as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, July 20, 2006

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Dante is to Italians what Shakespeare is to the English, Cervantes to the Spaniards, and Goethe to the Germans, and like these writers he has had more than his share of biographers, the latest being Barbara Reynolds, who writes that in his INFERNO this celebrated Florentine portrayed his fellow Florentines “as thieves, usurers, sycophants and sodomites.” As far as I know, no Armenian writer has ever dared to say as much about his fellow Armenians. It is true that near the end of his life Zarian called them “cannibals” but he was speaking metaphorically.

*

Nina Berberova (1901-1993) was a prolific Russian writer of Armenian descent who like all wise Armenians (Henri Troyat comes to mind, also Arthur Adamov, and Shahan Shahnour in his Armen Lubin phase) kept a safe distance between herself and her fellow Armenians. The only time she discusses her Armenian ancestors is in her autobiography, THE ITALICS ARE MINE (available in English) where we learn that Goncharov modeled his most famous fictional character, Oblomov, on her great-grandfather. Many of her books (short stories, novels, essays, biographies) are available in a number of languages and continue to be translated today, the latest being MOURA: THE DANGEROUS LIFE OF THE BARONESS BUDBERG, a shadowy character who became notorious as a spy and as the mistress of, among others, Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells.

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I am willing to plead guilty to the charge that sometimes I tend to underestimate my fellow men, but only in the sense that I don’t underestimate them enough.

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Those who violate someone’s freedom of speech do so on the grounds that they know best what’s good for the people, which is what all criminal regimes say.

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Some of my Armenian critics belong to a school of thought that says, “If I cannot slaughter you, I shall do my utmost to massacre your self-esteem” – all in the name of Armenianism of course, that is to say, Ottomanism.

#

[Armen]

i am sure you have been successful in convincing yourself...but who else?

we in the diaspora are wealthy and we can afford democracy, but why is it that we have allowed ourselves to be ruled by crypto-fascist bosses, and fornicating bishops?

i don't believe a word you say.

i find Raffi's dictum that "treason and betrayal are in our blood," more convicing; and Zarian's verdict: "Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another."

also, Aghbalian's opinion: "Like Turks and Kurds, we are a tribal people."

if central american countries are known as "banana republics," i will not be surprised in the least if in some quarters we are identified as a shish-kebab republic....

 

"Treason and betrayal are in our blood", "Armenians survive by cannibalizing each other" ...

 

Majestic words. Only Armenians can hate their nation with such passion.

[sen_Vahan]

"Treason and betrayal are in our blood", "Armenians survive by cannibalizing each other" ...

 

Majestic words. Only Armenians can hate their nation with such passion.

 

 

Don't you agree with these sayings? I doubt Raffi hated Armenians, he wrote in Armenian, and for Armenians, and died an Armenian (because of hunger btw).

 

Vahan

[ED]

some people make such a statements to hide there shortcomings and misfortunes, it's almost a motto for them in life, after reading so much of this thread and what said about Armenians, and if it were true, then author of this thread is living up to its reputation.

 

And, if one is not perfect I expect a whole nation to have faults, normal reality!

Why single out Armenians? Having in mind author also mentions he is a citizen of the world first before an Armenian.

 

I would rephrase what said and say

 

“Some Armenians, Turks, Russians, Japanese, Chinese etc... survive by cannibalizing each other, and treason/betrayal exist in every Nation, including among Armenians”

[ara baliozian]

Friday, July 21, 2006

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Many years ago I remember to have read an old Mohammedan prayer that goes something like this: “O God, if I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; or if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.” Is it conceivable that as a non-practicing Catholic I know more Mohammedan prayers than the mullahs who promise 73 virgins to sex-starved gullible teenagers?

*

It is true that some of the most important questions will forever remain beyond our reach, but we must keep raising them all the same lest we come to terms with falsehoods.

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Born-again fanatics remind me of the Jewish proverb that says: “Men occasionally find a new truth, but never an old button” – the implication being that sometimes an old button may be worth more than any number of new truths.

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On more than one occasion I have been verbally abused by born-again readers. To them and to all ayatollahs and mullahs I would like to quote the following passage from Pascal: “The worship of truth without charity is idolatry.”

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“From good books I learn how to write; from bad books I learn how not to write,” I once read in an interview with a writer. One of our elder statesmen once said to me: “The problem with us is that we don’t have role models.” But where there are no positive role models, there will be negative ones, and from them we can learn how not to behave. In other words, if you are disposed to learn, you will learn; but if you are of the opposite disposition, you are destined to remain an ignoramus.

#

[ara baliozian]

some people make such a statements to hide there shortcomings and misfortunes, it's almost a motto for them in life, after reading so much of this thread and what said about Armenians, and if it were true, then author of this thread is living up to its reputation.

 

And, if one is not perfect I expect a whole nation to have faults, normal reality!

Why single out Armenians? Having in mind author also mentions he is a citizen of the world first before an Armenian.

 

I would rephrase what said and say

 

“Some Armenians, Turks, Russians, Japanese, Chinese etc... survive by cannibalizing each other, and treason/betrayal exist in every Nation, including among Armenians”

 

i challenge anyone here to mention a single nation that has been through what we have been through -- countless military defeats, centuries of subservience to alien tyrannies, a long series of massacres, divisiveness, corruption, incompetence, fragmentation, exile, cooperation with the likes of sultans and stalin, earthquakes, civil war, starvation, slum-life...i could go on...the only people who are worse off than we are have been buried or are tribal like the kurds and gypsies.../ara

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, July 22, 2006

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ON OUR HISTORY, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY

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If you want to understand the history of your people and the cultural forces that went into shaping your identity, forget everything you were taught as a child. I would say this not only to Armenian boys and girls but also to boys and girls of all nations.

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Individuals may learn to be honest and objective, but not nations, perhaps because there is more fiction than fact in the concepts of nationality and nationhood.

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Almost everyone who identifies himself as an Armenian today or, for that matter, as a Greek, Turk, Russian, Jew, or Palestinian, comes with a political and ideological baggage that is incompatible with objectivity. Take away objectivity from history and the result is bound to be propaganda.

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The history of Armenia and the history of the Armenian people, moreover, are not one and the same. Until the Communist takeover the two centers of Armenian cultural life were Istanbul and Tiflis, not Yerevan, which was only a small single-factory town of no importance.

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Even more to the point: Armenians played a much more prominent role in the Byzantine Empire than in Armenia, and more often than not they adopted an anti-Armenian foreign policy; that is to say, they were more loyal to the Greek Empire than to the Armenian nation. This pattern of conduct followed within the Ottoman Empire and more recently within the USSR.

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, July 23, 2006

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“My son is an avid reader,” the letter says, “and he loves to write. I enclose one of his stories. Do you think I should encourage him to be a writer?”

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I have committed many blunders in my life and I plead guilty to many more transgressions, except that of encouraging others to follow in my footsteps. Literature is neither a job nor a career. Literature is a destiny, and in our context, a curse. You don’t choose it. It chooses you. If you think you have a choice, avoid it by all means. There is more dignity in being a plumber than a writer. Society needs plumbers, lawyers, cops, nurses, bus drivers, and garbage collectors. Have you ever heard anyone say he needs a new writer? Have you ever met anyone who has read all of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, or Shakespeare and Mann? There are already many more unread books and writers than read ones.

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It has been said that one of the functions of literature is to make order out of chaos. Myths, ideologies, and religions pretend to do that and the result is around us. A phony order cannot tame a real chaos. The law of the jungle is no law. What’s the alternative? Whatever it is, it should not be belief in falsehoods, illusions, lies, and misrepresentations, that is to say, propaganda.

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, July 24, 2006

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DEFINING FREEDOM

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Freedom does not mean to do this, that, or the other. Ants are free to move in all directions on the sidewalk but as long as they cannot support the passing of a law that prohibits men from stepping on them they cannot be said to be free.

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Freedom means participation in power. Freedom means to do what must be done and what needs to be done. The powerless are not and cannot be free. To be a voice in the wilderness is not free speech. To make or not to make a financial contribution to this or that cause is not freedom. To say our Sovietized leaders in the Homeland will see the light, reform and do the right thing in two or three generations is to accept subservience as an inevitable fact of life, which is exactly what we were brainwashed to think under the Ottomans and more recently under the Soviets.

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Under the Soviets our pundits in the Homeland were led to believe writing against the evils of capitalism and bourgeois nationalism (i.e. Tashnaks) was exercising their free speech. Our pundits in the Diaspora today are convinced they are exercising their free speech if they write against the Turks. But that’s not free speech; that’s not even writing. It’s more akin to an exercise in masochism, lamentation, regurgitated propaganda, and mental masturbation.

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Some of my readers don’t trust my judgment because they prefer to trust the judgment of their schoolteachers or nationalist historians, all of whom come with a political or ideological baggage, and they are as objective in their judgments and as trustworthy as their Turkish counterparts.

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We confront today a veritable encyclopedia of problems. The only reason our pundits focus on a single entry under the letter “G” is that the roots of all the other problems from A to Z may have to be traced on the incompetence and corruption of our own leadership, and that makes them taboo subjects of discussion and analysis.

#

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

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Ignorance I am willing to forgive because I was ignorant most of my life and I still am of many things. Arrogance I also understand because I too used to take it for granted that I occupied a central position in the universe. What I find unbearable is a combination of both in white trash parading as members of a political elite qualified to be leaders of men.

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I am not in the least surprised to read the following passage in Antonina Vallentin: “A student of psychiatry found that politics offered a larger field of observation than any clinic for mental disease.”

*

“Israel cannot bomb its way to peace in the Mideast.” Thus reads the headline of a commentary in our local paper today. Its author, a Muslim pundit by the name of Mohamed Elmasry, who no doubt operates on the assumption that he is fully qualified to enlighten infidels by recycling Muslim propaganda. I should like to see pundits like him write commentaries with headlines to the effect that Muslims cannot terrorize their way into reviving their Medieval Empire.

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Why write if you cannot say the unsaid?

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The aim of all power structures is the systematic moronization of the masses.

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It is easier for a child to uproot a sequoia than for a thousand wise men to uproot a prejudice.

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Prejudices are popular because they support a worldview that combines self-interest with self-sacrifice – the self-interest of the few and the self-sacrifice of the many.

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Why pretend to be smarter than you are if in the process you make yourself vulnerable to the charge of dishonesty? No one expects you to be smarter than you are; but everyone expects you to be honest.

#

[ara baliozian]

#

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

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LESSONS

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Roland Barthes: “The function of a writer is to purify things of the unwarranted meanings which men ceaselessly deposit upon them.”

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When someone tells me what I was told as a child, I feel justified in suspecting that he has not done much thinking for himself because he is too infatuated with his own infallibility.

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The only thing we have learned from being the first nation to convert to Christianity is to brag about it.

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The only thing we have learned from our genocide is to produce, support, and promote genocide pundits who write books and commentaries demanding an apology and reparations from the perpetrators -- the implication being, all our major problems are in the past, we are now in good hands, and we have nothing to worry about because we never had it so good.

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The only thing we have learned from our blunders is to say we are no different from the rest of mankind.

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There is no merit in being like everyone else. Neither is there any merit in allowing ourselves to be victimized. As for bragging about our conversion to Christianity: we ought to know by now that to convert to Christianity is easy; what’s hard is being good Christians. Which leads me to conclude that since we have nothing to brag about we brag about nothing.

*

Speaking about our blunders: perhaps one of the greatest is the systematic moronization of the masses by our sermonizers, speechifiers, and pundits.

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, July 27, 2006

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WHAT I KNOW ABOUT FASCISTS

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Under fascism to call a spade a spade and to suggest that two plus two make four may be construed as dissent, that is to say, a capital offense.

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Under fascism the only way to play it safe is to say what they want to hear and to pretend they know better what’s good for you even if they know nothing about you and they care even less.

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Fascists will identify you as an enemy not because you are wrong and they are right, but because you dared to disagree with them.

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Under fascism if you refuse to be systematically moronized you will be called an enemy of the people by enemies of the nation.

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Fascists preach patriotism, practice the destruction of the nation, after which they blame the rest of mankind.

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And now a question: knowing what I know about fascists, if you had a choice between living in a fascist Armenia and a democratic Turkey, where would you live?

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I am willing to concede that people like me improve nothing. But sometimes I am tempted to believe that they may make a tiny -- even if tiny to the point of being invisible -- contribution towards preventing things from getting worse.

#

[ara baliozian]

Friday, July 28, 2006

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If I were to name the three most incomprehensible things in the world they would be (one) why things exist; (two) why propaganda works; and (three) why do we obstinately refuse to see any inconsistency in preaching Armenianism and practicing Ottomanism.

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A systematically moronized generation will moronized the next generation with a clear conscience and total unawareness of what it is doing.

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Russian proverb: “Right is on the side of those who have more rights.”

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Extremism: a frequently used word these days and to me one of the most annoying, not only for what it stands, which is repulsive enough, but also for what it looks like – excrementalism.

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“Consciousness cannot go through the same state twice,” Bergson tells us. It follows, to say “I haven’t changed my mind” is to admit that I am not in the habit of allowing my consciousness to make a contribution to my thinking, which is a contradiction because objective judgment and logic are operations of the conscious mind.

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“Loving a human being amounts to killing all others,” Camus writes in his NOTEBOOKS. Patriotism may not amount in killing or hating all other nations, but it makes us less receptive to their humanity.

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An Armenian who dares to think for himself will make many enemies and very few friends. The same could be said of Turks and in general of all people who view tolerance as a state of mind that may lead to treason.

#

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, July 29, 2006

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Saroyan once said that he felt sorry for the Turks. For a long time I couldn’t understand that. But I do now. Saroyan could have added that he felt sorrier for his fellow Armenians for their lack of awareness, for what they have become, and for the way they treat one another.

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A Turk once said to me, “What about the innocent Turks massacred by the Armenians?” In my reply I said that I have always been on the side of victims and against victimizers regardless of race, color, and creed.

*

I feel sorry for the Palestinians today, but I feel sorrier for the Jews. If the Palestinian have known oppression for fifty years, the Jews have known it for five thousand years. When I speak of Palestinians I don’t have in mind their “freedom fighters” or “terrorists,” but the innocent civilians who are double victims – victims of Israelis as well as their incompetent and corrupt leadership; and I have every reason to believe that Palestinians will be better off in a democratic Israel than in their own theocracy.

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In Chekhov’s NOTEBOOKS we read: “Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.” That indeed is the true tragedy of all defeated and massacred people – the emphasis on hatred in their collective existence and the absence of friendship, respect, and ultimately common sense and decency.

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Elsewhere, Chekhov writes: “It is better to be the victim than the executioner.” There you have another reason why Saroyan felt sorry for the Turks.

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It has been said that only the very wise and the very stupid don’t change. No matter how hard I try I see very little wisdom in our past blunders and present conduct. You may now draw your own conclusions.

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I am not a man of faith and I have every reason to suspect that organized religions have done more harm than good. And yet (the two saddest words in the English language, it has been said), and yet, sometimes I feel an irresistible urge to go down on my knees and pray: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven…”

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, July 31, 2006

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My intention is not to promote friendship between Turks and Armenians – I am neither a miracle worker nor a megalomaniac. My daydream, which is 99% illusion and 1% hope, is to promote friendship between Armenian and Armenian. But so far all I have succeeded in doing is provoking contempt, ridicule, sarcasm, intolerance, and insults.

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“If you describe someone’s conduct,” Sartre tells us, “you expose him to himself – he becomes visible to himself.” Unless of course he is blind and deaf.

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Speaking of dumb and deaf: we have been so catastrophically wrong so often that our aim should no longer be doing the right thing but avoiding apocalyptic blunders.

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Whenever I refer to ourselves as perennial losers, I am reminded of our victory in Karabagh. Consider the Israelis who have won five wars against the Arabs, and so far all they have succeeded in doing is plant the seeds of future conflicts.

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Since they bowed their heads and resigned to their status as underdogs for five thousand years, the Jews find it difficult to understand why Palestinians don’t follow their example. Like the Jews, we too bowed our heads to a long line of conquerors. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the Azeris will do likewise. Now then, go ahead and brag about our victory in Karabagh.

*

Projection is a misleading tool of understanding because it fails to take into consideration the otherness of others.

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Life advances on an infinite number of lines some of which are invisible to the eye of our awareness. To say “I never had it so good” is to make yourself vulnerable to the sudden and unpredictable blows of fate; or as the old saying has it: “When the house is finished, death enters.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

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It is incorrect to say that Einstein proved Newton wrong, or Jung exposed Freud’s fallacies. Newton and Freud explained one fraction of reality, Einstein and Jung another. To understand all of reality is to read the mind of god, which amount to saying to be gods. It will never happen.

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André Gide: “If you want to understand something you must begin by loving it, after which you must distance yourself from it. This applies to countries, to people, and to oneself.” The trouble with most people is that they find it very difficult to distance themselves from what they love or from what they believe, that is to say, themselves.

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“Some people,” writes Paul Valéry, “kill themselves because they don’t know when to let go of their umbrella.” Or, because they are too obstinate in their refusal to distance themselves from an insignificant object, they allow themselves to be run over by a bus.

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If you believe what your government tells you, it may be because it flatters your ego even if in the process it makes of you a certified dupe.

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The first and most important priority of all power structures is to maintain and whenever possible to increase their power. Everything they say, and even more important, everything they don’t say or everything they cover up, is adjusted to that project and nothing else. What they say may be true, but what they avoid saying may be even more true. There is only one way to avoid being a dupe, or being systematically moronized, and that is by not believing anything that someone in power tells you; and when a layman, who is not a member of an organization, tells you something, ask him where he heard it from.

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What I said above applies not only to political but also to religious leaders. I once met a smart Armenian “khaliji” (rug merchant -- I use the Turkish word because that’s how he liked to identify himself) who dismissed the Pope as “a biscuit eater” but who was convinced that his bishop was a saint.

*

Speaking of smart khalijis and saintly bishops: according to Darwin, it is the most highly developed organisms that are least adaptable. This may explain why it is the elites of nations or our “betters” that eventually lead the nation to destruction, and they do this because they are so infatuated with their own privileges based on lies and half-truths that they refuse to adapt themselves to new truths or reality. Their gods are not gods but idols; and they lead their subjects to the slaughterhouse because they refuse to let go of their umbrella.

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And now, let us go down on our knees and pray: “Our Father Who art in Heaven, give us humility and strength – the humility to admit that as wretched human beings we cannot read Your mind, and the strength to value your most precious gift to us, our life, above that of a lousy umbrella.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

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Honest Armenians don’t brag. They know better. Like all human beings we no doubt have our share of good qualities; but my guess is, the negatives in us far outnumber the positives, and this is especially true of our sermonizers and speechifiers who parade as role models and leaders. The only thing these charlatans have succeeded in doing so far is to teach us to brag, and to brag even about what others have done to us, such as being the first nation to experience genocide in the 20th Century.

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When we discuss writers like Baronian, Odian, and Massikian, we treat them as humorists and not as objective observers and competent analysts of our character and ethos. As for writers widely recognized as nationalists and patriots: it is in their correspondence with close friends and diaries, only a small of which has been published so far, that they reveal their true sentiments and thoughts about their fellow Armenians – see above all Varoujan’s correspondence and Zarian’s notebooks, both published posthumously in Yerevan.

*

The only place Armenians are portrayed as loveable characters are in Saroyan’s fiction. In biographies of Saroyan even Saroyan himself emerges as a nasty piece of business who hated his own children. As for his relatives and friends: none of them may be remotely described as Saroyanesque.

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If you want to meet real unSaroyanized Armenians, ignore their holier-than-thou pundits, folk dances, and cuisine; visit instead any Armenian discussion forum on the Internet.

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Balzac: “Customs and traditions are a nation’s hypocrisy.”

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Baudelaire: “Life is a disease. This is a widely known secret.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, August 03, 2006

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We all like to bend reality in our favor, but reality being much older and “cunning” (Hegel) than us, has its own ideas. Had he lived long enough to witness Stalinism, Marx would have been the most disappointed man on earth. It is said of Elias Canetti that he was disappointed to realize that his book, CROWDS AND POWER, failed to prevent a single war. And think of Napoleon spending his last years in exile in a rat-infested villa on the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic and at the mercy of a sadistic English governor. And then there is Einstein: when he learned he had helped invent the atom bomb, he is quoted as having said, “If only I had known, I should have become a plumber.”

*

We like to portray ourselves as innocent victims of Turkish atrocities, but in our relations with one another our first priority seems to be to verbally abuse, humiliate and insult anyone who dares to disagree with us, and we do this without any sense of guilt or doubt as if we were on a mission from god. I shiver to think what may happen to the rest of the world on the day and by some satanic miracle we become an imperial power.

*

To be able to smile once a day is worth a small fortune.

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The decency of a people can be judged by the way they treat their pets and poets.

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The encounter of the ruthless with the inept: our history in a nutshell.

#

[sen_Vahan]

Dear Ara,

 

I would like to know your opinion about the assassination of JFK, more specifically, how do you think in an open and democratic society like the one in America, the public just lets it go? As I wrote in the topic I opened, recent statistics shows that 70 % of the Americans believe in conspiracy behind JFK's murder, however in more than 40 years the true reasons are not yet revealed. Taking into account the large number of people involved in Kennedy's case, who were killed and died in unusual conditions and circumstances, one finds it hard to believe that Oswald was simply acting on his own.

 

Thanks,

Vahan

[ara baliozian]

Friday, August 04, 2006

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Is friendship between Armenians and Turks possible? I am not sure. Some day in the distant future we may be able to bury the hatchet, but I suspect we will never forget where we buried it.

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To say all our misfortunes are due to our geography is to imply that Armenia is a good place to die.

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Never argue with a man whose most powerful argument is his bad breath.

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The certainty of being right is what’s wrong with most people. All crimes against humanity begin with the conviction on the part of the perpetrators that they are right and their victims wrong.

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As a rule, fanatics who say God is on their side are not in the habit of wasting any time worrying whether or not they are on His.

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The more ignorant they are, the more patriotic they pretend to be, as if to say, “We may know less, but we love the flag more.”

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A small group of thoughtful, committed men can change the world; but an even smaller group of thoughtless fanatics can destroy it.

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Dying is easy. Writing for Armenians is hard.

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There is more truth in the advertisements of our partisan weeklies than in their commentaries and editorials, and I have never even been remotely tempted to buy anything they advertise.

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As children we are brought up to trust our fellow Armenians and to suspect odars. As adults we learn to trust crooked odars more than honest Armenians.

#

[ara baliozian]

Dear Ara,

 

I would like to know your opinion about the assassination of JFK, more specifically, how do you think in an open and democratic society like the one in America, the public just lets it go? As I wrote in the topic I opened, recent statistics shows that 70 % of the Americans believe in conspiracy behind JFK's murder, however in more than 40 years the true reasons are not yet revealed. Taking into account the large number of people involved in Kennedy's case, who were killed and died in unusual conditions and circumstances, one finds it hard to believe that Oswald was simply acting on his own.

 

Thanks,

Vahan

 

dear Vahan:

i am familiar with some of the conspiracy theorists surrounding JFK's assassination.

but may i confess that i find the men of the Warren Commission much more trustworthy.

as for what really happened: i am willing to concede that we may never know. / ara

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, August 05, 2006

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Nothing gives me more pleasure than to be contradicted by someone who makes sense – I may learn something. And nothing annoys me more than to be contradicted by someone who recycles the kind of nonsense I was taught as a child.

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Unanimity is easily achieved among moral morons and mental midgets.

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“Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Armenian translation: Scream at the top of your lungs and carry a toothpick.

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Hating is easy – any child can hate. What’s difficult is understanding.

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We begin to think only on the day we learn to think against ourselves.

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Our partisan weeklies print 99% anti-Turkish propaganda and 1% nonsense and they tell me I am consistently negative. In their eyes all talk of Turks, massacres, hatred and intolerance is positive, understanding and truth negative.

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I chose Armenian literature for the same reason that some people choose suicide.

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Because the dead cannot speak, our “betters” say, “We did what’s best for the people.”

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Never trust the judgment of a nation whose perennial best sellers are cookbooks.

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, August 07, 2006

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It has been said, “Academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are small.”

Corollary I: The smaller the stakes, the more vicious the arguments.” Corollary II: When nonentities disagree on nothing, the result is bound to be verbal massacre.

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In our controversies we are like Oscar Wilde’s foxhunters: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”

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“Why do you always find fault with us?” a reader demands to know. “Why are you afraid to criticize odars?” Odars interest me only in so far as they make visible that which we pretend not to see in us. And before I undertake the daunting task of collecting the garbage on Main Street, I like to clean up the mess in my own backyard.

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Let others preach hatred of the Turk; I prefer to get busy recognizing the Turk within me.

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The answer to conventional wisdom is not unconventional stupidity.

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It is in their efforts to appear deep that the shallow expose their lack of depth.

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Even the most ruthless dictator depends on the subservience of the majority, provided of course the majority remains unaware of this.

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My experience with Levantines is that, they think they are ahead of you if they are better at making money. Nothing runs deeper than the contempt of the merchant for the poet. One of our national benefactors is quoted as having said to one of our poets: “I hire and fire people like you every day.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

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DIALOGUE, ARMENIAN STYLE

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When an Armenian disagrees with you he is not satisfied with a simple counterargument; he also feels the need to let you know that he wouldn’t mind tearing off a piece of flesh from your body. Hence, Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”

*

Let others brag about Armenians being the first nation to convert to Christianity. I prefer to deal with facts even when – especially when – they happen to be against us. Because then and only then may we learn to deal with reality as opposed to voicing chauvinist crapola and recycling such nonsense as “it may take two or three generations for our problems to be solved.”

*

Armenians excel in a certain and rare type of counterargument whose true intent is not to contradict but to be a carcinogenic agent.

*

All pro-Palestinian arguments recycle mullah propaganda whose most irrefutable tenet is the reward of 78 virgins.

*

I trust our televangelists more than their mullahs if only because even the most crooked televangelist – and there have been quite a few of them – has never dared to go as far promising a single virgin to sex-starved teenagers.

*

A self-ASSessed Armenian genius will voice the argument of a certified mongoloid moron and see nothing inconsistent in it.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

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DIALOGUE, ARMENIAN STYLE

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When an Armenian disagrees with you he is not satisfied with a simple counterargument; he also feels the need to let you know that he wouldn’t mind tearing off a piece of flesh from your body. Hence, Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”

*

Let others brag about Armenians being the first nation to convert to Christianity. I prefer to deal with facts even when – especially when – they happen to be against us. Because then and only then may we learn to deal with reality as opposed to voicing chauvinist crapola and recycling such nonsense as “it may take two or three generations for our problems to be solved.”

*

Armenians excel in a certain and rare type of counterargument whose true intent is not to contradict but to be a carcinogenic agent.

*

All pro-Palestinian arguments recycle mullah propaganda whose most irrefutable tenet is the reward of 78 virgins.

*

I trust our televangelists more than their mullahs if only because even the most crooked televangelist – and there have been quite a few of them – has never dared to go as far promising a single virgin to sex-starved teenagers.

*

A self-ASSessed Armenian genius will voice the argument of a certified mongoloid moron and see nothing inconsistent in it.

#