Thursday, June 15, 2006
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There was a time when I would get all kinds of calls urging me to translate or review this or that book. When the phone rings these days it’s either telemarketers or wrong number, and strange as it may seem, I prefer it that way.
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According to a Yiddish saying, there is a type of individual who is such a nobody that when he goes out of a room, it feels like someone came in.
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The first line of a poem titled “Credo” by Lucien Jacques (1898-1961): “I believe in man, that piece of filth.”
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After greed for money comes search for immortality. I once had a call from one of our national benefactors (who are outnumbered only by our self-appointed pundits who pretend to know everything there is to know about Turks and Armenians simply because their last name ends in –ian) asking me to ghost his memoirs. He offered to travel all the way to my place in the middle of nowhere and to spend as much time with me as it was necessary to complete the task. Shortly thereafter I read his obituary in one of our weeklies.
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When told by an American philanthropist that he was writing his memoirs, Truman Capote (it may have been Gore Vidal) is quoted as having said: “Are you using a typewriter or a calculating machine?”
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From THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY by Ambrose Bierce:
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“BIRTH: The first and direst of all disasters.”
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“BRAIN: An apparatus with which we think that we think.”
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“CALAMITY: Misfortune to ourselves and good fortune to others.”
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CORSAIR: A politician of the seas.”
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“FAITH: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
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“PATRIOT: The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.”
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Friday, June 16, 2006
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THE USES AND ABUSES OF HISTORY
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The study of history attempts to answer two sets of questions: (one) what happened and (two) why. When one of them (the what) is emphasized at the expense of the other (the why), or vice versa, the result is bound to be more propaganda and less history.
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On the subject of the Genocide: we tend to emphasize the facts or what happened, and the Turks prefer to emphasize the why and view the facts as of secondary importance. As for the rest of the world, like us, they too stress the what, but a different kind from ours, namely, “what’s in it for us.” The result is not dialogue, compromise, and consensus, but monologues that never cross.
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There is another disadvantage in stressing the importance of what happened in the past; we neglect the present, or what’s happening today. When I see nineteen articles and commentaries on the Genocide (or “Red Massacre”) in a single issue of our weeklies and none about its “White” counterpart (assimilation in the Diaspora, exodus from the Homeland) I may be justified in suspecting there is a planned and deliberate effort on the part of our leadership and academics to manipulate, mislead, and deceive the masses into thinking we are in good hands and our past problems are more important than our present ones.
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We share this in common with dogs: we know our masters but not our masters’ master. We know what we think and feel, but not why we think and feel as we do, or what were all the factors that went into shaping our state of mind.
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Facts don’t exist in a vacuum. They are products of a long chain of conditions, circumstances and thought processes or convictions; and convictions, as we know, can be wrong, especially when they stress one aspect of reality and ignore others.
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Consider the following scenario: A house is on fire. The owner accuses his next-door neighbor of arson. They quarrel. Result: both houses burn down.
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If you think I am being too tough on our historians and their dupes, consider the following two definitions from Ambrose Bierce’s justly celebrated THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY:
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“HISTORY: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
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“IDIOT: A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.”
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Saturday, June 17, 2006
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The need to ask questions can be irresistible, and the temptation to believe in answers, no matter how false, can be overwhelming.
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There are three ways of going wrong: when you don’t know, when you think you know, and when you think.
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A conformist does not think of himself as a conformist, that is to say, as someone who has been indoctrinated to believe that subservience is a commandment from above and not to obey it is a capital offense.
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I am single because I would never marry anyone willing to marry me. Consider my long list of liabilities: I am Armenian….
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We inherit our parents’ fears and acquire some new ones of our own. Which may explain why most of us view subservience to our mini-sultans and neo-commissars as ordained from above.
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You don’t have to be right to be influential. Logic and common sense are less popular than that which is false, accessible, and flattering.
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“Literature consists in making crap look like rose jam,” Jean Genet tells us. Since I have so far failed to acquire that magic skill, I have reconciled myself to being an unpopular failure.
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In Michael and Ellen Kaplan’s CHANCES ARE (New York, 2006) I read the following: “Once you know that daisies usually have an odd number of petals, you can get anyone to love you.”
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