Three Apples: My Avatar Will Sink Your Titanic
By Paul Chaderjian on Feb 19th, 2010
avatar-will-sink-your-titanic/
BY PAUL CHADERJIAN
Everyone is always measuring our worth with units of money.
Our employers tell us we are worth this much. We tell our clients we
want that much for our time. And some random illogical and unstable
marketplace algorithm puts a price tag on the cost of our health care.
We’re not just the victims in this scheme but also the victimizers.
We’re always trying to guess how much people are bringing in annually.
We’re blurting out the square-footage of our homes and offices,
guesstimating the price of other people’s rides, assessing their
couture and bling, and readily announcing our children’s tuition.
We’re always doing the math like TV channels that count wealth all day
long. We’re like conglomerates tallying totals at the box office.
We’re gauging the successes of our community by the number of
attendees at events rather than the experiences of those attendees or
the work accomplished through our fundraisers.
Armenian life in the modern century has become a telethon of quantity
over quality, material over substance.
We seem obsessed, like Western Civilization, with things, material,
and having more and having better. We are fixated on our material and
financial wealth.
And in a community where the children of have-nots from the Genocide
and have-nots from Soviet Armenia suddenly have a lot, most of us
think our things are more impressive than our soul and our mind.
So where there is money, we pay our respects. Where there is wealth,
we listen. Where there is gaudy abundance, we gawk.
Not just that, but we make our rich into our gods. We make our big
donors into our community’s wisest elders. We let our benefactors, by
default, set our community agenda and values.
Those with money can be Armenian broadcasters, beam into our living
rooms, and set our moral and cultural compass. Those with money get to
speak on our behalf to Sec. of State Hillary Clinton about our
community’s collective concerns regarding the Homeland.
Those with money can buy popularity for themselves, the artists they
sponsor, and some rich Armenians even try rewrite our history like the
Turks.
Not that our rich aren’t wise and experienced in our materialist
society, but they may or may not be in touch with the masses like me
and you, our concerns, issues, and struggles.
Remember, businesses and corporations have no souls, and we shouldn’t
follow soulless models of operation to deal with our community and our
issues. Businesses are created to make money, but communities are
created to protect individual.
Can the affluent truly and successfully advise or dictate my tastes,
thoughts, and opinions about all things Armenian? And why is every
Armenian organization lusting after Kim Kardashian as its mascot?
She’s a pleasant girl but does not represent me.
This is the kind of healthy dialogue that is missing in our community.
We seem to have little `internal communication,’ and everyone seems
satisfied with other people’s decisions, morality, and measurements of
success as a community and as Armenians.
Not only is there little dialogue between our elders – the generous
donors – and the masses down here where I live, but we seem to have no
culture for allowing individual members of our community to have a
voice.
Witness all the comments after these columns that confuse these
commentaries for news articles and journalistic reporting. Witness
when I recently reviewed a television show in this column and was
called impish and a narcissist.
Not only do some in our community confuse commentary with reporting,
but they have the audacity to sit at home and decide that these
columns are worthless and should not be printed.
Obviously, some of us still live in Soviet China where there’s only
one way to see the world, where people don’t have a voice, and where
only a selected few have the authority to represent us.
Grassroots organizations and grassroots news media with activists and
contributors from all walks of our community is a better way of life.
The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) comes to mind. This
organization is the closet thing we have to a democratic approach to
managing our existence. This organization is the best way we can
collectively set our agendas and define our priorities as a people, as
a Diaspora, and as a community.
If you truly care about who we are as a collective, then get involved
with your local ANC chapter, speak up about your local, regional, and
national priorities, agendas, needs, and yes, dreams. Make sure your
community is informed, influence your local organizations to do the
right thing, educate others, and set our collective agenda with your
peers.
Another way to create what corporations call `internal communications’
is what this column is about. This column is about how our culture,
which has a centuries-old tradition of telling stories, isn’t doing a
lot of organic story-telling.
The street stories and our `people’ stories are not getting recorded
in this age of 140-character Tweets or Facebook updates. We have
hundreds of friends and lots of contacts, but what good are they if
they only accept our glam shots from parties and weddings or `like’
our PR on how great we are doing with all of luxury cars and our
bling?
Who are we beyond the poses and postures and all the kudos and happy,
smiley faces? Who are we beyond the ‘sold out’ community events and
the weddings and banquet halls that go one above another week after
week?
Is there anyone who is not successful or anything we do as a group
that fails? Do we ever organize events that weren’t better than last
year or bigger than ever before? Has anyone had a low turnout for
their Armenian festival or cruise?
If something is sold out or if I’m not being invited to your party or
wedding, then why are you telling me about it? Are you rubbing it in
my face because I know I can’t go to your event? Can anyone be real
anymore? Does anyone remember being human versus being a soulless
corporation where how much money we earn at the end of the day or
after the fundraiser is all that matters?
Where is the real, the organic dialogue of about the stories of modern
Armenians? Where are the cares and concerns of a 21st century Armenian
layman written? Who is chronicling the hardships of noble hard-working
men and women who are earning living wages and raising children while
struggling to keep their culture alive?
We may know each other’s projected stories, but do we know our
collective story? Should we not know various facets of our individual
and collective struggles so that we can respond to our collective
needs?
A psychology professor once told my class that when two people – say
Adam and Eve – sit face-to-face at a table, there are actually six
players at that table. The first and second characters at the table
are the real Adam and Eve. The third and fourth characters at the
table are the two individuals the real Adam and the real Eve are
projecting. The fifth and sixth characters at the table are the Adam
that Eve is perceiving and the Eve that Adam is perceiving.
If that’s the dynamic of modern man, how can we not be estranged from
our own community? How can we, you, and me not be confused about who
and what our community is? Are we the people we think we are, are we
the people we are projecting, or are we the people we’re being
perceived as?
The only way we will ever know who we are as a community or as a
people is by sharing our real stories with one another. The only way
is through organic storytelling.
Last Sunday, in a random, empty warehouse in Atwater Village, on the
wrong side of the railroad tracks, the vision of two sisters, Adrineh
and Karineh, brought together a small group of us, and we told our
stories.
There were no ads in the papers. There were no commercials on our
local digital cable channels. There was no budget.
A dozen of us got up one by one and read our ten-minute-long stories
under the title, `I went all the way to Armenia, and all I got was a
lousy T-shirt.’ The title was meant to be humorous, perhaps alluring,
but the theme was genius.
We had to tell stories of our experiences of Armenia, of our Homeland.
And the range of stories that rang from the microphone that night were
nothing but the truth about who we are as a people.
Nazo spoke of reciting the Lord’s Prayer when his turn came to make a
toast at a wedding a cab driver he met that day invited him to attend.
Lory recalled liking Soviet Armenia only after getting to swim in one
of Yerevan’s fountains as a child.
Sam talked about his dream of ancient gods sending him geometric
formulas of ancient knowledge that float in our DNA’s. Allen talked
about Diasporans running a summer camp for kids in Gyumri.
Some of these stories were funny, others were touching, and some
inspiring. But more importantly they were our people’s stories. They
were stories that may have not fit anywhere in our newspapers, in a
Facebook entry, at a lecture, or around the banquet table at a
wedding. Yet, there were truths that needed to be heard in each of
these stories, patterns unveiled that allowed the readers and those in
the audience to relate to one another and to our collective experience
as Armenians.
We told stories that night, and we built a community like in the old
days. We told stories like they used to around camp fires, around
fireplaces or Pagan hearths. We told stories like we did before the
Internet, before television.
In the great Armenian tradition of story-telling, the Gregorian
sisters executed another installment of their Siroon Storytellers.
They succeeded in bringing Armenians from various walks of life
face-to-face. They succeeded by creating dialogue, breaking barriers,
and providing a night of entertainment that beat any mega-block buster
[fill in a title here].
Stories are what communities are about, after all. Stories are what
unite us and make us one. We go to the movies, to church, or sports
arenas to worship together, to laugh together, to mourn together, and
to feel connected. And our individual stories spoken to our neighbors
and to our friends end up defining us in the here and now.
So where are your stories – your real stories? Where are you writing
them, sharing them? Who is validating and acknowledging them? And why
aren’t you contributing to our collective consciousness of what it
means to be an Armenian in 2010, in our corner of the Diaspora? Why
aren’t you providing your two cents to who we are as a people, who we
should be, and what we should aspire for?
And where this all started was when I ordered a pizza the other day,
and the worn and torn, gray-haired Armenian man who showed up at my
door said, `Do stegh es aproum (You live here)?’
It took me a second to understand what was happening, that he was
Armenian and I was Armenian, and that he knew I was Armenian.
I was his last stop after a 12-hour day, and this stranger had been
wanting to tell his story – a story of migrating from Yerevan, saving
up enough money to buy his own Domino’s franchise, baking and
delivering seven-days-a-week, and barely being able to care for his
family and pay his property taxes.
His story had been bottled up perhaps. Maybe he’d been driving around
with his story for hours, maybe days, maybe years. And he had to tell
it to the first friendly face (or familiar face?) he had seen that
day. And tell, he did.
I stood there holding my box of pizza, listening with great interest
to a member of my own community exhaling his soul out to me, saying no
one had told him it would be this difficult in America.
Did he have regrets? Did he have hope-perhaps. But he indeed had a
need to talk, to tell, to share with another Armenian soul in this
vast global wasteland of impersonal addresses that were consuming his
pizzas without validating his soul, his substance.
Perhaps stories like my pizza man’s don’t get into the newspapers of
our day and don’t get communicated to those who need to hear them in
the Homeland. Maybe they are heard through the word-of-mouth media and
taken for granted by Yerevani families watching us on yachts, in
lavish banquet halls and in mansions on their TV screens and dreaming
of leaving the Homeland for greener pastures.
That’s another column.
But for now, this question. What if we all allowed ourselves to take a
chance once-in-a-while and told our story like my pizza delivery man?
What if you were that emigrant delivering a pizza past ten o’clock one
night and took a chance, stood outside another Armenian’s door and
told your story?
Wouldn’t that just make us closer, our community tighter, and our
world smaller, less hostile? Wouldn’t that help us help each other?
… And seven million apples fell from heaven: one for the storyteller,
one for him who made him tell it, one for you the reader, and one for
each individual Armenian in the our world today.