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Sunday, August 28, 2005
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If you read a scholarly essay or book on human nature that begins with the words, “Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that…” you can be sure you are in good hands.
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Armenians enjoy reading about Turks because they love to hate.
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The nation that hates together stays together.
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A man is not necessarily good if he lacks the means to do evil.
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I’d rather be wrong as a human being than right as a dupe.
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Free speech does not say “Shut-up because I know better,” or “because I am somebody and you are nobody!”
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There are many known cures for dandruff, the guillotine is not one of them.
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I write in the name of all those writers who were silenced or slaughtered by tyrants.
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A woman may be a mystery to men, among them Freud, but to other women she is a cliché. Which may suggest that mysteries too, like so much else in life, are in the eye of the beholder.
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“Too much reading will ruin him,” a parish priest kept warning my parents, and he was right because to him success meant being a bishop.
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Freedom of the press does not mean the printing of agreeable lies but of disagreeable truths.
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Poverty, real poverty is not life in the slums and dinners of macaroni and cheese, but the degradation one must suffer in order to obtain these luxuries.
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If wisdom were a religion, fools and dupes could not be converted, which means there wouldn’t be enough converts even for a single congregation.
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Monday, August 29, 2005
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All our controversies amount to bickering while the barn is burning.
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Armenians love to see their names in the paper. Which is why our weeklies drop names as profusely as a flock of pigeons on ex-lax.
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The assertion “I am better than you” convinces no one. And yet, more often than not, that’s exactly what our so-called pundits do: they assert moral superiority. “Behold the Turk, the lowest scum on earth; and “Behold the Armenian, the noblest specimen of humanity!”
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Lately there has been some talk about Armenian pimps and prostitutes from the Homeland operating in foreign countries. It is true that we in the diaspora don’t have that problem but not because we are morally superior but because we are not driven by unemployment, destitution, hunger, and a power structure so corrupt that it feels no responsibility towards its citizens.
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A recent best seller in the United States is titled ON BULLSHIT. (*) We learn here that most of what politicians, salesmen, advertisers, and academics say or write fully qualifies as bullshit. Nothing new in that. Most of Plato’s dialogues say as much. If one were to write a history of bullshit, it would probably be the longest book in the world.
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(*) ON BULLSHIT by Harry G. Frankfurt. See also, YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US: THE TRUTH ABOUT BULLSHIT by Laura Penny; and DEEPER INTO BULLSHIT by G.A. Cohen. It is to be noted that both Frankfurt and Cohen are noted contemporary philosophers.
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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
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When I thought of myself as a good Armenian, I was no better than a bad Turk; and I know now that it was my own assessment of myself as a good Armenian that allowed me to behave like a bad Turk – minus the fez, shalvar, mustache, and yataghan.
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At all times and everywhere our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge, and we have a tendency to overestimate the value of what we know and underestimate the value of what we don’t know.
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Only fools assess themselves as smart, and only swine represent themselves as noble specimens of humanity.
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All that talk about 20/20 vision is nonsense, humbug, and b.s. I don’t demand infallibility from our leaders; but I have every right to expect honesty. No matter how you slice it, a military defeat is not a moral victory, and not all tragedies are acts of god.
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On a radio program on children’s poetry this morning, I overheard the following quotation: “There is some shit / I will not eat!” That’s what I call good poetry – rhythm, music, and words that once heard are never forgotten.
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Wednesday, August 31, 2005
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Censorship promotes mediocrity and when the mediocre are in charge, excellence becomes their greatest enemy.
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A Simenon characters remarks: “It’s a tough job to be a human being.” It’s tougher being an Armenian, and what makes it tougher is fellow Armenians.
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When the dishonest fail to convert or brainwash the honest, they silence them.
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Denis Donikian: “There are those among us today who have only one ear that hears only one voice: their own.”
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The most unbearable prospect for an Armenians is to be proven wrong, as if his infallibility were such a universally acknowledged fact that no sane person who dare to question it. And we have infallible men because we have infallible institutions.
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When two infallible men contradict each other, eiher one or both of them are bound to be wrong.
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Intolerance means violating free speech. Violating free speech means killing ideas; and where ideas are killed, people will be massacred; and there is no such thing as the massacre of only the guilty. It is not in the nature of those who commit massacres to discriminate the innocent from the guilty.
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