Sunday, October 09, 2005
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To understand is to forgive. But since human understanding, unlike divine understanding, is limited, our forgiveness is bound to be tainted. The best we can do is to say we will not allow our enemy’s character and conduct to define our sentiments and thoughts.
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To understand another means to see oneself in him because “nothing human is alien to me.” Which may explain why Dostoevsky wrote with some understanding and sympathy about an ax-murderer of old ladies (CRIME AND PUNISHMENT), Nabokov about a child molester (LOLITA), and Richard Stark (real name Donald Westlake) about a ruthless killer (POINT BLANK).
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To be brainwashed means to have a fraction of our brain paralyzed.
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Prejudice is like a knife that maims and castrates our thinking organ.
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I have been exposed to too many patriotic speeches by charlatans to have any respect for verbal professions of patriotism.
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Monday, October 10, 2005
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TWO MEN OF INTEGRITY
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Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian writer who hated his fellow Austrians with a passion. No other writer has been as relentless as he in his excoriations of his fellow countrymen. Our Raffi too was very critical of Armenians but in his fiction he also created a good number of heroes and noble specimens of humanity. Baronian, Odian, and Massikian couched their attacks in humor and satire. Zarian’s trajectory from great expectations to despair and disgust was gradual and he was careful to confide his denunciations in his correspondence with friends, diaries and notebooks that were published only posthumously. Thomas Bernhard’s hatred seems to have been born in his cradle and continued all the way to his grave at the age of 58. But since he was widely translated and admired throughout the world, the Austrians had little choice but to award him a prestigious literary prize in the hope of that flattery may mollify him. It had the opposite effect. In his acceptance speech Bernhard delivered such a scathing attack on Austrian double-talk, mediocrity, intolerance, and fascism that the Austrian Minister of Culture and half of the audience walked out on him. I dare you not to love and admire such a man!
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When a prominent Soviet official died, a good number of Soviet personalities in the arts, among them Shostakovich, were invited to deliver eulogies. As it was to be expected, all the brown-nosers emphasized the positive and ignored the negative in the deceased, all except Shostakovich who chose to emphasize only the negative by exposing the man’s dishonesty and opportunism. Which is why, ever since I read this, I have had a soft spot for Shostakovich, whose music I also love not because it is elegant, refined, deep, intricate, or noble but because it has a propulsive and sometimes gut-wrenching forward drive.
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005
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Bad news for our massacre pundits: as the number of tragedies around the world rises, the magnitude of our own goes down. This phenomenon is also known as “compassion fatigue.” As a result, the more we talk about our tragedy, the more sympathizers we lose. I suggest therefore, “Less is more.”
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Our massacre pundits remind me of the survivors of another holocaust in the Old Testament who looked back and turned into pillars of salt.
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If a friend “is a masterpiece of nature” (Emerson), what is an enemy if not a curse from hell.
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It is not easy educating those who are infatuated with their own ignorance.
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I have written over a thousand commentaries and letters and I am proud to announce none of them ends with Comrade Panchoonie’s punch line, “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money). I am thus in a position to say to my readers, “If dissatisfied, your money will be cheerfully refunded.”
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Wednesday, October 12, 2005
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What’s wrong with assimilation, an assimilated reader demands to know. Nothing, if the assimilation is driven by necessity such economic conditions, unemployment and destitution. But if the economic conditions are results of a corrupt and incompetent administration, then emigration and assimilation become our collective responsibility. Assimilation in the Diaspora is less a result of economic conditions and more of internal conflicts, divisions, mutual intolerance, and inept leadership. In which case, assimilation or “white massacre” may be said to be the death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts.
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Another reader wants to know why I am against millionaires? I am not, provided they mind their own business and don’t get involved in culture and politics, because where benefactors enter, brown-nosers rise to the top. It is worth remembering that plutocracy and democracy are mutually exclusive concepts, and a developed wallet means an underdeveloped intellect.
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