as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Monday, November 13, 2006

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RIDDLES WITHIN

MYSTERIES

WITHIN ENIGMAS

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Unlike Christians, who believe in three gods (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), Muslims are convinced theirs is a better religion because they believe in only one God. It seems they find the concept of Trinity incomprehensible. So do I. So do most Christians. Which is why they call it a mystery. Religions call their contradictions mysteries.

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Father and Son I understand. What I don’t understand is the necessity of the Holy Spirit (also called, until very recently, Holy Ghost), the Gray Eminence of the Triumvirate. If Almighty God is at the top of the food chain, why does He need an assistant or a VP? As a Christian I never thought I believed in three gods, perhaps because I was told otherwise. It’s astonishing the degree of trust we place in our elders. What is even more astonishing is our lack of awareness of contradictions within us.

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To prove they are good Muslims, some Muslims don’t see anything wrong in behaving like bad Christians, and vice versa. And consider the case of the Armenian who in his effort to prove he is a good or even a better Armenian sees nothing remotely questionable in behaving like a hoodlum or a bad Turk. This to me is as incomprehensible as God or the concept of the Trinity.

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To understand man, psychologists have come up with many contradictory theories and explanations. To understand God, theologians have done the same, probably because the need to understand and explain is as strong in us as the instinct to survive in animals. But unlike animals, in order to survive we are willing not only to kill, but also to die; and to cover up that contradiction, to invent such noble-sounding concepts as heroism, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, and patriotism.

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To explain the concepts of good and evil, an African tribal chieftain is quoted as having said to C.G. Jung: “If I steal my enemy’s wives, it’s good. If he steals mine it’s bad.” We fool ourselves, or we allow our sermonizers and speechifiers to fool us (which is worse), if we think our motives are more civilized or noble.

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After witnessing a horrible crime in his own neighborhood, a Canadian is quoted as having said in today’s paper: “You read about all this negative stuff coming from the Middle East, but guess what, there is a lot of negative stuff happening in Canada that is unspeakable!” To which I can only say, “So what else is new?”

#

[Takoush]

Monday, November 13, 2006

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RIDDLES WITHIN

MYSTERIES

WITHIN ENIGMAS

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Unlike Christians, who believe in three gods (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), Muslims are convinced theirs is a better religion because they believe in only one God. It seems they find the concept of Trinity incomprehensible. So do I. So do most Christians. Which is why they call it a mystery. Religions call their contradictions mysteries.

*

Father and Son I understand. What I don’t understand is the necessity of the Holy Spirit (also called, until very recently, Holy Ghost), the Gray Eminence of the Triumvirate. If Almighty God is at the top of the food chain, why does He need an assistant or a VP? As a Christian I never thought I believed in three gods, perhaps because I was told otherwise. It’s astonishing the degree of trust we place in our elders. What is even more astonishing is our lack of awareness of contradictions within us.

*

To prove they are good Muslims, some Muslims don’t see anything wrong in behaving like bad Christians, and vice versa. And consider the case of the Armenian who in his effort to prove he is a good or even a better Armenian sees nothing remotely questionable in behaving like a hoodlum or a bad Turk. This to me is as incomprehensible as God or the concept of the Trinity.

*

To understand man, psychologists have come up with many contradictory theories and explanations. To understand God, theologians have done the same, probably because the need to understand and explain is as strong in us as the instinct to survive in animals. But unlike animals, in order to survive we are willing not only to kill, but also to die; and to cover up that contradiction, to invent such noble-sounding concepts as heroism, self-sacrifice, martyrdom, and patriotism.

*

To explain the concepts of good and evil, an African tribal chieftain is quoted as having said to C.G. Jung: “If I steal my enemy’s wives, it’s good. If he steals mine it’s bad.” We fool ourselves, or we allow our sermonizers and speechifiers to fool us (which is worse), if we think our motives are more civilized or noble.

*

After witnessing a horrible crime in his own neighborhood, a Canadian is quoted as having said in today’s paper: “You read about all this negative stuff coming from the Middle East, but guess what, there is a lot of negative stuff happening in Canada that is unspeakable!” To which I can only say, “So what else is new?”

#

 

Ara, the Holy Ghost is what Jesus and or God have given us to go to after the death of Christ, who went on the cross for our sins to save us from the hellish fires and "in whomever believes and accepts Christ and God will go to heaven" as it is said in the Bible. The Holy Ghost is who we turn to in the absence of the Son Jesus when He is no longer an emobodiment to go to as He was on earth with us when he was alive.

 

The Holy Ghost is therefore the one to pray to in the absence of Christ. But God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost are one.

Edited November 14, 2006 by Anahid Takouhi

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

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IS HONESTY ANTI-ARMENIAN?

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Somewhere along the line it seems we as a nation decided that it is. That once upon a time we valued honesty there is no doubt. Think of our folks songs, think of our liturgical music, think above all of our architecture, and I don’t mean the derivative neo-Hellenic style but that of our small, humble, severe churches, shorn of all ornamentation, whose impact is as straight as an arrow.

What happened to our composers, architects, and our creative impetus in general? The answer must be obvious: we concentrated all our efforts on entertaining and pleasing our masters. We were Romanized, Arabized, Ottomanized, and Sovietized. Sinan and Balian became more Ottoman than Turks. The onlyArmenian feature in Khachaturian is his reliance on Caucasian (which doesn’t mean Armenian only) folk tunes; his orchestration is more Russian (Tchaikovsky) and French (Ravel).

Saroyan’s characters may be of Armenian descent but their aim is not to express the Armenian voki but to amuse the average American reader. When a critic of TIME magazine said something to the effect that Michael (PASSAGE TO ARARAT) Arlen’s Armenians and Saroyan fictional characters shared very little in common and that Saroyan’s Armenians were less authentic, Saroyan wrote an angry letter to the editor saying he had at no time distorted his fellow countrymen, only “stylized” them. Stylized them to what end, except perhaps to make them more accessible to his non-Armenian readers. This is not what Shakespeare does with his characters. This is not what great writers do in their fiction.

What do Odian’s fictional Armenians share in common with Saroyan’s? Absolutely nothing. Saroyan’s characters are cute, colorful, harmless. Odian’s are the exact opposite – mean, narrow, full of piss, vinegar and venom. Saroyan’s Armenians have been Americanized, Odian’s Ottomanized.

Had we presented a united front against our enemies and maintained our independence, we would now be bragging about our own Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, not to say, Dante, Dickens, and Dostoevsky…instead of Gulbenkian (who was Sultan Abdulhamid’s hireling) and Mikoyan (Stalin’s flunkey).

#

[ara baliozian]

Ara, the Holy Ghost is what Jesus and or God have given us to go to after the death of Christ, who went on the cross for our sins to save us from the hellish fires and "in whomever believes and accepts Christ and God will go to heaven" as it is said in the Bible. The Holy Ghost is who we turn to in the absence of the Son Jesus when He is no longer an emobodiment to go to as He was on earth with us when he was alive.

 

The Holy Ghost is therefore the one to pray to in the absence of Christ. But God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost are one.

 

there is a story about a theologian who after writing a huge tome, took the manuscript to the Pope and said: "Holy Father, i have finally solved the mystery of the Trinity, and here it is, in this very manuscript." Whereupon without reading a single word, the Pope said: "Burn it!" / ara

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

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ASSESSING AN ASS

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Whenever people assess themselves they tend to emphasize the positive and cover up the negative, and after they fool themselves, they think they have been successful in fooling others.

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What is flattery? To say to a second-rater that he is first rate. To flatter someone means to imply that he is so bad that he needs to be propped up by lies.

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Sometimes asking questions is more important than answering them. But if you ask the wrong questions, don’t expect to get the right answers.

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The most effective way to expose a liar is by speaking the truth, not by speaking bigger lies.

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To my critics I say, even literary giants like Thomas Mann and Solzhenitsyn were powerless against the likes of Hitler and Stalin. If you are a competent judge and I am what you say I am – a minor scribbler – what’s the harm in what I have been doing? Unless you assess your fellow Armenians to be such gullible dupes that they will be taken in even by a mental masturbator.

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 16, 2006

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REPEATING,

REITERATING,

RECAPITULATING

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Yeghishe (410-470): “If a nation is ruled by two kings, both the kings and the nation will perish.”

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A divided nation condemns itself to slow-motion genocide.

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Raffi (1835-1888): “An Armenian’s worst enemies are not odars but Armenians.”

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In an anti-intellectual environment even an inbred moron will think he is smarter than a “mental masturbator.”

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Raffi: “Armenians have no future in Turkey.”

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To be a prophet, all you need is to use your common sense and to read the writing on the wall.

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Raffi: “A people that does not like to read cannot be educated.”

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Even the mightiest empire can be victimized by the weakest of nations if the empire is divided and the nation united.

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Raffi: “Sad is our past, and what is our present if not an extension of that past?”

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Better to repeat an old truth than to invent new lies.

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Raffi: “We are like sheep without a shepherd.”

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A nation whose victims outnumber its survivors should not brag about its genius for survival.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, November 17, 2006

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ON THE SPIRIT OF CONTRADICTION

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The ambition of every underdog is to be a top dog, and the ambition of every fool is to be smart by pretending to know better -- to say in effect: “I may not be as big as you, but mine is bigger than yours.”

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If I hold a mirror up to you and you don’t like what you see, am I to blame?

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Some of our benefactors think of wealth as a blessing from above. They are not satisfied with being experts on how to make money; they also like to parade as makers of cultural policy and role models of ethical conduct. But they are no better than damn idiots if they think they can bribe the Good Lord by building churches.

*

Our political bosses are not satisfied with being “of no political use to us” (Zarian); they too compound the felony by making cultural policy. Hence, our unspeakable mediocrity in all fields of artistic endeavor. The very few who have achieved a modicum of success have been alienated outsiders.

*

I respect anyone who knows better, but my contempt for those who pretend to know better is without bounds. If I were a dictator I would go as far as declaring them guilty of a capital offense.

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“Truth is a language that if not spoken is forgotten.”

I did not say that, Hagop Baronian did.

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“The miracle is not that we survived our enemies; the real miracle is that we survived our leadership.”

I said that.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, November 18, 2006

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QUESTION

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If the Turks behaved like wolves and we had no choice but to behave like sheep, where the hell were our shepherds?

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THREE STAGES

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An exchange of insults cannot be an exchange of views.

Where there is no exchange of views. There will be no vision.

And where there is no vision, the blind will lead the blind and both shall fall into the ditch.

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BORN AGAIN

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When asked if as good Christians Armenians should love Turks, an 80-year old born-again Armenian replied: “Armenians hate one another, and you expect them to love Turks?”

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OUR PROBLEM

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After calling me an “intellectual” and identifying me as a “mental masturbator” and a “scumbag,” some of my readers demand that I solve our problems. It doesn’t even occur to them that they may well be our most serious problem.

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SAROYAN AND TURKS

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Saroyan felt sorry for Turks because by committing and denying the Genocide, they were committing moral suicide. What if, by adopting a Turcocentric view of life and making hatred our central concern, we too are committing collective moral suicide, or genocide by other means?

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MEMO TO MY CRITICS

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Don’t take everything I say personally, please! I assure you I have nothing against underdogs, victims, and dupes. I am after bigger game: namely, those who brainwashed you and are now engaged in brainwashing the next generation. There is another reason why I have nothing against you personally. When I was your age I too was a loudmouth smart-ass who made a nuisance of himself. In today’s jargon, I know where you are coming from. It’s a stage in life that we all go through. It can’t last. Life being the most skilled teacher, it will not allow it to last.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, November 19, 2006

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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian philosopher and dissident: “There are those who lament and others who curse. But no one, or very few, ask themselves, had I lived up to my responsibility as a citizen, had I done what I should have done, maybe what happened wouldn’t have happened.”

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When Orhan Pamuk mentioned the Armenian genocide in a recent interview, he was not being “a good Turk,” as defined by the regime in Ankara, but an honest man. And when we blame all our misfortunes on others, including the Good Lord (“we are what God made us”) we speak not as honest men in full possession of our faculties but as dupes of nationalist leaders whose first and most important concern is not to serve the people but to project the image of competent statesmen.

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And speaking of competence: It makes no difference how competent a right-wing (conservative) or left-wing (liberal) critic is, he will convince only his partisans. The same could be said about an Armenian or Turkish critic.

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What matters about a critic is not his love of country, or his commitment to this or that ideology or school of thought, but his honesty and objectivity. A critic without honesty and objectivity is not and cannot be a critic, only a propagandist.

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My analysis of the Armenian psyche is based on a close reading of our writers, beginning with Gregory of Narek (who at one point in his LAMENTATION identifies himself as “an abusive contradicter”), personal observations and encounters, and last but far from least, self-analysis. If I call some of my readers dupes, fanatics, and hoodlums it’s because I was all of these things. I at no time have said anything about my fellow Armenians that I am not prepared to say about myself. And when our dupes and hoodlums assume a morally superior stance and look down at me as a lesser man or a bad Armenian, I have every reason to suspect they fool no one, not even themselves. Hence, their faceless, nameless cowardly anonymity.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, November 20, 2006

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Daniel Varoujan (1884-1915), Armenian poet and Genocide victim: “What’s the use of acquiring knowledge and developing one’s esthetic judgment in a world run by ignorant scum?”

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Anonymous (dates unknown), one of the greatest and most prolific thinkers of all time, very probably of Armenian descent: “In troubled waters, the scum rises to the top.”

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Insulting Turkishness is against the law in Turkey today. Nothing new in that. Because in one of his letters Solzhenitsyn made a derogatory remark about Stalin, he was bundled off to Siberia. I assume there were corresponding laws under Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Franco, and Genghis Khan.

*

What is considered an insult in Turkey? Mentioning the Armenian genocide for one, thus implying that the founders of the Turkish Republic may have been war criminal.

We are lucky; we don’t have a law against insulting Armenianism. That doesn’t mean, however, that if you dare to mention our scumbags (of which we have our share) you won’t be called a scumbag by loudmouth gutless, faceless, nameless. anonymous scumbags.

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If Baronian and Odian were alive today and wrote with the same degree of honesty about our bosses, bishops, and benefactors as they did at the turn of the last century, not only they would be called scumbags by our ubiquitous commissars of culture and defenders of the faith, they would also be alienated, silenced, ignored, forgotten, and buried alive. There is more than one way to send an innocent man to the Gulag.

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A thousand years ago Gregory of Narek (in addition to being a saint, also our Dante and Shakespeare combined) in his celebrated BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS (translated into English by Mischa Kudian, among others), made a long list of his personal failings (“a wicked and slothful servant, an abusive contradicter, an ass’s foal, inscrutable, wild and uncouth; the broken lock on a door; the useless coin buried beneath the soil; ever active in satanic inventions; slow in mine observance of promises; diligent in malignant acts of ribaldry,” and so on and so forth). If anyone were to write in that vein today, what would happen to him? Who would read him? How would our holier-than-thou brown-nosers react?

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What happened to us between then and now? Is it conceivable that the only thing we learned from the Genocide are intolerance, dishonesty, doubletalk, and cowardice? Is it possible that the Turks did not just massacre our bodies but also our critical faculties?

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To end on a more positive note: All nations spawn their share of white trash. Why should we be an exception?

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A digression and a p.s. here: Has anyone ever accused Washington or Jefferson of war crimes? Why would anyone, let alone a Turk, even consider questioning the greatness, integrity, and nobility of such statesmen of vision as Talaat and Kemal? Unless of course… No, strike that! It is not my intention to cast aspersions on anyone here. I am just asking questions because, I don’t mind admitting, I know next to nothing about Turkish history, and I don’t understand, neither can I guess why, noble specimens of humanity like Talaat and Kemal would be in need of a law whose unmistakable intent is to protect their impeccable reputations.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

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NOW THANK WE ALL OUR GOD

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Siamanto (real name Adom Yerjanian: 1878-1915) poet and victim of the Genocide: “Our perennial enemy, the enemy that will eventually destroy us, is not the Turk but our own complacent superficiality.”

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If our misfortunes are not our fault but must be ascribed to factors and circumstances beyond our control, such as bloodthirsty neighbors, geographic position, and the Good Lord Himself, it follows: literature lies, propaganda speaks the truth.

Political leaders are honest men, writers enemies of the people.

Which also means, our politicians have been consistently right and our writers consistently wrong.

Let us therefore trust our leaders and ignore our writers, and whenever possible, silence and starve them. They deserve no better.

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Since our problems are not our problems but someone else’s, there isn’t much we can do except adopt a passive stance and wait until our bloodthirsty neighbors see the light and turn into vegetarians, our mountains and valleys yield oil or gold or some other valuable mineral, and the Good Lord takes pity on us.

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Yeghishe was dead wrong when he said, “Solidarity is the mother of good deeds, divisions of evil ones.” Solidarity is for wolves. We prefer to live as divided sheep because we are morally superior to wolves.

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Raffi was wrong when he said we have no future in Turkey. Mass exodus from Turkey in the 19th century would have been a tragic mistake. As for mass exodus from Armenia today (a million and a half so far): that must be seen only as a temporary minor setback in the aftermath of war and earthquake (those damn carnivorous neighbors and cursed geography again).

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To conclude: we have nothing to worry about because we are in the best of hands. Let us therefore go down on our knees and give thanks to the Lord and His representatives on earth (our bosses, bishops, and benefactors), and count our blessings.

Amen.

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

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MEMO

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To readers who find my comments disturbing enough to foam at the mouth: In Hollywood, to put things into perspective, even when there are reputations and millions of dollars at stake, they say, “It’s only a movie.” And I say to you, “Relax, it’s only one man’s opinion.” There is no law that says only the right opinion by wise men may be voiced. None of us, not even you, can claim to be consistently right and wise. Only the abysmally ignorant and arrogant think their way of thinking is the only right one and all others should be ignored, and whenever possible, silenced. When I was young and foolish I too thought there were only a very limited number of ideas and worldviews and my familiarity with all of them allowed me to know which were right and which wrong. I was a fascist and I didn’t know it. I had no doubt whatever in my mind that all Turks were rapists and butchers, it was the patriotic duty of all Armenians to hate them, and the only good Turk was a dead Turk. It took me many years to appreciate the advantages of living in a multicultural and multiracial democracy and enjoying the fundamental human right of free speech. I wonder how many of my readers, be they bosses, bishops, benefactors, editors, and publishers of weeklies and periodicals suspect that treating someone who disagrees with them as an enemy is neither patriotic nor Armenian but fascist. This indeed may well be one of our most dangerous blind spots: namely, our tendency to confuse an Ottomanized and Sovietized brand of fascism with Armenianism. Speaking on this very same subject, Zarian has this to say in his TRAVELLER AND HIS ROAD: “They are spitting on Raffi. They are spitting on Aharonian. They are spitting on Derian. And that with the borrowed, consumptive spittle of Muscovite ‘masters.’ Even their filth is second hand. Even their trash has not been picked up from our streets but from foreign gutters. Danger, danger, danger!”

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[ara baliozian]

November 23, 2006

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REFLECTIONS

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Let others speak of Armenian pride. I prefer to speak of Armenian courage, the kind that allows us to take an objective look at ourselves and assess the damage that centuries of oppression has done to our psyche.

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One of the hardest things in life is to convince an Armenian idiot that he is not a genius. I did not say that. One of my gentle readers did. And he was talking about me.

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Dialogue is an unArmenian activity, and if you can insult someone from a safe distance, why stand on ceremony?

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There is a type of reader who reads to have his views confirmed. The only way to please such a reader is to find out what he thinks about a specific subject and repeat it to him. As for good manners: I guess that’s making too many demands on victims of massacres.

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There is something about me that Armenians don’t like. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there is something about Armenians that Armenians don’t like. Is it because they see reflections of themselves?

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, November 24, 2006

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Even as children in the ghetto we used to quote a Turkish saying that, if memory serves, went something like this: “Chok ghareshterma, bokhou chekar” – freely translated: “Don’t stir things too much, you may expose the shit.”

Listen to a German philosopher (Herbert Marcuse) saying almost the same thing: “Remembering the past may be a source of dangerous intuitions, which is why an established society has reason to fear the subversive contents of memory.”

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Speaking of simplifications, I remember to have read somewhere the following assertion by a Turkish diplomat to an American politician: “Why all the fuss about Armenian massacres? We did to them what you did to your Indians. Think of Armenians as our Indians.”

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Perhaps my mistake consists in not allowing my patriotism to direct and shape my analysis. But if I were to value my patriotism over my objectivity, I would do what our enemies do and say, in effect, even at our worst we are better; or, even our crap is better than their rose-jam.

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I believe in Armeno-Turkish dialogue, but I also believe before we tackle that challenge, we should learn to engage in Armeno-Armenian dialogue.

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I prefer a tolerant Turk to an intolerant Armenian.

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Everyone writes these days: politicians, singers, actors, directors, Popes, Oriental carpet dealers (at least three of them wanted me to translate their memoirs into English), bordello madams, and serial killers… When my plumber found out I was a writer, he said he too was writing a book.

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Why would anyone who knows anything about Armenians and Armenian literature choose to be an Armenian writer? I wish I knew. As for success: I shall consider myself a success if I survive…and so far so good.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, November 25, 2006

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HISTORY-MAKERS AND HISTORIANS

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It is an undeniable fact that history is not always made by the best and the brightest. Think of the abysmal mediocrity of most kings and political leaders. It would be more accurate to say that more often than not history is made by the worst and the dumbest. Think of fascist dictators and their countless dupes and victims. To judge a nation by its history sometimes means judging a people by its criminals. Consider Armenians and Turks as cases in point. No doubt the majority of Armenians and Turks were peace loving decent folk lacking in political awareness and incapable of harming anyone. And yet, most Armenians and Turks today judge each other by the very few criminals who took it upon themselves to act in the name of their respective nations. Instead of combating this misconception, most historians legitimize and promote it. To them the average law-abiding, harmless citizen is ahistorical, therefore of no interest. In other words, instead of promoting mutual understanding, historians legitimize prejudice, and ultimately hatred. In the books written by royalist historians, for instance, the French Revolution is seen as a colossal blunder instigated and perpetrated by bloodthirsty agitators who committed many unspeakable crimes against humanity. In the eyes of anti-Bonapartist historians Napoleon is seen as the devil incarnate, and in the eyes of their adversaries as an agent of progress and enlightenment. We may not all be fanatics and chauvinists, but I suspect even the least patriotic and partisan among us carries within him traces of narcissism that leads him to say, “My country (or my ideology, or religion) right or wrong!” Perhaps the only way we will make any progress towards tolerance and peace is to teach ourselves to think and feel not in terms of countries, nations, tribes, and races, but in terms of human beings and humanity. And that’s where historians have failed us. What mankind needs is not patriotic historians but unpatriotic ones who will dare to emphasize the blunders and misdeeds of their own political leaders, because true patriotism consists in promoting self-examination and understanding as opposed to asserting moral superiority, because there are no such things as morally superior tribes, nations, and races, only morally superior human beings who do not, as a rule, brag about their moral superiority.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, November 26, 2006

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ON SELF-KNOWLEDGE

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Of the many forms of ignorance the worst is ignorance of the self. If you don’t know yourself you don’t know where you are going, and once you get there you may even discover it was a big mistake getting there. If you don’t know yourself, what else can you possibly know and understand?

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My troubles begun on the day I decided I was smart. That’s when life went into action and devised a thousand ways to prove that I was a damn fool.

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On the day you close your mind, life will start opening it, and the longer you resist and keep it shut, the harder and more painful the operation will be.

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For a long time I didn’t see any practical benefit in using my imagination until I realize that reality has so many layers that the only way to penetrate them is by using my imagination.

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Memo to readers who find me depressing:

Read our great writers instead and if you find them even more depressing, have the courage and honesty to admit you are what the pigswill of our propaganda has made you, “a compulsive liar drunk with the folly of deceptive wine” (Gregory of Narek).

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, November 27, 2006

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CRIME STORIES

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My kind of writing is not my favorite kind of reading. May I confess that I have never been able to read Montaigne's ESSAYS from beginning to end. I prefer crime is the only Hemingway story I have read three times. Chandler’s FAREWELL, MY LOVELY I have read four times with undiminished excitement for its poetic use of slang. No other story given me as much pleasure as Hammett’s DEAD YELLOW WOMEN. I love these writers not so much for the suspense they provide as for their wit, humor, and dialogue. If I could, I would write crime stories. But my experience with cops and killers is next to nil. I have been inside a police station only once, many years ago, when I reported a roaming German shepherd attacking pedestrians. The cop at the desk didn’t even bother to look at me, he simply grabbed the phone on his desk and I didn’t wait long enough to hear what he said.

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My fascination with crime stories began with Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, and Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. And my fascination with Simenon (the most prolific of them all, over 600 titles) began with Andre Gide’s JOURNALS, where he describes at considerable length his own fascination with Simenon.

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There are some crimes stories in which the guilty party is neither the butler nor any of the usual suspects, but the narrator himself. On second thought, perhaps I too write crime stories when I focus on the origins of our complexes and contradictions, and instead of naming the obvious suspects (bloodthirsty neighbors and cynical West) I cross-examine myself.

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A headline in this morning’s paper reads: ISTANBUL: ALMOST 25,000 PROTESTERS DENOUNCE POPE BENEDICT. Nothing astonishes me more than the self-righteousness of the guilty. Instead of denouncing Muslim extremists, terrorists, insurgents, and jihadists, they protest against a remark made by a Christian emperor a thousand years ago. Figure that one out if you can.

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Speaking of self-righteousness: One of Simenon’s favorite themes is the guilt of the victim. In many of his stories, Simenon explains and to some extent justifies the criminal by exposing his victim’s insensitivity and unawareness of the consequences of his actions. And that’s what I am after too – our past and present unawareness, which at times assumes criminal dimensions.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

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WRITERS AND CRITICS

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The Catholic novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize (1952) Francois Mauriac (b. 1885) gave up writing fiction after Sartre, (b. 1905), a relative newcomer on the French literary scene and an atheist to boot, published an essay critical of his work. This may suggest that a competent critic has the power to deconstruct, demolish, and reduce to silence even a universally admired great writer.

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I look forward to the day when someone with average or even below average intelligence will give me a similar treatment and I will quit writing this stuff and go back to writing fiction. But so far I haven’t had much luck in my critics. If they are not brainwashed partisans or brown-nosing self-appointed Turcocentric pundits, they are intellectually challenged skinheads whose insults I find stimulating rather than wounding.

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Are we heading in the direction of a new renaissance or are we on our way to the devil? If you answer this question by resorting to chauvinist clichés and platitudes, then we have nothing to look forward to.

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I grew up with the notion that there was more truth in an Armenian lie than in an odar truth. It took me many years to realize that a lie is a lie and it makes no difference whether it is spoken in Zulu, Turkish, or Armenian. The same could be said of propaganda.

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

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LET’S TALK TURKEY

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Common sense tells us, when two witnesses contradict each other, both can’t be right.

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Experience tells us, to say all politicians lie except ours, is to declare oneself to be a certifiable dupe of nationalist propaganda.

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Warning: If you question the validity of these two assertions, no need to read any further.

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Since some of my Armenian readers are convinced I am a pro-Turkish denialist, and some of my Turkish readers take it upon themselves to correct my occasional pro-Armenian and anti-Turkish lapses, I must conclude I am on the right path. It is not part of my agenda to please, mislead, or accuse anyone. There are already more than enough hirelings who make a comfortable living (thank you very much) by doing these things.

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“The Armenians were punished because they sided with the enemy,” a gentle Turkish reader reminds me. By “punished” he probably means deported and not massacred. Which is it? Since both of my grandmothers survived and both my grandfathers perished, I must conclude some were deported, others “terminated.” As for siding with the enemy, this may indeed be true of Armenians on the Russo-Turkish border, but definitely not of Armenians on the mainland, except for the very few agitators and revolutionaries who may have acted in the name of the people but who represented no one but themselves, very much like the Talaat, Jemal, Enver troika. The overwhelming majority of Armenians in the ghetto of refugees where I grew up were both illiterate and devoid of political awareness. To accuse them of harboring secret territorial ambitions and betraying the Empire is not just wrong but absurd. I don’t remember my father saying anything remotely kind about our political parties or remotely unkind about Turks. I write these lines not as an Armenian but as a human being, and my intention is not to assert moral superiority but to understand why two people who lived side by side for six centuries prefer to believe their political leaders and to ignore the testimony of witnesses who value honesty and objectivity above prejudice and nationalist propaganda.

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How can any tribe, nation, or race assert moral superiority and believe in it? Even worse: How can it also believe that in doing so it will not arouse the contempt and hatred of all men? The ancient Greeks knew better. They believed that pride or arrogance (hubris) is punished by the gods (Nemesis). And yet, in their eyes, all non-Greeks were barbarians. What happened next we know. They were defeated and colonized by Macedonians, Romans, and last but far from least, Turks. And unbelievable as this may see, even after centuries of enslavement, even in their present bastardized condition, they continue to cling to the notion that they are the real Chosen People. Figure that one out if you can.

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 30, 2006

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BEFORE AND AFTER

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For most of my life others set the terms and conditions and I had no choice but to accept them. (Sounds familiar?) I was born again as a human being on the day I decided to set my own terms and conditions; and even when I lost (which I did most of the time) I felt as though I had won.

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Like parrots, the brainwashed have no use for free speech.

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“Treason and betrayal are in our blood,” Raffi tells us. So are criticism and dissent. Not even our toughest critics, including Gregory of Narek, have gone as far saying “Mart bidi ch’ellank!” (We will never acquire the status of human beings.) Compare this popular mantra with such propaganda lines as “first nation this” and “first nation that,” and “Armenians are smart.” How can anyone be smart who is also deaf and ignorant of what people are thinking and saying?

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For the brainwashed there are two kinds of propaganda – theirs and ours. As for honesty and objectivity: they might as well be subversive concepts. If honesty is subversive and objectivity an instrument of the devil, does that mean we have a marked preference for dishonesty and charlatanism? What’s next? We might as well get out our shovels and start digging – and I mean digging our own graves. Toynbee is right: nations are not killed, they commit suicide.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, December 01, 2006

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A QUESTION OF CREDIBILITY

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Why would anyone choose to believe a minor, disgruntled, and marginalized scribbler who can’t make ends meet and ignore textbooks written by established academics? You may choose to believe whomever you wish of course (and I say this to readers of all colors, creeds, and races, including Armenians and Turks) as long as you keep in mind that academics are hirelings of the state, that is to say, politicians, and as such they are as subservient to the power structure as diplomats and bureaucrats. Even the mightiest empire in the world, like the United States of America, cannot afford to choose textbooks written by historians who emphasize its dark side and its crimes against humanity, or textbooks written from the perspective of its victims (“white man speaks with a forked tongue,” or “white man is the devil”). Until the collapse of the USSR, Communist textbooks did not mention the Gulag; so much so that even Nobel-Prize winning intellectuals of the West dismissed all talk of the Gulag as capitalist-inspired anti-Soviet propaganda.

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Textbooks, commentaries, editorials, and memoirs of the Genocide are safe because they stress what has been done to us at the expense of what we could have done and what we can do today to solve our many problems. When it comes to what we can do today, for instance, we are given to understand we can do nothing but wait and hope that in two or three generations the corrupt among us will see the light and solve our problems, after which we may live happily ever after. Our subservience to “the blind forces beyond our control” is such that we have become deaf and dumb to the fact that by adopting a passive stance we are committing genocide by other means (exodus from the Homeland, assimilation in the Diaspora). I am not advocating covering up and forgetting the 1915 Genocide. What I am saying is that we should not allow it to paralyze our will.

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A Turcocentric view of life marginalizes the nation as surely as our bosses, bishops, and benefactors marginalize anyone who refuses to say “Yes, sir!” to whatever they say, no matter how absurd. As for the corrupt seeing the light and solving our problems: don’t hold your breath; they will be too busy proving their integrity, statesmanship, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and moral superiority, not to say defending with everything they’ve got the source of their power, prestige, and wealth, to have any time left for solutions.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, December 02, 2006

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GRANDMASTERS OF THE BLAME GAME

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Shortly before she died, one of our self-appointed partisan pundits wrote me an angry letter saying I had ruined the Armenian-American community. There was a time, she explained, when everyone was happy. Now everybody was bitching. And everybody was bitching because my kind of writing had started the trend. She was lying of course. And she was lying because lying comes naturally to our pundits. Had I been born before the Tourian assassination in 1933, she would have pinned that on me too, no doubt.

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The other day I read an editorial in one of our partisan weeklies written by still another self-appointed partisan pundit that said, in effect, Armenians are their own worst enemies because Armenians like Rouben Mamoulian had not helped a single Armenian in Hollywood. The implications were unmistakable: what had prevented the Armenian community from going down the drain had been the idealism, dedication, hard work, and vision of statesmen like him and his kind. As for legitimizing intolerance and promoting divisions and mediocrity: they must be ascribed to my kind of bitching, of course.

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I could have written a letter to the editor but I didn’t. I knew better. Once, many years ago, when I didn’t know better, I wrote a letter to the editor of this same weekly pointing out some factual inaccuracies in an editorial, only to be told: “We don’t as a rule publish letters that question our editorials.” I did not ask why not because I guessed the answer: “Because we are infallible!” If the Catholics have their Pope, if Muslims have their imams, and Turks have their Ataturk, why can’t we have a corresponding figure, and if we don’t have him, why can’t we pretend to have him, and by feeding him royal jelly, elevate him to the status of a king, that is to say, a representative of god on earth?

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, December 03, 2006

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WORK IN PROGRESS

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Identifying oneself with a fraction of mankind -- be it race color or creed, or nation, tribe, and party -- means drawing a curtain on the rest of mankind and adopting a propaganda line; and as we know by now, for every propaganda line there will be a counter-propaganda line with all the familiar results – contradictions, conflicts, assertions of superiority, intolerance, and hatred leading to war, massacre, and atrocities. I see this clearly today but for a long time my “betters” did their utmost to make me an unthinking robot who will swallow their venom, ignorance, prejudices, and unsettled scores, and feel as though I were discharging my patriotic duty and acting in the name of a noble cause, as opposed to satisfying some imbecile’s lust for power.

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No one (except perhaps the Pope of Rome) dares to assert infallibility, because doing so would mean provoking ridicule; but everyone argues as if he were infallible in his judgment. The hardest thing for a dogmatist, fanatic, and patriot is to say, “You were right and I was wrong”; and the hardest thing for a self-assessed smart person is to say, “You are smarter than I am.”

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Some may call what I have been doing “masochistic self-examination,” others “deconstruction,” which may not be the same as destruction but shares something with it. But then, all creation begins with destruction.

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When we argue perhaps our real goal is to assert some kind of superiority – if not in IQ than in wisdom or patriotism. But suppose we were to come right out at the beginning of an argument and say, “What I think is right because I am smarter and wiser than you”: would anyone believe us?

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If you think my views are unorthodox or anti-establishment or radical in any way, allow me to quote a passage from a recent commentary (September 30, 2006) by Rev. Frank Morgan, a local faith columnist who died last week at the age of 92: “Don’t claim to have all the truth and don’t claim that other faiths are lesser faiths than your own. And be very sure that if your thinking about God and His will has not changed since you were in public school, then you really need a spiritual refit.” And from another commentary (June 15, 1991): “I believe the Bible to be the greatest and surest guide to faith and life. I am also convinced that if you take it literally, you will lose that guide. It [the Bible] is a story of people’s growing understanding of God and His will for us. We still have a long way to go.” In other words, none of us can claim to be a finished product because we are a work in progress.

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On the subject of having a long way to go: I remember to have heard an old story about a man who went all over the world in search of something or other, only to come back home and discover it in his own backyard.

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Before we engage in an argument, we should ask ourselves: “Is my central concern love or hatred? And worse, is it hatred in the name of love? What is it that motivates me, tolerance or intolerance, arrogance or humility?” If you can’t answer these questions clearly and unequivocally, it only means one thing: you are in deep sh**!

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, December 04, 2006

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ON PRIDE

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“I am proud to be the offspring of a persecuted nation,” writes a reader, thus proving that one can be or pretend to be proud of anything, including degradation. Speaking for myself, I can’t say I am proud of anything, and I have every reason to suspect no one who has ever been persecuted, really persecuted, can be proud of it.

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We were persecuted because we were defeated. We were defeated not because God made our enemies strong and us weak but because they were united and we were divided. We were divided because our wheeler-dealers parading as representatives of God on earth and leaders of men failed to unite us. To say we are proud of being the offspring of a persecuted nation amounts to bragging about being divided, defeated, persecuted, massacred and scattered to the four corners of the world like unwanted, uninvited, and useless autumn leaves. I have heard of people bragging about their success. Leave it to Armenians to brag about their failures.

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“I am glad we never had an Ataturk,” I read elsewhere. As a matter of fact we had several potential Ataturks, among them General Antranik and Nejdeh, but we also had many more mini-sultans and crypto-commissars who excel in only one endeavor – obstructing the path of all those who attempt to achieve solidarity. This minor detail is not stressed in our textbooks because that would amount to admitting incompetence. I say these things not to gloat over our failures but to point out the simple fact that only after we admit failure we may aim at success. To be satisfied with our incompetence and failures also means to perpetuate them.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

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ON GOD, ETC.

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Like most of my fellow Christians I was brought up as a believer. In my teens I lost my faith. Today I am not longer sure what to believe. I can say the same about so many other things, including my Armenian identity and everything that is connected with it. Lucky are those who are born, raised, and grow old with certainties, which they never question, doubt, or lose.

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I agree with Descartes who once said the only way to reason and make sense is to assume that everyone, including an army of invisible cunning demons, were out to deceive you. One of my very few certainties is this: if I ever see the light and regain my faith, it will not be a belief in the god of our priests, televangelists, imams, and mullahs.

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I don’t mind admitting that I tend to simplify complexities, but my simplifications are more akin to counter-simplifications: I simplify to expose the simplifications of meaningless clichés and slogans of propaganda, which are simplifications twice removed from reality, and not so much lies as absurdities whose ultimate aim is to remove us from the demands that life makes on us.

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As long as we say to our leaders “You are our best and brightest,” they will never try harder, and even as we sink into oblivion they will continue to brainwash a new generation to brag about our genius for survival. And if you were to accuse me of always seeing the dark side of things, allow me to remind you that (one) optimism thrives in insane asylums, and (two) it was optimists who said if we rise against a tottering empire (with the blessing of the Lord and the support of the West) we will recover our historic lands and live happily ever after. What they didn’t know or refused to consider is that the Good Lord may or may not care what happens to His Chosen People (which we may or may not be), and the mighty West may be too divided (very much like us) to be in a position to help us, or for that matter, itself. Our revolutionary heroes were too naïve and simple-minded in their simplifications to know what Herzen knew nearly a century before they went into action, namely that “nature and history are full of the accidental and the senseless, of muddles and bungling.”

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