Author: arabaliozian

Sunday, February 12, 2006
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Please note that the following notes and comments are meant for a mature audience. For children of 14 years of age and under, and Armenians of all ages, parental guidance is advised.
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When I retire I may go into crocodile wrestling. After thirty years of writing for Armenians, it may be a safer and an easier way to make a living. It may even be more fun.
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My credibility with some readers goes south whenever I assert that the very same people who speechify and sermonize about our culture are engaged in lobotomizing our literature. But consider the facts: under Sultan Abdulhamid II in Istanbul and under Stalin in Yerevan, we had many more brilliant writers than we have today under the leadership of our bosses, bishops, and benevolent benefactors.
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Writing for Armenians is like fighting a war on two fronts – against the leadership and against the readership (as you can see I have successfully resisted the temptation of replacing the letter p with t). Instead of wrestling with a single crocodile maybe I should wrestle with two…
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You cannot argue with someone who is in a position to silence you, as Socrates discovered 2500 years ago, and more recently Solzhenitsyn. As the French are fond of saying, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme merde.”
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Writers cannot solve the problems created by politicians for the simple reason that politicians are the ones who acknowledge the existence of problems, and whenever they create them they refuse to acknowledge them. The reason why we have so far failed to solve our problems is not that we lack the IQ and the motivation but that the men at the top (a) hate to share power, and (b) they have become masters of the blame game. Which means that as long as there are Turks (and it looks like they will be around for some time) the blame-game will continue to be our national sport.
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Monday, February 13, 2006
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NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER
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My guess is the EU will eventually agree with us on the Genocide controversy and ask the Turks to acknowledge responsibility. It may also agree with Turks by saying Armenian claims of monetary reparations and territorial claims are unrealistic because monetary compensation would make Turkey even more economically dependent on the EU, and because territorial concessions would create more problems than solve them.
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ANOTHER SCENARIO
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If the Turks agree to offer monetary compensation to survivors, they may set up criteria so easy that many phony claimants will abuse them. At which point they will set up a bureaucratic system so complex and tough that it will be a nightmare for the applicants and enrich only their lawyers.
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DO YOU WANT TO BE POPULAR?
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If you say capitalists amass their fortunes by exploiting cheap labor or overpricing their products or both, you will not be very popular with our benefactors and their assorted hirelings. If you say the universal medium of all political parties regardless of race, color, and creed is propaganda, our partisans will call you an enemy of the people. If, on the other hand, you teach yourself to say “Yes, sir!” to everything you are told, you have a much better chance to achieve popularity.
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MEMO TO MY CRITICS
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What you say is not what you think. What you say is what you were told when you could not yet think for yourself.
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TWO INDECENT PROPOSALS
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Our benefactors are avid readers of our weeklies but only of articles in which their selfless generosity is discussed. This suspicion became a certainty to me when one of them once asked me to ghost his memoirs.
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An editor once complained to me that a benefactor had agreed to support his weekly only if the editor agreed to publish a minimum of one article about him per week.
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Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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In the Byzantine Empire Christians who supported the depiction of images (iconolaters) and their opponents (iconoclasts) fought wars and massacred one another. Did the defeat of iconoclasts make for a better brand of Christianity? An irrelevant question. I mention this to point out the fact that history teaches us that man has consistently refused to learn from past blunders.
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We say we want the truth but we are willing to die only for a lie — the bigger the lie the better.
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Propaganda cannot solve problems. It can only create new ones. When Czarist propaganda in the 19th century was replaced by Communist propaganda in the 20th, things went from bad to worse.
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By brainwashing people propaganda narrows their minds and reduces them to the status of apes who cannot think for themselves, they can only echo their leaders who rule by lies, coercion, and terror.
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In a letter to the editor in our local paper I read the following Arab proverb: “The truth is good, but better to talk of the palm trees.”
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For every propaganda line there will be a counter-propaganda line. In the same way that for every organized religion there will be one or more heresies. That’s because truth is one, but lies many.
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One could also say that truth is one but the roads leading to it many; and when one kills one does not kill in the name of truth or God but in the name of a lie or Satan.
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To say my road is the only true road is the biggest of all lies.
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Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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In a commentary in our paper this morning I read: “Muslims are offended and insulted, and rightly so, by the controversial cartoons published in papers around the world.” If I were to demonstrate every time I feel offended and insulted, I would be a full-time 24/7 demonstrator and the earth from where I stand to the horizon would be scorched.
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Perhaps I should feel sorry for the lawyer accidentally shot by Vice-President Cheney, but I don’t. He should have been more careful in his choice of friends and hunting companions. If I feel sorry for anyone it’s the quails.
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Speaking of hunting expeditions, one of Norman Mailer’s novels is titled WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM which is about a hunting expedition in an American forest and in which the word Vietnam is not even mentioned. To dramatize the kind of mindset that drove the U.S. to the war in Vietnam, what Mailer does, and he does it brilliantly, is to quote from the hunters’ incessant talk which is crude, coarse, and peppered with profanities. To some Americans, Mailer is saying here, war is nothing but a hunting expedition.
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Thursday, February 09, 2006
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Once upon a time I was a fascist and I didn’t know it. I didn’t know it because I was brainwashed by fascists who didn’t know it either. Since I could not think for myself I aped my elders who were too traumatized by six centuries of tyranny that culminated in wholesale massacres, deportation, life in the ghetto, and still another World War to even begin to understand the difference between fascism and democracy. I understand their confusion and political disorientation. What I refuse to understand is the pretended confusion of individuals born and raised in a democracy who behave like fascists in the name of patriotism, as if patriotism and fascism were incompatible or mutually exclusive concepts. They are not. As far as I know no one has ever accused Hitler and Mussolini of being unpatriotic. It was Stalin himself who named World War II a “Patriotic War.”
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I define a fascist as anyone who thinks nothing of violating someone’s fundamental human right of free speech in the name of a misguided or self-serving definition of patriotism. A fascist has no use for free speech and does not consider that a serious aberration because he is either ignorant or pretends not to know that the worst crimes against humanity begin with the violation of someone’s human right.
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Friday, February 10, 2006
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Once more I have been asked to solve our problems. Once more we are invited to pretend that solutions are obscure verbal formulas like abracadabra that when spoken they will usher us into a new Golden Age. Once more I shall have to remind our dupes that solutions cannot be ordered the way you order pizza with or without anchovies.
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In the 5th century (that’s 1500 years ago) two of our foremost historians (Khorenatsi and Yeghishe) exposed two of our central problems (corruption in high places and divisiveness) and provided their solutions (honesty and solidarity). I will let you decide what are two of our central problems today.
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I have said this before, I will say it again, and it bears repeating: Finding solutions is not our problem, implementing them is.
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After lobotomizing our literature our leaders spread the rumor that so far our writers have failed to solve our problems.
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Let us assume for the sake of argument that our literature has been a waste of time and an irrelevant commodity that has ignored our problems. Let’s go further and declare all our writers to have been mental masturbators who did nothing but sing songs about the eternal snows of Mount Ararat and the glories of the Armenian language. What about our faith? We brag about being the first nation to convert to Christianity but fail to practice what we pretend to believe. What could be easier than to convert to Christianity and what could be more difficult than to be good Christians?
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When Yeghishe spoke against divisiveness he was only paraphrasing a well-known passage from the Scriptures: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” When was the last time our leaders behaved as though they had read and understood the meaning of this passage?
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After quoting two medieval historians allow me to quote a 20th-century author if only to illustrate the distance we have traveled during the last fifteen centuries. “Our political parties,” Gostan Zarian tells us, “have been of no political use to us. Their greatest enemy is free speech.” And, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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Saturday, February 11, 2006
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Once in my salad days when I contradicted a fellow Armenian with some degree of vehemence, he said, “You may be right” with complete indifference, smiled, and turned his back on me. That’s when I learned an important lesson: in an argument let the facts speak for themselves. No need to assert the moral strength of your argument. Believing in the moral strength of your argument may color your perception of the facts and thus weaken your position.
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If the Pope doubts his faith seven times every day (as Italians are fond of saying) one is justified in questioning all belief systems, especially if they are based on the words of a schoolteacher, a parish priest, a bishop, a mullah, an ayatollah, or a political boss – especially a political boss.
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Politicians and truth might as well be mutually exclusive concepts. Sometimes you will be much closer to the truth if you believe the opposite of what a politician says, and sure enough, for every politician who says one thing there will be another who says the opposite.
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Facts are important provided you also keep in mind that they do not exist in isolation. You may not be able to contradict facts but you may argue against their context. I suspect one reason we don’t see eye to eye with the Turks on the Genocide is that we emphasize the facts and they emphasize the context.
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There are honest Turkish writers and historians today who are willing to accept the facts of the Genocide. On the day some of our own historians (most of whom enjoy the support of a political boss, which might as well be the kiss of death on their objectivity) express a willingness to consider their context, we may have a better chance of reaching a consensus.
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And if, at this point, you are tempted to contradict me with vehemence and accuse me of being a revisionist, a denialist, a traitor to the Cause, and perhaps even the lowest form of animal life, I will say, “You may be right” with a smile.
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Sunday, February 05, 2006
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Corrupt and incompetent regimes survive by creating an enemy, thus persuading the people to blame their problems on external factors and to ignore internal ones. The Nazis had the Jews, the Soviets the capitalist West, Americans the Communists (during the Cold War) and more recently, Al Qaida. And we have Turks.
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We say we hate no one, we only want justice. But instead of cleaning our own backyard we concentrate our efforts on decontaminating someone else’s street. We say Turks and Americans do not recognize the reality of our Genocide because they are morally corrupt. But instead of teaching morality to our own leaders, we try to reform theirs.
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What are our chances of success? If the past is an index, nil. And if you think I am sharing privileged or inside information, some kind of Da Vince code, think again. What I have said so far is known to every journalist, historian, politician and layman who has acquired the ability to use his common sense and the confidence to trust his own judgment.
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To those who say what the Turks did to us was evil and to reject its reality is a crime, I say, yes, certainly, no doubt about that, I agree. But it is also true that neither Germans nor Russians, neither Yanks nor Turks are evil. They commit evil acts only when they behave like dupes and allow themselves to be taken in by corrupt, incompetent, and degenerate leaders who legitimize prejudice and promote hatred. I say therefore, instead of focusing our hatred on a specific enemy, let us oppose all corrupt power structures that commit crimes against humanity regardless of race, color and creed, beginning with our own, not because we are worse than others but because we are in a better position to reform ourselves.
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Monday, February 06, 2006
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Faith, we are told, can move mountains. What we are not told is that more often than not it can also misleads us into biting more than we can chew. The Soviets believed they were going to change the world and they ended up destroying themselves. Something similar happened to the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy. While aiming at immortality they committed suicide.
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Speaking of suicide: suicidal Muslim fanatics today believe they will be rewarded with 73 virgins.
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All nations that declare war believe victory will be theirs, if not military victory than moral victory, because God or Right is on their side. The list of believers and losers could sketch to infinity.
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Closer to home, our revolutionaries at the turn of the last century believed the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse and they were the rightful inheritors of our historic lands.
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Another definition of faith: a faculty designed to lead Homo sapiens to the abyss of nothingness.
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Whenever I am accused of being a pessimist I cannot help thinking: If only our revolutionaries had been more pessimistic!
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Today we believe our cause is right but after countless demonstrations around the world, editorials, memoirs, monographs, speeches and sermons, what have we accomplished? Not a single red cent in reparations, not a single inch of historic soil annexed, not a single victim resurrected. And what are the chances that in the next century we shall achieve that which we failed to achieve in the last? The question of a pessimist or a realist? You decide.
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Here is another question for you: Can an Armenian with a Turcocentric worldview be an authentic human being? Or, How much of his Armenianism or humanity must he sacrifice in order to acquire a Turcocentric worldview?
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About faith, I will say this: Don’t believe everything you read in books or hear in sermons. Rely more on your own reason, common sense, and experience. To think the worst sometimes makes more sense than to believe in miracles. And remember, during the last five millennia Ararat has not moved an inch.
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Tuesday, February 07, 2006
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There are two kinds of words: words that are spoken at the right time and place and words that are spoken at the wrong time a place. Example of the second kind: when you shout “Fire!” in a crowded place and create panic. There are also two kinds of ideas: ideas that have been handed down like second-hand shoes, and ideas that are based on one’s own sweat and tears. A Turcocentric worldview belongs to the first category.
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I grew up in a ghetto surrounded by survivors of the Genocide. They did not have a Turcocentric worldview not only because they were too busy trying to survive in an alien and hostile environment but also because they were too pragmatic to allow the past to define their future.
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As a student in Italy I met a good number of Armenians from Istanbul and their attitude was very similar to that of survivors.
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The French have an expression that speaks volumes: “C’est la guerre!” – meaning, in time of war, or in time of troubles (to use Toynbee’s terminology) things happen, all kinds of things, including unspeakable things. Sometimes unspeakable things happen even in time of peace.
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When party bosses push their young editors to print dozens of Genocide stories in every issue of their weeklies, they do so to cover up the fact that they are lobotomizing Armenian culture.
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I am not saying we should forgive and forget. What I am saying, there is a difference between dealing with today’s problems (whose solutions are within the realm of possibilities) and making the Genocide a collective obsession that paralyzes our will, poisons our worldview, and in the end may lead us to a dead end.
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Speaking of dead ends: we sometimes forget that so-called historic Armenia happens to be historic Kurdistan too. So that if by some miracle we are successful in annexing our historic lands we may have to contemplate the very real possibility of a war on two fronts, which raises the question: How many of our sermonizers and speechifiers are prepared to die in defense of Mount Ararat?
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Wednesday, February 08, 2006
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When I was a child I believed everything I was told. I had no reason to question the authority of my elders. If they had told me to kill and die in the name of a cause I would have obeyed. Since I could not think for myself I confused subservience with wisdom. I suppose all fanatics could plead not guilty by reason of infantilism.
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It is true that criminals don’t respect authority either. But compared to the crimes legitimized by authority (slavery, terrorism, war, and massacre) criminals, even the worst of them, are only isolated petty amateurs.
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We are told Islam forbids any illustrations of the prophet for fear they
could lead to idolatry. Does that mean Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism are idolatries? And is not to kill and die in the name of a cause whose legitimacy is questioned by the majority of mankind the surest symptom of idolatry?
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Kofi Annan: “Aggression against life and property can only damage the image of a peaceful Islam.” But is not “peaceful Islam” an oxymoron? Has not Islam been warlike from its inception? Did it not conquer a good fraction of three continents by fire and sword?
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In a letter to the editor by a local Muslim praising religious tolerance in Canada and condemning the publication of cartoons of the prophet in Europe, I read: “Government is a guardian over all private and pubic (sic) sectors.” I like to believe the misprint was intentional.
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Sunday, January 22, 2006
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If you think my contempt of our leaders is exaggerated, ask one of them what he thinks of the opposition.
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All analysis is self-analysis of the old self by the new self.
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I have had many unforgettable encounters and experiences but I did not think of them as unforgettable until much later.
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Whenever we are understood better than we understand ourselves we say we have been misunderstood.
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When I was a boy I thought I could achieve anything I wanted. I had the appetite of a giant. But as I grew older I began to resign myself to the fact that one cannot afford to have the appetite of a giant with the stomach of a midget.
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Everything is connected with everything else. You cannot step into the same river twice because countless imperceptible changes have taken place within us as well as in our surroundings, including the position of the planets and stars.
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Nothing can be as vulgar as the need to prove oneself smarter than others.
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Monday, January 23, 2006
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BOOK REVIEW
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ESTABLISHMENT: STORIES, ARTICLES, POEMS, TRANSLATIONS. By Vahe Avetian (290 pages, Yerevan, 2005).
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In her review of Vahe’s first book, INDEPENDENCE ARMY (Yerevan, 2005) Ashkhen Keshishian said it was “the best thing that could happen to our otherwise gray and moribund literary scene.” Another reviewer went further and called it “a volcanic eruption.” In his second book, ESTABLISHMENT, Vahe continues his struggle against ignorance and intolerance, the twin sources of most of our problems.
When told by hostile readers – make it, psychoanalyzed by phony Freudians – that his criticism is a result of a suppressed childhood trauma and a way of settling personal scores with unidentified adversaries, he explains he is only introducing critical criteria established in the West. At best, he goes on, “I only translate and paraphrase for readers who may not be familiar with foreign languages.”
Elsewhere he writes: “The consensus about me seems to be that I am a megalomaniac and a self-centered egoist because I speak incessantly about myself. It follows, as night follows day, that those who speak in the name of the nation and mankind are humble altruists.” I find this type of scorching sarcasm irresistible. If others find it unsettling, so much the better.
A word of warning: Vahe’s style is colloquial, direct and deliberately crude. If you are easily ruffled by unbuttoned exuberance or provoked by unleashed fury this book is not for you. But if you like to be exposed to the testimony of an honest witness, if you prefer your vodka straight, and if you are not afraid to shake the hand of an hombre whose grip is bone-crushing, Vahe is your man!
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Tuesday, January 24, 2006
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One reason I enjoy writing for my fellow Armenians is that it allows me to play Pollyanna’s glad game and say, “I am glad we don’t live in the USSR and my readers are in no position to denounce me anonymously to a commissar of culture.”
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If 1% of the charges leveled against me were true, I would not wait to be tried and found guilty by a jury of my peers. I would hang myself from the nearest tree.
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There is a type of prejudiced individual who thinks by saying, “I am not prejudiced,” he absolves himself of all prejudice. That’s what I call confusing abracadabra with thinking.
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Some of my readers are disappointed, even angry, when I refuse to join the chorus of our sermonizers and speechifiers in order to make it unanimous. It doesn’t even occur to them how ridiculous, not to say absurd, their position is. Unanimity among us is like Mark Twain’s weather, everyone talks about it but nobody does a damn thing – nobody, especially those who are in a position to do something…such as bishops. Why do we need two bishops within the same city and neighborhood? The answer must be obvious: if we needed only one, the other one will have to be discarded, or even worse, relegated to number two position; and in case you didn’t know, number two is the most hated number among Armenians, especially those who have achieved number one status.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2006
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You cannot separate politics from literature. Everybody, including tyrants, know this except our dime-a-dozen pundits who analyze our present problems (some of which are as old as our history) without first reading our major writers (all of whom wrote about them).
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If you cannot separate politics from literature, neither can you separate literature from politics. The Mekhitarists thought they could do that and they condemned themselves to irrelevance. The Vienna branch has been reduced to an empty library and the Venice branch to a museum.
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Some of our pundits don’t even write about Armenian politics. They write about Turkish politics of which they know and understand even less.
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And what do our pundits know about our history beyond the usual clichés – first nation to convert to Christianity and first nation to be subjected to wholesale massacres in the 20th Century? At best they may also know about the Tourian assassination in New York in 1933. What else? And they know whatever they know from a nationalist and partisan perspective, which means their judgment has been polluted with recycled propaganda.
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To sum up: we continue to be at the mercy of dupes who succeed only in covering up the blunders of our corrupt and incompetent leadership and reinforcing our image as perennial victims. They thus end up doing more harm than good. So what else is new?
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Thursday, January 19, 2006
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Learning from history is a special faculty: some people have it and some don’t. If an entire generation of smokers were to die of cancer tomorrow, they would be replaced by a new generation of smokers. Something similar could be said of thieves, drunk drivers, sexual molesters, prostitutes, johns, pimps, and corrupt politicians who go on about their business as if they were immune to prosecution.
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Speaking of smokers, I read the following in the paper this morning: “Doctors worry about face transplant patient because she is using her new lips to take up smoking again which could interfere with her healing and raise the risk of tissue rejection.” Obviously what this patient needs more than a new face is a brain transplant.
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Are corrupt politicians obstinate ignoramuses who view history as a meaningless succession of chance occurrences? I am not sure. I suspect greed or power deprives them not only of their moral compass but also of their reason.
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Friday, January 20, 2006
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THOMAS MANN
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MANN ON MANN
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“The creative genius must first become a world in itself, in which only discoveries and not inventions, remain to be made.”
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He could write about medicine with the competence of a physician (see THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN), about music with the expertise of a composer (DOKTOR FAUSTUS), and about ancient Egypt with the authority of an Egyptologist (JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS).
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MANN IN MY LIFE
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It was at the age of 14 or 15 and in Venice that I first read DEATH IN VENICE in an Italian translation. Failed to make contact. Found his fictional characters cold and distant. But I persevered. I went on to read ROYAL HIGHNESS and TONIO KROEGER. Again nothing happened. Then, in my early twenties I read CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL, CONFIDENCE MAN, his last unfinished novel, in an English translation, and that’s when I got religion.
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MANN AND NABOKOV
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Notwithstanding the fact that LOLITA and DEATH IN VENICE share a common theme (the morbid and obsessive infatuation of an adult for a minor – an American girl and a Polish boy respectively — that ultimately ends in the early death of both men) Nabokov loathed Mann with the contempt of an aristocrat for the bourgeois. Mann’s international popularity and Nobel Prize were no doubt two more contributing factors to Nabokov’s hostility.
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MANN AND SARTRE
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As a bourgeois, Mann lacked Sartre’s ferocious hatred of the bourgeois and a clearly defined political line. In the words of a critic: “He was always both conservative and radical, thoroughly proper and deeply demonic.” His fictional characters (like Naphta and Settembrini in THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN) argue endlessly about all the central political and philosophical issues of the day without reaching any apparent conclusion. As a youth, and unlike his brother Heinrich, Mann was seduced by German nationalism, but when it evolved into Hitler’s National Socialist (or Nazi) Party, he rejected it violently (see below). His attitude towards the United States, where he lived for a number of years during World War II and after, changed from admiration for FDR’s New Deal to outrage and disgust for the abuses of McCarthyism.
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LUKACS ON MANN
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“There is in Mann’s writing that now vanishing sense of bourgeois dignity which derives from the slow movement of solid wealth.”
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MANN ON HITLER
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“A brother – a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother. He makes me nervous, the relationship is painful to a degree. But I will not disclaim it. For I repeat: better, more productive, more honest, more constructive than hatred is recognition, acceptance, the readiness to make oneself one with what is deserving of our hate.” And,
“Thanks to his own baseness, he has indeed succeeded in exposing much of our own.”
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Hitler attempted to have him assassinated but failed. Hitler’s antagonism was not just political. He resented the fact that THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN sold more copies than MEIN KAMPF.
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Saturday, January 21, 2006
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The first paragraph of a front page article in one of our weeklies today reads: “A top leader of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) renewed late Thursday calls for President Robert Kocharian to take tough action against widespread corruption and other manifestations of ‘injustice’ in Armenia.”
This to me is a typical instance of empty verbiage compounded by double-talk. There is only one way to combat injustice and corruption in high places and that’s by strengthening the judiciary. Because without an independent and co-equal judiciary, the executive branch is bound to run amok. Sometimes even with an independent judiciary (as in a well-established democracy like the United States) the executive branch has a tendency to abuse its powers.
And now the question we should ask is did we in the Diaspora ever have anything resembling an independent judiciary? And if we by a miracle acquired such an institution tomorrow, how many of our leaders would escape impeachment on grounds of corruption, abuse of power and incompetence?
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Sunday, January 15, 2006
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A writer is first and foremost a national nuisance. On the day he achieves popularity he has outlived his usefulness.
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There are as many explanations of the past as there are perspectives. God’s perspective is the only one that matters. But since a worm cannot have the perspective of an eagle, to speak in the name of god must be just about the surest symptom of charlatanism.
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If you are brought up to believe you are right, you can be sure of only one thing: that’s the worst kind of being wrong.
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To sum up: We may not be dumb but we are far from smart, and in politics our performance has been an unmitigated fiasco. Our leaders may be compared to a drunk driver without a license who keeps having head-on collisions but is allowed to go on driving. And the source of our poor performance has been and continues to be intolerance of dissent, which also means a total inability or stubborn unwillingness to engage in dialogue.
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To those who ascribe my views to 20/20 vision, I say it doesn’t take the expertise of a political scientist or the foresight of a historian to guess that a tribal revolution against an empire, and a wounded empire at that, has the chance of a snowball in hell.
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Monday, January 16, 2006
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Most of my thinking goes into exposing what they are thinking.
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Propaganda works because it flatters the go; criticism doesn’t for the opposite reason.
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If you ignore the ignorance factor in human affairs a great many things remain unexplained or they are ascribed to so-called “unforeseen factors beyond our control.”
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The past is a seamless web and everything is connected with everything else. Understanding consists in connecting two apparently unconnected dots.
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If anyone ever dares to criticize one of our bosses, bishops or benefactors, an entire chorus of brown-nosers, parasites, hangers-on, flunkies and yes-man rise to his defense. But if a dissident is silenced, it’s like a tree that falls in the middle of an uninhabited forest on a different planet.
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Tuesday, January 17, 2006
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I don’t believe in the moral superiority of the victim if his secret ambition is to be a victimizer.
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My conception of great distances: that which exists between what politicians know when they speechify and what they don’t know when they are accused of an offense or a blunder.
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If the average Armenian doesn’t much care about the integrity and competence of his leadership, why should the world give a damn?
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If I were to identify the most repellent facet of our collective existence today, it would have to be the blatant opportunism and cowardice of our academics that jabber endlessly about the Middle Ages and the Genocide as if our present degrading conditions were of no concern to anyone.
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We talk too much about God and Country and not enough about honesty. It should be the other way around. Only then may we count on God’s cooperation.
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I shall attain wisdom on the day I give up writing. But as long as I think by writing I can change things or anyone’s mind I am condemned to remain an obstinate fool.
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006
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Whenever our editors see a positive story about Armenians and a negative one about Turks they print it to reinforce the by now familiar propaganda line that says Armenians are good and Turks evil. As an Armenian I find this editorial policy prejudicial and embarrassing. In the name of tolerance, objectivity and fair play I should like to see more stories about the thousands of Armenians who live happy lives as Turkish citizens and at least one story about a happy Turk in Yerevan. To those who say “We are not guilty of genocide, they are!” I say I have every reason to suspect, for the same reason that I would hate to be identified with any Armenian political party or regime, there are many Turks today with a similar disposition, and they may turn out to be our best friends, or at least much better friends than countless other people who know little or nothing and care even less about what happened to us at the turn of the last century.
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Thursday, January 12, 2006
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UNDERDOGS
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Has anyone ever seen an underdog rejecting on moral grounds the opportunity to become a top dog? If the secret ambition of an underdog is to become a top dog, in what way he may be said to be different or morally superior?
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SHITHOUSE READERS
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Once upon a time I had as many as fifty thousand readers: that’s when our partisan as well as non-partisan editors in Canada, United States and Middle East printed everything I wrote. So what if most of these readers were of the (what’s known in the business as) “shithouse” variant? – that is, they read me in the john. A reader is a reader even if he does his reading while engaged otherwise. And now that our editors have conferred upon me the status of non-person, how many readers do I have? Hard to say. A dozen? Two? It doesn’t really matter. I can always console myself by repeating the old Chinese proverb: “If you think the right thoughts, you will be heard thirty thousand miles away.”
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ON WRITING
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The most important thing to remember is the less art the better. Be brief. Write 100 pages, reduce them to one page, squeeze that page into a single paragraph, and discard it into the wastepaper basket.
Be honest. Forget all about the crap you have been exposed to by sermonizers and speechifiers. Speak from your own experience and testify on what you have observed with your own eyes. Do these things and you’ve got it made, which in our environment means making the maximum number of enemies.
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PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
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If I had a choice between dealing with a proud Armenian and a humble Turk, I would choose the Turk.
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MEMO
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I have said this before and it bears repeating: the problem with hating Turks is that inevitably and before the end of the story the hatred spills over on fellow Armenians.
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THE LAST CHAPTER
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In a biography I am less interested in the subject’s birthplace and schooling and more in the manner of his death. I may skip the first chapters but never the last.
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Friday, January 13, 2006
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Man’s infinite capacity for blunder (including my own) never ceases to amaze me. Which may explain why my favorite mantra is: “So what if in a less than perfect world I am myself less than perfect?”
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What do the Old Testament and MEIN KAMPF share in common? The absurd and ultimately self-defeating need to assert moral superiority.
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I write with some authority on absurd assertions because at one time or another I have myself subscribed to them.
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According to Heidegger, “When we are considering a man’s thoughts, the greater the work accomplished the richer the unthought-of element in that work.” In other words, the more you understand, the more aware you become of that which eludes your understanding. Or, in religious terms, the closer you get to god, the less you understand him.
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Sartre’s version of this phenomenon: “Man is not the sum of what he has, but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.”
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Awareness of ignorance is, therefore, also knowledge.
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Saturday, January 14, 2006
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THE POSITIVE AND THE NEGATIVE
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Baronian and Odian did not speak about Ottomanized Armenians in Istanbul at the turn of the last century, but about human nature. Honorable beggars and Panchoonies continue to be with us today. The reason some of us remain unaware of their existence is that those whose task it is to enhance our perception of reality believe in emphasizing the positive and covering up the negative.
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THE FRUITS OF SUPERSTITION
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In their efforts to kill the devil, 363 Muslims in Mecca kill one another. Like so much else in life designed to make us feel good, superstitions too come with a price.
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THE TROUBLE WITH HONEY
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Some of my readers accuse me of using too much vinegar and not enough honey. “Honey,” they like to remind me, “catches more flies.” To them and to everyone who believes in the wisdom of the ages, there is a Spanish proverb that says: “Haceos de miel, y os comeran las moscas” (Make yourself honey and the flies will eat you).
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CONTRADICTIONS
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I am read by readers who find me unreadable. I am hated by Armenians who tell me Armenians are loving people. I am called a jerk by individuals who consider themselves noble specimens of humanity. I am torn to shreds by chauvinists who tell me I should be more constructive. I am called son of a whore by individuals who have assessed themselves as paragons of virtue. I am told to go to hell by born-again Christians. If anyone were to ask me now: “What is the most terrible curse you can think of?” I would reply: “May your offspring choose Armenian literature as a career!”
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Sunday, January 08, 2006
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We say we are smart. We also say we need solutions to our problems. We never ask, if smart people can’t solve their problems, who can? Are we then smart only when it comes to selling Oriental rugs?
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State a problem clearly and its solution becomes obvious to all except certified morons.
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Problem: our leadership is authoritarian.
Solution: democratization, beginning with respect for fundamental human rights, and above all that of free speech. I mention this solution first to point out the fact that it won’t cost a single penny.
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The solution to our tribalism? The brotherhood of all Armenians and ultimately of all men — another solution that will not make any demands on our budget.
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The solution to our Turco-centrism? A shift in focus – (ditto).
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When Zarian said, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another,” he clearly implied the solution, namely, vegetarianism (metaphorically speaking, of course).
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Speaking of Zarian: when I started publishing my translations, writers from both sides of the Iron Curtain informed me that I was wasting my valuable time on a mediocrity. Mischa Kudian, our foremost translator, joined the chorus by telling me I was on the wrong track leading to a dead end.
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Am I an Armenian writer if I write in English? I do not consider that a problem, and to those who do, I say, if I challenge anyone’s power and prestige I might as well be a Turk in the eyes of our Turco-centric cannibals.
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Monday, January 09, 2006
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INTERVIEW
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Q: Your favorite genre of reading matter?
A: Brief interviews with celebrities – I find them compulsively readable even if consistently disappointing.
Q: The funniest book you read last year?
A: THE COMPLETE CARTOONS OF THE NEW YORKER.
Q: What annoys you the most?
A: People who speak like morons because they think everyone else is a lesser moron.
Q: Do you believe in god?
A: Not in the god of priests, mullahs, and rabbis.
Q: What’s your own god like?
A: He is an absentee landlord – distant, incomprehensible, and indifferent.
Q: Your greatest regret?
A: Arguing with individuals who were not prepared to lose an argument.
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Tuesday, January 10, 2006
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ON POLITICS AND POLITICIANS
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When a doctor makes a mistake, more often than not his mistake is buried and forgotten.
I once knew a bus driver who after killing a pedestrian he was forced into retirement, became an alcoholic, and died an early death.
When a businessman makes a mistake, he may lose a fraction of his capital or he may even go bankrupt.
But when a politician makes a mistake, thousands and sometimes even millions may die. That’s why politicians find it impossible to admit mistakes and to learn from them. That is also why they rewrite history and become masters of the blame-game.
A politician’s worst adversary is neither his opposition nor the enemy, but the truth. Politicians propagandize, misrepresent, and lie because they must pretend to know better and to be morally superior even when they know nothing and they are the scum of the earth.
That may explain why in a democracy most people don’t vote or if they do they don’t vote for the right man but for the lesser of two or more evils, and even then they are disappointed.
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Wednesday, January 11, 2006
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THE IRRELEVANCE OF LITERATURE
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Christians trust their clergymen, Muslims their mullahs, and Jews their rabbis not because these gentlemen are wiser or more honest, but because they were in a position to brainwash them.
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To the average Soviet citizen a commissar had more credibility than the entirety of Russian literature; and intimidation and fear had nothing to do with it. Young Muslim insurgents kill themselves today not because they are driven by fear but by conviction.
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The collapse of the USSR had nothing to do with its dissenters who were more like canaries in a mine: they only detected the economic bankruptcy and the moral degeneration that preceded the collapse.
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In an authoritarian environment anyone in a position of authority, be he a boss, bishop, or benefactor and their countless hirelings, hangers-on, and brown-nosers, will enjoy more credibility than Socrates, Gandhi, and Solzhenitsyn, all three of whom were treated like common criminals by their respective power structures.
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Thursday, January 05, 2006
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In Cormac McCarthy’s ALL THE PRETTY HORSES I read the following: “Those who have suffered great pain of injury or loss are joined to one another with bonds of a special authority.”
If only! I thought.
Further down: “What is constant in history is greed and foolishness…and this is a thing that even God seems powerless to change.”
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Speaking of foolishness, once in a while a reader takes it upon himself to inform me that I am not an Armenian writer because I write in English, as if my sole aim in life were to be mentioned or discussed in a future text on Armenian literature.
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If I write about Armenian problems, if I say what must be said, or if I say what matters, even if I take a fraction of a step in the right direction, does it matter if I am a member of this or that tribe?
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I write in English because had I chosen to write in Armenian I would have been ignored as well as starved. Because I write in English I was awarded a series of literary prizes and grants that allowed me to devote my full time to writing and to publish thirty books half of which are translations from the Armenian.
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What happened to Zarian who chose to write in Armenian? He was ignored in the Diaspora, silenced in the Homeland, and ended his days thinking, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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What happened to Baruir Massikian who also wrote in Armenian? How many Armenians read him today because he was an Armenian writer?
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On the subject of our problems, of which we have more than our share: one that I have discussed on several occasions is the academic or self-appointed pundit who operates on the assumption that he can cover his foolishness beneath a cloak of patriotism on the grounds that his readers are even more ignorant than he is.
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Friday, January 06, 2006
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ON A COMMON ABERRATION
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Arrogance is based on two fallacies: (one) that one knows better, and (two) that others know less. The first is based on self-assessment (a notoriously unreliable index), and the second on ignorance (no one is in a position to know with any degree of certainty what others know).
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Sooner or later arrogance is punished not because the gods feel challenged (as the Greeks believed) but because men hate to be short-changed by a self-satisfied bastard.
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The antidote to arrogance is the formula “from dust to dust.” We are all born with the certainty that we are the center of the universe, but gradually life drives home the realization that we are no better than inanimate particles at the whim of the winds.
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Saturday, January 07, 2006
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“Poverty breeds crime,” reads a headline in our paper today, and I think of Ken Lay, Koslowsky, Abramoff, and Co. I also think of Talaat, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin Dada, and Genghis Khan…
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Once upon a time I knew an Armenian so rude in argument and so eager to go down into the gutter that very few wanted to follow him there, so that after a while he thought of himself as a 20th-century reincarnation of the famous medieval Armenian philosopher David Anhaght (“Invincible”) so called because he is said to have been invincible in argument.
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To say that in one or two generations conditions will improve in Armenia is not just nonsense but Ottomanized and Sovietized rubbish, because it means only one thing: we will adopt a passive stance because doing so comes naturally to us after 600 years in the Ottoman Empire and 70 years in the Soviet Union.
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I am wide open to all arguments except ones that I would have voiced myself as a dupe.
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It has been said that forgiveness can be a spiritual victory. I am not sure about that. Forgiving commissars and fascists can also mean legitimizing criminal conduct.
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Thursday, December 29, 2005
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LOVE AND HATE
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“When the rich fight, it is the poor who die.”
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Power begins with the power to redefine words by perverting their meaning.
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Patriotism redefined means to hate your enemy’s patriotism.
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In time of war the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” becomes “Thou shalt kill!”
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The poor are brainwashed to die in the name of patriotism. The rich are educated to lie and deceive in defense of their powers and privileges.
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A hero is one who dies in the name of a Big Lie.
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When I use the word hate in a political or religious context it also means to hate unto death.
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To believe in your god also means to question and reject the existence of all other gods.
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To love god also means to hate those who do not share your love.
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Friday, December 30, 2005
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“Was Santa good to you?” I asked an old Jewish friend in Texas. “Santa is an anti-Semite,” he replied. “He never visits Jewish homes.”
“You Armenians are lucky,” this same friend once told me, “Only Turks are after your ass. The whole world is after ours!” Poor old overworked Santa too?
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Because I use my common sense and make an honest effort to be objective, dupes call me a cynic, a charlatan, a hostile witness, an enemy, a denialist, and a number of other unprintable names. Questioning the validity of illusions can be a dangerous career move.
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Armenians who portray themselves as victims sometimes forget the ruthlessness with which they victimize fellow Armenians who refuse to recycle their favorite brand of crapola.
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Sheep and wolves can be easily identified.
Wolves in sheep’s clothing can be exposed.
But sheep whose secret ambition is to be wolves can be as slippery as Turkish olive-oil wrestlers or used condoms.
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Armenians: the most unassailable argument against Intelligent Design.
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