Sunday, November 27, 2005
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After describing in some detail the rhythmic exuberance and melodic inventiveness of the final movement of a Mozart piano concerto, most of which I no longer remember, the announcer concluded: “This is what it means to be alive!” Sometimes the easiest explanation is also the most unforgettable.
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According to the press release of a new publisher, he is willing to consider any manuscript that qualifies as “entertaining trash.”
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I have been in the business long enough to know that nothing I write matters, and on the day I start taking myself seriously I will have to declare intellectual bankruptcy.
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Reason tells me it makes no sense writing for Armenians. Even so, I go on. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know. Far better men than myself have fallen silent after five, ten, or at most twenty years, because they couldn’t take the insults of a vocal minority, the hostility of the establishment, and the apathy of the majority. I have been writing for thirty years now and even if nothing changes, my guess is, I will go on writing for another thirty (if I am lucky enough to live that long). So what if I have only two readers left, both of whom misunderstand and contradict every line I write?
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Monday, November 28, 2005
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COMPASSION FATIGUE
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A young woman has written a commentary in our paper today the title of which is “Hello I’m a person, not some guy’s stereotype.” By yakking endlessly about massacres and Turks we have reduced ourselves to the status of a stereotype – a victim nation – and the world is full of them.
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People judge us by our contributions to the welfare of mankind, or how useful we can be to them, and not by how much we have suffered. This is true of individuals as well as groups. I will never forget the young, cool blonde co-worker of mine, Carol by name, who cut me short once with the words, “Listen, I’ve got problems of my own.” Politicians in need of our votes may not say as much, but they sure as hell think it.
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“I’ve got problems of my own!” A good explanation as to why Naregatsi may well be the most praised and least read Armenian writer.
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If I have learned one sure thing in life it is this: Never challenge the power of someone you are not in a position to kill with impunity. This applies to Turks as well as Armenians because power is power regardless of nationality.
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Tuesday, November 29, 2005
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I don’t trust a writer who belongs to a political party. I don’t trust political parties and politics. I trust politicians even less. I will go further and say that I see them as my natural enemies.
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Being Armenian is an abnormal condition. Being an Armenian writer is compounding the felony.
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It’s all right to be prejudiced as long as you have an open mind.
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History teaches us that it is easier to learn from it than to change it.
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All empires are warlike. There has never been a pacifist empire. A pacifist empire might as well be a contradiction in terms. A pacifist empire would cease being an empire before you can say Jack S. Avanakian. That’s because an empire is like an attractive wench. Everyone wants a piece of the action and if she doesn’t resist she becomes a woman with a past and no future, and in today’s parlance, history.
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The justice of victims can be as ruthless as the justice of victimizers.
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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
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There came a moment in my life when I suddenly realized that all the knowledge I had acquired until then was worthless. It follows, all the knowledge that I have acquired since may also be worthless sometime in the future. If men in positions of power and authority experience such moments, they must pretend otherwise. The same applies to men of faith. And yet, somewhere in the scriptures we read: “If you think you are wise, behave like a fool so that you may be wise,” or words to that effect. I suspect men of faith interpret these lines in such a way as not to question or doubt their faith-based assumptions, knowledge and understanding. And that’s another problem with men of faith: not only they must not question their fundamental assumptions, but also their interpretations of scriptures. Not only the Pope must pretend he does not doubt his faith seven times every day (as an Italian adage has it) but also he must pretend he has at no time questioned his own infallibility. The same applies to bishops, mullahs, and televangelists. Hence orthodoxies and heresies; hence religious wars and massacres; and hence Voltaire’s dictum, “Since it was a religious war, there were no survivors;” and Bertrand Russell’s maxim: “The aim of philosophy is to introduce doubt in an environment of certainties.”
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Speaking of certainties: in a fascist environment the press is exclusively anti-enemy, and if there is no enemy, it invents one. In a democratic environment the emphasis is on exposing corruption and incompetence in one’s own power structure. By publishing 19 anti-Turkish articles in a 16-page weekly and ignoring our own filth, our press fully qualifies as a crypto-fascist medium.
Censorship is another prominent feature of fascism and all its crypto- and neo- variants. If I have said this before, it bears repeating. For, according to Socrates, “to know is to remember.”
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