charm

Sunday, August 1, 2008
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FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE
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For a thousand years we dreamed of freedom but we at no time asked ourselves if we are worthy of freedom. For a thousand years we dreamed of free speech, and now that we have it, we rant, bluster, curse, and reduce our discussion forums into cesspools of verbal abuse. We brag about survival but we don't know how to live. How long before we are born again as human beings as opposed to being bundles of mutual contempt, intolerance, and hatred?
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The very same Armenians who brag about out heroes, hide their identity behind false names as if they were important enough to be targeted for assassination; and to make sure no one will locate them, they pretend to live in remote corners of the globe. And what do they do with their newly acquired sense of invulnerability? They hurl insults and profanities at anyone who dares to question their infallibility...
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Some people learn from their mistakes. We cover up ours or pretend we never made them. It was all someone else's fault, beginning with Turks; and armed with that conviction we behave like Turks. Even in a civilized country, when Armenian meets Armenian, it's the Ottoman Empire all over again.
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If you say I am wrong, I say, sure why not? But if you say you are infallible, all I can say is, go ahead, make an ass of yourself.
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“Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I am free at last to make an ass of myself!” Is that all there is to freedom? You want solutions to our problems? Make yourself worthy of freedom, and then we will exercise our human right of free speech and talk. Until then we are not the cradle of civilization but its grave.
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Monday, August 4, 2008
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METAPHYSICS
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Whenever I lose a critic – in our context, a euphemism for an enemy who is out for blood – whenever I lose a vampire, I also lose a source of inspiration. The only solution to that problem is to enter a new Armenian discussion forum, and bingo! presto! – it never fails: before you can say Jack S. Avanakian, I run into half-a-dozen new avanaks.
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The best way to combat depression is to count your blessings. I do that all the time and it never fails. Things could be much worse, I say to myself. I could be a Chinese living in China, or a Russian living in Stalin's USSR, or an Armenian in America before the advent of the Internet.
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When I was silenced by the editors of our weeklies, two friends sprang to my defense: one, an employee of IBM in San Jose, sent me a computer; the other from Toronto, sat down with me and with great patience taught me how to use it.
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I believe God created my friends, and the Devil created my enemies. I also believe God created man and the Devil created woman. For it takes a diabolical imagination to think of all those curves and secret interstices that will reduce any man to an irrational bundle of desires, urges, and drives.
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If God created man, who then created Talaat, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Mussolini? Good question. My tentative answer: nobody. They were not creations but reincarnations of the Devil.
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Finally, which came first, the chicken or the egg? It was the rooster, of course!
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Tuesday, August 5, 2008
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ON THE IRRESISTIBLE CHARM OF ARMENIANS
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“You are a pessimist,” a friend tells me, and goes on: “The only predictable thing about life is that it is unpredictable. We don't know what's going to happen next.
I for one will not be astonished if we enter another Golden Age. Our literature enjoyed a Renaissance in Istanbul at the turn of the last century. Why not another Renaissance in the Homeland or Diaspora or both?”
“Cultures, civilizations, empires, nations – once dead, they stay buried,” I explain. “Consider the history of such empires as the Roman, the Ottoman, and more recently, the Soviet. To think that a new Alexander the Great will be born and raise the Macedonian Empire from the grave is an impossible dream, an illusion, a plot for a science fiction novel... To speak of another Golden Age of Armenian literature and culture in our context is not optimism but megalomania run amok. Let us therefore be more realistic, shall we? Let us aim at common sense and decency.”
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Because I write against dividers, they call me a divider. Because I write against fanaticism, they call me a fanatic. And because I make fun of sermonizers, they call me a sermonizer.
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Until I visit Armenia, I do not qualify as an Armenian, a reader tells me. To him I say, “If Armenians in Armenia are as nasty as you are, telling me to go to Armenia amounts to telling me to go to hell. To which I can only say, no, thanks. I prefer to stay in my own gulag.”
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If a man is both ignorant and stupid, he will also be stupid and ignorant about all the evidence against his self-assessed status as a genius.
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In his novel, A PARTISAN'S DAUGHTER (New York, 2008) Louis de Bernieres writes about “an emperor who blinded all his prisoners except for one in every hundred, who was supposed to lead the others home, and when the opposing king saw what had happened to his troops, he died of the shock.” What he doesn't say is that both the emperor (Basil II Bulgaroktonus [Bulgar-slayer]) and the Bulgarian king (Czar Samuel) were of Armenian descent. For more details, see my book, THE ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE (New York, 1981).
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"Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right." Arthur Schopenhauer




Wednesday, August 6, 2008
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ON ARMENIAN PECULIARITIES AND PARADOXES
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Most of my readers are Armenian and they read me not to enhance their understanding or to consider a worldview different from their own, but to settle a score with me.
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After insulting me daily for several years in an Armenian discussion forum, a reader called to apologize – that's another Armenian peculiarity: insulting publicly, apologizing privately. His apology was so verbose and disarming that I believed him. I completely ignored the old saying, “If you hear a mountain has moved, believe it. If you hear a man has changed, believe it not.” And sure enough, shortly after his apology, this reader reverted to his old ways and he is still at it.
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The Armenian paradox: Even as he behaves like swine, he considers himself a superior being, and he believes the only way to assert his superiority is by looking down at his fellow men.
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It happened in Athens at the end of World War II and at the beginning of the Greek Civil War. Very early one morning the rumor spread that there were three corpses in a ditch less than a block from our house. I was eight or nine then, and I joined the small crowd to view the unusual sight. Later we were told both the victims and their killers had been members of rival Armenian political gangs.
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There is a dark side to our story, and the older I grow the larger the darkness grows. And the prevalent misconception among us is that it is the duty of every patriotic Armenian to cover up this darkness and to pretend it doesn't exist.
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I am constantly attacked for being a defective or bad Armenian, a Turk in disguise, a traitor to the Cause, and so on; even though on several occasions I have stated in no uncertain terms that my ambition in life is not to be a good Armenian (whatever the hell that means) but a decent human being, and to think of others (including Turks) not as members of a different nation or tribe but as member of the human race.
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"Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right."