Sunday, January 23, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Speaking of one of our political bosses,
a friend – himself a poet – once said to him:
“He is a good man, a man we can trust.”
“I trust no one in politics,” I said.
“You don't know him as I do.
He loves literature and he respects writers.
He once told me poets are engineers of the soul.”
“He never said that,” I said.
“He said it to me.”
“He was quoting Stalin.”
*
We are a nation whose defenders of the faith
are themselves ignorant infidels.
*
Worth repeating and remembering:
Don't believe everything you read or you are told.
Everyone has an ax to grind – an ax aimed at your neck.
*
Never identify a regime, any regime, or power structure
with the Homeland.
*
Most of our disagreements and controversies
are rooted in two propaganda lines
which we have swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
#
Monday, January 24, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Nothing comes more naturally to an Armenian bully than to assume, as a superpatriot he speaks in defense of the eternal snows of Mount Ararat.
“All you do is write,” such a specimen once told me.
To which I could only say:
“And what else have you been doing beside pulling your dick?”
I should write a book on the art of making enemies for life.
*
Armenians are smart?
A really smart person does not need to be told he is smart;
and the surest way to flatter the vanity of an imbecile
is to tell him he has the IQ of a genius.
*
“Among ten men nine are sure to be women,” Turks say.
This may explain why they relied on infidel boys
to do their fighting for them.
This may also explain why slaughtering defenseless women, children, and old men came naturally to them.
*
They say “Live and let live, that's my philosophy -- not that's my favorite cliché, platitude, or slogan, but philosophy.
In a democracy everyone is a philosopher.
Not a philomoron but a philosopher.
Nobody ever says “I believe in God, that's my theology,”
or “Smoking causes cancer, that's my oncology.”
*
An Armenian born in Iran and educated in Yerevan
became an instant celebrity last week.
He was in all the papers, on radio, and TV.
He killed a cop for no apparent reason.
#
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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The “I” must be the most irrelevant part of our being.
We are born without it and we lose it when we die.
*
If only popes, imams, and rabbis were honest enough to admit
they don't deal in verifiable facts
but in unverifiable assumptions and theories
all of which may be open to error.
Or, like Socrates, to be modest enough to say,
“Of the gods we know nothing.”
*
As children we are taught to believe obedience to authority is a virtue.
As adults we learn that subservience to scum is an inevitable fact of life
that we challenge at our peril.
*
One positive aspect of computers is that
it makes inaccessible people accessible.
*
An Armenian will demand your agreement (meaning subservience)
even when he contradicts himself.
*
Anonymous: "It is easy to lust for fame,
much harder to achieve greatness."
*
Ideological truths become lies
when they justify violations of human rights,
the first of which is always freedom of speech.
Where there is censorship of ideas
there will be censorship of lives.
Next time you promote censorship,
ask yourself this question:
"Do I really want to legitimize murder
in the name of God and Country?"
#
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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The work of an honest writer
tells the story of a liberation from the tyranny of fear,
the limitations of ignorance,
and the oppression of prejudice.
*
The aim of all propaganda is to legitimize prejudice
by means of such lies as “superior race,”
“the Chosen People,” and closer to home,
“first nation this, first nation that, “ -- lies
whose ultimate aim is to convince dupes
they are in the best of hands
and they never had it so good.
*
Even the most liberal and democratic power structures
will speak the truth only if it is in their own interest.
But since self-interest is a big lie,
and since truth and lies are mutually exclusive concepts,
it follows: even when nations speak the truth, they lie.
Either that or they use one truth to cover up many lies.
*
Where was God before the Big Bang?
The only possible answer:
in a dimension that is beyond
the time-space continuum – such as
the dimension of dreams, music, and mystical visions;
or the realm of Platonic ideas,
“the Kingdom of God” within us,
or the “satori” of Zen Buddhism.
#