this and that

Thursday, March 20, 2008
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A SHIP WITHOUT A CAPTAIN
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By emphasizing some details and ignoring others, one can speak the truth and lie at the same time. Likewise, by combining the letter of one law with the spirit of another, one can pretend to serve justice even when committing unspeakable crimes against humanity.
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“Why don’t you leave us alone and busy yourself educating your Turkish brethren,” writes a gentle reader. I speak in defense of my brothers, all my brothers, regardless of race, color, and creed. To the fools who tell me to shut up, I dedicate the following lines by Walt Whitman: “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy / Walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”
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It’s astonishing the amount of crap people will take before they decide enough is enough.
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The best I can hope to achieve is embarrass the bastards. Is it worth it? I am not sure. It keeps me busy thinking I carry on a tradition that goes back many centuries: that of calling a spade a spade and a baloney artist a jackass.
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Again and again I am reminded that honey is more effective than vinegar. Yes, by all means. Let’s try the honeyed approach with the Turks for a change, not only because it is more civilized or effective but also because we have wasted vast amounts of vinegar without any tangible results.
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Speaking of Whitman: when Lincoln was assassinated, he wrote one of his most celebrated poems titled “O Captain! My Captain!” which begins with the line, “O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done,” and ends with the words: “…on the deck my Captain lies, / Fallen cold and dead.”
And I reflect that, at the end of “our fearful trip” what lay “fallen cold and dead” was not our captain (did we have one?) but the nation, which happens to be one of those minor details that have been covered up by our nationalist historians.
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Friday, March 21, 2008
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METAMORPHOSIS
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The American conservative pundit, William F. Buckley, who died recently, is quoted as having said that Africans will be ready to run their own affairs “when they stop eating each other.” On reading this line, I immediately remembered the old saying, “One Armenian eats one chicken, two Armenians eat two chickens, three Armenians eat each other”; and Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing each other.”
If Africans learn to run their own affairs before we do, no doubt it will be because their former masters and role models were European, unlike ours who were Asiatic.
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To preach is to confess, because preachers tend to practice the opposite of what they preach.
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Power seems to radically alter the DNA of most people, which may explain why Armenians with power behave as though they belonged to a different species.
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I once had the following brief exchange with one of our notorious Turcocentric pundits who has succeeded in elevating Turcocentrism to a pathological monomania:
“You complain too much,” said he.
“Isn’t that what you do too?”
“Who asked you?”
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No Armenian will ever praise with the same intensity as he reviles.
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“I am a tolerant man…”
“Live and let live, that’s my philosophy.”
“I love my fellow Armenians, regardless of their political and religious affiliations.”
To describe oneself is to deceive oneself.
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The ego is an extension of the gut.
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Saturday, March 22, 2008
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ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER
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Work hard. Write every day. Concentrate. Rewrite. Delete more and expand less. Avoid writing at night when your critical faculties are down. But if you are an Armenian, find yourself another line of work.
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I am not rejected because I am misunderstood. I am rejected because I understand and what I understand is not flattering to our vanity.
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If you voice opinions that I held twenty or thirty years ago, I will not agree with you because agreeing with you would amount to deleting two or three decades from my life.
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One problem with brown-nosers is that after spending a lifetime osculating derrieres, they are outraged when the same treatment is denied to them.
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If you can reconcile belief in God with belief in the honesty of multimillionaire televangelists, you may claim to understand America.
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Cioran: “Shakespeare: the meeting of a rose with an axe.”
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Paul Morand: “Unpopular people fascinate me.”
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Anonymous: “Contentment is better than wealth.”
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