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Sunday, October 29, 2006
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IF THE SHOE FITS…
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Whenever I feel mean, unforgiving, and full of venom, I ascribe it to my Ottoman heritage.
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A false friend can be more dangerous than a mortal enemy. That’s because a false friend knows where your Achilles’ heel is and he strikes when you least expect it.
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A false friend is one who escalates a minor disagreement to terminal hatred and verbal slaughter.
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My false friends outnumber my enemies because being naïve and gullible (dumb for short) I have been brainwashed to believe I am smart and can’t be taken in.
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I have said and repeated that I am smart so often that I now have no doubts on that score.
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My position is so vulnerable and my weaknesses so many that no matter how absurd the flattery, I swallow it hook, line, and sinker.
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Because I consider all defeats moral victories, I am invincible. Or, as they say in diplomatic circles in Washington: “Whichever way the shit goes down, my ass is covered.”
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Monday, October 30, 2006
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ON OBJECTIVITY
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Objectivity is like common sense, even fanatics don’t complain that they don’t have enough of it. But the truth of the matter is, we either underestimate or overestimate people, including ourselves. The aim of racism is to legitimize this widely practiced aberration.
As a child I was brought up to underestimate Turks to such a degree that I could not conceive of a day when I would read such oxymoronic phrases as “a great Turkish pianist,” or “a widely translated Turkish novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize who has been compared to Thomas Mann.”
To the same degree that I underestimated Turks I overestimated my fellow Armenians. When I finally realized that Armenians were human beings, like the rest of mankind, with their share, perhaps even more than their share, of failings, I experienced a state of shock that lasted several years during which I came close to becoming an alcoholic.
If I am too critical of Armenians today and not critical enough of Turks, it is because I don’t know and I will never know everything there is to know about them, or for that matter about myself.
Historians like Toynbee and philosophers like Sartre tell us it is impossible to know everything about the past, and history is not a story with a fixed plot but a narrative that must be constantly updated and rewritten.
As human beings we are therefore condemned to pronounce verdict only on partial and sometimes even hearsay evidence.
To rely on a politician’s version of the past is like assuming the roles of judge and jury and relying on the evidence presented by a single lawyer whose aim is not to prove the innocence of his client but to challenge the prosecution to dispel all doubt as to the guilt of the accused.
When an Armenian poet said, “Human justice, I spit on your face,” and long before him, when Dickens has one of his characters say, “The law is a ass!” they were emphasizing this very same point and the impossibility of achieving objectivity and impartiality.
Historians, even honest and well-meaning ones, are human beings like the rest of us: they may know better about some things, perhaps even many things, but they don’t know everything. We should trust their judgment on big things as much as we trust ours on little things.
Only almighty and all-knowing god may be objective, but as far as I know the word isn’t even mentioned in the Bible, where we are asked not to judge our enemies but to love them.
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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
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PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL REFLECTIONS
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God created the universe in his own image. Astronomers tell us there are many more stars in heaven than grains of sand on earth. And now, consider the fact that the earth isn’t even a star but a planet, and relatively speaking, about the size of only an almost invisible fraction of a dust particle. Need I say more?
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MORE ON RACISM
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In a fable by La Fontaine titled “The Wolf and the Lamb,” the wolf accuses the lamb of having spoken ill of him last year. When the lamb says he wasn’t even born last year, the wolf replies, “It must have been your brother.”
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TURKISH PIANISTS
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I asked a professor of music if he had ever heard of a famous Turkish pianist. “Two of them,” he replied to my racist astonishment. “Is one of them good with Brahms?” I asked next. “His recording of the Intermezzi is famous,” he said after naming him.
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As an Armenian I began to make sense of things only on the day I realized that some Turks may indeed be horrid (Turks may agree with me on this) but our own “betters” are not as good as we think they are (I don’t expect Armenians, especially our “betters,” to agree with me).
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20TH-CENTURY ARMENIAN LITERATURE
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A MOTHER’S HEART
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By AVEDIK ISSAHAKIAN
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There is an old tale
About a boy
An only son
Who fell in love with a lass.
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“You don’t love me,
You never did,” said she to him.
“But if you do, go then
And fetch me your mother’s heart.”
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Downcast and distraught
The boy walked off
And after shedding copious tears
Came back to his love.
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The girl was angry
When she saw him thus
And said, “Don’t you dare come back again
Without your mother’s heart.”
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The boy went and killed
A mountain roe deer
And offered its heart
To the one he adored.
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But again she was angry
And said, “Get out of my sight.
I told you what I want
Is your mother’s heart.”
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The boy went and killed
His mother, and as he ran
With her heart in his hand
He slipped and fell.
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“My dear child,
My poor child,”
Cried the mother’s heart,
“Did you hurt yourself?”
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(Translated by Ara Baliozian)
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Wednesday, November 01, 2006
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EXPOSING LIES
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A politician is a politician regardless of nationality, and as a politician he shares more things in common with other politicians than with his own people.
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The one endeavor in which politicians excel is making wrong appear right. In his last days, Hitler blamed not himself but the German people. Since they had failed to live up to his expectations, he is quoted as having said, they deserved to be wiped off the map.
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We live in a world where the credibility of lies is greater than that of truth, hence the popularity of organized religions and ideologies. I am not saying all ideologies and religions are wrong. It is ideologues and religious leaders who say that. It is popes and ayatollahs, bishops and mullahs who say if you don’t trust the salvation of your soul into their hands, you are no better than a heretic and an infidel dog and will burn in hell for eternity.
Since at all times and everywhere heretics and infidels have outnumbered true believers, there must be more people in hell than anywhere else.
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If you say I repeat myself, I will make a deal with you: on the day a preacher says he is no longer against sin, I will consider changing my tune.
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I think it was Aldous Huxley who once observed that the earth is the insane asylum of other planets. That makes more sense to me than the idea of a compassionate and loving god being guilty of the greatest holocaust (i.e. hell) in the history of the universe.
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Exposing lies can be a catastrophic career move.
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