academics

Thursday, January 27, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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All our organizations (be they political, cultural, or religious)
have a HUAC (House Un-Armenian Activities Committee)
and a McCarthy of their own whose job it is
to separate the sheep from the goats,
the (brain)washed from the unwashed,
the dupes from those who can think for themselves,
the kind who drop their pants and say thank you
from the kind who for some unfathomable reason of their own
refuse to do so.
*
Dissidents are not born but made,
and what makes them are self-satisfied, power-hungry idiots
who pretend to know better.
One such specimen once promised a goodly sum
if I consented to write portraits of ADL leaders,
to which I could only say,
I didn't know any,
I had never heard of one,
and I wasn't even aware of their existence.
*
Some great men believed in Big Lies
for the same reason that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
of Sherlock Holmes fame believed in ghosts.
*
No job can be as demanding
as a job that any nonentity can perform.
That's because nonentities can be easily replaced
by other nonentities and the world is full of them.
*
Charlie Chan: “Truth, like football – receive many kicks
before reaching goal.”
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Friday, January 28, 2011
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ACADEMICS
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Academics operate in a dog-eat-dog environment.
The competition is stiff.
The unspoken rules and commandments outnumber the spoken ones.
In what follows I have made an attempt
to share my knowledge and understanding
of their character, values, and worldview.
*
Violations of human rights in both the Homeland and Diaspora
is a subject they avoid discussing
because it may question the integrity of individuals
on whose goodwill they depend.
*
Our historians study history
not to learn from it but to hone their skills
of their favorite sports, namely the blame-game.
Their unspoken message is:
(one) there is nothing wrong with us;
(two) we never had it so good;
(three) we are in the best of hands.
*
In a Western-style democracy
some of the most ferocious anti establishment critics
(like Bertrand Russell and Arnold J. Toynbee in England)
were themselves members of the aristocracy.
We don't have an aristocracy.
What we have are the offspring of victims
shaped by famine, poverty, and slum-life,
that is to say, individuals whose greatest ambition in life
is a steady income and a suburban existence.
*
In the 19th century we produced fearless intellectuals
like Raffi, Baronian, and Odian
who exposed the corruption and greed
of our establishment figures -- that is, bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
Even under Stalin we had intellectuals
who placed dedication to ideals and principles above their self-interest.
Today we have only academics
who live in fear of their own shadows.
To paraphrase an old Turkish saying:
Among ten Armenian academics
eleven are sure to be brown-nosers.
*
Their favorite topics of expertise are
Middle Ages, massacres, and anything else that is removed
from our present state of decline, degeneration, and disintegration.
*
During the Soviet era when they published their travel impressions of Yerevan,
they never dared to criticize anyone above hotel waiters.
*
They operate on two levels:
privately they are full of venom;
publicly they are all sugar and spice.
Their greatest enemy is neither intolerance nor corruption,
neither authoritarianism nor Ottomanism,
but the competition – anyone, that is,
who may be perceived as a threat to their position of eminence.
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Saturday, January 29, 2011
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CONTRADICTIONS
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An Armenian prefers his own ignorance
to someone else's knowledge.
*
If an idea flatters his vanity,
he will make it his own.
*
Tell a coward he comes from a long line of proud warriors
and he will bare his teeth and growl
next time he faces a mirror;
and when he slices a watermelon,
he will imagine it's a Turk.
*
Since he cannot defeat the Turk
he will exploit, insult, and humiliate a fellow Armenian.
You want proof?
Read a history of Armenian literature.
*
He is self-righteous, therefore infallible.
*
He is smart but he can't tell the difference
between a synonym and an antonym.
Neither can he tell the difference
between an insult and a compliment.
Example: “It takes seven Jews to fool an Armenian.”
And the synonymous assertion:
“After shaking hands with an Armenian,
count your fingers.”
*
He stresses the irrelevant at the expense of the essential.
Case in point:
He does his utmost to avoid asking questions like:
Has a thousand years of subservience to alien tyrants
changed our DNA?
If the answer is “It has not,”
how do we explain the contradictions outlined above?
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