as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, October 02, 2011

*****************************************

IN LOVE

*************************************

When in his eighties Pablo Casals fell in love

with one of his students and wanted to marry her,

his doctor was against it saying it could be dangerous;

to which Casals replied:

“If she dies, she dies.”

*

READERS

**********************

Some readers resent the fact that

I refuse to reproduce their sentiments and thoughts.

They believe a writer should be like a secretary –

take dictation.

I see that as another symptom of our sultanism.

*

Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821): “I don’t know

what the life of a rogue can be like

since I have never been one;

but the life of an honest man is abominable.”

*

Anything that is not worth rereading

can’t be worth writing.

#

Monday, October 03, 2011

*****************************************

DENIALISTS

*************************************

Denialists have a powerful argument in their favor:

Everybody lies.

*

My aim in life:

to humanize the dehumanized.

Call me a megalomaniac.

*

The arrogance of the half-learned:

I know all about that.

I was there once.

*

Life’s favorite trajectory:

from arrested development

to advanced degeneration.

*

We have been ruled by barbarians

for such a long time that

we don’t mind our own.

Either that or we see them

as the lesser of two evils.

#

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

*****************************************

AS I SEE IT

*************************************

Until very recently,

we, Armenians of the diaspora,

were not allowed to know

the identity of our political leaders;

and now that we know them,

we understand why they preferred to remain anonymous.

*

One of the best things about life is that it’s short.

*

Actions have consequences,

consequences have repercussions,

repercussions have echoes

and so on ad infinitum.

*

Memo to our editors:

silencing writers,

burning books,

burning men,

concentration camps,

gulags:

they all begin with censorship.

*

It is impossible to struggle

against the certainties of ignorance

with the doubts of knowledge.

#

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

*****************************************

ON A VARIETY OF THINGS

*************************************

Some of my Turkish readers are outraged

when I criticize Turks.

Like all dictators, Kemal knew that

the only way to be popular

is to flatter the collective ego of the nation.

Which is why most Turks are convinced

they are beyond criticism.

*

I don’t always write what I think and feel

because I don’t really know what I think and feel.

All my thoughts and feelings contain

their own deviations as well as contradictions.

*

I resent it when someone steals my stolen lines.

I work hard to find lines that are worth stealing.

Let him do the same.

*

Here are some aphorisms by Antonio Porchia (1886-1968),

an Argentine writer of Italian descent

who appears to know all about us:

*

"Truth has very few friends and those few

are suicides."

*

"A door opens to me. I go in and am faced

with a hundred closed doors."

*

"You think you are killing me.

I think you are committing suicide."

*

"Some things become so completely our own

that we forget them."

*

"They will say that you are on the wrong road,

if it is your own."

#

[ED]

"God is not in the business of explaining the incomprehensible.

We must either find a meaning in our genocide

or dismiss it as incomprehensible.

By making of it a collective obsession

we accomplish nothing but reinforce our image

as perennial victims and losers."

 

Nothing? think again Sir!!!

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, October 06, 2011

*****************************************

COMMENTS

*************************************

With every book I publish,

I acquire a new friend and lose two old ones.

Any day now the number of my friends

will bear a negative sign.

*

I feel most alone when

in the company of my fellow Armenians.

*

William James:

"A great many people think they are thinking

when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

*

The absence of God

plays a more important role in the life of atheists

than the existence of God in the life of most believers--

judging by the way they live.

*

Is it humanly possible to ignore or forget the truth

after hearing it?

#

Friday, October 07, 2011

*****************************************

COMMENTS (II)

*************************************

As soon as you settle on the answer

of an important question,

you begin to suspect there may be more merit

in its contradiction;

in the same way that after you take a woman in marriage,

all other women appear more desirable.

This may suggest that the world was created

not by God but by the Devil;

and if I am not mistaken

there is an Armenian medieval Christian heresy

that says as much.

*

Andre Malraux: “I am an agnostic.

But you know better than I that

no one can escape God.”

He should have added,

“and the Devil.”

#

Saturday, October 08, 2011

*****************************************

DIARY

*************************************

Very early this morning, on the radio,

a demonstrator in Athens:

“What’s happening today is not about saving Greece;

it’s about saving the banking system.”

*

Obama’s greatest blunder:

to ask men from Wall Street

to fix Wall Street.

Imagine asking predators

to reform the law of the jungle.

*

In a televised press conference

the other day when asked

why he did not prosecture the men

responsible for the economic collapse, Obama replied:

“What they did was immoral; it was not illegal.”

When the same question was asked to an economist:

“Their actions were criminal

and they should have been indicted.”

*

Who would have thought the Arab spring

would influence and shape

the Occupy Wall Street movement in America today?

Yanks being taught democracy by Africans!

What a strange place the world we live in is!

How gloriously unpredictable human beings are!

*

In an Op-Ed commentary this morning, I read:

“Russians say they are often more afraid

of the police than of criminals.”

Elsewhere Putinism is seen as an effort

to revive Stalinism.

What else would you expect from a former KGB agent?

*

Anonymous: “The rotten apple is the first to fall,

and it never falls far from the tree.”

*

A line from a western with Errol Flynn:

“There I was, no ma, no pa, brung up by Comanche Indians.”

*

I am reminded of a line by Updike

to the effect that as a boy

he was more influenced by Errol Flynn than Jesus Christ.

#

[ara baliozian]

"God is not in the business of explaining the incomprehensible.

We must either find a meaning in our genocide

or dismiss it as incomprehensible.

By making of it a collective obsession

we accomplish nothing but reinforce our image

as perennial victims and losers."

 

Nothing? think again Sir!!!

 

if you have done some thinking, why don't you share?

[ED]

I would, ask a man who is about to die, ask a man who is about to suffer, for this and many other similar reasons, man has to believe in something, to belong, and go in peace, salvation of the soul is a key component for living and dying.

 

In my case, I believe there....IS God, what ever shape or in form it may be, I believe in my family, to my friends...I try to keep it simple as possible.

 

when the dusk comes; and my days are numbered, I know I'll go in peace knowing I contributed 000001% to Humanity and my Nation. if not then what is the point of living? we have to belive in something, no matter what is your preferance...Isk du menak nalines xpum, tes vor chpakasi mi lav Jakat. however I never will stop to scream and fight for all, i like all to think about this, including you Sir.

 

Pardon my writing skills, my mind runs faster then my fingers

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, October 09, 2011

*****************************************

OBSERVATIONS

*************************************

In evil men we see ourselves exposed.

*

To see meaning in the meaningless:

that’s the truest mark of creativity.

*

Forgiving others is easy.

What’s hard, perhaps even impossible,

is forgiving oneself.

*

Never take a whole paragraph

to say what can be said in a single line.

Never take a whole line

when a single word will do just as well.

And never underestimate the power of silence

which can be more eloquent than

the most eloquent speech.

*

Instead of eighty and ninety,

the French say four-twenties and four-twenties-and-ten.

This may suggest that human intelligence or inventiveness

is limited and after a certain point

it becomes inoperative.

*

If in a democracy the majority can be

systemativally moronized,

in what way democracy may be said to be

different from tyranny?

#

Monday, October 10, 2011

*****************************************

A JOKE

*************************************

“One Jew tells another that,

that very morning, he asked a passerby

what he’d think, if the next day,

as was rumored,

they’d kill all the Jews and all the haidressers.

And the passerby answered,

‘Why the hairdressers?’”

*

After reading this joke very early this morning

I wept and laughed uncontrollably

for almost an hour.

#

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

*****************************************

FROM THE MEMOIRS

OF AN UNEMPLOYABLE MISFIT

*************************************

For ten long years I worked for a living

in factories, department stores, and offices.

The work itself i didn’t mind.

What I despised were the men I had to work for

and the subservience of my coworkers.

And because I have always had trouble

disguising my feelings,

I was fired shortly after I was hired.

I don’t know of anyone in my circles

of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and neighbors

who has been fired as often as I have.

Don’t get me wrong.

I am not complaining.

They were right to fire;

so was I in finding all forms of modern employment

repellent.

*

If I am ever hired as a teacher,

one of the very first things I will say to the class will be:

all ideologies and religions have their own propaganda line

that contradicts the competition.

There may be some truth in all of them

but in so far as they divide mankind,

they are big lies.

You may now guess

how long my career as a teacher would last.

#

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

*****************************************

DIARY

**********************************

Watched Chaplin’s GREAT DICTATOR.

His imitation of Hitler speechifying was wildly hilarious.

I couldn’t stop laughing.

To all our speechifiers I say:

“Let that be a lesson to you.”

*

STRANGERS

**********************

You may say whatever you wish about me

or anyone else for that matter

and you will be partly right.

That’s because we are not one but many

and some of them are strangers we may never meet.

*

JUSTICE

*********************

Madame Justice is not blind.

She has 20/20 vision – but only for her friends.

During our Ottoman and Soviet periods,

and today, under our own semi-sultans and neo-commissars,

she has consistently ignored us.

*

FRIENDS?

******************

You don’t have to go out of your way

to make a mortal enemy out of an Armenian friend.

He will see something invisible,

hear something in audible,

and react as if you were plotting his murder.

*

ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

*****************************************

So do words.

What if what I write may result in the destruction of the nation?

I am responsible only for what I say.

I cannot be held responsible for what others do.

#

[ara baliozian]

I would, ask a man who is about to die, ask a man who is about to suffer, for this and many other similar reasons, man has to believe in something, to belong, and go in peace, salvation of the soul is a key component for living and dying.

 

In my case, I believe there....IS God, what ever shape or in form it may be, I believe in my family, to my friends...I try to keep it simple as possible.

 

when the dusk comes; and my days are numbered, I know I'll go in peace knowing I contributed 000001% to Humanity and my Nation. if not then what is the point of living? we have to belive in something, no matter what is your preferance...Isk du menak nalines xpum, tes vor chpakasi mi lav Jakat. however I never will stop to scream and fight for all, i like all to think about this, including you Sir.

 

Pardon my writing skills, my mind runs faster then my fingers

 

faith and the absence of faith prove nothing!

they spring from within -- and man who cannot create a single worm has created ten thousand gods.

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, October 13, 2011

*****************************************

FROM MY NOTEBOOKS

**********************************

Two favorite aphorisms on love and marriage:

Balzac: “The fate of the house hangs on the wedding night.”

Chinese proverb: “The rose has thorns only for those

who would gather it.”

*

In Roger Ebert’s LIFE – ITSELF: A MEMOIR

(New York, 2011, page 226) Lee Marvin is quoted as having said:

“'You ever hear me sing an Armenian song?’

Marvin sang an Armenian song.”

*

A question without an answer:

What prompted God to introduce imperfection

in a perfect world by creating man?

*

A glance is enough to change two destinies.

#

Friday, October 14, 2011

*****************************************

AS I SEE IT

**********************************

Whenever I reply to a critic, I make an enemy;

and whenever I am not diplomatic enough

in my replies – diplomacy not being my field –

I make a mortal enemy.

*

Once when I asked the nationality

of a dazzling beauty – a teenage waitress in the cafeteria

of a department store where I was employed as a stockboy –

she said: "Canadian."

When I asked for more details, she replied:

"Let’s see now, Irish, Polish, German, Cherokee,

French, Italian and Ukrainian.”

*

"We are a wounded nation,"

I am reminded once in a while by our propagandists,

"and you don’t kick someone who is down," – thus

equating truth with a kick in the groin.

But truth is a kick only to those

who prefer to live in a world of lies.

#

Saturday, October 15, 2011

*****************************************

FROM MY NOTEBOOKS

**********************************

On the Tea Party:

The forces of evil know how to get organized.

On the Occupy Wall Street movement:

It never pays to give up one’s faith in mankind.

*

For twenty days – or is it forty? – they were ignored.

Now, everyone is talking about nothing else.

*

Solidarity can move mountains.

Without solidarity,

all solutions will be dismissed as unrealistic and utopian

by the very same people who consider it

their patriotic duty to divide the nation

in the name of this or that orthodoxy or ideology,

thus giving patriotism a bad name.

*

Where there is solidarity

even bad solutions may improve matters.

Where there is no solidarity

even the best solution will be ignored.

*

I have met good, patriotic Armenians

who give up on Armenianism after the first insult.

*

After being insulted ten thousand times,

sometimes I reply with an insult

on the grounds that I have earned the right.

If you disagree with my MO,

you can go to hell!

*

“Help those who need the help,”

reads a headline in the Op-Ed page this morning.

The implied subtext: “Prevent future revolutions.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, October 16, 2011

*****************************************

OCCUPY WALL STREET

**********************************

A single anonymous slogan

strikes me as more eloquent

than a hundred academic analyses

by learned economists.

*

“Wanted: corporate accountability.”

*

“Where is the penalty for financial incompetence?”

*

“I can’t afford my own politician.”

*

And the one that must strike fear

in all presidential candidates:

“We are the 99%.”

*

By the time this thing is over,

there may be enough slogans to fill a volume.

I for one am looking forward to it.

*

As for the Republicans who dismiss the movement

as leaderless (as if that were a liability)

or class warfare:

all I can say is that

no matter how rotten the status quo,

it will have its supporters and defenders.

From Nero and Caligula to

Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, and Saddam:

they all had their supporters and beneficiaries.

#

Monday, October 17, 2011

*****************************************

FROGS AND ELEPHANTS

**********************************

Anyone who decides to depend

on the kindness of strangers

must sooner or later come to terms with the fact that

most strangers are not kind.

*

We cannot speak of the moral failings of a volcanic eruption

or the questionable logic of an earthquake.

Neither can we speak of justice

for victims of massacres.

As far as they are concerned,

what’s done is done and cannot be undone.

As for those who editorialize and speechify endlessly

about genocide recognition:

they remind me of a certain American presidential candidate

who promised “Yes, we can!”

and delivered, “No, I can’t!”

*

What a book one could write

on the promises of politicians!

“When I hear 9-9-9

I want to dial 9-1-1.”

To which I can only say,

“It takes one to know one.”

The good news is,

so far no one has dared to say

“It ain’t 99%. It’s only 98.5%.”

*

They call it class warfare

and hope to win with their 1%?

That’s not optimism.

That’s megalomania run amok.

Reminds me of our revolutionaries

at the turn of the last century:

“A frog trying to rape an elephant,”

to quote one of our elder statesmen.

#

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

*****************************************

WALL STREET

**********************************

Leaderless?

With leaders like them, who needs one?

*

“Incoherent, confused, and self-contradictory?”

What about “LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE?”

*

A commentary Headline in the Op-Ed page:

“Ballot is still the best way to bring change.”

Not if the choice is between bad and worse,

or between the gutless and the greedy.

*

“National Media, Corporate PR.”

*

"Against Politics, Bankers, Gangsters.”

*

“Eat the Rich.”

*

“Greed is the opium of the Rich.”

*

“99% of the world unite –

you have nothing to lose but your bloodsuckers.”

#

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

*****************************************

COMMENTS

**********************************

We are told “Thou shalt not kill!”

but we are also coerced into killing

in the name of God and Country.

Power structures and organized religions

are full of #$@% -- if you will forgive my French.

*

You are free as long as you do what you are told?

Try to make sense of that!

*

Can you really know someone

who doesn’t himself?

What about an institution

that contradicts itself?

*

Wars become inevitable only

when we do nothing to prevent them.

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, October 20, 2011

*****************************************

COMMENTS

**********************************

Don’t judge a man by his opinion of himself

or a political party by its propaganda.

*

You may hope to be forgiven by a Turkish enemy

but by an Armenian friend, never!

I speak from experience.

*

Whenever I disagree with an Armenian,

every Armenian who agrees with him

becomes my enemy.

*

African proverb: “Until lions have their historians,

tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.”

#

Friday, October 21, 2011

*****************************************

GUESSING GAMES

**********************************

An unforgettable line from a forgotten American movie:

A lecherous hombre with a foreign accent

to a scantily clead sexy teenager:

“I want to balanga you with my bonnie johnnie.”

My guess is, as children that’s how we learn languages:

we may not understand the words

but we can guess their meaning.

As when in winter a man shivers and says,

“I am cold,” for instance;

or when he says “I am thirsty”

and is given a glass of water.

But as we grow older,

we seem to lose that particular faculty.

*

One of my favorite Jewish jokes goes something like this:

Two old friends meet on a road somewhere in Russia

and after a brief exchange one of them says to the other:

“You tell me you are going to Minsk

because you want me to believe you are going to Pinsk,

but I happen to know you are going to Minsk:

Why must you always lie to me?”

#

Saturday, October 22, 2011

*****************************************

ON THE ETIOLOGY

OF GENOCIDE

**********************************

“There is nothing more valuable than our honor!”

declared a Muslim in Montreal

after murdering his three teenage daughters

because they had boyfriends.

(It is to be noted that he called it “treachery”).

There it is: the perfect justification

for killing defenseless civilians.

*

After dismissing me as anti-Armenian,

less than mediocre and totally unprintable,

they demand solutions from me.

They must be in deep %#$&

and they expect us to believe

we never had it so good

because we are in the best of hands.

*

Fear of free speech might as well be

synonymous with running away from the truth.

*

Mel Brooks: “Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger.”

This may explain why sadists outnumber masochists.

*

Chinese saying: “The great man is a public misfortune.”

*

Japanese proverb: “A wise falcon hides its talons.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, October 23, 2011

*****************************************

POLITICS

**********************************

The secret aim of all propaganda

is not to spread lies – be they small, middling, or big –

but to convince you to believe

your brain is a useless organ;

and it becomes useful only when authorized by the state

or a central authority.

This may explain why fools have as many certainties

as the wise have doubts.

Speaking for myself: my only certainty is that

when fools are in charge,

war and massacre are sure to follow.

*

What a book one could write on politics

as the art of deception.

*

Kemalism in four words:

“Fez, no. Yataghan, yes.”

*

No one will ever accuse me

of taking myself seriously.

On more than one occasion

I have identified my role in our collective existence

as that of a @#$%-disturber.

*

A statesman is a politician who has done one right thing.

#

Monday, October 24, 2011

*****************************************

EARTHQUAKE

**********************************

It must be obvious by now that

the regime in Ankara has invested more money and manpower

in rewriting history and in persecuting Kurds

than in providing safe housing for its citizens.

*

THE RICH AND THE POOR

************************************

The rich like to believe the poor are lazy

and the poor like to believe the rich are greedy.

Who is right?

As far as I know no pundit has so far

dared to suggest that

we owe the present global economic crisis

to the laziness of the poor.

*

A ROLE MODEL

****************************

Crime doesn’t pay?

But it paid and paid handsomely to Gadhafy

for almost half a century.

I wouldn’t be surprised if future dictators

adopt him as a role model.

#

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

*****************************************

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

**********************************

We are expected to believe that

our revolution at the turn of the last century

in the Ottoman Empire was a success

even if the patient died.

*

Propaganda is designed to flatter the vanity of a few

even if it means insulting the intelligence of the many.

*

What Talaat and chief executive officers

on Wall Street have in common is the certainty that

if the law is on their side

they can get away with murder.

*

Richelieu: “If the poor are too well off

they will be disorderly.”

It follows, the poor must remain poor for their own good

and in the name of law and order.

*

Pushkin: “Where there is a trough, there will be swine.”

The only reason textbook on political science

don’t begin with that line is that

all educational systems are controlled by politicians.

*

Proust: “The pleasure an artist gives

is to make us know an additional universe.”

#

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

*****************************************

SUMMING UP

**********************************

After six centuries of servile subservience

a sudden eruption of violent uprisings.

I dare anyone to suggest that

our collective destiny has not been shaped

by cowards and fools.

Treating them as heroes with good intentions

is to forget that hell is paved with them.

*

Bullies at the mercy of bigger bullies:

that just about sums up our present leadership.

Dzour nesdink, shidag khossink!

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, October 27, 2011

*****************************************

REFLECTIONS

**********************************

There is a dupe, a coward, and a bully in all of us.

That’s the only way to explain world history.

*

Q: If you were an animal,

what animal would you be?

A: A vegetarian tiger.

I hate predators.

They are the commissars of the animal kingdom.

*

Good writing consists in deleting.

Silence can be more eloquent than

a torrent of rhetorical verbiage.

A history of silence will have no quotations.

*

If there are homophobes it may be because

they were traumatized by serial pedophiles,

among them such authority figures as priests.

*

After every line I write I ask myself:

Why should anyone be interested in this?

What if he already knows or understands what I am saying?

What if he is ahead of me when it comes to certain ideas

and experiences?

#

Friday, October 28, 2011

*****************************************

SOCRATES

********************************

When asked where he came from,

Socrates is said to have replied:

"Not from Athens but from the world."

And yet, when he was condemned to death by the Athenians

and was given an opportunity to escape,

he said he’d rather die in Athens

than live anywhere else.

*

BEETHOVEN’S SHADOW

********************************

When Vahe Berberian once suggested that

Beethoven’s somewhat overblown shadow

unfairly eclipsed the reputation and worth

of many other equally great composers,

among them Boccherini,

Paul Jungmann, the quintessential German –

blond, blue-eyed, intense, unsmiling – said,

one should not speak such nonsense

in the presence of children.

Forever after music was never discussed in his presence.

*

PROPAGANDA AND LITERATURE

********************************************

All our problems must be ascribed to our enemies,

our propaganda tells us.

The enemy is us, literature reminds us.

And propaganda is more popular than literature

because no one likes to be told

he is a fool or a pervert bent on self-destruction.

#

Saturday, October 29, 2011

*****************************************

ON LOVE AND DEATH

********************************

Love is an arrow, marriage a boomerang.

*

Where there is love

there will be a pierced, broken, shattered, or shish-kebabed heart.

*

There is a Greek myth

whose intent is to emphasize the fact that

the woman you love

and the woman you marry are seldom one and the same.

The critical passage in it reads:

“No lovely naked bride awaited him

on the marriage bed,

but a tangled knot of hissing serpents.”

*

Your children will break your heart

as surely as your parents (when they die).

*

I first fell in love at age eight

with my schoolteacher.

She married another,

had a nervous collapse,

attempted suicide,

and became physically unrecognizable,

by which time I was nine and in love with another –

this time a coeval.

*

My dictionary defines “passion” as “suffering.”

*

The woman you love

and the woman you cease to love –

what a difference!

Not just black and white

but everything and nothing.

*

According to a Frenchman,

“the heaviest body in the world

is the woman you have ceased to love.”

*

After mentioning a dead person

it is customary to say, “may s/he rest in peace,”

when it is not the dead that are in need of peace

but the living.

*

Stendhal, the author of ON LOVE,

one of the best books on the subject:

“All my life I have always seen what I imagined

rather than reality.”

*

And Tolstoy: “In the presence of others,

women – especially when they are young –

pretend so skillfully that no one can see them as they are.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, October 30, 2011

*****************************************

BROTHERS

********************************

The West has its share

of dupes, fools, fanatics, racists, skinheads,

serial killers, child molesters,

and chief executive officers –

in short, hoodlums and hooligans –

as Turkey has its share of denialists.

It’s beyond me why anyone in his right mind

would expect them to be morally superior.

#

Monday, October 31, 2011

*****************************************

OVERPOPULATION

********************************

In my lifetime alone

world population has increased

from three to seven billion.

Scientists tell us the planet cannot sustain

this rate of growth.

Contraception is the only solution.

So far politicians have done nothing in that direction

because they don’t want to offend the Catholics.

But I believe the Pope is as much to blame

as film producers who glamorize sex

and treat pregnancy (if at all) as if it were

an alien, disconnected, and rare condition.

#

Tuesday, November 01, 2011

*****************************************

REREADING TOYNBEE

********************************

After Shakespeare, he is for me the most quotable English writer.

But whereas Shakespeare is universally admired,

Toynbee continues to have more enemies than friends,

especially among his fellow English historians,

probably because he exposed their mediocrity.

In that sense, he reminds me of our own Zarian.

I love Toynbee’s ideas; but what I love even more

is his Mandarin prose.

*

ON GOD

*****************

“I believe that Man has been given the capacity to see God, and I believe that this is the summum bonum towards which all creation groans and travails.”

*

THE CHOSEN

************************

“The Jews, the Japanese, the British ‘sahib’, the Nazis…all seem to me to have been chosen by no one except themselves.”

*

ON HIS CRITICS

************************

“Their pummelings have given me a mental massage that has loosened the joints and muscles of my mind and has set it moving on a new course.”

*

A GOOD QUESTION

*********************************

“If the Turkish atrocities could be explained as anachronistic outcrops of a residual savagery in the hearts of recent proselytes to a Western

way of life, how was a Western historian to explain the apostasy of Germans who were native-born children of the Western household?”

*

ON PATIENCE

************************

“A capacity to suffer fools gladly and to do this with gusto, not as a martyrdom, but as a fine art which the practitioner can practise with zest.”

#

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

*****************************************

IN THE NEWS

********************************

Until very recently

Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad were as close

as “kolo kai vraki” (bum and pants).

Today “one of Ahmadinejad’s advisers

stands accused of raping 340 virgins during the last year.”

Not even a writer with the fertile imagination

of Gabriel Garcia Marquez could have written such a sentence.

For more, much more, on the subject,

see Abbas Milani, “Desperate Dictatorship,”

(THE NEW REPUBLIC, Oct. 6, 2011, page 30).

*

Peace is wonderful.

Friendship is great.

Love is best.

But one must be a pervert of the worst kind

to love creeps like Khamenei and Ahmedinejad who,

after conspiring to commit countless crimes against humanity,

end up hating each other.

*

Where there is too much talk of God,

can the Devil be far off?

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 03, 2011

*****************************************

SWAN SONG

********************************

If you have any hopes,

prepare yourself to see them shattered.

*

The source of all my problems?

I value honesty above everything else.

So much so that

I’d much rather listen to the braying of an honest jackass

than to the seductive song of a phony nightingale.

*

When it comes to painful experiences

I have the memory of an elephant.

As for happy ones:

I can’t think of a single one that did not end badly.

*

The first thing I did when I came to Canada

from war-torn Greece was to buy a loaf of bread

and a cup of coffee.

The bread tasted like @#$%

and the coffee was so hot that it burned my tongue.

After that everything went downhill.

*

The only thing that cheers me up these days

is the prospect of death.

#

Friday, November 04, 2011

*****************************************

PARALLELS

********************************

In an interview published in TIME (Oct. 10, 2011, page 64),

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan

has this to say on the Israelis:

“As long as they refuse to apologize for the nine people

of Turkish descent who lost their lives

on the flotilla, as long as they refuse to pay compensation

to the families and as long as the embargo on Gaza

has not been lifted, the relations between the two countries

will never be normalized.”

*

On President Bashar Assad of Syria:

“It is impossible to preserve my friendship

with people who are allegedly leaders

when they are attacking their own people,

shooting at them, using tanks.”

*

It can truly be said of Erdogan and Turks

that they are a clear-cut case of the blind leading the blind.

To my Turkish friends and readers I therefore say:

“See you in the ditch.”

#

Saturday, November 05, 2011

*****************************************

ON INSANITY

********************************

In his biography of Alexander the Great,

Plutarch writes:

“One of the largest and most handsome lions,

which was kept in Babylon

was attacked and kicked to death by an ass.”

*

Shaw may be right:

the insane should be punished more severely than the sane

if only because they are more unpredictable and dangerous.

*

And speaking of insanity:

if you are in love,

you should remind yourself at least once a day

that your beloved is less a real person

and more a product of your imagination.

*

I don’t agree with a reality that makes crooks wealthy

and honest men poor,

and because I speak of this reality,

some of my readers hate me

as if I were responsible for everything

that has gone wrong in their lives.

*

Subtract imagination from love

and the result may be closer to contempt than affection.

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, November 06, 2011

*****************************************

METAPHYSICAL REFLECTIONS

*****************************************************

If God knows neither fear nor doubt,

can He really understand man?

*

When we speak of God

it is useful to remember that we speak of Him

not as He is but as we conceive Him to be;

and it is a serious blunder to conceive of God

in our own image.

*

We may have the answers to the most important questions

only after we die. In that sense,

death may be not an end but a beginning.

*

To God past and future are one

and both might as well be a fraction of a second.

*

What if the Big Bang as we know it

is only the last bang in an infinite series of bangs?

*

Everything we say about God is based on hearsay evidence

and therefore inadmissible.

*

God and men are more fiction than reality.

*

Reality (or God or Truth) is so different

from what we imagine it to be that

if the two ever met

they would not recognize each other.

#

Monday, November 07, 2011

*****************************************

FROM MY NOTEBOOKS

*****************************************************

To go down into the gutter with your adversary

is almost to agree with him -- if not with his words

than with his way of life.

*

No Armenian writer loved his fellow Armenians

as much as Khachatur Apovian – and he committed suicide.

*

I don’t criticize ideas;

I criticize their absence,

*

In a controversy to be silent

is to support the status quo.

#

Tuesday, November 08, 2011

*****************************************

HOW MANY ARMENIANS?

*****************************************************

We have more questions than answers.

Who qualifies as an Armenian?

What if half of Turkey is half Armenian?

Because an Armenian girl was legally raped as a teenager,

does it follow that her offspring

acquired the national identity of her rapist

who may have been himself half Armenian?

An Armenian who is against us,

is he not more Turkish than Armenian?

A Turk who is with us

is he not more Armenian than Turkish?

If to divide-and-rule is enemy action,

do our dividers qualify as Armenian?

How many of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors

(who support only one faction) qualify as Armenian?

If we say only Armenians who are for solidarity

qualify as Armenian,

who will dare to say he is against solidarity?

If we preach solidarity and practise divisions

do we not speak with a forked tongue?

Can an Armenian who speaks with a forked tongue

qualify as a human being?

Confused?

You should be.

i am.

Who said reality is easy to figure out?

#

Wednesday, November 09, 2011

*****************************************

OBSERVATIONS

*****************************************************

After a disaster,

those who are partly or wholly responsible for it,

will come up with a thousand reasons why

the disaster was inevitable.

Don’t believe a word they say.

Their priority is not to understand and explain

but to mislead and deceive.

Their aim is not to learn from history

in order not to repeat it,

but to salvage their powers and privileges.

*

To say where there is power there will be abuse of power

is like saying where there are people

there will also be the law of gravity.

*

Haves and have nots?

It would be more accurate to speak of

bloodsuckers and their victims.

*

Deceivers and dupes?

Even better: predators and herbivores.

*

Class warfare?

I suggest telling bloodsuckers

to minimize their intake of blood

does not qualify.

*

There are many things that can be seen

even by a legally blind man,

but most of us are so carefully and consistently indoctrinated

that we are willing to testify under oath

we saw nothing.

*

Sh*t happens because most men are sh*ts.

And more often than not

a deceiver is as much of a sh*t as a dupe.

*

Voltaire on the origin of religion:

“From the meeting of the earliest scoundrel

with the very first fool.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 10, 2011

*****************************************

YOUR CHOICE

*****************************************************

There are no new or original ideas.

We are all in the recycling business.

I like to believe I have at no time recycled fascist crap

in the name of patriotism or religion.

*

Faith is gut-driven.

So are dogmas.

Where the brain is marginalized,

disaster is sure to follow.

*

Where there is faith,

there will be intolerance.

Where there are dogmas,

there will be heresies.

Where there are heretics,

there will be persecution.

You may now draw your own conclusions –

or confusions.

Your choice.

#

Friday, November 11, 2011

*****************************************

LIES

*****************************************************

Where there is power

there will be propaganda;

and where there is propaganda

there will be lies.

*

We are told again and again that

our Church played a key role

in the survival of the nation.

Listen to Raffi:

“Our clergymen preached patience to us

thus promoting subservience to the point of slavery…

they have always been against individual freedom.”

*

As recently as the collapse of the Soviet Union,

the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin opposed independence.

*

In Manuel Sarlisyantz’s A MODERN HISTORY

OF TRANSCAUCASIAN ARMENIA (Leiden, 1975, page 326)

we read:

“The pro-Soviet Archbishop Tiran Nersoyan was, in 1944,

appointed from Etchmiadzin to be

Prelate of the Armenian Church in North America.

He endorsed Communism as ‘leading to a Christian ideal’

and had written that

'what the clergy is…on the spiritual level,

the Communist Party is on the worldly level

of politics and economics.'”

(See T. Nersoyan, A CHRISTIAN APPROACH

TO COMMUNISM, [London, 1942, page 29].)

#

Saturday, November 12, 2011

*****************************************

LIES (II)

*****************************************************

Very early this morning

when I was half asleep

I heard someone say on the radio:

“We havent’ had democracy in 20 years.”

And I thought, we haven’t had it for 2000.

*

More often than not

our choice is not between truth and lies

but between big lies and bigger ones.

*

The cowardice of the many

and the stupidity of the few:

that’s the only way to explain our past.

The rest is propaganda.

*

And now that I have spoken the truth

I deserve a horse with which to gallop off

in all directions

in a cloud of dust.

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, November 13, 2011

*****************************************

ETHOLOGY

*****************************************

Pick a man, any man, from the gutter,

give him a title and a regular salary,

and forever after he will say

he never had it so good.

One reason I write as I do is that

I was spared that kind of treatment.

I was born in the gutter and my guess is

I will die in it.

I am not complaining.

Things could have been much worse.

What saved me was pure luck.

No one ever bothered to give me a title.

As for salary:

what I was offered was never above minimum wage.

Had it been above minimum wage

I may have chosen a different path

and I would now be on my way to the devil.

#

Monday, November 14, 2011

*****************************************

WHERE I STAND

*****************************************************

There are advantages

to being a third-rate minor scribbler

living in the middle of nowhere.

To begin with you are left alone.

Your readers are so few in number

that if you alienate one of them

it doesn’t feel like you have lost

half of your income from royalties.

*

By contrast, consider the case

of an Armenian-American academic

with a regular salary and a captive audience.

Not only will he be careful

not to say anything that may be construed

as critical of God and capital

(make it Capital and god) in general

and benefactors in particular

(one of whom may be subsidizing his “chair”)

but also anyone who may be remotely connected with them.

In short, he will support the status quo

and pretend we never had it so good

because we are in the best of hands.

*

During the Ottoman and Soviet eras

our poets wrote odes and panegyrics

to sultans and commissars.

Habits die hard.

“Treason is in our blood,” said Raffi.

So is cowardice.

Hence the scarcity of dissidents

and the overabundance of brown-nosers.

#

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

*****************************************

CHUCK YOU, FARLEY!

*****************************************************

“You call yourself a dissident?”

said a (Soviet-Armenian) writer from Paris.

“Did they throw you out of your home and homeland?”

No, they didn’t because they couldn’t.

I was born and raised on foreign soil

and my home was mine, not theirs.

The contempt in his voice was such that

I understood why in their eyes

we will never rise above the status of “aghber.”

*

Because I try to be honest and objective

I am dismissed as pro-Turkish by some of my readers

as if being dishonest were an integral part

of the Armenian identity.

*

I must get used to the idea that

some of my fellow Armenians are so wrong

that they challenge all concepts of wrongness,

so that one could say they are not even wrong!

#

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

*****************************************

THE 99%

**************************************************

There is no such thing as a belief system

without childhood indoctrination.

Eliminate indoctrination and the chances are

a belief system will collapse

into an abyss of absurdities.

*

It can truly be said of dupes that

they are the 99%.

*

On the radio this morning:

“Pakistan today is ruled by criminals.”

An American pundit:

“Almost everyone in Washington is on the take.”

*

He who admits to being a dupe

will not admit to being a coward, a liar, and an idiot.

*

Workers of the world unite?

Even better:

Dupes, idiots, and victims of the world…

*

What belief systems do is

convince idiots they are smart,

barbarians they are civilized,

and the scum of the earth they are the Chosen.

*

You think I am being cynical?

Allow me to confide in you:

Reality is worse!

*

Sigmund Freud: “The first human

who hurled an insult instead of a stone

was the founder of civilization.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 17, 2011

**********

YES IM ANOUSH HAYASTANI

(TO MY SWEET ARMENIA)

**********

How sweet was it to the poet

who wrote that line?

After being betrayed to the authorities

by his fellow Armenians,

he committed suicide

by banging his head against the wall.

Many others were shot in the neck

or driven to Siberia.

If you say all that happened in a different era

and under a different regime, I say,

regimes may change

but the scum always rises to the top.

*

There is a sultan and a commissar in all of us.

If we ever undertake the task of

de-Ottomanizing and de-Stalinizing ourselves,

how many of those who are in power today

would remain in power?

*

If you are one of those readers

who think I have been consistently wrong

in my judgment of my fellow countrymen,

all I am prepared to say in my defense is,

I have at no time violated anyone’s human right of free speech.

Can you say the same about the status quo

in whose defense you speak?

#

Friday, November 18, 2011

**********

CONFESSIONS OF AN IGNORAMUS

**********

Do we have a constitution?

What does it say about free speech?

Is it for it or against it?

If it’s for it,

why is it that some of our ablest intellectuals

live in exile?

What about a Supreme Court?

Do we have one?

Who are its members?

What do we know about them?

Are they for or against fundamental human rights?

Do we have dissidents?

How many?

Who are they?

How many members of the present administration

are former KGB agents?

*

We are told most American senators and congressmen

are millionaires, sometimes even multimillionaires.

What about their Armenian counterparts?

Do we have anything resembling

the Occupy Wall Street movement in Yerevan?

*

A few years ago the Canadian spy agency

called me and said they were going to send someone

to interrogate me about our present situation.

I said I was the wrong man for such an undertaking;

it would be a waste of their valubale time;

I was only a distant observer;

I knew little or nothing about specifics.

They disagreed.

They said they read my commentaries in the Armenian press

and they considered me an expert on the subject.

An excpert?

An expert!

They must be joking.

They were not joking.

If they were interested in names

I could be of no use to them

because I didn’t even know someone who knew someone.

What kind of expert was I

if I had more questions than answers?

*

And if so far I have made no effort to know more

it maybe because in this case

ignorance may indeed be bliss.

#

Saturday, November 19, 2011

**********

ARMENIAN LITERATURE

**********

Canadian literature is rumoured to be dreary.

By contrast, Armenian literature is not even rumoured

to be defunct or non-existent.

*

One advantage in being non-existent is that

no one bothers to spread the rumour that it is trash.

*

The only people who take Armenian literature seriously

are Armenian writers who take themselves seriously.

*

The central concern of Armenian writers

who take themselves seriously

is to expose the mediocrity of all others.

*

“Yes im anoush Hayastani.”

I should like to see one of our poets producing a sonnet

titled “To my sweet fellow countrymen.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, November 20, 2011

*****************************************

NOTES AND COMMENTS

**************************************************

A headline reads:

“Should Some Bankers Be Prosecuted?”

The obvious answer is, of course!

Gross incompetence is penalized in all other lines of work.

Why should bankers be immune?

Is it because as the 1%

they control 99% of the power?

*

A typical passage in the article reads:

“The federal government has been

far more active in rescuing bankers

than in prosecuting them.”

And why?

Because the 1% can afford politicians,

the 99% cannot.

*

What is American-style democracy

if not the fascism of capitalists?

*

When we demonize Turks

we forget that angels and demons

are creatures of our imagination

and that in reality some Turks may well be better or wrose,

but none of them is an invulnerable being

beyond our reach.

*

Sartre is right:

in human relations

magic plays a more important role than

reason, common sense, and experience.

Where imagination enters,

misconceptions are sure to follow.

*

All popular ideas can be easily and safely contradicted

and they have been.

One could even say,

thinking consists in exposing contradictions.

#

Monday, November 21, 2011

*****************************************

AS I SEE IT

**************************************************

Once, recently, when I said something to the effect

that our treatment of writers

has been worthy of barbarians,

it was the barbarians who were eager to prove me right

by hurling insults at me and in general

behaving like hoodlums on the warpath – as if

that was the only way they knew

how to prove me wrong.

*

"For a smart man you can be very naïve!"

a trial lawyer, who is also a good friend, tells me.

I don’t know about smart

but I am worse than naïve

when I get emotionally involved.

Emotion reduces a complex reality

into a one-dimensional extension of ourselves.

Emotion, writes Sartre somewhere,

attempts to change the world by means of magic.

What could be more primitive?

*

The most beautiful spectacle I have ever beheld

was a sunrise from a seventh story hospital window;

and to think that the purpose of a sunrise

is not to provide man with beauty.

#

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

*****************************************

THE HUMAN CONDITION

**************************************************

It’s not Armenians against Turks,

Germans against Jews,

Jews against Palestinians,

or Cain against Abel.

It’s man against man.

If the world were populated

by a single race, nation, or tribe,

the number of wars, revolutions and massacres

would remain constant.

*

God created man.

God also created the Devil

and the Devil belongs to no race, nation, or tribe.

*

Organized religions are maneuvers

designed to allow one to sit at the right hand of God

and to behave like swine.

*

God created time and space.

What would stop Him from creating

an infinite number of other dimensions?

*

God created man.

He must have been bored stiff.

What other possible explanation is there?

#

Why are you so tough on your fellow Armenians?

I am asked once in a while by concerned readers.

I am not tough on Armenians.

I am tough on deceivers, dividers, and bloodsuckers

regardless of nationality.

I am tough on all victimizers.

Now then, identify yourself please.

Are you a victimizer or a victim?

If you are a victim, why do you object

to my speaking up against your tormentors?

*

Dupes are not born but made

and what makes them is childhood indoctrination --

brainwashing for short;

and if you say you were not brainwashed

i will say, that's because

those who brainwashed you

were successful in convincing you

you were being educated.

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 24, 2011

*****************************************

WOMEN

**************************************************

To how many women we could say:

I love you with all my heart

and I shall continue loving you to the end of my days,

but not you as you are,

but you as a figment of my own imagination.

*

ON VANITY

*********************

Charlie Chaplin asked Truman Capote

to read the manuscript of his memoirs

with the eyes of a professional writer.

When Capote did and reported back with a list of suggestions,

Chaplin said: "Get the hell out of my sight!"

*

ON ORIENTAL WISDOM

*********************************

To avoid grief, conflict, misery and suffering,

do nothing and be nobody. Or simply, imitate the dead.

That’s what most Oriental wisdom boils down to.

But since life is only an extremely tiny interval of light

in the darkness of non-being,

it should be as different from death as we can make it

even if in the process we experience confusion and misery.

#

Friday, November 25, 2011

*****************************************

FROM MY NOTEBOOKS

*****************************

The official Kemalist classification of Armenians

as “Christian Turks” is patently absurd

in view of the fact that we are devoid

of both Christian charity and Turkish solidarity.

*

What motivates us to assess ourselves

as smart, progressive, compassionate, and God’s chosen

is the suspicion that we may be none of these things.

*

One of the worst things that can happen to a nation

is to believe in its own propaganda;

and one of the worst things that can happen to a leader

is to become a dupe of his own lies.

Speaking for myself,

I committed my worst blunders

after convincing myself that I knew better

and anyone who dared to contradict me

was a damn fool.

*

When it comes to women,

not only boys will be boys

but also men of all ages.

Hence the saying,

“The brain of a man is the body of a naked woman.”

#

WHAT’S YOUR RACKET?

*********************************

Even after 30 books and over a thousand articles,

stories, and essays in periodicals and newspapers

I hesitate to identify myself as a writer

because more often than not I am asked:

"How come I have never heard of you?"

to which I am tempted to reply:

"Next time you visit your public library

check and see how many names you recognize

besides Shakespeare’s and Hemingway’s?"

*

HIS RACKET

****************************

I can’t imagine Mozart at the age of thirty saying:

"I have composed enough. I am quitting."

I have no doubt whatever in my mind that

Mozart would have gone on composing

even at the age of 80, very much like Verdi.

Likewise, I can’t imagine God saying,

"I have created the universe and enough is enough!"

What if, even as I write these lines,

God is busy creating other universes

in other dimensions?

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, November 27, 2011

*****************************************

Q/A

********************

I cannot think of a single important decision or judgment

that I have made in the past

that did not contain a 99% margin of error.

Let that be a warning to all those with whom

I share my wisdom.

*

What do the Pope of Rome and Stalin have in common?

Infallibility.

*

When asked to name my favorite Armenian dish,

I identify myself as a vegetarian.

When told there are many delicious vegetarian dishes

in our cuisine,

I say I prefer to keep my answers to that subject short

because all talk of pilaf and shish-kebab bores me stiff.

*

And speaking of questions:

I don’t remember a single interview

with an African-American writer

in which mention was ever made of chicken and watermelon.

*

A question I have never been asked:

“On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate our leadership?”

The obvious answer is minus one, of course!

#

Monday, November 28, 2011

*****************************************

Why is it that some very smart and learned Armenians

confuse anti-charlatanism with anti-Armenianism?

Why is it that some very cunning Armenians

in their defense of their own selfish, narrow interests

voice reasons worthy of an inbred moron?

*

When it comes to Genocide recognition

the American question is not whether it is true or false but

“What’s in it for us?”

Call that cynicism if you like.

They call it pragmatism.

*

Whenever I write for Armenians

I remind myself that I am breaking the commandment:

“Thou shalt not share your wisdom

with wiser men than yourself.”

*

Wisdom and serenity are mutually exclusive concepts.

You can’t be serene in a world of lunatics

who think you are the lunatic.

#

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

*****************************************

It is a universally shared human weakness

to prefer flattery to criticism,

but it is adangerous addiction

to prefer lies to truth.

*

On a radio program on children’s poetry this

morning, I overheard the following quotation:

“There is some shit / I will not eat!” That’s

what I call good poetry – rhythm, music, and

words that once heard are never forgotten.

*

Belief systems have nothing

to do with reality and everything to do with the

power to shape our perception of reality.

#

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

*****************************************

BOOK REVIEW

********************************************

TWILIGHT VISIONS.

By Vahan Vahanian (Jansezian).

Los Angeles. 2011. 255 pages.

(In Armenian)

**************************************************

“I am told I go to extremes in my assertions,

to which I say, What are words for?"

The labyrinth of Armenian life in Los Angeles

is Vahan Vahanian’s territory

and he has as many stories to relate as Scheherazade.

His style is brief, to the point,blunt.

He takes no prisoners.

“With the dollar, a man who signs his name with an X

is treated as a philosopher.

Without the dollar a genius is shunned as a lunatic…”

“That’s the way it is in America.

Novelties aplenty,

real-estate developments everywhere,

institutionalized larceny rampant,

refinement an absent factor.”

Vahanian is not afraid to step on toes or,

for that matter, to kick balls.

A man after my own heart.

As the editor/publisher of a newspaper

that is distributed freely,

neither is he afraid to alienate a fraction of his audience.

He speaks of a woman who tells him

her aim in life is to have more of everything –

“more fun, more money, more jewelry and more sex with younger men…”

“In Los Angeles there is neither brotherhood nor friendship.”

Phony intellectuals, exhibitionists, megalomaniacs, and womanizers

are a dime a dozen.

Vahanian may speak of depressing things

but he does so with a friendly smile

and his smile is infectious.

“Every other Armenian you meet these days

has political ambitions.

If Raffi Hovannisian and Jirair Libaridian made it,

why can’t I?”

And there is the self-appointed genius with literary ambitions:

“Did you get my article?”

“When are you going to print it?”

“No editorial changes, please!”

“How much are you going to pay me?”

If to say what must be said were music,

Vahan Vahanian would be our Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

(For more information, write to newarmenia ).

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, December 01, 2011

*****************************************

What can you possibly know about a country

if you have never tried to make a living there?

What can you possibly know about the human condition

if you have at no time been dependent

on the charity of swine?

For 25 years I had to produce pseudo-Saroyanesque trash

in order to make minimum wage.

The reason why I write as I do today is that

I have declared my financial independence

and, with it, to write as I please

without fear of retaliation.

I may not be a “good” Armenian

as defined by our Ottomanized, Sovietized, and Americanized

wheeler-dealers but I like to believe

I fully qualify as a born-again human being.

#

Friday, December 02, 2011

*****************************************

A lie is like a deadly virus.

Left unattended it will poison and kill its speaker

as well as his dupes,

families as well as communities,

tribes as well as nations,

empires as well as civilizations.

#

Saturday, December 03, 2011

*****************************************

After listening to the patriotic spiel

of a fellow passenger on a train,

Tolstoy is quoted as having said:

“As long as there are men like you

we will have wars and massacres.”

Likewise, as long as there are organized religions

we will have prejudice, intolerance,

and crimes against humanity.

*

The true enemies of God

are men who speak in His name.

*

Tolerance means not only to be open to new ideas,

including ideas that contradict our own,

but also to welcome and cherish them.

*

If we admit there is some truth in all belief systems,

we must also admit that truth is not in a single god

but in all gods; or, in Gandhi’s words:

“If God is Truth even atheists are believers

because they believe in God’s non-existence.”

*

God is either on no one’s side or on everybody’s side.

To say, like the Nazis, “God is with us,”

is not theology but pathology.

(For more on this subject,

see Toynbee’s STUDY OF HISTORY, volume x.)

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, December 04, 2011

*****************************************

CONTRADICTIONS

*******************************

Thomas Mann on creativity:

“By creation we understand

not making something out of nothing

but rather the kindling of spirit in matter.”

It must have been an extremely painful

and degrading experience for Mann

to realize that

a morally and intellectually inferior contemporary of his

could be superior to him in the business of kindling….”

*

Wars are fought in the name of certainties,

which may suggest that

(a) all certainties have contradictions, and

( all certainties may well be inventions of the devil.

*

Organized religions create an environment

in which voicing contradictions is called heresy,

and heresy is thought of as a capital offense

punishable by death or eternal hellfire.

*

What Marx said on politics applies to religions:

“Whatever class is in power

dictates the moral code which will support it

and keep it in existence.”

Some day when mankind awakens,

religions will be seen as collective nightmares.

#

Monday, December 05, 2011

*****************************************

POLITICS

*******************************

My morning paper informs me

Russians call their present rulers

“crooks and thieves.”

If our own rulers are also “crooks and thieves,”

I suspect they are a better class

of “crooks and thieves,”

and by better I don’t mean morally superior

but smarter – more greedy, ruthless and cunning.

I say this on the grounds that

as far as I know no one has ever dared

to accuse Armenians

of being dumber than Russians.

*

On the positive side:

I don’t know about you

but I am having a lot of fun

following the slow suicide of the Republican party

in the United States.

#

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

*****************************************

SHOP TALK

*******************************

On rereading the ten pages

that I wrote last night

in a burst of inspiration

I search in vain for the one or two lines

that may or may not be worth publishing.

*

When you preach to the converted

the temptation to believe in what you say

becomes irresistible.

*

Follow youR dream

until it turns into a nightmare –

as dreams have a tendency of doing.

*

Sometimes we get so involved

in defending ourselves that

we lose awareness of the damage

we inflict on our adversaries.

That’s one way to explain our genocide –

and please note,

to explain does not mean to justify.

#

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

*****************************************

NOTES AND COMMENTS

*******************************

We have had so much history rammed down our throats

that we haven't yet had a chance to digest it.

We are a nation suffering from chronic constipation.

*

My country right or wrong

and myself right or wrong

might as well be synonymous.

*

More often than not "I am right, you are wrong," means:

My self-interest or ego is more important than yours.

*

On the origin of the universe:

was it an accident?

was it by design?

was it designed to look like an accident?

Why?

Who benefits?

*

Armenians with their perennial demands

of Genocide recognition and territorial claims

are like sheep preaching vegetarianism

in a world run by wolves.

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, December 08, 2011

*****************************************

NOTES AND COMMENTS

*******************************

A good line once read is never forgotten.

It is my ambition in life to produce such a line.

Call me a megalomaniac.

*

In our environment agreement means

sharing the same bias.

*

When a man sees the light

he assume everyone else is blind.

*

I once met a born again

who thought I was a dead man walking.

*

Because I did not worship his God

he thught I worshipped the Devil.

*

Whenever I see the photo of an Armenian writer

in the company of a boss or bishop,

I can't help thinking,

"There goes the neighborhood."

*

To those who say I repeat myself:

Only if you insist on reading me –

for which many thanks!

#

Friday, December 09, 2011

*****************************************

NOTES AND COMMENTS

*******************************

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

I am informed this morning on the radio,

is the most widely translated document in the world;

also (my guess) the most ignored.

Has it been translated into Armenian, I wonder.

I am not casting aspersions;

only sharing my ignorance and need for answers.

*

Bias is universal.

Resistance to bias

a slowly and painfully acquired asset.

*

All nationalists are brought up to believe

they are all white and their enemies all black.

When in fact they are not even gray but brown --

the color of @#$%.

*

Crude, you say.

So is life.

We have no choice but to deal with it

on its own terms.

*

My parents survived the Turks.

I am now busy trying to survive my fellow Armenians.

#

Saturday, December 10, 2011

*****************************************

WE ARE THE 50%

*******************************

What we need is a revolution

and I don’t believe in revolutions.

At best we may get reforms

but if the past is an index

we have no reason for optimism.

*

Subtract the brown-nosers, the yes-men,

the hirelings, the brainwashed, the dupes,

the alienated and assimilated,

we may be closer to the 50%

rather than the 99%.

*

We are no longer at the mercy of our enemies

but of a far more invincible and insidious adversary:

our own leadership.

Our Wall Street is in the convolutions of our cortex.

*

The only way to describe our situation is to say that

we are committing slow-motion suicide

by self-inflicted ten thousand cuts.

In that sense one could even say that

Turks were more merciful than

our own bosses, bishops, and benefactors.

*

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, December 15, 2011

*****************************************

NOTES / COMMENTS

*******************************

The only time what you say offends no one

is when you say nothing.

*

In our environment the fools speak, shout, sing,

speechify and sermonize

and the wise are silent.

*

This year too I made several new friends

and twice as many enemies.

*

Armenian friends are a sometime thing,

but Armenian enemies, like diamonds, are forever.

*

Scientists claim they are very close

to discovering the “god particle”

that will explain what has been incomprehensible so far.

We may be almost there but no cigar.

*

When I was young and ambitious

I wanted to write “literature.”

All I hope to do now is produce an honest line.

#

Friday, December 16, 2011

*****************************************

TOLSTOY

*******************************

Reading a new biography of Tolstoy

is like visiting an old friend.

After cross-examining theologians of the Orthodox Church,

Tolstoy notes in his diary:

“The Church, from the present day

all the way back to the third century,

is one long series of lies, cruelty and deception.”

See TOLSTOY: A RUSSIAN LIFE

by Rosamund Bartlett (New York, 2011, page 278).

*

THE STORY OF THE WEEPING CAMEL

********************************************

That’s the title of a Mongolian film.

I enjoy foreign films because

they tell much more than a story;

they also show how the other half lives.

*

CLASS-WARFARE

***************************

When the 99% assert their right,

they call it class-warfare.

When the 1% get richer

they call them “job creators.”

Which raises the question:

If they are job-creators

why is it that the unemployment rate

hasen't been going down?

*

POLITICS

************************

If you want to know more about a political party,

speak to its opposition,

because everything a partisan says

will be contaminated by partisan propaganda.

#

Saturday, December 17, 2011

*****************************************

OF GOD & MEN

*******************************

We should be careful not to contaminate God

with human attributes or

to create God in our own image.

God does not have to exist in order to rule.

That’s the true meaning of being Almighty.

*

Money is power,

and power means manipulating the law,

and manipulating the law means

getting away with murder.

When they don’tlegitimize slaughter by declaring war,

the 1% suck the blood of the innocent and the weak.

Remember the Ottoman Empire

or any empire for that matter.

Not that nations are morally superior.

*

Where there is power,

there will also be abuse of power

and it makes no difference whether the man at the top

is a sultan or an imam or a pope

acting in the name of a merciful and compassionate Allah.

#