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Sunday, January 4, 2009
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ON PHONIES
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There is a tendency in all phonies to see only the phony in others. Face to face with an honest man, they feel ill at ease and their first instinct is to bring him down to their own level. Consider what happened to Zarian, one of the very few authentic giants in our literature. Every mediocrity in both the Homeland and Diaspora accused him of being a KGB or a CIA agent, or even a plagiarist. When Shahnour accused Siamanto of plagiarism, he quoted chapter and verse. When Zarian himself accused Charents of plagiarism, he mentioned Marinetti and Mayakovsky. But as far as I know none of our phonies ever stated whom did Zarian plagiarize.
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Once upon a time fascists identified themselves as fascists. Not anymore. Nowadays they speak in the name of nationalism, as if fascism and nationalism were mutually exclusive concepts; and when they silence dissent, they do so as if it were their patriotic duty.
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Some of my readers remind me of sharks circling and waiting for traces of blood to appear in the water.
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Why do I write as I do? Because no one else does.
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If the laws in Dickens's time were applied to American chief executive officers today, a great many of them who now travel in their own private jets would be in jail. It is such a pity that technological progress has become inseparable with moral degeneracy.
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Monday, January 5, 2009
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ON IDEAS
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Armenians who are obsessed with Turkish criminal conduct are eager to inform me that my ideas lack originality.
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The awareness of doing the right thing is better than fame, fortune, and happiness.
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If you have only one idea, you have no choice. If you have two ideas, you have a choice. Two is better than one because freedom is better than slavery.
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There is a familiar type of Armenian who is cunning enough to know that one way to have the last word is to make himself so repellent that anyone with the minimum sense of hygiene will do his utmost to stay as far away from him as possible.
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Annihilating your enemy in the name of victory is the Ottoman way. So is verbally abusing those who disagree with you.
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What matters is not how we treat our friends, but how we treat our enemies.
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An enemy is one we have failed to convince that it will be to his advantage to be our friend.
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To be savaged by fools and fanatics is the surest sign of being on the right path.
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Tuesday, January 6, 2009
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AD HOMINEM
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Let better men than myself reach for the truth. All I want is avoid being absurd.
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History teaches us to recognize blunders when we see them. If history, including our own, continues to be a succession of blunders, it may be because the number of blunders is infinite, the human brain at its most creative in their invention, and self-deception a constant.
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Self-deception allows us to be absurd and self-righteous at the same time.
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To those who wonder how dare I speak in the name of the nation when no one elected me, my answer is: I speak only as a human being and I don't need majority support to think, feel, and reason as a human being.
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A typical Armenian is an open wound and a closed mind.
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Anonymous: "A genius has his limitations. A fool does not."
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Voicing morally superior sentiments is not the same as being morally superior. If it were, every sermonizer would be a saint.
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Commissars of culture and culture are mutually exclusive concepts.
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Wednesday, January 7, 2009
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PARALLEL LINES
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It is safe to assume that not all chief executive officers in America are crooks. But when the honest ones saw the writing on the wall, spoke up and said, “We can no longer afford private jets, million-dollar salaries, big bonuses, and golden parachutes,” they were silence by the crooks who said, “Relax! We are too big to fail. Uncle Sam will bail us out.” And Uncle did because the easiest thing in the world is to be generous with someone else's money. (I have already read a pundit who called Obama “an empty suit.")
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Something similar happened to our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire when they were warned they were no better than frogs trying to rape an elephant. To which our revolutionaries replied: “Relax! We are not in this alone. The great powers of the West are on our side. The Turks wouldn't dare!” But the Turks dared because they knew the great powers were not our Uncle Sam and wouldn't spill a single drop of blood to save us.
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And speaking of blood: We have shed our blood and we have done so copiously in defense of alien and even hostile empires, among them the Byzantine, the Ottoman, and the Soviet (350,000 dead during World War II alone). If we judge a tree by its fruit, a man by his actions, and a nation's IQ by its history, we may have to conclude that we are not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
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