Sunday, September 30, 2007
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“THE ART OF DIALOGUE”
BY JACK S. AVANAKIAN
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You begin by establishing your infallibility.
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The best way to avoid criticism and contradiction is to brag as forcefully as you can about how much you know. The more forcefully and aggressively you brag, the more invulnerable you make yourself. After all, who in his right mind would want to tangle with a foul-mouthed ignoramus?
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I once met an Armenian who asserted no one knew as much about Armenian history and culture as he did. When asked where he had studied these subjects, he replied, “In Zimbabwe.” (May have been Timbuktu or some other remote corner of the Dark Continent – please, don’t ask me to quote verbatim the utterances of an idiot). After that no one dared to question his expertise and infallibility. It worked. See what I mean?
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As children we are brought up on stories, myths, fables, legends, and fairy tales, and eventually become addicts of fiction. This may explain why as adults we develop a violent allergic reaction to facts. Hence our preference of propaganda and illusions, and our intolerance of straight talk.
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The Brits have a favorite slogan: “We have neither friends nor enemies, only interests.” An original and practical, even if cynical, approach to diplomacy? Not quite. I read the following in Polybius (2nd century BC): “Kings look on no man as a natural friend or foe, but ever measure friendship and enmities solely by the standard of expediency.”
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There are no new ideas and Hemingway is right: “Why plagiarize if you can steal?” And speaking of garbage-mouth braggarts and diplomacy: We brag about Mikoyan’s skill and cunning as a diplomat even though he engineered the Stalinist purges in Armenia that in its ruthless efficiency and number of victims has been rivaled only by Talaat’s purges of Armenian intellectuals in 1915. We brag about Byzantine emperors of Armenian descent even when they adopted an anti-Armenian foreign policy. We brag about our heroic revolutionaries who took over the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul at the turn of the last century even when this publicity stunt resulted in the massacre of several thousand defenseless innocent civilians.
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Where did our leaders, diplomats, and nationalist historians study their subjects, you may wonder. Since I don’t know everything there is to know about Armenian history and culture, I can only guess: it was either at the Saddam Hussein University in Basra or the Ayatollah Khomeini Center of Higher Learning in Qum. It may also have been somewhere in Libya, Namibia, or Botswana. Go ahead, I dare you to make a damn fool of yourself by questioning my infallibility!
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Monday, October 01, 2007
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TWO SAINTS AND
TWO THOUSAND RASCALS
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There are a number of good reasons why I prefer to emphasize the negative, one of them being, the positive has been repeated and instilled in us for so long that we have lost all awareness of our failings. So that we see more merit in pride, arrogance, and prejudice than in humility, objectivity, and tolerance.
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In the Prologue of her autobiography, Santa Teresa of Avila tells us it is at the request of her superiors that she is undertaking to write a book about her spiritual experiences. She goes on to say, she wished she had been asked instead “to make a detailed list of all the things I have done wrong in my life,” and “I would be so much more comfortable disclosing my imperfections.” All this in the first brief paragraph of her preamble. She goes on to describe herself as “wicked” and “incorrigible.”
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“Wicked” and “incorrigible”: Naregatsi’s LAMENTATIONS may be said to consist in endless variations on this theme. By acknowledging Naregatsi as our Shakespeare, we also express a tacit admiration for the “method in his madness.”
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I don’t expect our bosses, bishops, benefactors, charlatans, and commissars to behave like saints; neither do I want them to behave like rascals. If we want to improve things we can’t begin by saying we are God’s chosen and he has created us in his image, we are therefore models of perfection and the envy of the world.
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The mark of a good quotation is this: once heard or read it is not forgotten. One such quotation is by Santa Teresa of Avila, which I remember to have read twenty or thirty years ago: “Never submit your intelligence to someone who doesn’t have much of it himself.” Hence my inability to say “Yes, sir!” to our dupes, morons, and rascals.
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Tuesday, October 02, 2007
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WHAT I BELIEVE
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I believe in Socrates who said, “Of the gods we know nothing.”
I believe in Tolstoy who said you don’t have to believe in god to be a good Christian.
I believe in Gandhi who said god is truth, and truth is not a commodity that can be acquired, but an endless journey fraught with doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, agony, and despair.
I believe in Karl Barth who said heaven, hell, and immortality don’t have equivalents in the real world as we perceive it with our senses but are only metaphors,(*) in the same way that when Christ said “the kingdom of god is within you,” he was saying god and his kingdom are only dimensions within our psyche.
I believe in Sartre’s dictum “We believe that we believe but we don’t believe.” Which may explain Mother Teresa’s “dark night of the soul” that was not just an isolated episode, as described by Santa Teresa of Avila in her autobiography,(**) but lasted most of her life.
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WHAT I DON’T BELIEVE
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I don’t believe in a god that is swayed one way or another by human desires and prayers. A god, who allows a brute to rape and murder a defenseless child when he can put a stop to it, is not a god who takes sides or gets involved in human affairs. To say therefore that god is on our side is to blaspheme.
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TWO PRAYERS
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Be on my side. Teach me to think against myself.
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Bernard Berenson: “Give us this day our daily idea and forgive us all those we thought yesterday.”
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FOOTNOTES
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(*) In Karl Barth’s own words: “Resurrection means not the continuation of life, but life’s completion. The Christian hope is the conquest of death, not flight into the Beyond.”
(**)For more details, see “A Glimpse of the Underworld,” in THE BOOK OF MY LIFE by Teresa of Avila, translated by Mirabai Starr (Boston, 2007, page 251).
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Wednesday, October 03, 2007
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ON PATRIOTISM AND RELATED
ABERRATIONS AND ATROCITIES
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Patriots of all nations share three things in common:
(one) hatred of the enemy; (two) intolerance of dissent; and (three) a genetic predisposition to confuse indoctrination with education.
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When ideology enters a controversy, reason flies out the window.
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Patriots are the ideal dupes of tyrants.
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Whenever I step out of the box, I am called an enemy.
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In a patriotic environment anyone who refuses to be brainwashed is called a traitor.
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You know all you need to know? What if your need of flattery exceeds your desire for knowledge?
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There is collective wisdom and there is collective stupidity. You may now guess which is more popular.
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I should like to see our patriotic speechifiers discharge their empty verbiage on an odar audience instead of preaching to the choir.
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All ideologies generate their own jihadists.
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Never call a moron an imbecile; he may take it as a compliment and spend the rest of his life trying to live up to it. I have seen it happen.
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If straight talk offends you, blame your ego, not me.
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Our enemies speak in the name of the devil even when they speak in the name of god.
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A headline in today’s paper reads: “Study says half of fraud victims relied on trusting relationship.”
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Delivering patriotic speeches is like offering free drinks to alcoholics.
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