Sunday, February 26, 2006
************************************
The many ways those in power have to control our thoughts and emotions, especially the emotions of the thoughtless.
*
Most of his life, Gide writes in his World War II diaries, his efforts have been concentrated on understanding “the other,” that is to say, the enemy. It is such a pity that the world is run not by men like Gide but by the likes of Hitler and his dupes.
*
Armenian problems? What problems? Since we haven’t been able to solve them so far we must assume them to be an integral part of the human condition, like death and taxes.
*
Patriotism allows us to do nothing and to feel good about it.
*
Patriotism also allows us to think that if our heart is in the right place, we can’t go wrong. But what if the heart is controlled by a dysfunctional psyche?
*
An honest man is a charlatan’s worst nightmare.
*
That which we learn from books may not even register on our consciousness. But that which we learn from experience we can’t forget.
*
If your understanding focuses on yourself and ignores the other, your understanding of yourself as well as reality is bound to suffer because you are only a tiny fraction of a far larger reality, and tiny to the point of being invisible. And what is patriotism if not an extension of the self?
#
Monday, February 27, 2006
***************************************
In a tribal environment the myth of “pure blood” is taken seriously. It is different with the ruling classes and elites in general where mixed marriages are the norm rather than the exception.
*
After centuries of intermarriage a Turk is more difficult to define than an American. Something similar could be said of an Armenian. In the ghetto where I was born and raised there were Armenians who looked like Mongols, Germans, and Negroes but they all identified themselves as Armenian because (a) Armenians were the dominant tribe, (b) to identify themselves as anything else would have been against their own interests, and (c) because the offspring of mixed marriages were looked down at as mongrels.
*
There are harmless idiots and then there are dangerous idiots. A dangerous idiot is one who believes what his political and religious leaders tell him.
*
I understand idiots because I was one most of my life. Perhaps I still am for thinking that common sense and decency are transferable.
*
I was born again as a human being on the day I said to myself, “I am an Armenian, therefore I am an idiot.”
*
There exists an American school of thought that says, if you repeat to yourself “Today I like myself more than yesterday. Tomorrow I will like myself even more,” you will cease being a lousy bastard.
*
There is also an Armenian school of thought that says, if you repeat to yourself every day, “I am smart,” or “I am smarter today than I was yesterday,” you will cease being an idiot.
*
If two idiots meet and one says to the other “You are smart,” and the other replies, “You too are smart,” they will part with the conviction that, unlike most of their fellow men, they are not idiots.
#
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
*************************************
There is more to America than cowboys and Indians. There is also more to Armenians than the massacres. And yet, our press, our educational system, our editorialists, pundits, and academics conspire to reduce our identity, to distort our worldview, and to narrow our horizons when they emphasize the dark side of our recent past. They go further and cover up our failures and shortcomings, of which we have more than our share, because, they tell us, they come under the general heading of “dirty linen.”
*
Anyone who dares to discuss our problems is told to shut up unless he can solve them, or rather make them disappear as if by magic with a single verbal formula like abracadabra.
*
We are more, much more than misunderstood victims if only because we are human beings, or rather, it is within our powers to be born again as human beings.
*
We have a small army of lawyers, PR men, lobbyists, propagandists, and fund-raisers who are fully equipped to handle our grievances. We don’t have to brainwash our children to think and behave as their unpaid hirelings or crusaders.
*
In a commentary in our local paper today I read: “A smart country is a country brimming with ideas, a country open to pioneering minds, a country not fearful of intellectual fertility, experimentation and daring – a thinking country.”
*
Even more to the point: “We need to be careful in our use of language, avoid reductionist marketing strategies, and celebrate the fully broad nature of smartness. Otherwise we will miss the Mozarts and Platos in our midst. And that would not be a smart thing to do.” Where, O where is the Armenian pundit capable of producing such a paragraph?
#
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
***************************************
Renan: “A good policy consists not in opposing what is inevitable but in being of use to it and in making use of it.”
We have been better at “being of use to it,” than “in making use of it,” alas!
*
Robin Hood did not steal from the rich, he simply returned to the poor that which had been stolen from them.
*
Gide in 1941, after the German occupation: “For years now, France has hardly given us any reason to be proud. The France of today has ceased to be France.” By France I assume he meant the leadership and its dupes.
*
Genocide is a plant whose seed is prejudice, and prejudice comes to us disguised as love of God and Country.
*
As the offspring of perennial underdogs and victims I refuse to assert moral superiority because to do so would mean adding hypocrisy to my previous list of vices.
*
If someone I don’t trust were to agree with me, I would disagree with myself.
*
Andrea De Carlo: “He tells me to follow my instinct. But what if I have two of them?”
*
ON WRITING (THREE PARAPHRASES)
*********************************************
If the first sentence comes from the gut, the rest is bound to follow. (Hemingway)
*
Before you sit down to write you must stand up and live. (Thoreau)
*
Force yourself to be brief and miracles may happen. (Chekhov)
#