Sunday, February 12, 2006
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Please note that the following notes and comments are meant for a mature audience. For children of 14 years of age and under, and Armenians of all ages, parental guidance is advised.
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When I retire I may go into crocodile wrestling. After thirty years of writing for Armenians, it may be a safer and an easier way to make a living. It may even be more fun.
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My credibility with some readers goes south whenever I assert that the very same people who speechify and sermonize about our culture are engaged in lobotomizing our literature. But consider the facts: under Sultan Abdulhamid II in Istanbul and under Stalin in Yerevan, we had many more brilliant writers than we have today under the leadership of our bosses, bishops, and benevolent benefactors.
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Writing for Armenians is like fighting a war on two fronts – against the leadership and against the readership (as you can see I have successfully resisted the temptation of replacing the letter p with t). Instead of wrestling with a single crocodile maybe I should wrestle with two…
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You cannot argue with someone who is in a position to silence you, as Socrates discovered 2500 years ago, and more recently Solzhenitsyn. As the French are fond of saying, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme merde.”
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Writers cannot solve the problems created by politicians for the simple reason that politicians are the ones who acknowledge the existence of problems, and whenever they create them they refuse to acknowledge them. The reason why we have so far failed to solve our problems is not that we lack the IQ and the motivation but that the men at the top (a) hate to share power, and (b) they have become masters of the blame game. Which means that as long as there are Turks (and it looks like they will be around for some time) the blame-game will continue to be our national sport.
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Monday, February 13, 2006
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NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER
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My guess is the EU will eventually agree with us on the Genocide controversy and ask the Turks to acknowledge responsibility. It may also agree with Turks by saying Armenian claims of monetary reparations and territorial claims are unrealistic because monetary compensation would make Turkey even more economically dependent on the EU, and because territorial concessions would create more problems than solve them.
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ANOTHER SCENARIO
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If the Turks agree to offer monetary compensation to survivors, they may set up criteria so easy that many phony claimants will abuse them. At which point they will set up a bureaucratic system so complex and tough that it will be a nightmare for the applicants and enrich only their lawyers.
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DO YOU WANT TO BE POPULAR?
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If you say capitalists amass their fortunes by exploiting cheap labor or overpricing their products or both, you will not be very popular with our benefactors and their assorted hirelings. If you say the universal medium of all political parties regardless of race, color, and creed is propaganda, our partisans will call you an enemy of the people. If, on the other hand, you teach yourself to say “Yes, sir!” to everything you are told, you have a much better chance to achieve popularity.
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MEMO TO MY CRITICS
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What you say is not what you think. What you say is what you were told when you could not yet think for yourself.
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TWO INDECENT PROPOSALS
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Our benefactors are avid readers of our weeklies but only of articles in which their selfless generosity is discussed. This suspicion became a certainty to me when one of them once asked me to ghost his memoirs.
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An editor once complained to me that a benefactor had agreed to support his weekly only if the editor agreed to publish a minimum of one article about him per week.
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Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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In the Byzantine Empire Christians who supported the depiction of images (iconolaters) and their opponents (iconoclasts) fought wars and massacred one another. Did the defeat of iconoclasts make for a better brand of Christianity? An irrelevant question. I mention this to point out the fact that history teaches us that man has consistently refused to learn from past blunders.
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We say we want the truth but we are willing to die only for a lie — the bigger the lie the better.
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Propaganda cannot solve problems. It can only create new ones. When Czarist propaganda in the 19th century was replaced by Communist propaganda in the 20th, things went from bad to worse.
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By brainwashing people propaganda narrows their minds and reduces them to the status of apes who cannot think for themselves, they can only echo their leaders who rule by lies, coercion, and terror.
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In a letter to the editor in our local paper I read the following Arab proverb: “The truth is good, but better to talk of the palm trees.”
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For every propaganda line there will be a counter-propaganda line. In the same way that for every organized religion there will be one or more heresies. That’s because truth is one, but lies many.
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One could also say that truth is one but the roads leading to it many; and when one kills one does not kill in the name of truth or God but in the name of a lie or Satan.
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To say my road is the only true road is the biggest of all lies.
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Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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In a commentary in our paper this morning I read: “Muslims are offended and insulted, and rightly so, by the controversial cartoons published in papers around the world.” If I were to demonstrate every time I feel offended and insulted, I would be a full-time 24/7 demonstrator and the earth from where I stand to the horizon would be scorched.
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Perhaps I should feel sorry for the lawyer accidentally shot by Vice-President Cheney, but I don’t. He should have been more careful in his choice of friends and hunting companions. If I feel sorry for anyone it’s the quails.
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Speaking of hunting expeditions, one of Norman Mailer’s novels is titled WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM which is about a hunting expedition in an American forest and in which the word Vietnam is not even mentioned. To dramatize the kind of mindset that drove the U.S. to the war in Vietnam, what Mailer does, and he does it brilliantly, is to quote from the hunters’ incessant talk which is crude, coarse, and peppered with profanities. To some Americans, Mailer is saying here, war is nothing but a hunting expedition.
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