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Sunday, April 06, 2008
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DECEPTION
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Nothing fascinates a man more than a woman, provided she is unattainable or she belongs to another man.
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The war described in the ILIAD by Homer was all about the abduction of a floozy.
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It is the ambition of every man to be taken seriously. The more ridiculous the man, the greater the ambition. Consider some of the most feared and influential names of the 20th century: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco – the scum of the earth
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René Descartes on his critics: “Two or three flies,” whose books are good only as “toilet paper.”
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One should not behave like a fanatic even in one’s opposition to fanaticism.
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If the Pope is right (and he is never wrong, or so he wants us to believe) shall we then assume all other non-Catholic religious leaders to be usurpers and frauds?
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The aim of nationalist historians is to unite the nation in its hatred of the enemy.
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The reason why the 11the Commandment is not “Thou shalt not take anyone seriously,” is that Moses wanted to be taken seriously.
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According to Freud, Moses was an Egyptian because Moses is an Egyptian name and monotheism an Egyptian concept (see his MOSES AND MONOTHEISM). And according to many Hebrew scholars and rabbis, Freud, like Marx, was an anti-Semite, and Christ was a heretic and a blasphemer.
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Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying there are no honest men. What I am saying is that honest men are as marginalized as criminals.
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Wittgenstein: “The hardest thing in life is not deceiving oneself.”
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Monday, April 07, 2008
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WITTGENSTEIN, MARX, JESUS, & HITLER
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Wittgenstein was one of the most influential philosophers of the last century; and yet he advised his fellow philosophers to give up philosophy. On meeting the greatest literary critic of his time, he is quoted as having said, “Leavis, give up criticism.” Had he been an Armenian, I suspect he would have advised his fellow Armenians to give up Armenianism and be born-again as human beings, on the grounds that their so-called Armenianism is nothing but disguised Ottomanism.
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If Jesus and Marx had known the way future generations would abuse their teachings, they would have kept silent and we wouldn’t even know they ever existed.
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It is to be noted that Wittgenstein and Hitler were contemporaries and as boys went to the same school, but neither ever mentioned the other.
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There is nothing wrong in thinking you have all the answers as long as you are prepared to face the fact that all of them may well be wrong.
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An Armenian today nurses more wounds inflicted on him by his fellow Armenians than by Turks.
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008
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HOW DO WE SURVIVE AS A NATION?
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For the unemployed and the poor, questions of national identity might as well be irrelevant. What matters to them more than anything else is a good job. They want to work and provide for their families, and who can blame them? Entire continents today are populated by people who left their homeland and now live a more or less comfortable life in America and Australia. According to recent statistics, most of Europe is now populated by non-Europeans.
How do we survive as a nation?
By creating decent jobs in the Homeland would be one answer. By asking fewer dumb questions whose obvious answers we pretend not to know would be another.
And speaking of dumb questions, here is another one for you: what does the average Armenian-American philistine know about Armenian history and culture beside massacres, shish kebab and pilaf? How do we convince such an Armenian that our music, literature, and art are expressions of our identity and to ignore them is to promote assimilation?
How do we survive as a nation?
By behaving as a nation as opposed to a collection of unruly tribes led by bloodsuckers and gravediggers whose number one concern is number one.
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Samuel Johnson: “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.”
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Unawareness of one’s failings is an infinitely more dangerous condition than Alzheimer’s.
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Whenever an angry reader unloads his inner filth on me, I can’t help thinking I must have hit paydirt.
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Where there is an honest man, there will also be holier-than-thou idiots who will call him an idiot.
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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
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COME AGAIN?
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In the March 29 issue of the ARMENIAN REPORTER (page A9) and in a commentary titled “Reflections on the state of contemporary Armenian politics” by Yeprem Mehranian, I read the following random paragraph: “The elemental principles of recursive thinking necessitate that in order to explore the depths of social processes of change we allow the past and the present to reciprocate, and then to use results of this interaction to guide us closer toward the point of comprehending reality.”
I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself, I consider inflicting this kind of prose on an unsuspecting public fully qualifies as a clear-cut case of man’s inhumanity to man. If Armenian readers don’t rise in self-defense against this type of verbal abuse, it may be because they come from a long line of victims and they are more or less reconciled to their status as perennial underdogs.
In the same issue of the REPORTER and on page B5 there is a photo of a man seated at the organ with both hands on the lowest of three manuals. The caption reads: “Maestro Mekanejian tunes the cathedral’s organ in preparation for Holy Week.” Maestro Mekanejian is doing nothing of the kind. What Maestro Mekanejian is doing is practicing. The tuning of an organ is done in a separate room where the pipes are housed.
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Julius Caesar: “In writing, one should avoid an unfamiliar word as a ship avoids a reef.”
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