Sunday, April 22, 2007
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WANTED: A MESSIAH
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Those who see the best in themselves will tend to see the worst in others. We all need scapegoats. Turks are ours, and we are theirs. Naregatsi – our Dante and Shakespeare combined – saw the worst in himself but the best in God, who, he said, would forgive all his sins not because he deserved His forgiveness but because His love knew no bounds. And then there are those who say, we all swim in the same soup; there is good and evil in all of us. It’s all a question of perspective. Talaat is a statesman of vision to them and the worst villain that ever crawled between heaven and earth to us. Or, as the African chieftain is quoted as having said to C.G. Jung: “When my enemy steals my wives, it’s bad. When I steal his, it’s good.”
Sometimes I am told I am on the wrong path, my efforts are misguided. I should change my style, way of thinking, and attitude towards my fellow Armenians. Instead of seeing the worst in them I should see the best, emphasize the good, stress the positive, ignore the negative. I find it hard to believe that we have failed as a nation because our writers failed in their mission. The history of our literature goes back 1500 years during which we have produced an astonishing variety of writers, some of whom, like Khorenatsi, pointed out our shortcomings, others saw the best in us (Abovian), still others (like Baronian and Odian) saw the worst; and then there is Raffi, who saw the best as well as the worst. Even more revealing is the case of Zarian, who began his brilliant literary career by calling us the real chosen people and concluded it by saying we survive by cannibalizing one another.
Do we really need a messianic figure with a new style and belief system that will set us on the right path? Speaking for myself, I don’t believe in messiahs and quick fixes. I believe in self-criticism more than in criticism. This may explain why sometimes I am perceived as anti-Armenian and pro-Turkish. To be misunderstood, rejected, silenced, and ignored: so what else is new?
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Monday, April 23, 2007
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A BATTLE ON TWO FRONTS
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Questions that I ask myself whenever I sit down to write: “Why bother? What’s the use? Why go on? To what end? What have I accomplished so far?” And the tentative answer that I come up with: “I am not sure. I have no idea…unless it is to let those in power know that they may fool most of the people most of the time, but there will always be one or two who will refuse to be taken in by their nonsense, even if the two happen to be a minor scribbler and his mother living in the middle of nowhere.”
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My mother has known all along that writing is a waste of time. In retrospect, I have to agree with her. I know now I would have been more useful to my fellow men had I been a carpenter or a bus driver. Or a travel agent. That’s what my mother wanted me to be, a pilot or a travel agent. She loves going places and I don’t even drive. The only two places that I visit regularly are the library and the church – both within walking distance. I go to church not to pray but to carry on a love affair with the organ works of J.S. Bach.
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There are some things that one is destined to understand only at the end of one’s life. Youth is a time for daydreams and megalomania. I know now that a writer doesn’t have much of a chance because his war is a battle on two fronts: (one) against those in power, their hirelings, and dupes; and (two) the philistines in whose eyes writers, poets, philosophers, and intellectuals in general are at best daydreamers and at worst mental masturbators.
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Who is to blame for World War II and the Holocaust? Most people will say, Hitler and the Nazis. Strangely enough, Thomas Mann put part of the blame on German literature. Unlike their French counterparts, German writers, he said, had spent more time exploring their inner life and less time on social issues. As a result, the German people had lacked the sophistication and political awareness to see the Nazis for what they were – not the future saviors of the nation but its destroyers. True or false? False, according to a French contemporary of Mann, who concluded his memoirs with the words: “Literature saves no one,” and “…no man is ever anything but a swindle.” (See Jean-Paul Sartre, THE WORDS.)
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Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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THE TRIUMPH OF MEDIOCRITY
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Nothing can be more misleading than to approach reality with received or preconceived notions, especially notions cunningly and carefully chosen by those in power to flatter our collective ego and to cover up their mediocrity. If you want to understand your fellow Armenians or, for that matter, your fellow men, begin with yourself and forget what you were taught as a child. The first step in all learning is unlearning.
Instead of bragging about being the first nation to convert to Christianity, ask yourself: “How good a Christian am I?” Next question to ask: if our ruling classes saw the light and converted to Christianity at the beginning of the 4th Century, they just as readily saw the darkness and converted to atheism in the 20th. What are we to make of that?
By teaching us to brag, our leaders hope to convince us we are in good hands and we have nothing to worry about, when the exact opposite is the case.
We brag about our survival in order to forget that most of us, including the best and the brightest, did not survive.
If we assume the invisible and hostile forces of history (assuming of course such forces are not within us but in a realm beyond our reach and control), had targeted us for extinction but only a few of us managed to survive, we could just as easily assume that, with less mediocre, corrupt, incompetent, and divided leaders not seven but seventy million of us could have survived. Very probably there are more than seventy million Armenians today, but most of them prefer to identify themselves as Americans, Hungarians, Italians, Bulgarians, Russians, even Kurds and Turks.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying there is something fundamentally wrong with our DNA. We are people like any other people. We have produced many great leaders, even leaders of mighty empires, and I don’t mean Dikran, the so-called,“Great” and his Mickey Mouse ephemeral empire. Oswald Spengler, one of the greatest historians of the 20th century has called such an Armenian leader (Basil I, founder of the greatest dynasty in the Byzantine Empire) “a Napoleonic figure.” And Toynbee, the other great historian of our time, has written a huge scholarly biography of Basil’s son and successor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus.
What I am saying here is that, where mediocrities are in charge, excellence will be persecuted; where crooks are in charge, honesty will be anathema; where fascists are in charge, the rule of law and accountability will be seen as unpatriotic; and where the unprincipled are in charge, opportunism will be the norm.
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Wednesday, April 25, 2007
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IDEAS IN HISTORY
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Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were Greeks; the prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus were Jewish. And yet, the history of Greeks and Jews has been a concatenation of defeats, tragedies, and oppression. Now then, go ahead and blame Khorenatsi and Naregatsi, or Raffi, Baronian, and Zarian for all our problems.
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Trying to change a situation without first understanding it is like trying to put out a forest fire with a bottle of soda water.
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Some people have been traveling on the road of dishonesty for such a long time that honesty appears to them as cynicism, objectivity as charlatanism, and straight talk as venom.
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If Turkish denialists question the reality of the Genocide, we deny the depth of our malaise. There are those who think, if a handful of dedicated individuals with good intentions get busy within our communities, we have an excellent chance to extricate ourselves from the abyss. Inevitably, they reach the conclusion that things are not as easy as they thought they would be and they give up in disgust. Their line of thinking goes something like this: If I can be more useful to my fellow men in an alien environment, why bother with a bunch of ingrates who, in Zarian’s assessment, “survive by cannibalizing one another”?
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Instead of saying my assessment of our present situation is inaccurate, they call me, at best, a pessimist, and, at worst, a charlatan.
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The trouble with being brainwashed is that you become fixed in your thinking; you cannot move ahead or go beyond of what you think you think, and when it comes to thinking, what matters above all is going beyond and moving ahead.
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