Thursday, September 13, 2007
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“YOU REPEAT YOURSELF!”
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Who doesn’t?
First nation this, first nation that, “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money)…At least when I repeat myself I don’t send you a bill.
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I repeat myself? When was the last time you heard one of our sermonizers or speechifiers speak in favor of sin or Turks. Why single me out? Because I refuse to flatter your ego? Is that how you classify your fellow men and their ideas? Only brown-nosers are welcome because they speak the truth? Everyone else is either an enemy or a liar?
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Our speechifiers and sermonizers never give up telling us we are right because god and truth are on our side. Isn’t that what their mullahs do too? What if both them and us are brainwashed by identical sets of charlatans who speak with a forked tongue?
I am not casting aspersions. I am only asking questions.
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Friday, September 14, 2007
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MICE THAT ROAR
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A good example of an irrefutable argument, Armenian style: What I say is right not because it is right but because I say so, and if you dare not to take my word for it, you deserve to die.
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There is a Pope of Rome in all of us. We assume to be infallible when we argue, and we argue as if what we say not only matters but it may also change the course of history.
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I have yet to hear an Armenian say, “After reading Naregatsi, Raffi, or Zarian, I changed my mind about my fellow Armenians.” If our greatest intellects cannot change anyone’s mind, what can we hope to achieve, except perhaps to expose ourselves as pompous asses.
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There is this about a pompous ass: no need to deflate him. Leave him alone and he will inflate himself until he self-destructs.
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When Shakespeare coined the phrase “full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” I have no doubt whatever he had an Armenian discussion forum in mind. How do I know this? The way you know everything: I feel it in my gut.
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My take on the human condition in general and ours in particular: crooks feel more at home in a crooked world and they will do their utmost to keep it that way.
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Saturday, September 15, 2007
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THEORIES
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A foreign traveler (I forget his name – may have been Lynch) once said that there are two distinct types of Armenians: the honest, hard-working peasant born and raised on Armenian soil, and the Levantine merchant whose number one concern is the bottom line. This traveler did not live long enough to observe the evolution of the naïve peasant into a murderous commissar infinitely more ruthless than the most cynical Oriental carpet dealer of the Diaspora.
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I had nothing to do with World War I that reduced my parents into penniless orphans and refugees. Neither did I have anything to do with World War II during which I spent my childhood in a ghetto as a “Turkish gypsy.” But after that every major source of misery has been my own doing. I say this to point out two morals: (one) no one gets away with anything, and (two) we are our own worst enemies. Consider the two first stories in Genesis: Eve tempts Adam, and Cain kills Abel.
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There are a number of theories explaining why we survived where many others perished. One of them maintains the reason we survived is that we are not biodegradable. Is that good or bad? It depends. If you ask an ecologist he will say being non-biodegradable is not good for the environment. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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