Sunday, December 05, 2004
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After Bach, the Beatles; after Socrates, Stalin; after Elgar, Elvis; after Sibelius, Sinatra; after Hegel, Hitler; after Vermeer, Warhol; after Gostan Zarian, Nairi Zarian…I could go on. The human race does not seem to be open to reason or esthetic and moral values.
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No matter what your field, you will have competitors who will be more successful by prostituting its integrity.
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After Jesus Christ, televangelists, who amass vast fortunes by perverting his message of love and compassion to greed, intolerance, and hatred.
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Speaking of man’s primitive faith in explanations: we are fond of saying that what made of us perennial losers is our geography, thus implying that we have been enslaved by our mountains, rivers, lakes, and valleys; or we have allowed our longitudes and latitudes to be masters of our destiny. If true, emigration would mean liberation. But consider our academics in America, our crème de la crème, who are in no position to plead not guilty on grounds of ignorance or unawareness: not only are they subservient to our mini-sultans and pseudo-imams but also to their flunkies.
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To assert their independence of mind, courage, and daring, some readers insult a defenseless and harmless scribbler anonymously and from a safe distance, all in the name of patriotism, of course, which means allegiance to the Homeland, namely Mount Ararat, Mount Aragats, Lake Sevan, Dilijan and Hraztan.
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Monday, December 06, 2004
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When Schopenhauer called Hegel an “arch-charlatan,” his unspoken intent was to replace Hegel’s philosophical system with his own; or, to propound an antithesis to Hegel’s thesis. Which means, in his rejection of Hegel, he was being a Hegelian.
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When your average layman calls an intellectual giant like Marx, Freud, or Sartre a charlatan without having read their works, he only succeeds in exposing his prejudice and arrogance.
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I define an intellectual giant as one who unveils something that has been hidden from view, and having done so, he changes our understanding of reality. He may be proven wrong and corrected by future thinkers, but only in the sense that Einstein corrected Newton.
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Pope Pius XI (1857-1939) publicly condemned communism. But when he declared in one of his encyclicals, “Dead matter leaves the factory ennobled and transformed, whereas man are corrupted and degraded,” he might as well have been speaking as a Marxist. And this indeed is an unmistakable mark of an intellectual giant: it becomes impossible to speak about anything that matters without in some way quoting or paraphrasing him.
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Sartre put it best when he said: “An anti-Marxist argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea.” Which also means, you cannot contradict a new thesis with an obsolete anti-thesis; or again, any effort to arrest the advance of human thought is destined to fail.
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Tuesday, December 07, 2004
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ON INTERMARRIAGE
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In the Armenian ghetto where I was born, raised, and brainwashed, I was led to believe intermarriage meant sleeping with the enemy. I know better now because I appreciate the positive aspects of mixed marriages, namely, racial and religious tolerance. And sure enough, some of our ablest and most progressive intellectuals, from Abovian to Zarian, and from Arlen to Saroyan, married odars.
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How to explain the popularity of intermarriage? — (about 80% in the U.S., I am told). A man is a man, a woman is a woman, and when the two meet, everything else – moral and esthetic values, political orientation, financial status, religious and ethnic affiliation – fly out the window. What remain are a man, a woman and the instinct to be fruitful and multiply.
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ON BEST-SELLERS
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In the U.S. best-selling books are as a rule either ignored or torn to shreds by critics. What makes them best sellers are average readers and word of mouth. We Armenians don’t have best-selling books because we don’t have average readers. Every Armenian who knows how to read considers himself not only a distinguished literary critic with impeccable esthetic criteria but also an expert on any given subject.
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ON GENTLE READERS
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Whenever I am described by some of these distinguished scholars and gentlemen as a purveyor of b.s. I am reminded of a popular saying in Hollywood, which brought a smile, when I first read it: “It may be shit, but it has integrity.”
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I once called one of my abusive readers an “inbred moron,” and ever since then he has done his utmost to prove me right.
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Wednesday, December 08, 2004
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ON FUNDAMENTALISTS
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A fundamentalist is one who uses (make it, abuses) the scriptures to camouflage his carnivorous instincts and cannibalistic disposition.
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“A bourgeois is a bourgeois regardless of national origin,” Lenin said. So is a fundamentalist — regardless of belief system.
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Lawyers, theologians, politicians, sophists and charlatans in general have at one time or another proved that a man may behave like swine and portray himself as a noble specimen of humanity. History is very clear on this point.
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A fundamentalist believes being virtuous, superior, or one of the “chosen,” consists in basing one’s conduct on the scriptures, and by cunningly isolating certain lines and completely ignoring the spirit of many other lines, he can prove to be (to his own satisfaction, at any rate) a man of compassion even as he engages in the massacre of innocent civilians.
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Those who commit massacres don’t like that word. They prefer the word war, and in war sometimes “bad things happen.”
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Fundamentalism in both the West and the Middle East might as well be reflections of one another. One reason Kerry lost is that as a moderate he could not see this, he thus underestimated the evil in both camps.
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How can any reasonable man change a message of love and compassion to one of hatred and murder? Easy. Listen to Richelieu: “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.”
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