reflections

Thursday, October 28, 2010
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UNDIPLOMATIC OBSERVATIONS
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It is written: “He who has the gold, defines the golden rule.”
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It is also written: “Revolutions may change the men at the top, they don't change human nature.”
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The economic crisis engineered under Bush and embraced by Obama proves one thing: Sooner or later both capitalism and communism degenerate into gangsterism.
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Obama's mistake was to seek the advice of men from Wall Street to fix Wall Street on the grounds that it takes a thief to catch a thief. But in this case the thieves didn't get caught; they got away with more loot, that is, taxpayers' money.
Obama behaved like Shaw's “gentleman” who steals from the poor to help the rich.
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I have myself been called all kinds of nasty names by our bloodsuckers and brown-nosers because I refuse to play the game by their rules – that is to say, to be one of them.
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A disgruntled insider once told me, shortly after the Earthquake in Armenia, one of our fund-raisers in New York demanded and got $100,000 salary plus expenses; and I assume he transferred the collected funds to his counterpart in Yerevan, who distributed them to his own counterparts in the affected areas, and so on.
This may explain why, disgusted by this kind of “trickle-down” charity, 1.5 million Armenians decided to emigrate to America and Turkey, among other countries, in order to find employment and support their families back home.
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To those who tell me I should be more diplomatic in what I write, I say: Diplomats are highly trained and skilled gentlemen who get paid good money for their work. Nobody is paying me to be diplomatic.
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Friday, October 29, 2010
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ON SURVIVAL
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Notwithstanding its countless blunders, dogmatism, intolerance and crimes against humanity, the Catholic Church has survived for two millennia. One reason why I don't rate our own survival as a worthy achievement worth mentioning or discussing. After all, the Ottoman Empire lasted longer than most empires.
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Sometimes to survive means to be as bad or even worse than the competition. Cobras and scorpions owe their survival to their venom and not to their sweet disposition, altruism, and love of truth. To say therefore that we owe our survival (if that's what you want to call it) to our civic virtues, tolerance, and love of democracy, is to lie.
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One reason I write short sentences and paragraphs is that I am afraid by the time I finish writing longer ones I may no longer have an audience. I am not implying I have one today – three or four readers an audience to not make – but they are better than no audience. Call it the consolation of a loser.
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If an explanation is endorsed by a political party, it can't be right. Truth and politics are as mutually exclusive concepts as fire and water.
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If I knew how to pray, I would say: “Please God, teach me how to forgive my own transgressions. Because then and only then I may learn to forgive those who transgress against me.”
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Saturday, October 30, 2010
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REFLECTIONS
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If it is the dury of every true patriot to sacrifice himself in defense of his fellow countrymen, how many of our revolutionaries qualify?
I am not casting aspersions (as they say in westerns), just asking an innocent question.
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When a member of the Party criticizes me, he does so with the certainty and daring of a prophet with 20/20 vision. But when it comes to critizing his own Party, he becomes deaf, dumb, stupid, and brain-dead.
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The offspring of the same revolutionaries who challenged a mighty empire a hundred years ago are now afraid to challenge the shadows of their own faceless and anonymous bosses.
What a great subject for a comedy!
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If “War is hell,” and “Hell is other people” (Sartre), it follows, peace is hell too.
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The only way to explain and reconcile the idea of an all-loving God and the murder of an innocent child, or for that matter, the senseless death of two or seven million innocent civilians, is to think of time (be it the lifetime of a human being or that of the universe itself) in relation to cosmic time or eternity, as only a fraction of a second.
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