Author: arabaliozian

Thursday, February 01, 2007
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GOD AND MUSIC
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Hector Berlioz: “Bach is Bach as God is God.”
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If music ennobles the soul, why is it that it failed to ennoble Nero and Hitler – both great lovers of music? What if music only enhances the inherent qualities of a man – makes the good better and the bad worse? Either that or the evil spell of power is mightier than the fragile charms of music. Even religious faith (or God), it seems, cannot resist the evil spell of power. Think of the Crusades, the vicious conduct of Renaissance Popes, the Inquisition, religious wars, and more recently, the epidemic of priests molesting children. I won’t even bother mentioning the daily atrocities committed in the name of Allah.
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God and music, faith and beauty: in their absence man would have found substitutes in whose name he would have spoken with a forked tongue and proceeded to follow his gut and ignore his brain.
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E.M. Cioran: “”Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.” (As opposed to pretending to be the morally superior winner.)
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Alain-Fournier: “Getting there is better than being there.”
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Asked how he writes his plays, Tennessee Williams is quoted as having said, “I start with a sentence.”
#
Friday, February 02, 2007
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Both the massacre of innocent civilians and the violation of someone’s human right of free speech have the same root: the arrogance of power. Now then, tell me, what’s the difference between them and us?
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Whenever I get emotionally involved in an argument I know I have lost it, because emotion betrays more ego and less reason.
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There are as many versions of a historic occurrence as there are paintings of Fuji-Yama and Ararat.
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When I was dead wrong it never even occurred to me to consider the possibility of not being right. Another way of saying, I too was a believer and a fanatic.
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Are we perennial victims or morally superior victors? Can lamentation be reconciled with bragging? Tell me, do you have an answer?
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Why should love of homeland stand in opposition to love of truth?
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Paul Klee: “Art does not reproduce what we see. Rather, it makes us see.” (Or, it exposes our blindness.)
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George Orwell: “We are living in a world in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.”
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What’s the difference between racism based on blood, and a racism based on ideas? Do you see any difference between “My blood is better than yours,” and “My ideas are better than yours”?
#
Saturday, February 03, 2007
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MEMOIRS
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In the memoirs of two contemporary English novelists there is endless talk of several troubled marriages, lovers by the dozen, substance abuse (both alcohol and pills), psychiatrists, and attempted suicides, among other problems. So far I have relied only on alcohol. Couldn’t afford the rest. Sometimes it pays to be poor. During the war years and after our breakfast consisted of tea, bread, and olives. My cousin in America by contrast breakfasted on eggs, bacon, and buttered toast. Result? Open-heart surgery, pacemaker, and a dozen pills a day, among other problems.
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Speaking of lovers: in the final page of her memoirs, a filthy rich American celebrity in her eighties describes her latest gigolo as “the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.”
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“The pleasures of love last no more than a moment, its regrets a lifetime.” Has this old proverbial saying stopped anyone from resisting the temptations of the flesh? Instinct rules even the lives of reasonable men, perhaps because reason only whispers, more often than not inaudibly, where instinct is as loud as thunder. As for writers and philosophers: they may think they are in the business of dispensing wisdom, but all they can hope to do is provide a few moments of harmless entertainment.
#

Thursday, January 25, 2007
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REFLECTIONS ON A REMARK BY SHAHNOUR
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If there is a story in my life, I don’t see it. All I see is either a succession of dead ends or paths that lead nowhere. I have wasted so much time trying to reason with my readers — as if that were in the realm of possibilities.
In one of his letters Shahnour writes (I translate from memory): “Sooner or later the voice of an authentic writer will be heard. He will even prevail over those who misinterpret him.” But can he prevail over those who having heard his voice choose to ignore him or dismiss him as a nuisance? Who reads Shahnour today, or having read him is open to his line of thinking?
It is said that on the battlefield soldiers don’t think of victory, only of survival. I have survived, so has the nation. But what if our survival is nothing but a slow-motion death of a thousand cuts, most of them self-inflicted?
#
Friday, January 26, 2007
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CRITICS AND MAD DOGS
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Stand long enough at the edge of an abyss and someone is sure to push you.
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Whenever a faceless anonymous hooligan on the Internet verbally abuses me, my first reaction is to believe everything he says. Paul Valéry is right: when a mad dog bites, it hurts.
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There is nothing wrong in saying “I believe in god.” But there is something horribly wrong in saying “My god is the only true god.”
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To those who tell me I go about my criticism the wrong way, I say: Name an Armenian critic, or any critic, who went about it the right way and I will be more than happy to adopt him as my role model.
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Has anyone ever written a treatise on etiquette for critics and, having done so, has not been torn to shreds by critics?
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Speaking of a Sorbonne-educated avant-garde poet, a friend tells me: “When I told him I didn’t understand his poetry, he said you will, in 25 years. I met him again last week and told him the 25 years were up and I still can’t make heads or tails of it…”
“
Nothing comes easier to a charlatan than to assume everyone else is a charlatan.
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Three of our most abundant national products: bragging, backbiting, and bullshitting.
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My favorite 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not aim at perfection in an imperfect world.”
#
Saturday, January 27, 2007
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WHAT I UNDERSTAND ABOUT
POWER STRUCTURES
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You may not understand power structures but power structures understand you; and they understand you because they have only one criterion: “You are either with me or against me.” You may have the IQ of a genius but if you are not with the power structure body and soul, you might as well be an idiot, and worse, a nuisance. That’s why some of the best men in the history of mankind were persecuted and sometimes even condemned to death. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying those in power are all vicious fools. No. Most of them may even be highly able men – smart, sophisticated, cunning. What they lack is not smarts but moral compass. And they are moral morons because they place their own powers and privileges above all other considerations. This is true of all power regardless of race, color, and creed. Which is why sentences like “Their politicians are crooks, but ours are honest men” make sense only to the naïve and brainwashed dupe.
#

Sunday, January 21, 2007
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BOOK REVIEW
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SHAHAN SHAHNOUR: CORRESPONDENCE, volume 3 – LETTERS TO VAHAN TEKEYAN, ZAHRAD, VRATSIAN, SARAFIAN, ALAJAJIAN, SAROUKHAN & OTHERS. Edited, Annotated and with an Introduction by Krikor Keusseyan. Illustrated. (215 pages, 2007). Privately printed (50 Watertown St., #302, Watertown, MA, 02472).
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Shahnour was an honest man and an objective observer of our contemporary scene; and that was his undoing. Honesty has never been good policy in our environment. If the ubiquitous secret agents of an alien tyrant don’t get you, the hirelings of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors will. The occasional grudging support he received from benefactors (which more often than not he rejected) was more akin to charity that probably did more harm than good to his self-esteem and precarious health.
In his introduction, Krikor Keusseyan writes that three of Shahnour’s favorite writers were Turgenev, Flaubert, and Hardy, and that like them he was austere in his private life but audacious in his work. Which in our context means, among other things, that he consistently refused to recycle partisan propaganda and chauvinist clichés about the eternal snows of Mount Ararat. As a result he was treated as an enemy of the people and reduced to the status of abominable no man. Even after he gave up writing in Armenian, assumed a different name (Armen Lubin) and produced several volumes of prose and verse in French, a collected edition of which was issued recently by Gallimard, his critics would unearth things that he wrote thirty years ago and continue their attacks. In one of his letters, Shahnour quotes with obvious approval Mahari’s observation, “The curses of a good man are preferable to the flatteries of an idiot.”
Speaking of our writers under the Red Sultan in Istanbul, he comments: “They had neither universities nor scholarships, and yet they produced many more valuable works than our academics today.”
Some of his opinions on contemporaries are worth quoting:
On Nartuni: “He is neither good nor bad. He is elsewhere.” (This could be said of so many of our Turcocentric academics today.)
On Vorpuni: “He is not devoid of talent. What he lacks, it seems to me, is individuality. He tends to write under the influence of a book (invariably by a foreign writer) that he has just read and enjoyed.”
On Minas Tololyan: “In his CENTURY OF LITERATURE he discusses 56 writers none of whom he tears to shreds as thoroughly as he does me. He seems to be unaware of the view that there is a kind of hostile criticism that might as well be equivalent to praise.”
The illustrations consist of photos of the author, alone and with other writers, and samples of his own brilliant caricatures executed in different styles.
There is a great deal more in this excellent volume that is worth rereading and translating; and I promise to do so in future installments.
#
Monday, January 22, 2007
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NOTES AND COMMENTS
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In a fight both sides discover the worth of the other, Shaw says somewhere. But in my view, what a fight exposes more often than not is less worth and more worthlessness.
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The art of making dupes consists in simplifying complexities for the simple-minded.
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To those who disagree with me I ask: How much of your disagreement is based on hearsay? Do you disagree with me because you think I am wrong or because you heard someone say I am wrong at a time when you were in no position to know and judge for yourself?
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Most people think if they hide their defects they will project a better image. But the truth is, the more we try to hide our defects the louder our body language or style declares them. Have you noticed the way Putin and Kocharian walk? They don’t walk so much as they swagger like bullies.
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Not all Nazis were racists. When they saw a smart Jew they promoted him. To those who objected, Goering once explained: “It’s up to me to decide who is a Jew and who isn’t.”
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I see something fundamentally wrong in being right and dead. I don’t believe in being an excellent corpse. “A corpse is without interest,” says the Talmud.
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Life after death? Who’s who in the messiah business? Irrelevant questions. It’s more important that we concentrate on the mess we have made of the world, because that’s the first subject on which we will be cross-examined by the messiah or whoever is in charge of eternity.
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Man values knowledge over ignorance. In theory. In practice, the brainwashed, the dupe, the fanatic, and the man of faith are unteachable.
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Whenever we follow our gut or instinct and ignore the voice of reason, we behave like Hrant Dink’s killer. In that sense WE ARE ALL ASSASSINS, which happens to be the title of a post-World War II French movie. It is to be noted that the word assassin begins with “ass” and ends in “sin.” But that’s pure coincidence, like so much else in life. The root word of assassin is hashish, a drug used by a gang of Middle-East fanatics before they went on the warpath. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hrant’s assassin pleads not guilty by reason of drug-induced insanity.
#
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
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If you tell me Armenians are nice people, I believe you on the assumption that you speak from experience. If someone else tells me Armenians are nasty people, I don’t see why I should call him a liar. And if you were to ask me what I think of Armenians, I would say they come in all sizes and shapes and the higher they rise in the community, the nastier they are.
*
The better the message, the more easily it will be perverted. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” says the Good Book. So what our kings and nakharars, bosses and bishops do? They concentrate their efforts on inventing orthodoxies and ideologies with which to divide and demolish our house.
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If a man stands on principle it may be because he has nothing else to stand on. Another way of saying he is a born loser.
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If you begin to make a list of all those things you don’t know, you will never have time to brag about what you know.
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If war is hell, everyone involved in it must have something of the devil in him.
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Writing about Armenians for Armenians is a dead end. Writing about Turks, that’s different.
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If you repeat a thousand times what they want to hear, they will love you.
If you repeat twice what they don’t want to hear, they will hate you.
#
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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CONVERSATION WITH A PARTISAN
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“Are you saying we have done nothing right for the nation?” an angry partisan demands to know?
“No, I have at no time said that,” I reply. “What I have been saying is that on peripheral things you may have done some good. But on central and important issues, no.”
“Such as?”
“Such as solidarity — developing a mechanism whereby all sides engage in dialogue and reach a consensus; such as the waste of funds for building and maintaining multiple churches, schools, community centers, and weeklies when one will do.”
“I don’t agree with the notion that one is better than two if only because where are two there will also be competition.”
“I too believe in competition, but not competition that begins and ends with us, but competition with standards set by the world at large.”
“You mean like AIM and TIME magazine?”
“That was less competition and more slavish imitation. Less AIM and more APE. No matter how hard I try I don’t see any purpose in having a dozen or more mediocre weeklies with a handful of readers each, instead of a professionally edited publication with many more readers, including odars who are interested in our culture.”
“That will never happen.”
“If it doesn’t it will be because we are incurably tribal – many chiefs and no Indians – and we are tribal because of partisans who are afraid that some day their blunders may be exposed for all to see.”
“What blunders?”
“The very same blunders we have been talking about.”
“If you mean business, why don’t you join us and get involved in changing things? Talk is cheap.”
“So is censorship. During the last few years that I have been discussing our failings, our publications have been unanimous in treating me as an abominable no man. They say I insult Armenianism. The Turks have a law against insulting Turkishness. We don’t have such a law but we behave as though we did. Insulting Turkishness or Armenianism! What utter nonsense. How do we define these terms? Why should honesty and objectivity be an insult? In what way are we better than Turks if we allow our political leadership to define Armenianism? Does Armenianism consist in clinging to ideas that have been dragging us from genocide to alienation and from alienation to assimilation or white massacre? What is the difference between shooting a critic and silencing him…which amounts to cutting out his tongue?”
#

Thursday, January 18, 2007
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PROPAGANDA
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Propaganda says, “When we are brainwashed, we speak the truth. When our enemies are brainwashed, they lie.”
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CASE CLOSED
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When two religions or ideologies contradict one another on any point of their credo, and neither can prove the other wrong or itself right beyond a shadow of a doubt, or to the satisfaction of an impartial jury, both must be wrong.
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CREDO
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Only hoodlums believe hoodlumism to be an ideology. Likewise, only nationalists, tribalists, capitalists, communists…
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FACT AND FICTION
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Between fact and fiction, propaganda will always be a partisan of fiction.
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FANTASY AND REALITY
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When we say we are right or we are better, we engage in fantasy. When we say, like all human beings, we have our share of failings and blind spots some of which may well be beyond our awareness, we begin to come to grips with reality.
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WHAT’S WRONG WITH FANTASY?
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Nothing, provided we keep in mind that fantasies operate in a realm that is beyond common sense and logic.
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JEWISH WISDOM
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Amos Oz in HOW TO CURE A FANATIC: “The two nations will have a lot of soul searching to do, about their past and mutual stupidities.”
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MEMOIRS: FIRST PARAGRAPH
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Like most people I was born an idiot. Unlike most people, I was also raised as an idiot because I was told I was smart.
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REMEMBER
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It takes a very bad Armenian to be a good human being.
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To disagree with oneself is the beginning of all wisdom.
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Friday, January 19, 2007
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ON FANATICS
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In his book, HOW TO CURE A FANATIC, Amos Oz writes that the ultimate aim of fanatics is “to get crucified, or to crucify others, or both,” thus implying that fanaticism has a millennial history and a very respectable pedigree. But I think fanaticism goes back much further than two millennia. It began with the god of the Old Testament when he punished not only Adam and Eve for eating an apple, or from “the tree of knowledge,” (as if knowledge were a capital offense; as if ignorance were a better alternative), but also their offspring, and the offspring of their offspring to the end of time.
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On a number of occasions I have called our fanatics “inbred morons.” Oz agrees. “Very often the fanatic can only count up to one,” he writes, “two is too big a figure for him or her.”
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How to cure a fanatic? The answer is obvious: it can’t be done. Consider their role models.
##
Saturday, January 20, 2007
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MORE ON THE “F” WORD
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Fanaticism is as different from moderation as beast is from man. Fanatics are not just a different race, color, and creed, but also a different species.
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A fanatic does not reason. Common sense, logic, and dialogue are alien concepts to him. He is out to settle a score. He is out for blood. He defines an enemy as anyone who disagrees with him. Fanaticism and hoodlumism might as well be Siamese twins.
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A moderate may be prone to error, but a fanatic is never right. Even when on those extremely rare occasions he is right, the means he employs are sure to be wrong.
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Our revolutionaries were right to revolt against tyranny – no doubt about that. And because they were right, we did not survive.
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Like all men of faith, a fanatic begins with the certainty that he is right; and where certainty is placed above doubt, fanatics will flourish.
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A fanatic’s favorite disguise is moderation.
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LITERATURE AND PROPAGANDA
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Literature tells us we are not what we pretend to be, and more often than not, what we pretend to be is the exact opposite of who we are.
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QUOTATIONS FROM ART BUCHWALD
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“If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.”
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“People ask what I am really trying to do with humor. The answer is, I am getting even. For me, being funny is the best revenge.”
#

Sunday, January 14, 2007
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THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY,
AND THE ARMENIAN
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When it comes to races, nations, and tribes, there are no good guys and bad guys. There are only good and bad human beings, and more often than not, the bad are misguided dupes.
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To be human means to be prone to error, especially when one is sure to be right. “I may be right” is closer to “I may be wrong” than to “I am right!”
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It takes a lot of hatred to love one’s country – hatred of past and present enemies, hatred of those who are or have been on their side, hatred of fellow countrymen who do not share one’s love to the same degree, and hatred of those who believe in the brotherhood of all men, which also means hatred of tolerance.
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To be a good patriot also means to feel guilty by association whenever a fellow countryman is arrested and makes headlines. But guilt by association is a racist concept. Hitler was a racist. Buddha and Christ were not. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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To fall in love means to kill the rest of mankind, said Camus. If you say that’s going too far, let’s say, passionate love makes us indifferent to the fate of others. But indifference is worse than hatred. In hatred we are connected to those we hate. In indifference this connection is severed.
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Our enemies “fail to see us as what we really are – a bunch of traumatized half-hysterical refugees and survivors haunted by dreadful nightmares…” I am now quoting from HOW TO CURE A FANATIC (New York, 2006) by Amos Oz. I should like to see one of our Turcocentric pundits produce such a sentence.
#
Monday, January 15, 2007
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ON BELIEF SYSTEMS
AND RELATED ATROCITIES
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It is in life as it is in lottery: for every winner there will be several million losers. An optimist hopes to win; a realist is aware of the odds and does not believe in miracles; and a pessimist knows it’s a racket.
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I believe in miracles. I believe the universe to be the greatest miracle of all beside which changing water to wine is no better than an abracadabra trick.
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Speaking of miracles and abracadabra: I don’t believe which is better or worse: believing in a past messiah or in a future one. As for prophets and belief systems: I see nothing wrong with any of them provided their followers don’t kill one another or themselves.
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I believe any belief system that legitimizes murder and suicide to be an instrument of the devil.

Not all Turks are born killers or denialists. There is no doubt about that anymore. Likewise, not all Armenians bear a racist grudge against all Turks. With one difference. No Armenian of Pamuk’s or Akjam’s stature has produced a work to point out that fact. If he did, he would be ostracized and silenced as a traitor to the Cause. In that sense, Turks are ahead of us.
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To kill and die for one’s country fighting an enemy who also kills and dies for his own: does that make any sense to you? I am against capital punishment but I would make an exception of all those guilty of legitimizing and promoting the idea of killing and dying for one’s country.
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Of the many forms of illusion – I am smarter than you, I understand more than you do, my dick is bigger than yours – surely the most widely entertained and dangerous must be “My god is better than yours.”
#
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
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NOTES AND COMMENTS
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To contradict is not the same as to disagree. Some people contradict automatically, unthinkingly, instinctively – that’s their way of asserting superior wisdom. To pretend to be wiser than one is: I would call that the most universal of all temptations.
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When we think of experiencing life, we may delude ourselves into thinking that a man who has climbed Everest, or amassed a vast fortune, or slept with two thousand women has experienced life. But what if in the process of doing these things he has succeeded only in diminishing his capacity to feel, to understand, to love, and ultimately, to experience.
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I once heard someone reading to an audience from one of my books. My first reaction was to beg him to stop. I have a horror of boring people. I would have given up writing years ago were it not for the fact that even people who hate me, read me – judging by the number of abusive e-mails I get.
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Elfriede Jelinek in THE PIANO TEACHER: “The opposite sex always wants the exact opposite.”
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Wednesday, January 17, 2007
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THE ART OF LIVING
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Wisdom or the art of living consists in minimizing the guesswork and replacing total ignorance with partial knowledge.
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We may learn to limit the number of our blunders but we have no control over the blunders of others. Which may explain the tragic fate of some of the wisest men that ever lived, from Socrates to Gandhi.
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And speaking of Christ: if there is a moral in the story of Christianity it is that, not even god can survive human blunders. As for the wisdom of American presidents: in his SHADOW PEOPLE: INSIDE HISTORY’S MOST NOTORIOUS SECRET SOCIETIES, John Lawrence Reynolds writes that the feud between Shiites and Sunnis began in the 7th Century, which means it has lasted for 1,400 years. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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The universe is the greatest miracle of all – no doubt about that. I may have mentioned that already. What I may have failed to mention is that the second greatest miracle from where I stand is the fact that I have survived, and I have survived not only World War II, the Greek Civil War that followed, and a number of other natural and man-made disasters, but my own blunders.
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It has been said that the only reality we can come to grips with is the future. There isn’t much we can do about the past. The present is only a fleeting moment that even as we experience it has become the past. It follows, our struggle is with something that is prey to countless factors most of which remain beyond our perception and control.
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Thursday, January 11, 2007
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QUESTIONS
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If Armenians change some day, it will not be because of what I or a thousand others before me have said but because reality will have eroded their lies and half-truths. Why go on writing? That’s a question I should be asking myself. Your question should be: Why go on reading? “Looking for fish, don’t climb a tree,” says a Chinese proverb. And I say, “Looking for flattery, read a brown-noser.”
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ON NATIONALISM
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The problems with nationalism is that it narrows our horizons and with them our understanding of the world. Or, as the Malaysian proverb has it: “A frog beneath a coconut shell believes there is no other world.”
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ON HUMBUG
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One reason I ignore some of my critics is that I don’t know how to argue against humbug. Does anyone? Humbug has resisted millennia of philosophy and science and it will probably outlive long after we are all dead and buried – and by we I mean Homo sapiens.
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WHAT I UNDERSTAND
ABOUT OUR COMMISSARS
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I have no illusions about my fellow men, including my fellow Armenians. If some day in the near or distant future a Stalin-like figure emerges and takes over our homeland, he will have all the support he needs from our chic neo-Bolsheviks in the Diaspora and as many commissars as his dark heart desires. This may happen anywhere, of course, but not as easily in countries with democratic traditions. As for our commissars: after shooting all dissidents (assuming there will be any left by then) they will do what they did under Stalin: they will start shooting one another. Which raises the question: Why fight a system, any system, knowing that sooner or later all systems collapse?
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ON THE UNIVERSALITY OF PROVERBS
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Chinese proverb: “Those who have free seats at a play hiss first.” I experience the truth of this proverb every day.
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Friday, January 12, 2007
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A RULE WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS
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An Armenian who dehumanizes Turks, sooner or later will dehumanize his fellow Armenians. This is a rule without exceptions.
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A RULE WITH ONE EXCEPTION
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Good logic has the power to silence even a loudmouth smart-ass suffering from an advanced case of verbal diarrhea. This rule, however, has one exception: the Armenian of the species.
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MONGOLOIDS AND ARMENOIDS
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In a commentary titled “American forces in Iraq could learn from Genghis Khan,” I read: “The Mongols spared anyone with a craft such as carpentry and writing…” Henceforth whenever I use the word Mongoloid I will think Armenoid.
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GLOOM AND DOOM
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If you think what I write is gloomy because I see only the dark side of things, you couldn’t be more wrong. I become gloomy only when I think of my fellow Armenians.
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CASUALTIES OF WAR
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“I am right!” – the false assumption that is at the source of all conflicts. If all self-righteous and dogmatic people taught themselves to say, “I could be wrong,” we would have fewer casualties of war.
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ON BEING A REVOLUTIONARY
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I know too much about power and propaganda to be a partisan of any ideology or movement. I also know it is not necessary to adopt an ideology or join a movement to be a revolutionary. Be honest and the whole world will be against you.
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SHARING A SECRET
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Ever since I decided to expect nothing from my fellow men I have not experienced disappointment.
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Saturday, January 13, 2007
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FEAR OF FLYING
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“The smaller the country,” I remember to have read somewhere, “the longer its national anthem.” Also, I would add, the more long-winded its sermonizers and speechifiers. As a child I was exposed to countless speeches and sermons delivered by individuals infatuated with the sound of their own voice and the platitude of their clichés. I remember only one Armenian whose speech made sense to me and he committed suicide. Some say it wasn’t suicide but a political assassination. Others are convinced it was an accident – he was drunk, lost his balance and fell from his balcony. Which sounds to me like six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. At the root of these theories is the fact that he was misunderstood (or understood too well) and rejected by his fellow Armenians. All this to explain why I write in short paragraphs, I don’t drink, and I don’t live in a high-rise.
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MORAL: If you make sense, they will hate you.
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Sunday, January 07, 2007
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NO EXCEPTIONS
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A key passage in Taner Akjam’s A SHAMEFUL ACT: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE QUESTION OF TURKISH RESPONSIBILITY (New York, 2006) reads: “…there remains the high probability of such acts [i.e. genocides] being repeated, since every group is inherently capable of violence; when the right conditions arise this potential may easily become reality, and on the slightest of pretexts. There are no exceptions.”
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Translated into dollars and cents this simply means, none of us can afford to assume a morally superior stance. It follows, to pretend that we Armenians are better than Turks is racist nonsense. If we have not committed genocide it may be because we had neither the opportunity nor the power. To put it differently: if the Ottoman Empire had been an Armenian Empire and if the Turks had been a hostile minority with territorial ambitions, we would have done to them what they did to us. That’s the meaning of the final “no exceptions.”
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Like prosecutors eager to prove their case, our Turcocentric pundits and academics have been stressing Turkish responsibility to the exclusion of all other considerations. It has been their position, as it was Toynbee’s in his first phase, to ignore all questions dealing with Armenian responsibility and to focus exclusively on Turkish actions. To separate morality from political or legal issues is, I believe, to commit the same mistake that Turks commit when they deny the reality of the Genocide.
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There is another and a far more practical reason why we should not look down on Turks by calling them “bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians” or other derogatory terms. In addition to being self-serving it is also politically inadvisable because it may alienate even Turks, like Akjam and Pamuk, who are on our side.
*
A final comment on the misconception of moral superiority: a morally superior human being does not as a rule assert moral superiority because he is too busy examining his own conscience and reflecting on his failings and transgressions. I would go further and say that asserting moral superiority is the surest symptom of moral inferiority.
#
Monday, January 08, 2007
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MYSTERY / I
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It is beyond me why people like Tiny Tim, Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, and O.J. Simpson become celebrities in America. In my kind of world they would be arrested for making a public nuisance of themselves.
*
MYSTERY / II
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Why is it that phonies are idolized and honest men shunned, sometimes even crucified? We say we hate wars but we look up to war makers. We are against bloodsuckers but we admire exploiters.
*
HUNGER
******************
In the Ottoman Empire we were politically starved. During the Genocide the “hungry Armenian” became a cliché in America. The survivors were economically starved in alien slums. Today we are culturally starved by our own Turcocentric academics. So much so that whenever I take the liberty of paraphrasing Raffi, Baronian, Odian, Zarian, and Massikian, our brainwashed defenders of the faith call me a pro-Turkish degenerate denialist.
*
QUESTION
**********************
What if, when I finally see the light, all I will see is the darkness in man’s heart?
*
DEFINITION
************************
Dupe: anyone who believes in human beings and their institutions. Relax! I am only paraphrasing the First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods.”
*
SEMANTICS 101
********************************
The Brits associate the world “loss” with the loss of their Empire. “Survival” to Canadians means surviving American influence. To Americans yesterday is “history.” To us these words have a far more literal meaning.
*
ON DECLINE AND DISINTEGRATION
***********************************************
I remember to have read somewhere that the decline of the British Empire began at the turn of the last century when an English writer published a commentary in which he said something positive about British rule. One could say that our moral disintegration began on the day one of our charlatans bragged about us being the first nation to convert to Christianity.
*
INTOLERANCE
****************************
In this morning’s paper I read that Orhan Pamuk has published an editorial criticizing “the Turkish news media and government for suppressing free expression.” To him I say, “Welcome to the club.”
#
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
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I THINK THEREFORE I MAY NOT BE
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The older I grow the more ignorant I feel, perhaps because the more aware I become of all those things that I know nothing about. As a boy I was not aware of my blind spots; now I am more aware of them than the sum total of all those things that I have learned. For a long time I thought of the famous Socratic dictum “The only thing I know is that I don’t know” as a purely theoretical rather than pragmatic assertion. I know now that it stands for the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of knowing anything. I think therefore I am? What if what I think is a mechanism within me of whose operation I know nothing about, in the same way that I know nothing about my being on its molecular or even cellular level? And to say that one doesn’t have to know anything about molecules or cells to know about being on a human level, is like saying one doesn’t have to know anything about trees to know all about forests.
*
CRITICAL CRITERIA
**********************************
I have learned much more from my critics than they have learned from me, perhaps because I have everything to learn from them and they have nothing…I mean, nothing to learn from me, of course. One of the things that I have learned is that, if it were up to them, before they start writing and publishing, writers would apply for a license with two requirements: first, knowing and understanding everything; and second, being infallible. Failure to fulfill these two requirements would result in being disqualified as a writer. As for our bosses, bishops, and benefactors: like the Pope of Rome, who is said to be infallible in matters of faith, they are infallible so long as they speak in the name of God and capital – make it Capital and god. Which means, they don’t need a license to operate the machinery of state or community. Facts are on their side. History proves that we owe our very survival to them. If it weren’t for them we would have shared the fate of all those empires, nations, and tribes that have bitten the dust and ended on the garbage dump of history. As for our victims: you can’t have an omelet without breaking a few eggs – or, in our case, a few million of them.
*
GOD IS AN ARMENIAN
************************************
We were comparing Armenians to Jews – this motor-mouth anti-Semite and I – and when I said something to the effect that Jews like Jesus, Marx, and Freud shaped the thinking of entire continents and civilizations, unlike our own thinkers who cannot even change the mind of a single loud-mouth know-it-all smart-ass dupe with a single-digit IQ, she retorted: “Marx and Freud have been curses on mankind rather than blessings. As for Jesus: he was more Armenian in spirit than he was Jewish, because Jews rejected him and Armenians were the first nation to accept him.” I challenge anyone to assert, suggest, or imply that we are not the real Chosen People.
#
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
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ARMENIANS AND THE NOBEL PRIZE
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There are several theories as to why no Armenian – except perhaps Raymond Damadian – has ever come close to winning the Nobel Prize, one of them being the charge of plagiarism, which was leveled against Damadian himself by a fellow Armenian scientist. Since I am not personally acquainted with Damadian and my scientific knowledge is less than rudimentary, I am in no position to testify on Damadian’s integrity as a man or a scientist. But I do know his accuser and I have no reason to suspect he is motivated by anti-Armenian sentiments. On the contrary, he happens to be an ardent patriot.
There is of course nothing new about the charge of plagiarism in reference to Armenians. Similar charges have been leveled against some of our ablest writers by their peers – see Oshagan on Zarian, Zarian on Charents, and Shahnour on Siamanto.
Let me expand on the question placed at the beginning of this article: Why is it that nearly 200 Jews have been awarded the Nobel Prize but not a single Armenian? The answer favorite by our anti-Semites (of whom we have our share) is that the Nobel Committee is an integral part of the Zionist conspiracy. By contrast, honest Armenians (we have some of them also) maintain that the reason is much simpler: no Armenian has ever deserved the Prize.
My favorite theory is that, whenever an Armenian is mentioned as a possible candidate, the Nobel Committee receives a mini-avalanche of letters written by Armenians accusing the nominee of moral turpitude, terrorist sympathies, mediocrity, dishonesty, and a number of other failings and secret vices. Either that or a member of the Nobel Committee has an Armenian adviser who kyboshes every Armenian nomination.
In the investigation of a crime, they say “Cherchez la femme.” About the Nobel Committee’s anti-Armenianism, I say, “Cherchez l’armenien.”
#

Thursday, January 04, 2007
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GOOD OLD DAYS
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Saddam was no doubt a bad man and fully deserved his fate. But whether or not his executioners are any better remains to be seen. In movies, good guys prevail; but in life even when bad guys perish the chances are other bad guys will replace them. For centuries we dreamed of a free and independent homeland, and now what we have it, there are those who miss the good old days under Stalin, and I for one cannot blame them. And is there a writer today who does not miss the freedom our writers enjoyed in Istanbul under Sultan Abdulhamid II?
*
CRITICIZING CRITICS
******************************
When they say we need constructive or positive critics whose intent is to solve our problems, what they are really saying is that our literature so far has failed to produce a single writer who meets these criteria, and that all our critics have been anti-Armenian degenerates whose sole aim in life was to degrade the nation and to insult its leadership.
*
ON RULES
*******************
Study rules carefully in order to know when and how to break them.
*
ON A SERIOUS ABNORMALITY
*********************************************
One of the most serious abnormalities inflicted on human beings is considering oneself normal and all others if not abnormal than slight deviations.
#
Friday, January 05, 2007
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OUR ACADEMICS
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“What kind of Armenians are these?” I would ask myself whenever I thought of our academics (over a thousand of them in the U.S. alone) that produce a plethora of learned texts in which Armenians are not even mentioned. Now finally I have an answer: “Smart Armenians.”
*
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
*************************************
The headline of a commentary in this morning’s paper reads: “Culture a force for stagnation or change.” When things go from bad to worse, as they tend to do sometimes, culture becomes a force for decline and degeneration. That’s when the best and the brightest quit and search for challenges in alien environments. Some may call this betrayal. I call it reading the writing on the wall.
*
ON HISTORIOGRAPHY
*********************************
Facts don’t disagree – they can’t. Propaganda does – that is its raison d’etre.
*
GOOD QUESTION
***************************
How can anyone be so abysmally wrong and think he is right? This is a question I ask myself again and again when I think of my past.
*
UNDERSTANDING TURKS
*************************************
I make an effort to understand Turks because any child or fanatic can hate. As for understanding Armenians: I don’t even try because at one time or another I have been all of them in all their stages of disintegration, megalomania, self-righteousness, obstinacy, and that unique combination of naiveté and cunning which is peculiar to all underdogs from Jews to Gypsies.
*
BEARDED MEAT
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Unfamiliar idiomatic expressions sometimes read like riddles. Case in point: “Unless the penis dies young, it will surely eat bearded meat.” (From Chinua Achebe’s ARROW OF GOD.)
*
ON ORIGINALITY
*****************************
Sometimes originality is nothing but undetectable plagiarism, very much like great wealth, which more often than not is nothing but covered-up grand larceny.
*
VALUES
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Let others speak of family values. Let us learn to speak of national values, which stand in direct opposition to partisan or tribal values.
#
Saturday, January 06, 2007
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PHOBIA
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THE ARMENIAN REPORTER has published a long illustrated article in which one of our self-appointed dime-a-dozen pundits sets out to prove that Armenians are great because they have produced many great men, among them Raymond Damadian, Michael Arlen, William Saroyan, Alan Hovhannes, Ivan Galamian, and Aram Khachatourian. Mercifully Gregory Peck (Krikor Ipekian), Jack Palance (Hagop Palanjian), and Elizabeth Taylor (Yeghisapet Tertsakian) are not included. What seems to have escaped this chauvinist pundit’s attention is that all these great gentlemen lived and worked in alien environments. As a result the most important and relevant question remains neither asked nor answered: namely, what is it about Armenian environments that are incapable of producing or even tolerating greatness? The answer must be: in an environment dominated by dishonest mediocrities, honesty and excellence will be seen as undesirable goals, not to say threatening attributes. A mediocrity that has assessed himself as a first-class intellect will feel threatened by anyone who may be better than he. And when dishonest men get together and go about their filthy business behind closed doors, the last thing they want is an honest man who may shatter their image of themselves. Without realizing this so-called patriotic pundit, in his effort to brag about our greatness, has instead succeeded only in exposing the root of our decline and degeneration – envy and fear of honesty and excellence.
*
P.S. This much said, I am willing to concede that there are at least two fields of human endeavor in which we excel in our environments: fund-raising and charlatanism.
#

Sunday, December 31, 2006
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FRAGMENTS FROM A LIFE
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On the day I see the light I will give up writing because I will be too busy expiating my sins, one of them being the time I wasted writing all the nonsense (or “crap,” as several of my gentle readers put it) of use to no one.
*
A Jewish friend of mine once told me one reason why he acquired a university degree was to avoid the alternative — working in a used car lot, which he equated with “selling crap to shit.” The difference between selling used cars and writing for Armenians is that cars may take you from point A to point B.
*
At the age of thirteen when I first heard one of the Mildonian sisters in Venice (there were three of them: piano, cello, and harp) play Khachaturian’s Toccata and Chopin’s C-minor Etude (the “Revolutionnaire”) on a concert grand in the Hall of Mirrors of the Moorat-Raphael College, formerly Palazzo Zenobio, I decided to be a pianist. Never made it. Only one recital – a Chopin waltz, a Debussy Prelude, a Grieg Wedding March, and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony for four hands played on the same grand and in the same Hall of Mirrors with my temperamental piano teacher, Giarda (also Mildonian’s teacher) who loved to brag about his encounter with Puccini.
*
Many years later in Canada, at an organ recital in an Anglican church, when I heard Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G-minor, I switched my loyalty to the organ and eventually became the organist of a neighborhood Catholic church. It was a large congregation numbering over two thousand members. Though I can’t say I enjoyed playing at weddings and funerals (sometimes several a week) nothing gave me more pleasure than the long hours I spent alone wrestling with the complete works of Bach. That’s when I discovered the introspective and mystical Bach of the Chorale Preludes where he speaks of his longing for death.
*
I remember my cousin Esmerian who idolized Mozart telling me that after listening to a Mozart Piano Concerto he became so unhinged that he was tempted to commit suicide. He was a chain smoker and died of cancer at an early age.
*
There is a Somerset Maugham short story, adapted to a movie titled QUARTET, in which the central character, a failed pianist like myself, shoots himself after listening to a concert pianist play Schubert’s E-flat Impromptu.
#
Monday, January 01, 2007
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HAPPY NEW YEAR?
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Will the new one be an improvement over the old? I have no reason to think so; neither do I have any desire to engage in wishful thinking, which happens to be a perennial source of disappointment to individuals and of ruin to nations.
*
If our political parties survive it will be because they can always rely on a new generation of dupes, and wheeler-dealers willing to say and do anything for an empty title and minimum wages. Political parties, ideologies, and belief systems should be judged not by their longevity but by the mediocrity of their performance and the magnitude of their lies. If we were to judge a belief system by its longevity, we would have to admit that astrology is the most universal, reliable, and flawless system.
*
Perhaps my least popular and most anti-political idea is trying to close the gap between victim and victimizer by refusing to dehumanize the enemy. We have wasted so much verbiage in our efforts to prove that losers are winners on a higher plane; and they (our enemies) have done the same in their efforts to prove that victory may be achieved without victimizing anyone.
*
It is easy to hate. I want to understand the enemy not because I want to love him but for a far more selfish reason: namely, to enhance my understanding of the “other” in my fellow men, including myself.
*
I cannot in all good conscience look down on readers whose judgment exceeds their understanding. Once upon a time I too dehumanized those I neither understood nor wanted to understand.
*
To impose a belief system on life is the surest way of misunderstanding reality. Reality cannot be shaped like dough, it can only be understood on its own terms; and since only god can understand everything, we can only hope to understand it with the minimum degree of distortion or misinterpretation.
#
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
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MONEY TALKS
*************************
The headline of a front-page story in our paper today reads, “Top earners widen ‘stunning’ wage gap,” where we read that some chief executives make more money in an hour than the average working stiff in a year. I suspect one of our bishops today makes more money in a year than all our writers combined in their lifetime. I once heard of an Armenian writer who survives by pimping his wife. Others may earn minimum wage by pimping their integrity. To those who say, they can’t be good writers, I say, “Name a good one.” And if you were to ask me to define a good writer, I would say, “one who can afford to stand on his own two feet and speak his mind.” “I cannot afford to speak my mind now,” the hireling of one of our national benefactors once told me. “But on the day I retire and start collecting my pension, I will expose these bastards for what they are.” That was thirty years ago when he was in his fifties.
*
The things that we remember are not always things that we would like to remember. And when we remind things to others, we usually remind them of things that they may not care to remember. When Proust wrote REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST he was producing literature. Had he been under psychiatric care, his analyst would have been in a position to publish an entirely different book. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if, even as I write these lines, an ambitious novelist is working on a book about Proust titled REJECTED MEMORIES.
#
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
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FROM THE DIARY OF AN IDIOT
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For many years I suspected the world was populated by semi-idiots, and then, early one morning, to my shock and outrage, I woke up with the certainty that I was the idiot.
*
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
************************************
Once upon a time a man ventured into a jungle and as he was being torn to shreds by wild beasts, he said: “I didn’t know there were wild beasts in the jungle.” Our revolutionaries.
*
ON THE ART OF WRITING
************************************
After writing a line, write another that contradicts it and if you see even a quasi-invisible particle of truth in it, rewrite the first line.
*
MEMO
*****************
Remember, if you identify yourself as infallible, no one will believe you.
*
MONEY TALKS
**************************
Sometimes I am criticized for my rudeness. But even at my worst I am not as rude as the benevolent benefactor who once said to a writer: “I hire and fire people like you every day.”
*
CONFESSION
************************
How can anybody be so consistently wrong on so many things for such a long time? This is a question I ask myself again and again, and the only answer I can come up with is that a man’s capacity for believing the unbelievable is infinite.
#

Thursday, December 28, 2006
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BUSHWHACKED
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The pen is mightier than the sword? What unspeakable nonsense! Not even PRAVDA and IZVESTIA under Stalin would dare to print such an absurd assertion. How many lives have the Holy Scriptures saved? Or rather, how many wars have been fought in their name?
*
Contradictions are inherent in politics, religions, and human affairs in general. Wars are conducted in the name of peace, and innocent civilians are murdered in the name of a merciful Allah. Why should we be surprised if our dividers and destroyers portray themselves as our saviors?
*
Speaking of our destroyers: I dedicated the following quotation to my brainwashed gentle readers who would like to see anyone who refuses to recycle their favorite propaganda line silenced permanently: “I call on you not to hate because hate does not leave space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking.” Thus spake Saddam Hussein. Gandhi is right: No man is beyond redemption…except perhaps mankind.
*
To brag is to lie. Two recent examples: “I am not a crook,” and “Mission accomplished.” I wonder why American comedians and pundits don’t use the word “bushwhacked” more often these days.
*
The dwindling number of polar bears is now making headlines not only in newspapers written, edited, and published by polar bears but also those of an entirely alien species. What about the dwindling number of Armenians? I remember to have read somewhere that once upon a time we numbered as many as thirty million. Today it’s more like three million. And yet, I don’t see any panic in our streets.
#
Friday, December 29, 2006
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TWO DAYS TO GO
**********************************
Two days to go for the New Year. What does that mean? Nothing much. Years may come and go but some things never change; or, if they do, “the more they change the more they stay the same.”
*
A headline in our paper today reads: “Bush closer to new strategy.” New, meaning here, more of the same. What else?
*
Why do smart people make dumb mistakes? Because even the smartest man on earth cannot fathom the cunning of reality.
*
Our paper has printed a long list of all the famous men and women who died in 2006, among them the “gritty, satiric, and erotic” Canadian poet, Irving Layton, the only one I have met. I will never forget his piercing blue eyes and his comment to someone who dared to quote the words of one of his critics: “Some people think,” he replied, “just because they have an asshole they must also have an opinion.” Crude! – my style.
#
Saturday, December 30, 2006
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ON A REMARK BY BEETHOVEN
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Getting emotionally involved in music was wrong, Beethoven once said, because that way you miss the craft, the design, the architecture, all of which are results of expertise, hard work, dedication, and cold-blooded calculation. As a composer Beethoven knew that to master that aspect of music was much more difficult that to arouse emotion, which any modulation from a major to a minor key can do. Something similar could be said of understanding history or the workings of reality. Hence the importance of objectivity, which also means, the systematic elimination of all emotional involvement.
*
In rejecting the emotional aspect of musical composition, Beethoven was also saying that an artist (be he a poet, painter, or composer) should not rely on inspiration alone at the expense of technique. Inspiration is not enough. If the emotional commitment, or the irrational element in human activity (and it makes no difference if you call it faith, ideology, or mysticism) is not modified by reason or cold-blooded calculation, it is bound to lead to sterility and the commission of colossal blunders like wars, massacres, and genocides.
*
And speaking of crimes against humanity: Saddam’s greatest blunder was not the crime for which he was tried, found guilty, and hanged, (the revenge killing of 148 Shiite Muslims after a 1982 assassination attempt) but the war against Iran, during which millions perished. He was not tried for that offense because war making is not seen as a crime. If it were, how many political leaders today would be able to sleep at night?
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