as i see it - Pt. IV

Louise · October 15, 2009

Sunday, October 11, 2009
************************************
THE PROTOCOLS
************************************
Our leaders must be celebrating.
They now have another reason to divide the nation.
Why do they oppose the findings of an independent commission?
Words on a piece of paper, agreements, treaties: they can't change reality. They have been ignored in the past, many times, and they can be ignored again. They are binding only if we allow them to bind us, and no one has the power to do that.
Who takes politicians and academics seriously?
A so-called impartial commission does not scare me. It is here today, heard tomorrow, forgotten the day after.
Relax! The sky isn't falling.
Nothing can be more naïve than to confuse the verbal commitments of diplomats with accomplished facts.
If, say, ten or a hundred years from now, an independent commission were to decide there is no God, do you think believers will give up their faith? They didn't under Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their kind.
And speaking of God: the Scriptures tell us, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And yet our leaders keep dividing us. If they can ignore the Word of the Almighty, why can't they ignore the empty verbiage of a commission? If only they had been more skeptical a hundred years ago and ignored the verbal support of the West! There would have been no Genocide and no Genocide commission deciding whether the Genocide was in fact a genocide.
*
The daily quotation of my morning paper today is by Aldous Huxley and it reads: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Go ahead, say it ain't so!
#
Monday, October 12, 2009
************************************
DEAD MEN WALKING
************************************
In a book of abusive terms I once read that Greeks call Armenians “Turkish gypsies.” That was news to me probably because I seldom ventured outside our ghetto outside Athens – though I was fully aware of the fact that Greeks were not particularly fond of us. Not that they had any reason to be. In their eyes we were unwanted interlopers, D.P.'s (a Canadian abusive term for "displaced people"), who lived crowded in a ghetto that looked like a gypsy encampment.
*
Speaking of abusive terms: I have met many Armenians from the Homeland and none of them has ever called me “aghber.” If the natives call us “aghber” in the Homeland, why not in the Diaspora?
I suspect they don't call me “aghber” for the same reason that a white man is careful not to use the “n” word while visiting Africa, or refer to the natives as Japs while in Tokyo.
*
On a number of occasions I have been told when Armenians call their fellow Armenians “aghber,” they mean not “trash” but “brother.” But I happen to know from personal experience that no one can be as abusive to Armenians as a fellow Armenian (see below). If you don't believe me read Naregatsi on Naregatsi. Read Raffi, read Daniel Varoujan on priests, read Baronian, Odian, Massikian, Zarian....
*
I dare anyone to read Odian's FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY (Istanbul, 1910) and not think of his fictional characters as dead men walking – not in the sense of inmates on death row but as men so degraded and dehumanized that they might as well be dead. And if you think Armenians today – be they in New York, Los Angeles, or Yerevan – are alive, it may be because we don't have writers of Odian's caliber, only Turcocentric ghazetajis and academics who come alive only when they speak of massacres.
What kind of life is it that is fixated on death?
I shiver to think what would happen to someone like Odian today who would have the courage to speak of Armenians not as they wish to be described but as they are.
*
Speaking of his tuberculosis, Albert Camus writes: “The illness comes on quickly, but leaves very slowly.” He fails to note that sometimes tuberculosis may even result in death.
*
Speaking of Armenians being too nice to use abusive terms: I don't mind admitting that on occasion I have myself described some of them as “Ottomanized morons,” “the scum of the earth,” and “inbred morons”-- but always in retaliation of worse insults, whether fairly or unfairly not up to me to decide...remains to be seen...posterity will tell...take your pick!
#
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
************************************
HEMINGWAY ON KEMAL ATATURK
****************************************************
“[He] looks like an Armenian lace seller than a Turkish general. There is something mouselike about him.”
What does an Armenian lace seller look like? I plead nolo. An Armenian lace seller makes as much sense to me as a Patagonian barber or a Syrian carpenter.
But if you are an American writer writing for an American audience, you can say anything and get away with it.

OSHAGAN & DOSTOEVSKY
************************************
Oshagan was wrong when he said he could not write like Dostoevsky because Armenians did not have Dostoevksian characters. But Dostoevsky's characters owe more to his imagination than to his fellow countrymen. Even Russian writers like Turgenev and Nabokov found Dostoevsky's characters unRussian. As for Oshagan: since he could not write like Dostoevsky, he chose to write like Proust, whose French characters are even more unArmenian than Raskolnikov and Dimitri Karamazov.
*
TURGENEV ON DOSTOEVSKY
********************************************
Whenever he saw anything morbid and strange, Turgenev would say, “C'est du Dostoevsky.”
*
CHEKHOV & ZOHRAB
***********************************
When Chekhov discovered he could make money by writing stories, he gave up medicine – he went on practicing whenever the situation demanded but never charged for his services.
Had Zohrab given up lawyering, he could have been as great a short story writer as Maupassant and Chekhov. There was some money in Armenian literature at the turn of the century in Istanbul but not enough for Zohrab's upper crust lifestyle. To give you an idea how much money there is in Armenian literature today: I am told one of our national benefactors financially supported several writers, among them Shahan Shahnour, by sending them a regular monthly check of $8.00 (eight dollars).
*
SHAKESPEARE
*******************************
One reason he was great is that he had a great audience. He wrote for kings and queens, and even his queens had cojones. An Armenian writer writes for Levantine philistines in the Diaspora and the offspring of commissars in the Homeland. That's why even Turks are ahead of us in literature.
*
ON LEVANTINE PHILISTINES
**************************************************
There is a Turkish saying: “Eshek khoshavdan ne annar?” (What does a jackass know about stewed raisins?”
As for the commissars in the Homeland: they are more like Raskolnikov without a conscience. My guess is, they miss the good old days when they could hunt down and shoot writers like rabbits.
#
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
************************************
A RECURRING EXPERIENCE
****************************************************
When as a child I first heard the story about the Ottoman Bank takeover by a small band of young revolutionaries in Istanbul, who then negotiated their safe passage to a foreign country, but whose actions provoked the massacre of over 5000 innocent civilians: I admired the daring of our youthful heroes, hated the Turks for their cruelty, and suffered with the blameless victims.
That's when I was a child.
Now that I am no longer a child, I have second thoughts.
What kind of heroism is it when the heroes survive and the people perish?
Our revolutionaries justify this colossal blunder by saying, “We made headlines around the world!”
Maybe. But who gives a damn about headlines in newspapers?
The Genocide that followed made headlines too. And again the ship went down, the people drowned, but our captain survived. And we are now taught to say, Long live the captain!
We are also taught to brag about our will to live; and by “our” they of course mean their cunning to survive.
As for the people: the people exist to serve the nation – meaning the leadership. What we are not taught is that this is another definition of fascism.
In a democracy it's the other way around. The state and the leaders (also known as “public servants”) serve the people.
Democracy?
What do we know about democracy?
I have had an Armenian education and I don't remember anyone mentioning democracy.
To speak of democracy to an Armenian audience amounts to explaining the subtle aroma and flavor of rosejam to a jackass.
“If one has character,” Nietzsche tells us, “one has also one's typical experience that recurs again and again.”
One could also say, “If one has no brain...”
#

Louise · October 15, 2009

Sunday, October 11, 2009
************************************
THE PROTOCOLS
************************************
Our leaders must be celebrating.
They now have another reason to divide the nation.
Why do they oppose the findings of an independent commission?
Words on a piece of paper, agreements, treaties: they can't change reality. They have been ignored in the past, many times, and they can be ignored again. They are binding only if we allow them to bind us, and no one has the power to do that.
Who takes politicians and academics seriously?
A so-called impartial commission does not scare me. It is here today, heard tomorrow, forgotten the day after.
Relax! The sky isn't falling.
Nothing can be more naïve than to confuse the verbal commitments of diplomats with accomplished facts.
If, say, ten or a hundred years from now, an independent commission were to decide there is no God, do you think believers will give up their faith? They didn't under Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their kind.
And speaking of God: the Scriptures tell us, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And yet our leaders keep dividing us. If they can ignore the Word of the Almighty, why can't they ignore the empty verbiage of a commission? If only they had been more skeptical a hundred years ago and ignored the verbal support of the West! There would have been no Genocide and no Genocide commission deciding whether the Genocide was in fact a genocide.
*
The daily quotation of my morning paper today is by Aldous Huxley and it reads: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Go ahead, say it ain't so!
#
Monday, October 12, 2009
************************************
DEAD MEN WALKING
************************************
In a book of abusive terms I once read that Greeks call Armenians “Turkish gypsies.” That was news to me probably because I seldom ventured outside our ghetto outside Athens – though I was fully aware of the fact that Greeks were not particularly fond of us. Not that they had any reason to be. In their eyes we were unwanted interlopers, D.P.'s (a Canadian abusive term for "displaced people"), who lived crowded in a ghetto that looked like a gypsy encampment.
*
Speaking of abusive terms: I have met many Armenians from the Homeland and none of them has ever called me “aghber.” If the natives call us “aghber” in the Homeland, why not in the Diaspora?
I suspect they don't call me “aghber” for the same reason that a white man is careful not to use the “n” word while visiting Africa, or refer to the natives as Japs while in Tokyo.
*
On a number of occasions I have been told when Armenians call their fellow Armenians “aghber,” they mean not “trash” but “brother.” But I happen to know from personal experience that no one can be as abusive to Armenians as a fellow Armenian (see below). If you don't believe me read Naregatsi on Naregatsi. Read Raffi, read Daniel Varoujan on priests, read Baronian, Odian, Massikian, Zarian....
*
I dare anyone to read Odian's FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY (Istanbul, 1910) and not think of his fictional characters as dead men walking – not in the sense of inmates on death row but as men so degraded and dehumanized that they might as well be dead. And if you think Armenians today – be they in New York, Los Angeles, or Yerevan – are alive, it may be because we don't have writers of Odian's caliber, only Turcocentric ghazetajis and academics who come alive only when they speak of massacres.
What kind of life is it that is fixated on death?
I shiver to think what would happen to someone like Odian today who would have the courage to speak of Armenians not as they wish to be described but as they are.
*
Speaking of his tuberculosis, Albert Camus writes: “The illness comes on quickly, but leaves very slowly.” He fails to note that sometimes tuberculosis may even result in death.
*
Speaking of Armenians being too nice to use abusive terms: I don't mind admitting that on occasion I have myself described some of them as “Ottomanized morons,” “the scum of the earth,” and “inbred morons”-- but always in retaliation of worse insults, whether fairly or unfairly not up to me to decide...remains to be seen...posterity will tell...take your pick!
#
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
************************************
HEMINGWAY ON KEMAL ATATURK
****************************************************
“[He] looks like an Armenian lace seller than a Turkish general. There is something mouselike about him.”
What does an Armenian lace seller look like? I plead nolo. An Armenian lace seller makes as much sense to me as a Patagonian barber or a Syrian carpenter.
But if you are an American writer writing for an American audience, you can say anything and get away with it.

OSHAGAN & DOSTOEVSKY
************************************
Oshagan was wrong when he said he could not write like Dostoevsky because Armenians did not have Dostoevksian characters. But Dostoevsky's characters owe more to his imagination than to his fellow countrymen. Even Russian writers like Turgenev and Nabokov found Dostoevsky's characters unRussian. As for Oshagan: since he could not write like Dostoevsky, he chose to write like Proust, whose French characters are even more unArmenian than Raskolnikov and Dimitri Karamazov.
*
TURGENEV ON DOSTOEVSKY
********************************************
Whenever he saw anything morbid and strange, Turgenev would say, “C'est du Dostoevsky.”
*
CHEKHOV & ZOHRAB
***********************************
When Chekhov discovered he could make money by writing stories, he gave up medicine – he went on practicing whenever the situation demanded but never charged for his services.
Had Zohrab given up lawyering, he could have been as great a short story writer as Maupassant and Chekhov. There was some money in Armenian literature at the turn of the century in Istanbul but not enough for Zohrab's upper crust lifestyle. To give you an idea how much money there is in Armenian literature today: I am told one of our national benefactors financially supported several writers, among them Shahan Shahnour, by sending them a regular monthly check of $8.00 (eight dollars).
*
SHAKESPEARE
*******************************
One reason he was great is that he had a great audience. He wrote for kings and queens, and even his queens had cojones. An Armenian writer writes for Levantine philistines in the Diaspora and the offspring of commissars in the Homeland. That's why even Turks are ahead of us in literature.
*
ON LEVANTINE PHILISTINES
**************************************************
There is a Turkish saying: “Eshek khoshavdan ne annar?” (What does a jackass know about stewed raisins?”
As for the commissars in the Homeland: they are more like Raskolnikov without a conscience. My guess is, they miss the good old days when they could hunt down and shoot writers like rabbits.
#
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
************************************
A RECURRING EXPERIENCE
****************************************************
When as a child I first heard the story about the Ottoman Bank takeover by a small band of young revolutionaries in Istanbul, who then negotiated their safe passage to a foreign country, but whose actions provoked the massacre of over 5000 innocent civilians: I admired the daring of our youthful heroes, hated the Turks for their cruelty, and suffered with the blameless victims.
That's when I was a child.
Now that I am no longer a child, I have second thoughts.
What kind of heroism is it when the heroes survive and the people perish?
Our revolutionaries justify this colossal blunder by saying, “We made headlines around the world!”
Maybe. But who gives a damn about headlines in newspapers?
The Genocide that followed made headlines too. And again the ship went down, the people drowned, but our captain survived. And we are now taught to say, Long live the captain!
We are also taught to brag about our will to live; and by “our” they of course mean their cunning to survive.
As for the people: the people exist to serve the nation – meaning the leadership. What we are not taught is that this is another definition of fascism.
In a democracy it's the other way around. The state and the leaders (also known as “public servants”) serve the people.
Democracy?
What do we know about democracy?
I have had an Armenian education and I don't remember anyone mentioning democracy.
To speak of democracy to an Armenian audience amounts to explaining the subtle aroma and flavor of rosejam to a jackass.
“If one has character,” Nietzsche tells us, “one has also one's typical experience that recurs again and again.”
One could also say, “If one has no brain...”
#

Louise · October 15, 2009

Dear Ara Baliozian, I suppose you know the story of the lion who saw a donkey, that he wanted to eat.

He sent his dog to fetch the donkey, telling him that he loved him and would like to be his friend.

The dog went to the donkey and persuaded him that the lion loved him and would like to be his friend.

The donkey went, but as soon as he saw that the lion opening a big mouth to eat him, he escaped.

Then the lion sent his dog again, to persuade the donkey that he was wrong, that he did not

want to make any harm to him.

The donkey came back, and lion scratched his head, and said to the dog : What’s that, he has no brain ?

And the dog replied : if he had a brain, would he come back to you ?

That’s our story, we, Armenians. Why go back to the same traps ?

ara baliozian · October 17, 2009

Thursday, October 15, 2009

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

THE SOURCE OF ALL EVIL

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

Rabbis, imams, sultans and their Christian counterparts in the West: They may believe they speak in the name of God but they speak in the name of a figment of their imagination in which they are, if not God, than one with the Almighty. What makes them powerful is their connection with the collective unconscious, and the unconscious is the source of all evil.

*

You begin to think for yourself only on the day you begin to see the Big Lie that is at the root of all propaganda lines.

*

Call a military defeat a moral victory and you've got yourself a win-win proposition; which may suggest that, in addition to being the first nation to convert to Christianity, we may also qualify as the first nation to be taken in by the "massals" of spin doctors.

*

We have been careless in our choice of enemies and even more careless in our choice of friends who can be even more dangerous than enemies. Our leaders did not massacre us, true, they only made us more vulnerable to massacres.

*

There has been so much oppression, injustice, and slavery in the world that one is tempted to conclude God may not always be on the side of equality, liberty, and fraternity.

#

Friday, October 16, 2009

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

REVIEWING THE SHITUATION

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

The Jews worshiped Jehovah,

the Greeks Jupiter,

the Russians Jugashvili,

and the Yanks the Almighty –

and I don't mean the Good Lord.

If you see progress here,

I must be blind.

*

The Turks are a nasty folk,

and so am I

because I refuse to be bamboozled.

*

Sartre was an atheist.

He believed in freedom

but supported Stalin, Mao, and Castro,

not exactly friends of freedom.

Sartre's master was Heidegger

whose master was Hitler.

*

In the Ottoman Empire

we were brainwashed

to be loyal subjects of the Sultan.

In the Soviet Union

we were brainwashed to be good comrades

and to kill and die for the Union,

but mostly to die.

We are now being brainwashed

by the brainwashed

to believe we are in good hands.

Now then, go ahead and say

you see a light at the end of the tunnel,

because speaking for myself,

I don't even see a tunnel --

probably because I am blind.

#

Saturday, October 17, 2009

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

SONGS OF THE BLEEDING THROAT

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

Because history is the propaganda of the victor, we have made of it the consolation of the loser. Our revolutionaries assert they were not terrorists, they were freedom fighters. Americans are familiar with that line and they don't buy it. That's why when it comes to Genocide recognition they side with the Turks. They have other reasons. Imperial powers have neither friends nor enemies, only interests, and American interests are not on our side. We are of no use to them – except in time of elections when they are more than willing to tell us what we want to hear and we are more than willing to believe them. Being dupes comes naturally to us. It might as well be a habit, an addiction, a gorilla on our collective back impossible to shake off. Americans know this. So do our own leaders, whose lies are as bare-faced as those of Yanks running for office.

*

The average book on Turkish atrocities is another atrocity. In our efforts to paint them all black and ourselves all white, we succeed only in exposing our propaganda and damaging our credibility.

I am reading a new book on the Genocide in which our deportations during World War I are compared to the Japanese deportations in America during World War II. There are “loaded” comparisons as surely as there are loaded questions and as such they should be inadmissible, and those who make them ought to know better. It would be fairer to compare the treatment of Blacks and Indians in America with the treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

*

So far no book by an Armenian comes close to explaining why a writer of Siamanto's stature hated life in America so much that he preferred to return to Istanbul knowing full well that he could be butchered. Which he was. Or why an intellectual like Roupen Sevag, a medical doctor by profession and another victim of the Genocide, defended the Turks to his German fiancée when she was critical of them and wanted to convince him to move to Europe.

*

Speaking of Oshagan, Zarian writes somewhere that when writers like him speak of Homeland they don't mean Armenia but Istanbul. Several decades before the massacres, Raffi warned the Ottoman Empire was no place for Armenians. And notwithstanding Zarian's own repeated warnings that Soviet Armenia was no place for Armenians, American-educated Totovents and Sorbonne-educated Zabel Yessayan returned to Armenia only to perish in Stalin's Gulags. If our ablest intellectuals behave like dupes, why should we be surprised that there are still Armenians who trust our wheeler-dealers who try to brainwash us into believing we are in good hands and we have nothing to worry about?

#

ara baliozian · October 17, 2009

Dear Ara Baliozian, I suppose you know the story of the lion who saw a donkey, that he wanted to eat.
He sent his dog to fetch the donkey, telling him that he loved him and would like to be his friend.
The dog went to the donkey and persuaded him that the lion loved him and would like to be his friend.
The donkey went, but as soon as he saw that the lion opening a big mouth to eat him, he escaped.
Then the lion sent his dog again, to persuade the donkey that he was wrong, that he did not
want to make any harm to him.
The donkey came back, and lion scratched his head, and said to the dog : What’s that, he has no brain ?
And the dog replied : if he had a brain, would he come back to you ?

That’s our story, we, Armenians. Why go back to the same traps ?

a nice story:

no, i didn't know it.

my favorite armenian-american name is: Jack S. Avanakian.

Louise · October 19, 2009

a nice story:
no, i didn't know it.
my favorite armenian-american name is: Jack S. Avanakian.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I looked for the meaning of your name but I did not find it.

Mine is Sarian, which means yellow hair.

But I am glad to not be a "blonde" as there are so many jokes

about "blondes" in France. As if they were stupid.

Louise · October 20, 2009

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I looked for the meaning of your name but I did not find it.
Mine is Sarian, which means yellow hair.
But I am glad to not be a "blonde" as there are so many jokes
about "blondes" in France. As if they were stupid.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another story, but i am sorry, it is in French .

Le poisson qui développe la réflexion

"Un Arménien se rend à Moscou par le train. Dans le compartiment, il se trouve assis en face d'un Juif. Vers midi, ils rabattent la tablette pour manger un morceau. L'Arménien qui s'est muni de quelques succulents Ichkhan dzouk fumés (le fameux poisson ichkhan)* emballés dans du papier, commence à manger délicatement, minutieusement, le premier poisson, sans laisser le moindre morceau de chair. Son compagnon de voyage le regarde du coup de l'oeil et finit par dire : "Ce poisson m'a l'air d'être très savoureux". "En effet, dit l'Arménien, très savoureux, et en plus il a la vertu de développer la réflexion." "Ah bon? dit son compagnon de voyage, je peux en avoir un morceau?" "Bien sûr, dit l'Arménien, je vends le filet 20 roubles." Son compagnon de voyage paie ce filet de poisson extraordinaire et le déguste. Le poisson est tellement bon qu'il redemande un deuxième filet. "C'est 20 roubles" dit l'Arménien. L'autre paie le prix et savoure son filet. Une fois qu'il a fini de le manger, il demande à l'Arménien : "Ce poisson-là, où est-ce qu'on en trouve?" "Dans tous les magasins de Yérévan, pour 1 rouble le kilo." "Quoi?! fait son compagnon de voyage juif, 1 rouble le kilo, et tu me le vends à 20 roubles le filet d'à peine 200 grammes?!" "Ah, tu vois? rétorque l'Arménien, tu commences déjà à réfléchir!"

*(c'est le poisson qui est pêché dans le lac Sevan en Arménie)

ara baliozian · October 21, 2009

Sunday, October 18, 2009

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

WE NEVER LEARN

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

“We may think of Turks as backward Asiatic slobs,” Shahan Shahnour warns us somewhere, “but make no mistake about it: when it comes to Armenians, they can be very, very calculating and methodical.”

If the intention of the Protocols was to pit the Diaspora against the Homeland, it was must be declared a brilliant coup -- judging by the Diaspora's venomous opposition to the regime in Yerevan.

*

The Turks are now imposing punitive taxation on their media barons critical of the regime. It seems they respect a free press as much as we do.

I will never forget the conversation I once had with the publisher of a bilingual (English-Armenian) weekly in Los Angeles. He began by informing me that he had received a call from the secretary of a national benefactor.

“What did he want?” I asked, smelling a rat.

“He demanded why I go on publishing you,” was his reply.

“And you said?”

“I said I edit only the Armenian section, someone else handles the English section.”

“Did he buy that?”

I guess he didn't because shortly thereafter I was fired with no explanation, severance pay, or even a thank you note for my decade -long pro bono weekly contributions of book reviews, commentaries, and translations.

#

Monday, October 19, 2009

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

COMMENTS

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

“Deal may end Turkish-Armenian friction,” reads the headline of a commentary on the Protocols by a British pundit. So far however it has succeeded only in increasing Diaspora-Homeland friction.

*

According to a British diplomat, also quoted in today's paper: “Africans as a whole are not only not averse to cutting off their nose to spite their face; they regard such an operation as a triumph of cosmetic surgery.”

My first thought: That makes two of us.

*

If you can't explain the inexplicable, what's the use of writing?

*

Every morning on waking up sometimes I fail to remind myself that the sun does not rise to hear me crowing.

#

Tuesday, 20 October, 2009

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

MAKING CONNECTIONS

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

“A dog starved at his master's gate

Predicts the ruin of the state.” (William Blake)

*

To understand history means to see the connecting tissue that binds two apparently unrelated occurrences. Naregatsi's lamentations and a thousand years of subservience. Abovian's suicide and the Genocide. Tolstoy's excommunication and the Russian revolution. The persecution of dissenters and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

*

Perhaps one reason we don't behead our “kings” is that they know how to flatter our vanity. Example: We are a young nation and the oldest civilization.

*

If on occasion I insult my fellow Armenians it may be because so far flattery has not worked for us.

*

If they massacred us because they hated us, does that justify our own hatred for them? What if hatred is toxic to our understanding of our enemies, or for that matter of our friends, and ultimately of ourselves and reality?

*

I never say anything about others that I am not prepared to say about myself. It is through my own failings that I recognize them in others.

#

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

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

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

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

Someone voices an opinion, another develops it, a third sees an idea in it, and a fourth formulates a general theory. That's how human thought is advanced. But where there is intolerance, there will be censorship, and where there is censorship, progress will be arrested, creativity aborted, and man moronized.

*

I too am a survivor – not of Turkish atrocities but of moronized fellow countrymen.

*

All men are created equal, but some men are in a better position to say one thing, do the opposite, and get away with murder.

*

Like most men I was educated to be a dupe, but unlike most men I continued to be one even in my advanced years. When an Armenian writer from Beirut once told me he had given up writing because several of his masterpieces had burned during the civil war in Beirut, I believed him. But when I mentioned this to another writer from Beirut, I was told that's a favorite cliché of Beirutsi intellectuals – to blame the non-existence of their works on the war.

*

What we need is an Armenian Human Rights Commission that will expose our dismal human rights record. We are either for human rights or against it. If we are against it, we must be for Levantine charlatanism, Soviet brutality, and Asiatic barbarism.

*

We have a veritable alphabet soup of organizations and bureaucracies run by Levantine wheeler-dealers in the Diaspora and former commissars in the Homeland. What we don't have and need badly is a Human Rights Commission.

Bureaucrats are bureaucrats regardless of nationality. Unchecked by watchdog agencies, they will grab as much power as they can. But what I find even more repellent than power-hungry bureaucrats is the silence of our academics and intellectuals. Mart bidi ch'ellank.

*

I wonder, do Turks have a Human Rights Commission? If they don't, in what way are we different from them? If they do, is it conceivable that they are more civilized than we are? Something to think about.

#

ara baliozian · October 21, 2009

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Another story, but i am sorry, it is in French .

Le poisson qui développe la réflexion

"Un Arménien se rend à Moscou par le train. Dans le compartiment, il se trouve assis en face d'un Juif. Vers midi, ils rabattent la tablette pour manger un morceau. L'Arménien qui s'est muni de quelques succulents Ichkhan dzouk fumés (le fameux poisson ichkhan)* emballés dans du papier, commence à manger délicatement, minutieusement, le premier poisson, sans laisser le moindre morceau de chair. Son compagnon de voyage le regarde du coup de l'oeil et finit par dire : "Ce poisson m'a l'air d'être très savoureux". "En effet, dit l'Arménien, très savoureux, et en plus il a la vertu de développer la réflexion." "Ah bon? dit son compagnon de voyage, je peux en avoir un morceau?" "Bien sûr, dit l'Arménien, je vends le filet 20 roubles." Son compagnon de voyage paie ce filet de poisson extraordinaire et le déguste. Le poisson est tellement bon qu'il redemande un deuxième filet. "C'est 20 roubles" dit l'Arménien. L'autre paie le prix et savoure son filet. Une fois qu'il a fini de le manger, il demande à l'Arménien : "Ce poisson-là, où est-ce qu'on en trouve?" "Dans tous les magasins de Yérévan, pour 1 rouble le kilo." "Quoi?! fait son compagnon de voyage juif, 1 rouble le kilo, et tu me le vends à 20 roubles le filet d'à peine 200 grammes?!" "Ah, tu vois? rétorque l'Arménien, tu commences déjà à réfléchir!"

*(c'est le poisson qui est pêché dans le lac Sevan en Arménie)

i should translate that into english. it's wonderful.

but i suspect it's armenian propaganda.

i have never heard of a jew who can be fooled by an armenian.

my last night means sledge-hammer in turkish.

ara baliozian · October 24, 2009

Thursday, October 22, 2009

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

A BLAME-GAME SCENARIO

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

On hearing one of our elder statesmen blame our misfortunes on “chezoks” or non-partisan Armenians, I wrote a commentary in which I identified my father as a chezok and explained that he had been too honest to engage in charlatanism, too busy trying to provide for his family in time of war in an alien environment, and too unassuming to associate himself with individuals who thought of themselves as the offspring of heroes engaged in the difficult task of saving the nation.

On reading this, our elder statesman telephoned and said one reason he had said that about chezoks was that he though I was a member of the Party. Had he known I wasn't, he wouldn't have said what he said. I didn't have the heart to tell him I was not a chezok, I was anti-partisan on the grounds that I considered our revolutionaries the source of most of our misfortunes.

*

Finally a new book on the Genocide in which our revolutionaries are described as “a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings,” a “vicious political clique of terrorists” and “experts in deception and distortion.” The last two quotations are by John Roy Carlson (real name Avedis Derounian), a prominent Armenian-American journalist who witnessed the assassination of Tourian in 1933 in New York and wrote a best-selling book on fascist organization in America titled UNDER COVER.

*

Our historians are consistent in describing Armenians as a "historically persecuted race…an orphan nation" that has experienced "massacres, atrocities, and massive destruction" (Dadrian). What they fail to explore is, to what extent our own tribalism, lack of solidarity, and incompetent leadership -- things that have been discussed at some length by our own chroniclers, novelists, essayists, and satirists -- were a contributing factor to our perennial status as losers and victims.

#

Friday, October 23, 2009

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

CONSOLATION MANTRAS

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

We all make mistakes.

Tomorrow is another day.

Nobody's perfect.

Let bygones be bygones.

To each his own.

Easy come, easy go.

Forget about it.

This too shall pass. (A favorite of sufferers from chronic constipation).

Forgive and forget.

It takes all kinds.

We all die. (Once when I said that to a friend, he said: “Yes, but people like us die every day.”)

*

De Gaulle once blamed his problems on the 254 (or is it 378?) varieties of cheeses the French eat. We are better off. So far no one has blamed our problems on pilaf and shish kebab.

*

Propagandists don't believe in their own propaganda.

“The Pope doubts his faith seven times every day” (Italian saying).

“Idol-makers don't believe in idols” (Chinese saying).

*

Why the need for Ten Commandments? It would have been simpler to instill in us the ability to discriminate right from wrong, or God from the Devil.

*

Because I refuse to recycle chauvinist crapola, I am told I hate myself. That's Armenian logic for you. I wonder, what's Ottoman logic like? I don't know, but whatever it is, it can't be worse than Armenian logic.

*

Success spoils people. Failure by contrast makes them tougher and wiser. Like all rules, this one too has its exceptions, namely, Armenians.

*

One of my favorite lines in fiction: “And then something very unexpected happened.”

*

Armenians don't mind long sermons against sin and longer speeches on patriotism. But when it comes to reading, they have a very short attention span. That's one reason why I write short sentences.

*

Most people fail because they try to excel in someone else's field.

#

Saturday, October 24, 2009

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

KISS ME, I AM ARMENIAN

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

Like love and hatred, ideologies and belief systems have a tendency to dehumanize men by reducing them to predictable clichés. That's because they create an environment wherein the men at the top behave like wolves and their followers like sheep.

*

To be a leader consists in mastering the technique of flattering and manipulating.

Fools will believe anything they are told provided they are first brainwashed to believe they are too smart to be fooled.

*

The Greeks brag about their past, the Yanks about their present. If you are disposed to brag, you will find something, anything, including military defeats by calling them moral victories, including being massacred by the million by calling it first genocide of the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if some day we hear of a jungle tribe in South America that brags about being the only tribe that believes in the divinity of ants and anacondas.

*

In a world where everyone thinks he is the best, he is the chosen, he is superior to all others, our choice is either being like them or defending our humanity even if it means having more doubts than certainties.

*

Though I have written a great deal about history, I am not a historian. But I can recognize a propagandist when I see one.

*

We a small, peace-loving, civilized, landlocked country surrounded on all sides by warlike, bloodthirsty giants? Not quite. We were not always small and we were not always landlocked, and we were not always peace-loving.

*

We are not so much a work in progress as a case of arrested development.

Kiss me, I am Armenian?

I will be grateful to my fellow countrymen if they don't kick me in the balls.

#

ara baliozian · October 31, 2009

Thursday, October 29, 2009

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

COMMENTS

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

“Education is a womb-to-tomb activity. The person who isn't educating himself is obviously dead.” From INTERVIEWS WITH NORTHROP FRYE (Toronto, 2008, page 68.)

*

I remember to have read somewhere, it is easy to resurrect a corpse; much more difficult to raise the brain-dead.

*

In a recent issue of THE NEW YORKER (Oct. 21, 2009) there is a portrait of Nikki Finke, a Hollywood columnist, where we read that she “portrays many of the town's leaders as jackasses who elbow underlings aside to hog the spotlight... downsize underlings while lining their own pockets, and generally besmirch the fabric of civilization.”

*

Our problems are universal, with one difference: we don't like talking about them and whenever someone dares to do so, we shut him up in the name of patriotism, of course!

*

Our emperors have no clothes because what they need to hide is so tiny that it might as well be invisible to the naked eye.

*

Armenians are incomprehensible not because they are too complex but because they are absurd.

*

Is writing for Armenians some kind of anomaly or a complex in need of psychological therapy? I am not sure. Judging by the number of writers we have produced and the zero effect they have had on the direction of our collective existence, it must surely qualify as an exercise in futility and a total waste of time. Perhaps one reason I go on writing is to remind our jackasses that they can't fool all the people all the time, and if there is only one they can't fool today, there may be two tomorrow.

*

I am told there are readers who can't stand the sight of my name on their computer screen. I have an instant solution to that problem: it's called the Spam button. You don't know about it? Ask a child.

*

Ajarian, the foremost authority on the Armenian language, is quoted as having said: “Who among us can pretend to know the Armenian language?”

#

Friday, October 30, 2009

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

OTTOMANISM AND ARMENIANISM

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

“If you have them at your mercy and they are in no position to retaliate, be merciless!” That's the Ottoman way. The Armenian way? About the same. If on occasion I show no mercy in my dealings with our jackasses, it's for a good reason: to let them have a taste of their own venom.

*

“Before they start accusing me of sins I have never even dreamed to commit, let me plead guilty to all of them to satisfy their blood lust.” This may well have been Naregatsi's state of mind when he sat down to compose his LAMENTATION. And judging by the astonishing number of sins he enumerates, the 11th century must have been our Golden Age of Backbiting.

*

It is written: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Armenian translation: “If he is innocent and you are guilty, stone the bugger to death before he has a chance to expose you.”

*

There is an inflexible law in our collective existence: “The better you get, the worst they treat you.” You want evidence? Make a list of our best writers and consider the manner of their deaths. And remember to include Talaat's and Stalin's victims because they were betrayed by their fellow Armenians. Americans treat their dogs with greater kindness. My guess is, the reason why we have a veritable alphabet soup of cultural and charitable foundations is to cover up our philistinism and Ottomanism.

#

Saturday, October 31, 2009

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

IN PRAISE OF THE OPPOSITION

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

Only the insecure read to have their prejudices reinforced.

As a Catholic I enjoyed reading books that were on the Index.

I was taught to believe Turks were bloodthirsty savages. I now have Turkish friends with whom I enjoy exchanging views – something I cannot say about my fellow Armenians.

After a brief stay in New York City, an anti-Semite friend of the family from Greece paid us a visit. “I saw quite a few Jews there,” he said at one point. “Guess what. They are people like you and me!”

I have met several Armenians, among them a poet and a businessman, who on visiting Turkey, they became infatuated with Turks. I have also met Armenians who after visiting the Homeland and on their return to America, they went down on their knees and, like the Polish Pope, kissed the tarmac.

I have learned more about Tashnaks by reading Ramgavars and vice versa.

I am a liberal who enjoys reading the NATIONAL REVIEW, and one of my favorite contemporary American writers is Buckley's son, Christopher.

Friends justify your blunders and cover up your failings, they thus do more harm than good. I have learned more about myself by reading my critics. Perhaps one reason we have been going backwards as a community is our collective fear of criticism and dissent.

Mart bidi ch'ellank!

#

ara baliozian · November 11, 2009

Thursday, October 29, 2009
****************************************
COMMENTS
********************************************************
“Education is a womb-to-tomb activity. The person who isn't educating himself is obviously dead.” From INTERVIEWS WITH NORTHROP FRYE (Toronto, 2008, page 68.)
*
I remember to have read somewhere, it is easy to resurrect a corpse; much more difficult to raise the brain-dead.
*
In a recent issue of THE NEW YORKER (Oct. 21, 2009) there is a portrait of Nikki Finke, a Hollywood columnist, where we read that she “portrays many of the town's leaders as jackasses who elbow underlings aside to hog the spotlight... downsize underlings while lining their own pockets, and generally besmirch the fabric of civilization.”
*
Our problems are universal, with one difference: we don't like talking about them and whenever someone dares to do so, we shut him up in the name of patriotism, of course!
*
Our emperors have no clothes because what they need to hide is so tiny that it might as well be invisible to the naked eye.
*
Armenians are incomprehensible not because they are too complex but because they are absurd.
*
Is writing for Armenians some kind of anomaly or a complex in need of psychological therapy? I am not sure. Judging by the number of writers we have produced and the zero effect they have had on the direction of our collective existence, it must surely qualify as an exercise in futility and a total waste of time. Perhaps one reason I go on writing is to remind our jackasses that they can't fool all the people all the time, and if there is only one they can't fool today, there may be two tomorrow.
*
I am told there are readers who can't stand the sight of my name on their computer screen. I have an instant solution to that problem: it's called the Spam button. You don't know about it? Ask a child.
*
Ajarian, the foremost authority on the Armenian language, is quoted as having said: “Who among us can pretend to know the Armenian language?”
#
Friday, October 30, 2009
****************************************
OTTOMANISM AND ARMENIANISM
********************************************************
“If you have them at your mercy and they are in no position to retaliate, be merciless!” That's the Ottoman way. The Armenian way? About the same. If on occasion I show no mercy in my dealings with our jackasses, it's for a good reason: to let them have a taste of their own venom.
*
“Before they start accusing me of sins I have never even dreamed to commit, let me plead guilty to all of them to satisfy their blood lust.” This may well have been Naregatsi's state of mind when he sat down to compose his LAMENTATION. And judging by the astonishing number of sins he enumerates, the 11th century must have been our Golden Age of Backbiting.
*
It is written: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Armenian translation: “If he is innocent and you are guilty, stone the bugger to death before he has a chance to expose you.”
*
There is an inflexible law in our collective existence: “The better you get, the worst they treat you.” You want evidence? Make a list of our best writers and consider the manner of their deaths. And remember to include Talaat's and Stalin's victims because they were betrayed by their fellow Armenians. Americans treat their dogs with greater kindness. My guess is, the reason why we have a veritable alphabet soup of cultural and charitable foundations is to cover up our philistinism and Ottomanism.
#
Saturday, October 31, 2009
****************************************
IN PRAISE OF THE OPPOSITION
********************************************************
Only the insecure read to have their prejudices reinforced.
As a Catholic I enjoyed reading books that were on the Index.
I was taught to believe Turks were bloodthirsty savages. I now have Turkish friends with whom I enjoy exchanging views – something I cannot say about my fellow Armenians.
After a brief stay in New York City, an anti-Semite friend of the family from Greece paid us a visit. “I saw quite a few Jews there,” he said at one point. “Guess what. They are people like you and me!”
I have met several Armenians, among them a poet and a businessman, who on visiting Turkey, they became infatuated with Turks. I have also met Armenians who after visiting the Homeland and on their return to America, they went down on their knees and, like the Polish Pope, kissed the tarmac.
I have learned more about Tashnaks by reading Ramgavars and vice versa.
I am a liberal who enjoys reading the NATIONAL REVIEW, and one of my favorite contemporary American writers is Buckley's son, Christopher.
Friends justify your blunders and cover up your failings, they thus do more harm than good. I have learned more about myself by reading my critics. Perhaps one reason we have been going backwards as a community is our collective fear of criticism and dissent.
Mart bidi ch'ellank!
#

ara baliozian · November 11, 2009

Sunday, November 8, 2009

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

FOOLS

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

They don't brag about their culture

and they have a Nobel-Prize winner.

We brag about ours,

and what have we got?

Ask an Armenian to name a contemporary Armenian writer

and he will give you a dirty “Who-gives-a-damn?” look.

*

Will Safire (may he rest in peace) once said

Germans have a tendency “to look the other way

when moral values are threatened.”

Ask an Armenian

what a moral value is

and the chances are he will give you

a “What-the-hell-is-that?” look.

Ask him what a human right is

and he will give you a hostile “Don't-waste-my-time” look.

Ask him if we are civilized, progressive, and smart

and he will reply

“Of course we are!” with a look that says

“How dare you ask such a dumb question, you fool?”

*

After centuries of life under sultans and commissars,

we might as well be blind

to moral, aesthetic, and democratic values.

*

No use blaming others.

The fault is in us or rather

in our mini-sultans and neo-commissars.

*

All nationalists lie

when they speak about themselves

and their enemies.

*

“For a fool he sure is smart!” I used to think,

until I realized he was not the fool,

I was.

#

Monday, November 9, 2009

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

LIES

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

If a man marries seven times

it only means one thing:

he is a poor judge of feminine flesh.

Likewise, if a nation has been subservient

to alien tyrants for a thousand years,

it only means one thing:

its unspoken motto is not

“freedom or death”

but “survival at all cost.”

*

Instead of raising our children

to brag about our survival,

we should teach them honesty.

And since we don't have an Armenian word for honesty,

we should invent one.

The alternative is rewriting history

and engaging in double-talk.

*

No one likes liars.

Even liars prefer to deal with honest men.

*

We are divided because both sides

are too busy covering up their lies

to be honest with themselves,

their counterparts, and the people.

*

For an adult to believe in Santa is bad enough,

but what is infinitely worse

is to be an habitual and compulsive liar

and to brag about one's honesty and love of truth.

#

REPLIES

TO A STUDENT'S QUESTIONS

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

Question: Do you believe what the Turks did to the Armenians in 1915 was genocide?

Answer: I do.

Q: Do you believe it was a deliberately adopted and systematically implemented policy by the Turkish government?

A: No doubt about that. It was planned and executed in cold blood. The evidence -- the testimony of survivors, eyewitness accounts, historians who have studied the record, not all of them Armenian, some of them Turkish -- is overwhelming. Besides, no nation in the history of mankind has ever fabricated a genocide and believed in it for nearly a century.

Q: Do you know or have you ever met a survivor?

A: I grew up in a ghetto near Athens, Greece, populated by several thousand survivors. Most of them were not educated or literate. They didn't like to reminisce. Besides, they were engaged in the serious business of surviving World War II, the German occupation, blockade by the Allies, the Greek Civil War... The poverty was appalling. The housing a disaster area -- as bad as the worst slums in South America and India.

Q: Some say the so-called deportations were flight from the violence – true or false?

A: My father was a teenager in 1915 and he was lucky in that a friend of the family, a Turkish cop, warned the family of the coming deportations. He was able to flee the violence but only with the shirt on his back. My mother was only a tiny baby who ended up in an orphanage in Lebanon run by Catholic nuns.

Q: Do you think the Armenian genocide has had any impact on the world?

A: None whatever! There have been more genocides in the last century than at any other time in the history of mankind.

Q: In your opinion, what is the most important thing you have heard concerning the genocide?

A: The unimaginable cruelty of the sadistic criminals – and they were criminals – who carried out the deportations.

Q: Do you believe that the deportations and marches of Armenians in 1915 were deliberately designed by the Turkish government to lead to the death of the deportees, or do you believe that it was unintentional?

A: It was deliberate and intentional – no doubt about that. The only explanation I have is that, the Turks were convinced they were fighting for their own survival against overwhelming enemies from without as well as from within, among them the Armenians.

Q: What do you think is the most important thing that people can learn from the Genocide?

A: Like all belief systems and ideologies, nationalism can also be abused. It was in the name of nationalism that our revolutionaries challenged the might of the Ottoman Empire, and it was in the name of nationalism that the Young Turks thought the only way to defend the integrity of their nation was to exterminate the Armenians.

Q: What are your impressions of people who say it wasn't really a genocide?

A: People can be brainwashed to believe anything. Luckily not everyone is vulnerable to being brainwashed. There is now a generation of Turkish intellectuals that no longer believe what their politicians dictate.

Q: Did your mother or anyone you know who went through the genocide ever mention concentration camps, mass burnings, starvation or massacres?

A: Both my father and mother were among the lucky ones who did not witness or experience these things – except near starvation and abominable poverty in an alien environment.

Q: What is the single most important thing you would tell someone who questions the reality of the Armenian genocide?

A: Only this: state propaganda cannot be a reliable source of information.

#

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

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

DIARY

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

With reasonable men, reason is enough.

With children, repetition has a better chance.

*

No one can be as dumb

as he who has been brainwashed to believe he is smart.

*

According to Northrop Frye, the foremost Canadian authority on the Scriptures, the aim of the Bible is to expand human consciousness.

*

Philosophers are more modest than prophets. They don't pretend to speak in the name of God. No one has ever declared a war or tortured a fellow human being in defense of Plato's or Schopenhauer's theories.

*

The day man invented God,

he let loose the equivalent of ten thousand atomic bombs.

Who thinks of God as a weapon of mass destruction?

And yet...(the saddest words in the English language, it has been said).

*

For writing as I do, once upon a time I would have been sliced into ribbons and fed to the dogs by the Pope's henchmen.

*

Believing in miracles is bad enough.

Believing that man is worthy of them is worse.

*

To punish the guilty, sometimes Canadians send them back to their homeland.

I can't imagine a worse punishment.

*

Are we worthy of our martyrs?

What about our heroes?

Do we have them?

*

Every house in which I have lived has been torn down by either war or real-estate developers. My alma mater is now a motel. Which is almost like saying, my childhood sweetheart is now a bordello madam.

*

I have been a source of disappointment to everyone I have met, including myself, and I cannot decide whether that's an asset or a liability.

*

Good Armenians?

One in a thousand --

and I belong with the 999.

*

Eduardo Galeano in his MIRRORS writes: “Those who knew Leonardo said he never embraced a woman. Yet from his hand was born the most famous portrait of all times. A woman.”

And:

“Queen Elizabeth of England and the Sun King of France ate with their hands. When Michel de Montaigne ate in a hurry, he bit his fingers.”

*

When an old Indian predicted a bad winter and was asked how he can tell, he replied: “White man make big wood pile.”

#

ara baliozian · November 14, 2009

Thursday, November 12, 2009

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

DIARY / 2

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

“What Africa needs is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties to the larger loyalties of nationhood.”

I copy these lines from a magazine article for those of my readers who say we need solutions.

*

To be a dupe in our context means to be deceived by frauds who have deceived themselves to believe they are leaders of men.

*

Let us not confuse anti-Turkism with pro-Armenianism.

*

Martin Scorcese: “...thanks to a professor named Haig Manoogian I discovered that I could express everything I felt through film.”

*

Salman Rushdie: “My father was a great religious scholar, but he wasn't a believer.”

*

David Lynch on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: “I owe him the discovery that the possibility for happiness dwells within us.”

A hundred years before Maharishi, Tolstoy based a belief system on a 2000-year old dictum: “The kingdom of God is within you.”

*

There is only one religion: the search for meaning.

*

There is a type of reader who reads not to learn but to settle scores; not to engage in dialogue but to insult; and an insult is as difficult to refute as a massacre, perhaps because it is verbal massacre.

*

Nothing human is beyond criticism, including the Word of God as heard, interpreted, written down, translated, read and understood by man.

*

According to Buddha: “That which is spoken, heard, and understood are three different things.”

*

What a scathing book review Buddha would write of the Bible and the Koran!

#

Friday, November 13, 2009

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

DIARY / 3

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

To understand Turks, all I have to do is examine my own heart.

To understand Turkish lies, all I have to do is consider our own.

*

Why should I trust the judgment or integrity of men who hire belly-slitting lawyers whenever their sensibilities are offended?

*

Northrop Frye on a common misconception of God: “...the ferocious old bugger up in the sky with the whiskers and the reactionary political views, who enjoys sending people to hell.”

*

When I hear or read the word Islam, the first four words that come to mind are: giaour, imam, fatwa, and jihad; and I loathe these words as much I loathe the words boss, bishop, benefactor, and commissar.

*

You cannot change that which you hate: that may explain my failure. Perhaps what we need is not critics but messiahs. Anyone interested in being crucified?

*

There is something in our partisans that doesn’t like disagreement, dissent, criticism, dialogue, democracy, free speech, human rights, honesty, straight talk, common sense….

*

The disagreement of a single honest man means much more to me than the agreement of a thousand fools and ten thousand dupes.

#

Saturday, November 14, 2009

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

DIARY / 4

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

Sooner or later all lies are exposed and replaced by other lies.

*

Truth is not a noun but a verb – it consists in shedding lies.

*

Ottomanism, Sovietism, Armenianism: the only difference between them is the number of dupes and hoodlums they control.

*

Northrop Frye's explanation of deconstruction: “Rousseau wrote on the origin of language, but he was primarily interested in masturbation.”

*

Eduardo Galeano: “Hunting Jews has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who never played it, are paying the bill.”

*

Men need to believe in something, even if it is a lie that will enslave them.

#

ara baliozian · November 18, 2009

Sunday, November 15, 2009

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

DIARY / 5

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

When an American capitalist first heard the passage in the Scriptures that says a wealthy man cannot go to heaven in the same way that a camel cannot pass through the eye of a needle, he hired a succession of theologians and demanded an explanation. Only one came up with the answer that pleased him which was this: The “Eye of a Needle” was the name of a narrow passage under a low bridge in Jerusalem. That theologian went home with a fat check in his pocket.

*

I suspect if you were to ask one of our bishops to explain the line “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” he will say neither can a house with rotten foundations, and what could be more rotten than a heresy?

*

Theologians are like lawyers, they will plead not guilty even if their client is a serial killer who may kill again.

*

“The law is the law,” they say. So is the Word of God. But both cease to be what they claim to be if they are interpreted to mean the opposite of what they say.

*

I enjoy reading pundits who are on my side. I enjoy even more reading pundits of the opposition. But my very favorite pundits are liberals who turned conservative and vice versa.

*

I don’t read to have my ego massaged or my prejudices reinforced, but for the exactly opposite reason.

*

Dostoevsky began his literary career as a liberal and became conservative. By contrast, Thomas Mann began as a conservative right-wing nationalist and ended as a left-wing cosmopolitan liberal. I enjoy reading both. I enjoy them even when they express views with which I am in complete disagreement.

#

Monday, November 16, 2009

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

DIARY / 6

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

What Romans did to their Christians,

Christians did to their heretics.

Religions and regimes may change,

but man stays the same

and the scum of the earth

always rises to the top.

*

The people who do the most harm to mankind

are, as a rule, the least aware of it.

They may even think of themselves

as the best and the brightest,

or promoters of virtue,

or representatives of God on earth.

Kings, popes, imams:

we may be justified in calling them

certified moral morons.

*

Something to remember and repeat:

Self-criticism is not unpatriotic.

Silencing critics is.

*

It was Kant who said that very often

ignorance is nothing but

cowardice in the face of knowledge.

*

When a chauvinist who recycles crap says:

“Criticism must be constructive!”

what he really means is:

“If recycling crap is good enough for me,

how dare you think otherwise?”

#

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

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

DIARY / 7

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

I am grateful to all charlatans who,

with their example, taught me the value of honesty.

*

People profess to love the truth

but live as though they were afraid of it --

hence the old Armenian saying:

"If you speak the truth,

you will be chased out from seven villages."

*

The very same people

who pour venom on every line I write

and sling mud at me

(hoping some of it will stick),

accuse me of being negative.

*

In a dictionary of philosophy:

“Generally speaking megalomania is a reaction to failure.

The megalomaniac represents himself

as he would like to be

but as he is not.

Megalomania may also be a symptom

of the decline of one’s critical faculties.”

*

On dogmatism:

“It stands in direct contradiction to criticism,

skepticism, empiricism, and realism.

It fosters intolerance and fanaticism.”

*

To be read by friendly readers:

nothing unusual in that.

To be read by hostiles:

That’s where the money is,

because it means being allowed the opportunity

to introduce ideas where none exist.

#

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

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

ON THE DEATH

OF ARMENIAN LITERATURE

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

Poverty should not be confused with destitution.

Poverty is the total absence of all luxuries.

Destitution means anxiety, fear, subservience, uncertainty, degradation, envy, anger, hatred, and worse of all, dependence on the charity of swine.

This may explain why our writers, who ought to know better, are more than willing to crap on one another and kiss the posterior not only of an empty suit with money but also his flunkies and hirelings.

Their central concern is not producing a decent line but getting closer to the money tree even if the tree bears poisoned fruit.

*

What is an old man if not a fool with wrinkles?

*

A common Armenian misconception promoted by our ubiquitous and dime-a-dozen Turcocentric ghazetajis: to equate anti-Turkism with pro-Armenianism.

*

Our collective self-esteem is so low that it needs constant positive feedback. Hence the mantras first nation this and first nation that...

*

There is no such thing as an average Armenian. An average Armenian is a self-assessed genius and an unappreciated and misunderstood Armenian.

*

Asked what he thought of Nietzsche, Jules Romain replied: “There are too many unnecessary letters in his name.”

*

After reading one of my things,

an old friend writes: “I am glad you continue to be a patriotic Armenian.”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that

I loathe patriotism.

I love honest men and loathe charlatans regardless of nationality;

and some of the worst charlatans I have met are Armenian patriots.

#

ara baliozian · November 21, 2009

Thursday, November 19, 2009

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

CANADIAN VALUES

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

Two widely held views on Canada by Canadians:

“This country was founded on Christian values.”

“Canada is ours: we stole it from the Indians fair and square.”

*

ARMENIAN VALUES

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

It makes no difference whether you cut a writer's tongue out or you silence him.

Neither does it make any difference whether you kill him or you ignore him.

The result will be the same.

*

CATECHISM 101

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

Q: Do you believe Jesus was the son of God?

A: Aren't we all? We don't say “Our stepFather who art in heaven,” or “Our Father-in-law...” We say “Our Father...”

Q: Do you believe He rose from the dead?

A: I believe he never died. All gods are immortal. They don't die. That's a rule without exceptions.

*

DENIALISTS

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

Q: How do you explain American academics who deny the Genocide?

A: Promise an academic a regular salary and he will deny his own existence.

Q: What about Jews who deny the Genocide?

A: Jews don't, Israeli politicians do, and politicians have no principles, only interests.

*

ON TREASON

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

“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly, but the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. “

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 42 BC

#

Friday, November 20, 2009

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

ON REPETITION

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

Advertisements and propaganda

appeal to our lowest instincts

and they thrive on repetition.

Do I repeat myself?

Why shouldn't I?

If repetition works for the devil,

it can work for Jesus,

which is what Martin Luther said

when he adapted drinking songs to church hymns.

*

CRITICS

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

To subscribe to a belief system

means to reject all others

as aberrations, deviations and heresies.

To say I am against criticism

is also criticism.

*

INFANTILE CRITICISM

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

Because I write against prejudice,

I am accused of being prejudiced.

Because I write against subservience and ignorance,

I am accused of both transgressions.

The offspring of perennial victims,

I am accused of being on the side of victimizers.

Because I refuse to be a dupe,

I am told I am a dupe of enemy propaganda.

I call this type of criticism

tit-for-tat, senile, or infantile criticism.

*

LIES

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

What is the biggest Armenian lie?

That Armenians are honest.

What is the dumbest Armenian lie?

That Armenians are smart.

#

Saturday, November 21, 2009

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

TO MY CRITICS

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

If you have irrefutable evidence that suggests I am wrong,

then I must be wrong and I plead guilty as charged.

If, on the other hand, your evidence is based

on hearsay, propaganda, or a belief system,

then I suggest it is suspect

and therefore inadmissible.

*

Belief systems are infallible only to their dupes.

*

Knowledge based on propaganda

(and the favorite medium of all belief systems is propaganda )

is worse than ignorance.

*

When belief systems speak in terms of certainties,

they lie. And because they lie,

we have heresies, holy wars, and jihads

all of which operate like licenses

to commit crimes against humanity

in the name of an idol parading as God Almighty.

*

In a biography of Churchill I read today that

one of his favorite mottoes when in trouble was:

KBO = Keep Buggering On.

Perhaps that’s what I have been doing all along too

but didn’t know what to call it.

#

ara baliozian · November 25, 2009

Sunday, November 22, 2009

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

ON INDEPENDENCE

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

Simon Rodriguez is a 19th-century South-American writer and educator who could have had Armenians in mind when he wrote: “We are independent but not free. Something must be done for these poor people, who have become less free than before. Before, they had a shepherd king who did not eat them until they were dead. Now the first to show up eats them alive.”

On education: “Teach children to be curious so they learn to obey their own minds rather than obeying authorities the way the narrow-minded do, or obeying custom the way the stupid do. He who knows nothing, anyone can fool. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.”

*

ON JUSTICE

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

We should speak about the Genocide less to demand justice and more to remind ourselves where we live. Justice is a noble goal but it is not always attainable.

*

YANKS

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

You want to know why Americans refuse to recognize the Genocide? Read their history and their treatment of Blacks, Indians, and Latinos; or listen to their music; or watch their gangster movies in which the criminals are the heroes.

*

PIERRE BOULEZ SPEAKS

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

On funerals: “It's depressing to revive a part of your life that's dead. I am not one who goes to funerals for enjoyment.”

On patriotism: “I heard too many of Petain's disgusting speeches during the Occupation to give patriotism a single thought.”

#

Monday, November 23, 2009

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

ON KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING

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

The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for its brainless(*) to assume they are the brains of the people.

*

First they assumed to be smart – which was a serious blunder.

Then they assumed to know better – another serious blunder.

And now they spend most of their time and energy covering up both blunders – which is the greatest blunder of all, because it keeps them so busy that they don't have the time to identify and focus on our present problems.

*

The solution is obvious:

the first step is to admit they are not as smart as they think they are. But even if they were, that doesn't mean they are without limitations. Even the wisest men on earth don't know and understand everything.

*

To be smart or to know better does not mean to understand reality. No one can truly say he understands all of reality. The very best we can do is understand a small fraction of it.

*

When asked why things exist, all scientists and philosophers can say is, existence “is just one of those things,” which translated into dollars and cents means “we don't have a clue.” Which also means, to know a great many things does not mean to know the most important things. Or, to be the best Oriental carpet dealer in the world does not mean to know how to lead a dog to the nearest fire hydrant or to catch a cold in a flu epidemic.

=========================================================

(*) Avedik Issahakian's characterization of our leadership.

##

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

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

GEOGRAPHY

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

To those who blame our misfortunes not on our rotten leadership but on geography, consider the following passage from Eduardo Galeano's MIRRORS, which may best be described as history stripped of all propaganda.

After decapitating everyone who had taken part in the Boxer rebellion in China at the turn of the last century, we read, “Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Japan, and the United States...sliced up China as if it were a pizza, and each took ports, lands, and cities that the phantasmal Chinese dynasty bestowed upon them as concessions for periods of up to ninety-nine years.”

Closer to home, consider the case of the natives in America, Mexico, and Canada who were too busy slaughtering one another to present a united front to the handful of white men who ended up slaughtering them. Now then, tell me, what part did their geography play in their defeat and subjection?

*

Elsewhere, Galeano identified Heinrich Goering, father of the Nazi Hermann, as “one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the 20th century.” The victims are identified as the Hereros of Namibia. The order for their annihilation, we are told, was issued and carried out in 1904. And, “Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun.”

If you don't know who the Hereros are and where Namibia is, no matter. Very probably, my guess is, the Hereros, like so many Canadians I have met, don't know either who the Armenians are and where Armenia is.

#

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

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

MORE FROM GALEANO

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

Armenians are not mentioned in the index of Eduardo Galeano's MIRRORS but are discussed on page 300, where we read:

“The Ottoman Empire was falling to pieces and the Armenians paid the price. While the First World War thundered on, government-sponsored butchery did away with half of the Armenians in Turkey:

homes ransacked and burned,

columns of people fleeing without clothes, water, or anything else,

women raped in town squares in broad daylight,

mutilated bodies floating on the rivers.

Whoever escaped thirst or hunger or cold died by the knife or the bullet. Or the gallows. Or by smoke: in the Syrian desert, Armenians driven out of Turkey were forced into caves and suffocated with smoke, in what foreshadowed the Nazi gas chambers to come.

“Twenty years later, Hitler and his advisers were planning the invasion of Poland. Weighing the pros and cons, Hitler realized there would be protests, diplomatic outrage, loud complaints, but he was certain the noise would not last. And to prove his point, he asked:

“Who remembers the Armenians?”

*

Galeano is identified as “one of Latin America's most distinguished writers [whose] work has been translated into twenty-eight languages."

I have every reason to suspect if MIRRORS is ever translated into Turkish, this passage quoted above will be omitted. But if it isn't and the translator is an Armenian, he will be accused of insulting Turkish honor, arrested, tried, found guilty, and condemned to ninety-nine years in prison.

Lord have mercy on honest witnesses for they shall never be forgiven by crooks.

#

ara baliozian · November 28, 2009

Thursday, November 26, 2009

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

MORE IS LESS

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

A Turkish-Armenian is more Turkish and less Armenian.

A Soviet-Armenian is more Soviet and less Armenian.

An Armenian-American is more American and less Armenian.

An Armenian from the Middle-East is more Levantine and less Armenian.

Something similar could be said of French-Armenians, Greek-Armenians, Italian-Armenians (assuming there are some left), and so on.

That's because, in Krikor Zohrab's words: “As impressionable as soft wax, the Armenian acquires indiscriminately the virtues as well as the vices of the country in which he happens to be living.”

And I remember a retired Armenian schoolteacher in her eighties (may she rest in peace and may the blessing of the Lord be upon her) saying, “Armenians are fast learners of all the wrong things.”

*

When Isaac Babel was silenced by the Soviet regime, he said he had invented a new genre: “Silence.”

*

To those who brag about our survival, I say, I would like to hear the testimony of those who did not survive – victims of massacres, earthquakes, starvation, betrayal, and idiots pretending to be leaders of men.

*

Literature flatters no one. Propaganda flatters everyone -- hence its popularity.

*

My severest critics are readers who have not yet mastered the difficult art of understanding simple sentences in the English language.

*

I have discovered that one of the hardest things to explain to a smart (self-assessed, of course) Armenian is this: to refuse to say “yes, sir!” to idiots is not treason.

#

Friday, November 27, 2009

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

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING IN THE WORLD

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

The disciple of an infallible master will think of himself as infallible.

*

When asked what was the most beautiful thing in the world, Diogenes (4th century BC) replied: “Freedom of speech.” Ask one of our commissars what's the worst thing in the world, and he will give you the same answer.

*

There are those who believe our religion has civilized us. There are also those who believe our religion has made of us passive cowards and ideal subjects of tyrants (both foreign and domestic). Who is right? It depends on your choice of evidence: historic reality or narcissism; facts or wishful thinking.

*

Standards have fallen so low that if a man with money can draw the outline of a fish, write a grammatically correct sentence, and quote a line from Shakespeare, he is immediately declared to be a scholar, a gentleman, and a Renaissance man.

*

Armenian Ottomanism? Observe a brother on the warpath trying to get even with a fellow Armenian who has dared to question his judgment.

*

Armenian stages: acceptance, suspicion, dissent, anger, disgust, resignation, despair, alienation, assimilation.

*

Kierkegaard's question: “How many so-called Christians are really Christian?

#

Saturday, November 28, 2009

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

WHAT A WORLD!

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

When the judge and jury are murderers and the defendant is also a murderer whose motive is as clear as daylight, why should we be surprised if he is found not guilty by reason of insufficient evidence? That's one way to explain why the Yanks refuse to recognize the Genocide.

*

It was a case of the blind leading the blind, but they blame the Turks, they blame the West, they blame the opposition, and some of them even blame the victims for their refusal to join their ranks, after which they parade as men of vision.

*

What would you have done in their place? I am asked again and again. Probably what they did and what they are doing. Understanding must begin somewhere and the best place is the self.

*

“A writer without a homeland is like a king in exile,” writes Golo Mann. Speaking for myself I feel more like the inmate of a Gulag whose existence the regime denies and is believed by dupes.

*

If you ask a serial adulterer why he is always the one to cast the first stone, my guess is, he will answer: “It's good PR!”

*

An alienated Armenian is one who after rejecting his Ottomanism, Sovietism, Levantinism, and Americanism, is now in search of his humanity.

*

A headline in my morning paper reads, “Want monogamy? Marry a swan.” The first line of the article informs us: “Actually, it turns out swans cheat, too.” Who would have guessed we live in a world where even swans behave like swine?

#

ara baliozian · December 2, 2009

Notes: Sunday, November 29, 2009

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

ON SELF-ASSESSMENT

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

Popes, imams, dupes, and fanatics – that is to say, the majority of mankind – are never wrong. They may say “man is a fallible creature,” but they believe it doesn't apply to them. To everyone else, yes. To them, hell no!

*

If Mt. Ararat were allowed to assess its own height, it would say it is higher than Everest.

Mt. Ararat?

Make it, a hill of beans.

Even better, make it a pile of sh-t!

*

The greater the number of doubts, the greater the number of aggressively asserted certainties.

*

Power and propaganda are Siamese twins. Separate them and they both die.

*

One reason why imperial powers like Russia and the United States oppose democratic reforms in other countries, including our own, is that they hate to be at the whim of the people. Another reason: corrupt regimes are more easily bribed, blackmailed, and manipulated.

*

Why did Nobel Prize winners like Knut Hamsun and Sartre support Stalin and Hitler? My only answer: where emotions enter, common sense exits. Both Hamsun and Sartre saw only the positive in an alien system and the negative in their own.

#

Monday, November 230, 2009

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

REFLECTIONS OF A CYNIC

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

To commemorate the massacre of 70,000 Protestants in 1572, Pope Gregory XIII had a medal struck. So much for religious tolerance, Christian charity, and Papal infallibility.

*

When two men speak badly of each other, I am tempted to believe both . When they praise each other, I smell a conspiracy.

*

Armenian anti-Semites say the Young Turks were Semites. Speaking for myself, I am less interested in knowing what others (be they Semites or goyim) did to us, and more interested in knowing what we, or rather our leadership, did for us.

If they did something, what exactly?

If nothing, what kind of leaders do nothing but pull their dick in time of crisis?

*

Blaming our misfortunes on others is a dead end because it only reinforces our image as perennial losers and victims. Recognizing our blunders and learning from them however may teach us not to behave like idiots in the future.

*

Hugo Grotius was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher whose famous last words were: “By understanding many things, I have accomplished nothing.”

Speaking of understanding, my favorite famous last words are Hegel's: “No one understood me except one, and even he didn't understand me.”

*

Karl Marx understood Hegel, and those who read and understand Marx call themselves Marxists. But Marx himself said he was not a Marxist, probably because he knew where there is an -ism, or an ideology, or a belief system, there will also be swine like the above-mentioned pope, who not only did nothing to stop the massacres but celebrated the occasion as a victory.

*

What does the papacy and our leadership share in common? The pope struck a medal, our leaders raise monuments and build museums.

#

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

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

WORTH REPEATING

& REMEMBERING

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

“An Armenian's tongue is sharper than a Turk's yataghan.” (Zarian)

*

“Soft words can break bones.” (Anonymous)

*

“Where Armenian blood flows, look for an Armenian hatchet.” (Raffi)

*

“You want to save your fellow men?

Prepare yourself to be crucified.” (Raffi)

*

“A nation's history is an extension of its character.” (Nejdeh)

*

“Armenian literature is a cemetery and

writing for Armenians as cheerful a prospect as going to a funeral.” (Massikian)

*

“Once upon a time we shed our blood for freedom.

We are now afraid of free speech.” (Garabents)

*

“Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.” (Zarian)

*

“Solidarity is the mother of good deeds,

divisiveness of evil ones.” (Yeghishé)

*

“You must burn in order to enlighten.” (Toumanian)

*

“Let us learn to be human by observing animals.” (Aramais Sahakian)

*

“A hungry vegetarian can be as dangerous as a carnivore.” (Yeznig Palig)

*

“Teaching consists in opening the mind.

The mouth will open by itself.” (Avedik Issahakian)

#

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

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

ALL IN A DAY'S WORK

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

In an environment where no one thinks, thinking becomes a risky business. Socrates was not the only thinker who was condemned to death by a so-called enlightened and progressive democracy. You may be surprised to learn that the overwhelming majority of thinkers did not die a natural death but were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, burned alive, beheaded, committed suicide, and executed; or like Plato, Aristotle, and Voltaire, lived in fear of their life. For more on this subject see THE BOOK OF DEAD PHILOSOPHERS by Simon Critchley (London, 2008).

*

The shortest list in the world? That of great Armenian statesmen.

*

In judging others, I judge myself, or an aspect of myself that continues to reside within me even if only as a memory.

*

I have many doubts about many things but about one thing I am certain: those I have insulted will neither forgive nor forget me.

*

I condemn no one by calling them fools, dupes, and swine.

I have been called worse names and I feel just fine.

#

ara baliozian · December 5, 2009

Thursday, December 3, 2009

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

COMPASSION

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

Yesterday, when I said something to the effect that the majority of philosophers, beginning with Socrates, met a violent end, a gentle reader took it upon himself to point out that I had nothing to worry about. I am, of course, fully aware of the fact that Armenians do not as a rule condemn their writers to death. They only betray them to the authorities, even when the authorities happen to be bloodthirsty barbarians like Talaat and Stalin. After all, it is not for nothing that we are universally respected as the first nation that converted to Christianity, a religion based on compassion, which is a word we don't have in Armenian, and if we do, we never use it. My own dictionary translates it as "koot," which means pity rather than compassion, which means suffering with.

*

Propaganda allows bloodthirsty barbarians to say their aim is to advance the cause of civilization. As for their victims, propaganda allows them the luxury of bragging about their moral superiority.

*

If individual freedom is God's gift to us, as theologians are eager to explain, why is He more protective of the barbarian's freedom and less of the victim's? Is it conceivable that the Almighty is an unequal opportunity defender in Whose eyes the barbarian's freedom is of greater concern than the freedom of the defenseless victim?

*

Mao said, “Let one hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend.”

Napoleon said, “A man with an idea is my enemy.”

Mao spoke like Mao but acted like Napoleon.

That's politics for you. You tell them what they want to hear and do what you have to do even when what you have to do stands in direct contradiction to what you tell them.

*

Propaganda is a win-win proposition, or a lottery in which everyone wins the first prize.

#

Friday, December 4, 2009

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

THIS AND THAT

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

Repetition is the most powerful tool of persuasion. Commercials, slogans, prayers, sermons, and speeches rely on repeating a handful of predictable lines and ideas.

If thinkers have been unpopular with their contemporaries it may be because they refused to repeat what everyone wanted to hear.

*

There are those who believe patriotism consists in emphasizing the positive and covering up the negative. If a doctor were to behave like a patriot, the mortality of his patients would escalate dramatically.

*

The man who has stolen a billion dollars will plead not guilty, hire a dream team of lawyers, and cut a deal with the prosecution.

*

What could be more cowardly than insulting someone anonymously and from a safe distance?

*

One of the worst mistakes I have made in my life is treating some of my fellow men as if they were human.

#

Saturday, December 5, 2009

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

WANTED: WORDS

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

We don't have a word for compassion, and if we do, we never use it – at least I have never heard anyone use it, which may suggest we think of it as an irrelevant abstraction devoid of all cash value.

Life has taught us to think in terms of you are either with us or against us and if you are against us you might as well be a Turk in disguise. By life, I mean of course our former masters – be they Soviet, Ottoman, or any other Asiatic barbarian you care to mention.

Deviate a fraction of an inch from the line established from above and you are toast. I can tell that by the kind of insults hurled in my direction by gentle readers who operate on the assumption that as men of God and capital (make it, Capital and god) our bosses, bishops, and benefactors must know better than a lowly scribbler who can't even make ends meet.

If we don't have words for honesty, compassion, and compromise, let's borrow them. Nothing wrong in borrowing. Most of our words are borrowed from other languages to begin with. But if we have words for them, let's resurrect them by all means, and even more important, let's use and practice them. A nation of dishonest, uncompromising men devoid of all compassion is a nation on its way to the devil – if not already there.

#

ara baliozian · December 8, 2009

Sunday, December 6, 2009

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

SAFE ASSUMPTIONS

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

The chances are everything you were taught as a child when you couldn't yet think for yourself is a lie.

*

Any idea that divides our fellow men into them and us is based on a fallacy.

*

They did to us what we would have done to them. Our so-called moral superiority is nothing but an extension of military inferiority.

*

If reason is against us we drown it in an avalanche of empty verbiage.

Where there are too many long-winded speechifiers there are as many lies.

*

Where speechifiers are a dominant minority, dialogue will be seen as suspect.

*

The bigger the mouth, the smaller the brain.

*

Freedom of thought begins on the day we teach ourselves to say “No, sir!” to those who expect us to say “Yes, sir!”

*

Anything that justifies wars and massacres is wrong and anyone who justifies them is a liar.

*

I may know something you don't know, but that doesn't make me better or wiser.

*

The worst blunders in the history of mankind were committed by fools who thought they knew better or they had God on their side.

#

Monday, December 7, 2009

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

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

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

In a message to the Venetians, Pius II wrote in 1458:

“How much of your ancient character have you lost

as a result of too much intercourse with the Turks!”

Makes you think, doesn't it?

*

“La donna e mobile” says a famous Verdi aria.

So are (alas!) Armenian friends.

I have made and lost friends on the flimsiest of reasons.

I have made friends because I was Armenian,

and I have lost friends because

I did not share their anti-Semitism.

*

“An Armenian loves to eat

and he eats to hate,”

says an Armenian song.

And speaking of eating and hating:

“One Armenian eats one chicken,

two Armenians eat two chickens,

three Armenians eat each other.”

*

In a letter from a friend:

"If, as you say, Armenian literature is a dead end,

why not give it up?"

I write for two totally non-literary reasons:

to fight boredom and

to acquire friends;

and with every book I have published,

I have acquired a new friend;

also made not two but twenty-two enemies?

*

Raffi: "Even those among us

who have taken it upon themselves

to educate the people

are nothing but uneducated ignoramuses."

#

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

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

DECEPTION

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

If no one deceives us,

we deceive ourselves into thinking

we are the center of the universe

and what we think and say matters.

*

Deception works because we like to be deceived.

We like to be deceived so much that

we are more than willing to compensate our deceivers.

Some of the most highly paid men today

are professional, full-time deceivers.

They call themselves consultants,

public relations men, spin doctors,

advertisers, diplomats, lawyers, historians,

social engineers, chief executive officers, pundits,

senators and heads of state.

In the Vatican they are identified as

“propagators of the faith.”

Their counterparts in America

call themselves televangelists.

In Nazi Germany they worked for Dr Goebbels

and it's amazing the kind of people

that were taken in by their lies.

*

Do deceivers believe in their own lies?

If they do, they are dupes.

If they don't, they are crooks with a forked tongue.

In either case they deserve our contempt and ridicule.

*

Anyone who pretends to know and understand

more than he does is a deceivers.

And anyone who says “yes, sir!”

to someone he views as infallible is a dupe.

*

Chekhov was right when he said:

“If I cannot answer the most important questions,

am I not deceiving my readers?”

*

Today's quotations in my morning paper

is by Elbert Hubbard and it reads:

“Genius may have its limitations,

but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”

#

ara baliozian · December 15, 2009

Sunday, December 13, 2009

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

THE “S” WORD

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

All this nonsense about needing solutions is a lot of b.s.

Everyone knows that men of God and capital (make it Capital and god) know better. If they didn't, they wouldn't be where they are. Solutions doesn't even make it as the last item on their wish list. What they want and what they get from their brown-nosers and dupes is gratitude and subservience.

*

If a liar believes in his own lies, he will also assume he is a lover of truth.

*

In all of us ignorance exceeds knowledge, and most of what we know is based either on hearsay or is an extension of a belief system, that is to say, propaganda.

*

Whenever they can't blame it on the Turks and the West, they blame it on the opposition. They sure know how to cover their ass.

*

You cannot reason with the brainwashed. You can only try to deprogram them, which can be as difficult as changing a wolf to a lamb, and in our case, vice versa.

*

Benefactors like to parade as supporters of literature, but since their favorite reading matter is financial statements, they delegate the job to their brown-nosers. Which may explain the unbearable stench of mediocrity emanating from our contemporary literature.

#

Monday, December 14, 2009

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

O CANADA

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

During a recent visit to an Armenian community center in Toronto, the Minister of Immigration delivered a speech in which he reminded his audience that the Canadian government had recognized the reality of the Armenian genocide, but that it also expected all Armenian-Canadians to be nice to Turks because Canada is a multicultural country, which means everyone must live in friendship and peace with everyone else. The audience responded with blank expressions. And I thought:

How can we be nice to Turks if we cannot even be nice to our fellow Armenians?

*

In a recent issue of the NEW YORKER, Newt Gingrich was identified as “the Republican Party's putative sage.” Gingrich, it will be remembered, once named Kemal Atatürk as his role model. I have every reason to suspect that if he runs for president in 2012 and promises to recognize the Armenian genocide, Armenians will vote for him not because they believe in his promise but because they care much more about lower taxes than Genocide recognition. Never underestimate the cunning of greedy fools.

*

As a child whenever I did something wrong I was punished. And now that I am old I am silenced by the old and insulted by the young for exposing misconduct. Perhaps one reason I understand my fellow countrymen so well is that I am, very much like them, a perennial loser, with one noteworthy difference: I see no reason why I should fool myself and others into thinking otherwise. It is easy for a fool to fool himself, but more difficult to fool those who may well be smarter than he.

*

Today's quote in my morning paper is by Adlai Stevenson and it reads: “My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.”

I am safe today, it is true. It is also true that I owe my safety not to my fellow Armenians but to my country of adoption.

#

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

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

NOTES / COMMENTS

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

Moral superiority, especially the self-anointed kind, is such a cheap commodity that even the penniless can afford it. Even primitive Brazilian jungle tribes have myths whose sole aim is to assert their moral superiority. May I confess that I am so tired of being a morally superior loser that my secret ambition now is to be a morally inferior winner.

*

Only the brain-dead think they know and understand all they need to know and understand. Self-satisfaction is a tomb.

*

The brain-dead cannot think. They can only say “yes, sir!” to the unthinking.

*

Every civilized and progressive nation has a set of laws whose sole aim is to protect the people from their leaders. Since we never had such laws, most abuses of power in our institutions and bureaucracies have gone unexposed, and when exposed, unpunished. I tremble to think what will happen on the day the average patriotic Armenian discovers this fact.

*

You cannot argue with somebody who thinks you are nobody.

*

There are many forms of cowardice, surely one of the worst must be fear of free speech.

*

Every Armenian is infatuated with the aroma of his own b.s.

#

ara baliozian · December 19, 2009

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

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

THE ARMENIAN PRESENCE

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

In the last five books that I checked out from the library, I ran into Armenians in all of them.

*

In NATASHA & OTHER STORIES by David Bezmozgis (New York, 2004) there is a student identified as an “Armenian” and named "Arnan" (probably Arman).

*

In Ted Sorensen's political memoirs, COUNSELOR (New York, 2008), the Armenian mentioned and discussed is Anastas Mikoyan.

*

In Edmund Wilson's LITERARY ESSAYS & REVIEWS OF THE 1930s & 1940s (New York, 2007) there are two pieces on Saroyan, one of which is a review of THE ADVENTURES OF WESLEY JACKSON and the other a long overview of Saroyan's works, where we are told Saroyan was more influenced by Hemingway and less by Sherwood Anderson.

*

In VENICE: PURE CITY (London, 2009) by the prolific Peter Ackroyd we read about the Armenian island of San Lazzaro, “Where Byron travelled to learn the Armenian language as a way of exercising his mind among the more sensual pleasures of Venice.” The next sentence reads: “There as a colony of Turkish merchants, established as the Fondaco dei Turchi, where a school for the teaching of Arabic was maintained.”

*

In THE RICHNESS OF LIFE: THE ESSENTIAL STEPHEN JAY COULD (New York, 2006) the Armenian is George E. Boyajian, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a study “on ammonite suture lines.”

Elsewhere Gould speaks of “our cursed tribal tendency to factionalize, fight, and then, so often in righteous certainty, to define our opponents as vermin and try to expunge either their doctrines (by censorship and fire) or their very being (genocide).”

#

Thursday, December 17, 2009

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

REVOLUTIONS

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

When a revolution succeeds, the revolutionaries turn against one another and engage in cannibalism. This is what happened with the French and Russian revolutions.

When a revolution fails, it becomes a footnote.

But when a revolution results in genocide, it traumatizes the brain so severely that reality becomes a blur, and the line that separates fact from illusion is obliterated.

*

The study of history deals not only with what others have done to us, but also with what we have done to ourselves. To emphasize one at the expense of the other is to distort our perception of reality.

*

Our history is not just a catalog of crimes committed against us by others, it is also a much longer catalog of miscalculations and blunders committed by us.

*

God does not extend His support to those who don't support one another.

*

The first step in all solutions to our problems: To approach a new idea with an open mind.

*

The greatest truths are also the simplest.

*

I repeat myself?

Why shouldn't I?

TV commercials repeat themselves all the time.

And it works.

It must!

If it didn't, they wouldn't waste millions on them.

#

Friday, December 18, 2009

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

POWER & MONEY

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

Nothing can be more deceptive and dangerous than to believe the religion and history taught in schools. If Americans, Armenians, Turks, and any other nationality you care to mention were not duped as children into believing what they are taught to believe, they would no longer be loyal, that is to say subservient, subjects of their rulers. Which means, they would refuse to pay taxes (which is something they would like to do in any case) and even more important, in time of war, they would do their utmost to avoid being conscripted.

All rulers know this and none of them would even consider changing things even if it means continuing to legitimize ignorance, prejudice, lies, hatred, wars, and massacres.

That is why to speak the truth in a world of liars and dupes is considered a capital offense. That is also why to seek wisdom means to provoke persecution, exile, execution, and assassination.

On the day mankind sees the light, we will have only one God and one history, as opposed to ten thousand lies.

If mankind prefers to live in darkness, it may be because the exercise of power has always been more enticing than knowledge and understanding.

It is amazing the things people do for money. Even more amazing is the things they do for power. And power is like money in that one can never have enough of it.

#

Saturday, December 19, 2009

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

SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE

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

My greatest blunders were committed with total unawareness.

So much so that it didn't even occur to me to question their moral validity.

That doesn't make me feel less guilty today.

If anything, the opposite is the case.

I know now that I cannot plead not guilty

by reason of ignorance of the law.

Jung is right: unawareness is the greatest sin.

*

Lies have a propensity to generate more lies.

It is not at all unusual for a single Big Lie

to kill six million truths

and as many innocent lives with a clear conscience.

*

To be unable to read between the lines

is also a form of illiteracy.

*

To say or think “i am smart,”

is the surest symptom of arrested development,

and in some cases,

advanced moronism.

*

The hardest thing to master in the art of writing

is the art of deleting.

#

ara baliozian · December 23, 2009

Sunday, December 20, 2009

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

LIES

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

Lies. I was brought up on lies - lies spoken in the name of patriotism and self-esteem, but lies all the same.

I was told being an Armenian was a rare privilege.

I went into the world thinking the world owed me something - respect, sympathy, apology, admiration.

I soon discovered the world had no time or interest in taking notice of my existence. The world didn't give a damn about me.

The world didn't even know who Armenians were.

That's when I began to understand why some smart Armenians changed their names and assimilated.

Others preferred to stay away from their fellow countrymen.

Still others of mixed parentage hid their Armenian fraction.

What the hell was going on here?

Was the world full of ignoramuses and traitors?

It took me a while to realize that the world was what it has always been; and that I was the ignorant one in thinking there was something special in being an Armenian.

I know now that we are a people like any other people, or we would be, if we didn't try so damn hard to appear better or superior.

One could even say that, what makes some of us inferior is thirst for superiority.

#

Monday, December 21, 2009

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

ACADEMICS

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

Never judge a nation by its history as written by its own historians. A Turk who believes in Turkish historians is as much of a dupe as an Armenian who believes in Armenian historians.

All historians write with a bias, and I don't just mean nationalist, racist, or religious bias. Case in point: in a recent edition of the ENCYCLPAEDIA BRITANNICA the entry on Talaat, as written by a Turcophile historian, mentions only one violent death, Talaat's own by an Armenian assassin.

How to explain this outrage? Very easily:

(one) the historian treated the Turks as useful political allies of his own nation;

(two) there are many more potential buyers of the Encyclopedia in Turkey than in Armenia;

(three) since academics these days are a dime-a-dozen and the competition is fierce, they are willing to write anything for thirty pieces of silver.

I am not saying this particular academic is a bad man and a shameless liar willing to prostitute his discipline and expertise. I am saying, we live in a world with the moral standards of a bordello, and Armenians are no better (see below).

It is to be noted that this particular academic cannot plead ignorance of the Armenian genocide in view of the fact that in one of his first books on Turkey he mentions and discusses the Genocide in some detail. My guess is, that's when the Turks invited him to Turkey, gave him the red-carpet treatment, and made him see the light. They did the same thing to Toynbee with the same result, but not quite. Though he became a Turcophile, Toynbee never denied the Armenian genocide, but he did deny the republication of his book on the Genocide.

And speaking of red-carpet treatment, and this time by Reds: A prominent Tashnak leader was once invited to Yerevan by the Soviets and returned to America a chic Bolshevik. Whenever I would publish an anti-Soviet commentary in our weeklies, he would write me poison-pen letters and call me nasty names.

#

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

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

BIG EGOS & SMALL DICKS

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

An Armenian knows better not because he is wiser, older, more experienced, or more widely read, but because he assumes his fellow Armenians to be dumber than he is.

*

To how many of my fellow Armenians I could say, “With Armenians like you, who needs sultans and commissars?”

*

No matter how hard I try I cannot pretend to be a proud Armenian. Proud of what, may I ask? A thousands years of subservience to scum? – and I don't just mean foreign scum.

*

Jacques Chirac: “Sumo wrestling is a fine art, which is not always the case with political combat.”

*

Life has a way of cutting down to size anyone whose assessment of himself exceeds his real worth.

*

The reason why some men have big egos is that (according to Freud, Jung, and Adler, who agree on nothing but agree on this) they have small dicks.

#

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

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

NOTES / COMMENTS

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

“If he speaks as if he were somebody, let's treat him like a nobody to bring him down to our own level.”

*

The secret of success consists not in cultivating your own garden but in inventing it.

*

You can tell he has a college degree because he uses words like dichotomy, existential, and paradigm.

*

Ideas? If you have the money, you can hire philosophers (provided they are not Marxists) and theologians who don't take the Scriptures literally and believe Capital to be a blessing from god.

*

The world has no interest in someone who knows a great deal about a great many things. The world is more interested and more willing to reward someone who knows everything about one thing.

*

If the liquid in the glass is poison, it makes no difference whether it is half empty or half full.

*

A religion that emphasizes truth or dogma over love and charity, is an invention of the devil.

#

ara baliozian · December 30, 2009

Thursday, December 24, 2009

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

WE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD

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

We are few.

We are weak.

We are vulnerable,

Therefore, we are divided.

Which is like saying:

“I think.

Therefore I am not.”

*

In our environment,

the devils come disguised as angels.

I once heard a bishop say:

“We are for unity.

It's the opposition that is against it.”

Did he believe what he said?

I am not sure.

But his audience did,

on the grounds that God does not lie.

Neither does a man of God.

*

Hitler knew what he was talking about when he said,

“The bigger the lie, the more believable it will be.”

*

We are divided.

So what if we cease to exist?

*

Cease to exist? No way!

We have existed for thousands of years.

We must be doing something right.

You call a thousand years of subservience to scum existence?

You call a series of massacres and a genocide existence?

I call it worse than death.

*

Liars are not born but made

and they are made by dupes.

Who is guiltier, a liar or his audience of dupes?

*

You can rate the IQ of a nation

by the lies of its sermonizers and speechifiers.

*

We have two kinds of mortal enemies:

those who want to kill us

and those who want us to commit suicide.

We never had it so good.

#

Friday, December 25, 2009

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

RAFFI'S WARNING AND

CHARENTS'S MESSAGE

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

To prove to a visiting Venetian painter what the neck of a beheaded man really looks like, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, also known as the Lawgiver, had a prisoner brought before him and beheaded.

It is said that the Venetian painter was so shocked by the bloody spectacle that he left that same night under cover of darkness.

That is the difference between that Venetian painter and us.

The Venetian left.

We stayed

We stayed even after Raffi warned us the Ottoman Empire was no place for us because Turks had no respect for human life.

We ignored Raffi's warning in the 19th century as we ignore today Charents's final message concerning our “salvation.” By “we” I mean less the people and more the leaders who speechify during the day about survival and turn into gravediggers under cover of darkness at night.

*

In my next commentary I will explain why “treason and betrayal are in our blood” (Raffi).

#

Saturday, December 26, 2009

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

TREASON & HEROISM

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

A nation or a community run by traitors will constantly emphasize the importance of patriotism, self-sacrifice, and heroism. In such an environment, heroes will invariably outnumber traitors.

*

Traitors don't think of themselves as traitors. They think of themselves as patriots who are doing what must be done to safeguard the survival of the nation. But since in politics, as in war, there are either winners or losers, losers will be classified as traitors by their political adversaries.

Case in point: After the liberation of France, both Petain (a hero of World War I) and Laval were condemned to death by a French tribunal on the grounds that they had collaborated with the Nazis and they were therefore traitors.

*

Were Krikor Zohrab and Anastas Mikoyan traitors or heroes?

If we judge them by their actions alone (as the French tribunal chose to do) they do not qualify as heroes. Zohrab saved Talaat's life from the Sultan's secret police; and Mikoyan carried out the Stalinist purges in Armenia so thoroughly that to this day only unprincipled mediocrities survive. In other words, their actions resulted in defeat and tragedy.

*

Are our dividers in the Diaspora today heroes or traitors? If we judge them by the Biblical dictum “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and by Charents's final “message,” they cannot be said to be heroic figures.

*

One could of course explain and justify the actions of traitors by pleading extenuating circumstances, which might as well be inadmissible in our context.

The fact remains that both Zohrab and Mikoyan were not just wrong, they were catastrophically wrong, and both paid a heavy price for their blunder. Zohrab was murdered by order of the same man whose life he saved by risking his own, and Mikoyan spent the final years of his life in constant fear to such a degree that he slept with a revolver under his pillow with the intention of killing himself if they ever came to arrest him in the middle of the night.

As for the nation: I will let you decide whether their actions contributed to our collective profile as winners or losers.

#

Sunday, December 27, 2009

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

AN INVITATION TO THE BEHEADING

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

The French have a saying: “This little beast is nasty; when attacked, it defends itself.” Except that in our case, the little beast was a wounded tiger with nine lives, and we were no better than a toothless lapdog.

We were slaughtered because we have been thrice cursed with “earthquakes, bloodthirsty neighbors, and brainless leaders” (Avedik Issahakian); and ever since these brainless leaders have been trying to convince us there is nothing wrong with them; it's the rest of the world that's rotten; and what is even more unbelievable is that we believe them.

We lost because we believed the Christian West would not allow the massacre of brothers by bloodthirsty infidels – notwithstanding the fact that the West had already allowed a series of massacres to take place without lifting a finger (see VISIONS OF ARARAT: WRITINGS ON ARMENIA by Christopher Walker [New York, 1997]).

We were slaughtered because our Christian brothers in the West were at war and too busy slaughtering one another to give a damn about an obscure tribe of Christians being slaughtered by infidels on another continent (see the Preface of G.B. Shaw's ANDROCLES AND THE LION).

We lost because “we were tiny islands in a Turkish sea” (Hagop Oshagan).

We lost because our revolutionaries were long on enthusiasm and short on experience. One contemporary scholar refers to them as “twenty somethings” (see Michael Bobelian, CHILDREN OF ARMENIA [New York, 2009]).

We lost because we underestimated the strength and determination of the Turks to defend their 600-year old homeland.

We lost because we believed in the professed brotherly love of serial killers. (Consider the case of Zohrab saving Talaat's life by risking his own.)

We lost because we were divided. (See the correspondence between our revolutionaries and Artin Dadian in Pars Tuglaci, THE ROLE OF THE DADIAN FAMILY IN OTTOMAN, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL LIFE (Istanbul, 1993).

We were slaughtered because we have been fed “a steady and monotonous diet of shameless flattery and transparent lies” (Stepan Voskanian).

We were slaughtered because our conception of history has been shaped by “deceivers... the smoke of incense, and the sound of sharagans” (Nigoghos Sarafian).

Far from being an unexpected and unforeseeable Tragedy that “fell on us like a thief in the night,” our genocide might as well have been “an invitation to the beheading) (Nabokov).

#

Monday, December 28, 2009

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

THIS AND THAT

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

Patriotism is an irrefutable argument only to patriots.

So is fascism to fascists.

*

If faith and truth were one, we would have only one religion and no jihads.

Faith guarantees nothing.

To say that faith is beyond criticism is to justify a big lie with a bigger lie.

*

Deceivers exist because deception works.

It is astonishing the number of great men who were taken in by Hitler and Stalin, both of whom made a mafia godfather look like a benevolent uncle.

*

To an overly sensitive person, a wrong word can be as catastrophic as a volcanic eruption or an earthquake.

*

Turning points in one's life may happen not in noteworthy events but in insignificant occurrences that may at first escape notice.

*

To most Armenians the Genocide is only a page in our history – the darkest page, granted, but still only a page.

Books, including history books, are one thing, life another.

The average Armenian is much more seriously wounded by an insult than by any single page in history.

*

To ignore or cover up our problems is also to reject in advance all possible solutions.

*

We will mature as a nation only when we take ideas as seriously as money.

#

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

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

MY QUARREL

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

It is not safe to stand between a hungry lion and his kill.

Likewise, between a crowd and its cherished illusions.

*

I write what I think because deep down I know no matter what I say, I will be ignored. That's the way it has been in the past, and I see no evidence to suggest that things may not continue on the same path in the future.

*

My quarrel, my real quarrel, is not with my fellow men. My quarrel is with myself for allowing deceivers to brainwashed me in the name of a false deity or big lies.

*

They emphasize the importance of love because they are hateful and they know it. Was it love that drove Jesus to use the whip against the money-changers in the temple?

Was it love that drove the Orthodox Church in Russia to excommunicate Tolstoy, or the Catholic Church to torture and massacre heretics?

To those who say that was then and this is now: may I remind them that the Russian Church, like our own Etchmiadzin, went on to legitimize Stalin's regime, and the Catholic clergy engaged in serial child molestation.

*

Dupes of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but leaders with the moral quotient of swine.

*

I call an enemy a friend if what he says enhances my understanding of my fellow men and myself.

#

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

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

FROM MY NOTEBOOKS

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

The original aim of nationalism was to liberate the nation from the tyranny of imperial powers. In theory. In practice, however, it simply replaced one tyranny with another. That's the way it is with organized religions, ideologies, and mass movements: they begin as liberation and end as oppression.

*

Analysis and flattery (or propaganda) are mutually exclusive concepts. You can have either one or the other. You cannot have both.

*

On more than one occasion I have heard it said, “If you criticize benefactors, they will stop giving.” I have never heard anyone say, “If we starve writers, they will stop writing.” Which may suggest, money is everything, ideas nothing. Which may also explain why as a nation we are so brain-dead that even the Turks are ahead of us. This assertion may outrage some, but not as much as it outraged me when I first heard it about forty years ago.

*

Our editors and activists have been dishing out anti-Turkish venom for such a long time that it has acquired the authority of a Decalogue.

*

There is a kind of vulgar bluntness that is the soul of elegance.

*

Speaking of his fellow Americans, Thoreau once said: “The greater part of what they call good I believe in my soul to be bad.”

*

Anonymous: “A live dog is better than a dead lion.”

#

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