alas!

Thursday, May 28, 2009
*****************************************
ALAS!
************************************
You want to be a benefactor? Making a million or a billion is the easy part. What's hard is the realization that all they want is your money, and when they look at you they don't see a face but a dollar sign.
You want to be a boss or bishop? Nothing to it. You start by saying “Yes, sir!” to the idiots who are ahead of you and the chances are you will have no trouble filling vacancies all the way to the top.
You want to be a writer? You have two options: (one) to write what they want to read, and (two) to write what you think. If you choose the first option, they may do you the favor of printing you; if the second, you may be free to live in the gulag of your choice.
*
Literature: a field of human endeavor in which even the Turks are ahead of us.
*
Journalism: ditto, alas!
*
In a letter to the editor in our local paper today I read the following: “The general public, poorly educated for the most part and in many cases barely literate, is bamboozled by the media and lulled by game shows and sports extravaganzas.”
Replace “games” and “sports” with “atrocities” and “massacres” and you will have a fairly honest and objective assessment of our situation, alas!
#
Friday, May 29, 2009
*****************************************
ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
AND PRO-MESSIANISM
************************************
On more than one occasion I have been attacked and insulted by readers on the grounds that so far I have failed to come up with the right verbal formula that will save the nation, as if such a formula ever existed in some yet undiscovered dimension and it was up to me to fetch it. Illusions, like fools, come in all sizes and shapes. There are still Russians today who believe in Stalin's propaganda line and call Solzhenitsyn a traitor, as there are Germans who are for Hitler and against Thomas Mann, who exposed Hitler's charlatanism. Fascism is not dead in Italy, neither is Maoism in China.
The ancients may not have known much about balanced diets but they knew that one way to kill a man was to condemn him to eat the same food for forty days. Hence the spectacle of dupes who after being fed the same propaganda line for a generation become living cadavers. I have yet to meet the Armenian dupe or Turcocentric ghazetaji who was not brain-dead.
Perhaps our anti-intellectualism is nothing but an extension of our pro-messianism.
And the problem with pro-messianism is that it completely ignores the fact that messiahs don't solve problems, they compound them by making unreasonable demands on us poor mortals – such as loving our enemies. The only Armenian I know who dared to speak of sympathy for the Turks was Saroyan. As for our sermonizers whose job it is to preach the message of our Savior: the less said about them better.
#
Saturday, May 30, 2009
*****************************************
VARIATIONS ON ABRACADABRA
************************************
At the end of his career as teacher and philosopher, Plato had every right to believe that he had been successful in solving most of mankind's problems, one of them being that rulers should also be philosophers. We know now that power and wisdom are mutually exclusive concepts and mankind prefers to be ruled not by philosophers but by philomorons.
When Marx toiled on his magnum opus in a London library writing against exploitation, did it ever occur to him that some day his ideas would be exploited by bloodthirsty barbarians who would victimize millions of innocent human beings? And to think that he was fully aware of the fact that for nearly two millennia mankind had exploited even the Word of God by reducing it to “opium" thus legitimizing the rule of the Devil.
What are ideas if not variations on abracadabra?
We like to say if it weren't for good men, mankind would be in a far worse shape. Maybe so. But what kind of consolation is that for the hungry, the sick, the dying, and the dead? Illusions are for the living and the favorite occupation of the living is to spin illusions. There you have it, a history of human thought in a single sentence.
#