Sunday, September 09, 2007
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THE RAT AND THE PITBULL
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Once upon a time there was a pitbull, a rat, and a little mouse sharing the same junkyard. These three didn’t particularly care for each other but they coexisted in relative peace for many years until the rat fell seriously ill and was diagnosed with terminal old age. Whereupon the pitbull decided to put him out of his misery by delivering the coup de grace. When the rat realized what was about to happen, he fought like a demon. It was at this point that the little mouse committed the serious strategic blunder of siding with the pitbull. And when the pitbull, for reasons of his own, left the field of honor, the badly mauled rat fell on the little mouse and tore him to shreds. Ever since then historians of this occurrence have been divided into two, the pro-mouse faction asserting the rat had behaved like a rat and in total contravention of the Marquis de Queensberry rules. It is to be noted that most of these pro-mouse historians happen to be direct descendants of the pitbull.
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Monday, September 10, 2007
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MAN THE QUADRUPED
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Ask a specialist in any field, from astronomy to zoology, and from ethics to politics, and he will tell you the average layman is a total ignoramus about his subject. What he may not volunteer to admit as readily is that he is himself a total ignoramus about countless other subjects. In that sense we are all ignoramuses at the mercy of other ignoramuses who pretend to be infallible. Shaw was right when he said, “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.” Long before Shaw, Socrates spent a good part of his life exposing the ignorance of charlatans whose sole expertise consisted in pretending to know better. For every political leader or pundit who says one thing, there will be another who will say the opposite. Who is right and who wrong? Marx was right when he spoke of the machinery of capitalist exploitation. But he was wrong when he failed to see that his own theories would be mercilessly manipulated, perverted, and exploited by gangs of operators even more ruthless than the most ruthless of capitalists. After a lengthy interview with Hitler in the 1930s, Toynbee declared to the press: “I am now convinced Herr Hitler wants peace.” If a power-mad loudmouth demagogue can deceive one of the greatest political pundits and historians of all time, who will protect us from deceivers? A dog, it has been said, knows his master but not his master’s master. My question is, in what way are we different from dogs?
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Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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ON POPULARITY
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Marquis of Halifax: “Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought.”
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If those who promote hatred (sorry, I should have said justice)… if those who promote hatred are more popular than those who speak of understanding, it may be because hatred appeals to the gut, understanding to the brain, and in all primitive societies the gut rules the brain.
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Anyone who disagrees with us is either an ignoramus or a liar is an argument that succeeds only in undermining our own credibility.
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There is something Ottoman in our anti-Turkishness. Surprised? I don’t see why. It took less than sixty years for the Russians to Sovietize us and for the Yanks to Americanize us…
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More often than not the sentence “I know it for a fact” is followed by fiction.
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It is not at all unusual to deceive oneself all one’s life and remain totally unaware of the deception.
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I may be wrong on specific points but you are wrong on the most important things if you don’t allow me the freedom to be wrong on the assumption that you support a position, or an ideology, or a religion that happens to be infallible.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2007
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PERSPECTIVES
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When I first read a thick volume on the history of Christianity in which Armenians were not even mentioned in a footnote, I began to have second thoughts about what is remembered, what is thought of as relevant, and what is worth mentioning.
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To those of my readers who take me to task for being consistently nasty and deliberately malicious, I say it is all a charade, and that in reality and deep inside somewhere I am much worse, and that even when I feel good and at peace with the world, a more accurate description of my disposition would be like that of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire.
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I once met an Armenian who said he loved his fellow Armenians but every other word he uttered dripped with the concentrated venom of ten Turkish vipers.
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If memory serves, it was Baronian who once declared: “I love mankind but I hate people.”
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A buried head in the sand is not a defense but an invitation.
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