Thursday, December 01, 2005
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ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN
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If one takes into account earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, epidemics and many other natural disasters which insurance companies call “acts of god,” one may have to admit that the design is deeply flawed and the intelligence not equal to the challenge.
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ON POLITICIANS
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Paul Johnson, a noted conservative British intellectual, has published an essay in the SPECTATOR (August 20, 2005) titled “Wittgenstein and the fatal propensity of politicians to lie,” where he writes that lying has become a routine occurrence in British politics. What about Armenian politics? Shortly after the collapse of the USSR Sylva Kaputikian declared, “I am proud to have been a member of the Communist Party,” the very same party that murdered some of our ablest men and bankrupted (economically as well as morally) our homeland. And if you were to ask one of our average partisans or ideologues, don’t be surprised if you are informed that the leaders of his party never lie. This to me is another irrefutable proof of the fact that the design is seriously flawed.
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ON DEMOCRACY
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In the same issue of the SPECTATOR there is a letter to the editor in which I read the following lines: “Our democracy was not imposed from the top, it grew from beneath, well-rooted in our culture.” If democracy must grow from beneath, we have not yet begun, and even if we were to begin first thing tomorrow morning, we will have a long way to go. Our Big Brothers have nothing to worry about because the chances that they may run out of dupes are practically non-existent.
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Friday, December 02, 2005
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Flattering egos is a profitable enterprise, unlike exposing prejudices, which doesn’t even pay minimum wage.
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If by building a cathedral a benefactor thinks he will spend a minute less in purgatory he will build a cathedral. As for helping the poor and feeding the hungry, he will say what one of our brown-nosers once said to me: “There will always be poverty and hunger in the world and I doubt if it is in anyone’s power to abolish them.”
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Mistakes are the best teachers. Cursed are those who never make them for they will never learn.
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American literature welcomes writers from all four corners of the world – Nabokov (Russian), Bellow and Singer (two Jews and Nobel Prize winners), Saroyan… Something similar could be said of French literature – Zola (Italian), Cioran and Ionesco (Romanians), Beckett (Irish), Adamov and Lubin (Armenians). And I could make a long list of our own writers that we have silenced – among them Voskanian, Massikian, Shahnour, and Zarian. I have yet to meet an Armenian (and I include members of my own family as well as relatives) for whom the demise of Armenian literature rates as a fit subject for conversation.
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Saturday, December 03, 2005
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Neither the victim’s nor the victimizer’s versions of the same story will agree with god’s version.
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Some things we are destined to understand only at the hour of our death.
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Decent Armenians do not parade their Armenianism. It is only the phonies who feel the need to cover their nakedness with the flag.
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I like this thought by Jean Rostand: “In a future age we shall be just as astonished to find that we have had politicians as leaders as we are, today, to find that we once had barbers as surgeons.”
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He who overestimates himself will underestimate the opposition.
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It is useless to speak in an environment where fools have succeeded in convincing themselves to be wise.
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