
*
My prose is not academic or scholarly. It makes no demands on the average reader. And yet, some smart (self-assessed, of course) readers pretend to misunderstand me perhaps because they understand me too well but are too craven to see themselves as they really are.
#
Monday, August 08, 2005
**********************************
Whenever as a boy I would make outrageous assertions, adults would smile at me, and I would think they were smiling at my brilliance. I know now that their smile had nothing to do with admiration and everything to do with sarcasm tinged with pity. “No use explaining things to him,” it said. “Obviously he is not open to reason.”
*
The question I ask myself today is “Who taught and encouraged me to make wild assertions thinking they were brilliant?” The only answer is: I must have been emulating my elders – schoolteachers, parish priests, partisans, panchoonies, charlatans…all of whom dealt in certainties and considered doubt as unpatriotic or unchristian.
*
There are positive and negative role models. With one or two exceptions mine have been negative.
*
The Romans were wrong when they fed Christians to lions, but they were right when they punished the parents for the misdeeds of the child.
*
Bolsheviks under Stalin, Fascists under Mussolini, Nazis under Hitler, Americans under McCarthy: sometimes entire nations experience insanity as surely as individuals.
#
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
**********************************
If you believe in the evidence of your own eyes and use your common sense, you shall have to conclude that the earth is flat, and the sun and the moon are about the same size. It is this type of “logic” that leads some Armenians to believe that the West is corrupt, the Turks Asiatic barbarians and bloodthirsty savages, and Armenians the only truly civilized, smart, progressive, and Christian people.
*
To understand only one side of a story that may have more than one side is to misunderstand it.
*
Some of my readers have been generous in sharing their Ottoman venom. I look forward to the day when they will be equally generous in sharing their Armenian wisdom – assuming of course they can tell the difference between one and the other, which is assuming a great deal.
*
Civics is not a subject we like to talk about. I had an Armenian education and I don’t remember anyone mentioning it. I was taught all about authority and obedience but not about fundamental human rights. I was taught about power but not about abuses of power. I was taught to sing songs about freedom but I was told nothing about free speech.
#
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
******************************************
ENVY
*********
Whenever as a boy I heard rumors to the effect that Jews support Jews but Armenians do not always support Armenians, I dismissed them as exaggerations made by disgruntled failures. I know better now.
*
An Armenian-American composer once told me: “I no longer expect Armenian support. I will be grateful if I don’t get Armenian hostility.”
*
Nothing comes more naturally to an Armenian than to say, “If he is Armenian, he is bound to be a mediocrity.”
*
Speaking of Arshile Gorky, one of our elder statesmen once told me: “When he was alive, no Armenian every bought a single painting of his.”
*
In his ISLAND AND A MAN, Zarian ascribes this Armenian peculiarity to envy. And true enough, most of his contemporaries either ignored or denigrated him.
*
Did Sultan Abdulhamid II’s mother (who was Armenian) say anything in support of her fellow Armenians to him? Or was she the type who rationalized her silence by saying she did not want to get involved in politics?
*
“I don’t want to get involved in politics,” one of our eminent editors (may the good Lord have mercy on his soul) once told me when I raised questions central to our ethos and survival as a nation. He preferred to publish stories about grandmothers and Armenian celebrities who had made it in the odar world – Armenians like Arshile Gorky, Michael Arlen Sr. (who warned his son to stay away from Armenians) and Michael Arlen Jr. (who concludes his PASSAGE TO ARARAT by saying there is no such thing as Armenian culture).
#