Sunday, October 08, 2006
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ON THE MARK FOLEY SCANDAL
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Most crimes are never solved. Likewise, most cover-ups are never uncovered. Placed in this context, the Mark Foley cover-up makes perfect sense.
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ON ORGANIZED RELIGIONS
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If you have been successful in fooling millions of people for a thousand years or more, you have a good chance of fooling them for at least another thousand.
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GOOD VERSUS BAD IDEAS
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Even the best ideas are vulnerable to perversion. A good idea in step one may be a bad idea in step two. This explains why very often it is not easy to discriminate good from bad ideas.
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ON EDUCATION
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The true aim of education consists in preparing young minds to oppose injustice even if doing so may be against one’s own self-interest.
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ON UNDERSTANDING
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Understanding is acquired less by means of explanations and more through painful experiences.
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ON WRITING
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In an elementary school textbook on how to write, I read: “Turn someone you dislike into an animal.” I have never done that, but I have turned someone I disliked into two animals by calling him “Jack S. Avanakian.”
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Franz Kafka: “In the battle between the world and you, back the world.” He should have added: To write means backing yourself even when you know you are backing a sure loser.
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Monday, October 09, 2006
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In the preamble of Arshak’s THE SOLITARY WOLFE: NOVELLAS (700 pages, Yerevan: 2005) we read the following: “In the 20th Century predatory nations used religion and ideology as weapons with which to annihilate their enemies. By contrast, we the naïve were taken in by new and old religions and sacrificed our homeland to them.”
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We the naïve? I find that hard to swallow. I was brought up to believe Armenians are just about the smartest people on earth. So much so that even when I was taken in by idiots I thought of myself as smart. It took me not just years but decades to catch up with reality. Which may suggest that neither the Ottomans nor the Soviets were as successful in brainwashing us as we were in brainwashing ourselves.
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Bernard-Henri Levy (French critic and philosopher): “The Pope’s interpretation of jihad may have been offensive, but infinitely more offensive is justifying in the name of Islam human bombs, 9/11, the stoning of women caught in adultery, the beheading of a Jewish journalist, and the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow Muslims not only in Darfur but also in Iraq, as they stand by the gate of a mosque. The Pope should have mentioned these things.”
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Tuesday, October 10, 2006
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HOW TO COMBAT CORRUPTION
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Corruption means much more than the penetration of the social fabric by crooks and bloodsuckers; corruption means the systematic alienation of all honest men, in the same way that mediocrity means the systematic alienation of all those whose aim is to achieve excellence.
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Corruption is as old as mankind; so are ways of combating it. History provides us with many examples. The following suggestions are based on methods that have been employed in the past with some degree of success.
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To editors and publishers: print more articles, case histories, and commentaries on corruption and less on Turkish denials; and if that’s too much to ask, adopt an equal opportunity policy: for every headline on Turks publish one on Armenians — and I don’t mean bald-headed tennis players.
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To lawyers: provide pro bono services to victims of corruption, take the bloodsuckers to court, and if necessary go to jail. They may jail a few, but they don’t have enough jails to lock up everyone.
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To benevolent institutions: withdraw financial support from organizations that lack high standards of accountability.
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To tourists: let the relevant agencies and bureaucracies know that henceforth you plan to stay home or travel only to countries where you are more welcome.
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To those who say some of these tactics may penalize the victims more than the victimizers, I say, maybe, but for only a limited time (less than a year or at most two). Which is far more preferable than the alternative of adopting a wait-and-see and hope-for-the-best stance until the rotten structure collapses under its own weight (which may take forty or fifty years).
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History is clear on this point: corrupt power structures do not as a rule reform themselves. Consider the cases of the Roman Empire, and more recently of the Ottoman and Soviet Empires? This much said, I am willing to concede that all this talk about combating corruption in our context might as well be an academic exercise in futility because we are as much victims of corruption, mediocrity, and incompetence in the Diaspora as they are in the Homeland. That’s because the number one concern of our self-appointed elites is number one, and to hell with underdogs and victims, even when they happen to be our brothers.
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Wednesday, October 11, 2006
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MEN AND BOOKS.
GOD AND THE DEVIL.
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I approach a new book as if it held a secret that may change the course of my life. If most books disappoint me, it may be because I expect too much from them.
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If most men disappoint us, it may be because we make too many unreasonable demands on them. On the day we convince ourselves that the average man is very much like ourselves, a bundle of contradictions and a self-centered bastard with the potential of a hero or a saint, we may be more willing to see the potential and to ignore the actual.
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Divine impartiality makes sense only if both sides of a conflict are evenly matched. But when a hoodlum rapes and kills a child, we can no longer speak of divine impartiality, only of satanic indifference.
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For millions of years men believed in an Unnamable and Incomprehensible Being who was the source of good as well as evil. Traces of this belief survive today in the Lord’s Prayer when we say to God “Lead us not into temptation,” which we are taught to believe belongs to the Devil’s agenda.
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By departmentalizing the Incomprehensible into God and the Devil, so-called civilized man has allowed bloodthirsty fanatics to commit all kinds of atrocities in the name of God, when in fact it’s in the name of the Other one.
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Whenever pundits speak of Muslim aberration they feel obliged to cite the Crusades, religious wars, and the Inquisition, completely ignoring the fact that Christian aberrations belong to the irrevocable past, and that Muslim terrorism is rooted less in the Koran and more in money from oil — they have so much of it that they think they can take over the world.
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As the last but one Pope said when he visited a mosque, both Christians and Muslims believe in the same God who is love, mercy, and compassion. What the good Pope failed to say is that what we believe may well be propaganda.
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