Thursday, January 04, 2007
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GOOD OLD DAYS
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Saddam was no doubt a bad man and fully deserved his fate. But whether or not his executioners are any better remains to be seen. In movies, good guys prevail; but in life even when bad guys perish the chances are other bad guys will replace them. For centuries we dreamed of a free and independent homeland, and now what we have it, there are those who miss the good old days under Stalin, and I for one cannot blame them. And is there a writer today who does not miss the freedom our writers enjoyed in Istanbul under Sultan Abdulhamid II?
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CRITICIZING CRITICS
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When they say we need constructive or positive critics whose intent is to solve our problems, what they are really saying is that our literature so far has failed to produce a single writer who meets these criteria, and that all our critics have been anti-Armenian degenerates whose sole aim in life was to degrade the nation and to insult its leadership.
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ON RULES
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Study rules carefully in order to know when and how to break them.
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ON A SERIOUS ABNORMALITY
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One of the most serious abnormalities inflicted on human beings is considering oneself normal and all others if not abnormal than slight deviations.
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Friday, January 05, 2007
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OUR ACADEMICS
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“What kind of Armenians are these?” I would ask myself whenever I thought of our academics (over a thousand of them in the U.S. alone) that produce a plethora of learned texts in which Armenians are not even mentioned. Now finally I have an answer: “Smart Armenians.”
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CULTURE AND SOCIETY
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The headline of a commentary in this morning’s paper reads: “Culture a force for stagnation or change.” When things go from bad to worse, as they tend to do sometimes, culture becomes a force for decline and degeneration. That’s when the best and the brightest quit and search for challenges in alien environments. Some may call this betrayal. I call it reading the writing on the wall.
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ON HISTORIOGRAPHY
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Facts don’t disagree – they can’t. Propaganda does – that is its raison d’etre.
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GOOD QUESTION
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How can anyone be so abysmally wrong and think he is right? This is a question I ask myself again and again when I think of my past.
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UNDERSTANDING TURKS
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I make an effort to understand Turks because any child or fanatic can hate. As for understanding Armenians: I don’t even try because at one time or another I have been all of them in all their stages of disintegration, megalomania, self-righteousness, obstinacy, and that unique combination of naiveté and cunning which is peculiar to all underdogs from Jews to Gypsies.
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BEARDED MEAT
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Unfamiliar idiomatic expressions sometimes read like riddles. Case in point: “Unless the penis dies young, it will surely eat bearded meat.” (From Chinua Achebe’s ARROW OF GOD.)
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ON ORIGINALITY
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Sometimes originality is nothing but undetectable plagiarism, very much like great wealth, which more often than not is nothing but covered-up grand larceny.
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VALUES
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Let others speak of family values. Let us learn to speak of national values, which stand in direct opposition to partisan or tribal values.
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Saturday, January 06, 2007
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PHOBIA
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THE ARMENIAN REPORTER has published a long illustrated article in which one of our self-appointed dime-a-dozen pundits sets out to prove that Armenians are great because they have produced many great men, among them Raymond Damadian, Michael Arlen, William Saroyan, Alan Hovhannes, Ivan Galamian, and Aram Khachatourian. Mercifully Gregory Peck (Krikor Ipekian), Jack Palance (Hagop Palanjian), and Elizabeth Taylor (Yeghisapet Tertsakian) are not included. What seems to have escaped this chauvinist pundit’s attention is that all these great gentlemen lived and worked in alien environments. As a result the most important and relevant question remains neither asked nor answered: namely, what is it about Armenian environments that are incapable of producing or even tolerating greatness? The answer must be: in an environment dominated by dishonest mediocrities, honesty and excellence will be seen as undesirable goals, not to say threatening attributes. A mediocrity that has assessed himself as a first-class intellect will feel threatened by anyone who may be better than he. And when dishonest men get together and go about their filthy business behind closed doors, the last thing they want is an honest man who may shatter their image of themselves. Without realizing this so-called patriotic pundit, in his effort to brag about our greatness, has instead succeeded only in exposing the root of our decline and degeneration – envy and fear of honesty and excellence.
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P.S. This much said, I am willing to concede that there are at least two fields of human endeavor in which we excel in our environments: fund-raising and charlatanism.
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