jack s.

Sunday, July 5, 2009
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JACKASSES
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I learned to read in time of war when books were luxuries beyond our means. We had only one in the house – a dilapidated elementary school anthology with black and white drawings. The story on page one was not so much a story as an exchange of insults:
A street urchin to a donkey driver:
“Good morning, mother of jackasses.”
“Good morning, my son.”
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An exile is someone who lives in an alien country.
A double exile is an exile whose homeland is ruled by aliens,
and no one can be as alien as one's fellow countrymen.
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You cannot speak of freedom to a slave
who cannot see or feel the weight of his chains.
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A fool who fools another fool
thinks of himself as smart.
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Don't think of me as a writer or as an Armenian.
Think of me as a fellow human being
who writes not for readers
but for his younger self
when he was brainwashed, manipulated, and abused
by bastards with an agenda.
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A few years ago I wrote a series of short stories whose central character was named Jack S. Avanakian – an Armenian-American variation on Odian's Panchoonie.
Once when asked by an interviewer what I was working on, I replied I was planning to write an autobiography titled “The Swan-Song of a Jackass.”
“Why a jackass?”
“Because only an obstinate jackass would go on writing for thirty years for even more obstinate jackasses."
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Monday, July 6, 2009
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BAD HABITS
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It was only in old age that I learned to assume responsibility for my actions. Until then one of my favorite mantras was, “As a result of political, social, and cultural conditions beyond our control...” which translated into dollars and cents simply means, “not my fault.” The longer we postpone kicking a bad habit, the harder it gets doing what must be done.
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A dishonest leadership will spawn a dishonest educational system and dishonest citizens. It is widely known that during the Soviet era everyone engaged in petty larceny. They had no other option if they wanted to survive. There are over a thousand Armenians in California jails today. You may now guess their country of origin. Habits are easier to keep than to give up.
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In the Ottoman Empire we were Ottomanized; in America Americanized; in the Middle East Levantinized; in the USSR sodomized – meant to say Sovietized – not that it makes a difference. It was inevitable. It was as a result of political, social, and cultural conditions, blah, blah, blah!
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At the turn of the last century our political leaders were idealistic intellectuals, daydreaming poets and revolutionaries inexperienced in the ways of international diplomacy. They tried to transplant progressive Western ideas into an essentially Asiatic environment. Today our leaders are shrewd, down-to-earth, practical businessmen and cynical bureaucrats whose defining feature is contempt for ideas. National benefactors are our kings and heroes now. As for our vodanavorjis and mdavoragans: they are no better than contemptible beggars and brown-nosing academics.
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Who in his right mind would choose a corrupt, incompetent, and undemocratic leadership over freely elected honest administrators whose first and most important priority is the welfare of the people?
Next question: When was the last time in our millennial history when we the people were given a choice? Bad habits are easier to keep than to give up.
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Let us now pray!
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Tuesday, July 7, 2009
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ON OUR CELEBRITIES
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As a child I was brought up to brag about Gulbenkian, Saroyan, Mikoyan, Mamoulian and our Byzantine emperors. As an adult I discovered that Mikoyan was so fearful of Stalin's secret police that he slept with a revolver under his pillow planning to kill himself if they came to arrest him in the middle of the night. And when Stalin ordered the purge of “enemies of the people” in Armenia, Mikoyan went about it with the thoroughness of Talaat, with one difference: whereas in Talaat's holocaust Zarian, Oshagan, and Zabel Yessayan survived, by the time Mikoyan was through his purge there were no survivors except for a handful of yes-men like himself.
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It is common knowledge that only 7% of Gulbenkian's vast fortune is earmarked for Armenians. I will not speak of his private life because it is not fit for human consumption.
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At no time did Rouben Mamoulian extend a helping hand to Armenian actors, and in this he was not different from his Jewish bosses who were against hiring actors that looked remotely Jewish.
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Saroyan's fictional characters are typical Armenians only in the sense that Tevye the Milkman (of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF fame) is a typical Jew. Saroyan “stylized” (his word) Armenians to make them more palatable and harmless to his American audience. But according to his most recent biographer, near the end of his life he was suspicious of all Armenians, including his own children.
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As for our Byzantine emperors: their foreign policy was consistently anti-Armenian.
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Raffi once said that “treason and betrayal are in our blood.” What he failed to add is that this is especially true in our “best and brightest.”
Celebrity is an impure concept. To admire some Armenians simply because they achieved fame and fortune in foreign countries and to ignore the achievements of many others, among them Naregatsi, Abovian, Raffi, Baronian, Odian, and Zarian, is to choose the wrong role models for our children and, in doing so, to corrupt our values and to undermine the integrity of the nation.
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Wednesday, July 8, 2009
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GRAPHIC PORN
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Finally a book by a distinguished scholar (see below) in which the work of nationalist historians is described as “graphic porn.”
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One reason the Balkans are a vipers' nest of internecine conflicts is that each ethnic group has its own version of the past wherein it represent itself as innocent victim and its neighbors as “guilty bastards.” To combat this trend, a group of multi-ethnic enlightened historians has decided to produce textbooks that are objective, honest, and fair to all sides, and whenever there are two contradictory versions of the same event, to give both sides of the story.
One of these historians, Nenad Seber by name (a British citizen of mixed parentage) is quoted as having said: “Turkish history says the Ottoman Empire was incredibly enlightened, a heaven of religious tolerance, a golden age for the Balkans. According to Greek history books, it was 5 centuries of rape, slavery and butchery. We've moved away from all that. In our Ottoman Empire workbook, for example, we've got a Turkish historian talking openly about the Armenian massacres.”
For more on this subject, see Justin Marozzi's THE WAY OF HERODOTUS: TRAVELS WITH THE MAN WHO INVENTED HISTORY (Philadelphia, PA, 2008).
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