brothers

Thursday, October 25, 2012 ****************************************** DEGREES OF AWARENESS ************************************* We may see many things but we cannot see everything and more often than not what we don’t see is what we should have seen. * If you want to know more about someone, ask his enemies. The same applies to nations. * Truth is nobody’s friends and everyone’s enemy. * When dissidents ascribe criminal conduct to the leadership alone, they lie. They lie in so far as they reduce the people to the status of automata programmed to behave with the same degree of awareness as ants, sheep, or a pack of wolves. * Even the most backward and primitive man cannot be said to be on the same level as a beast whose conduct is dictated by instinct alone. * Our dividers are as guilty as hell. No doubt about that. But so are their dupes, whose IQ operates on two levels: when it comes to judging their enemies, they behave as if they had 20/20 vision. But when it comes to examining their conscience, they become deaf, dumb and stupid. * A headline in my morning paper reads: “Women hold just 20% of world’s power.” I have every reason to suspect in our case it’s less than 0, 0001%. # ON THE ART OF WRITING ************************************ The less art the better. * Editing consists in deleting. If you provide the key, no need to describe the contents of a room. * Unless you are another Tolstoyevsky, be more like Chekhov. Stick to writing short stories. The shorter the better. * When asked about the tempo of a song, a French composer (may have been Gabriel Fauré) is quoted as having said: “If the singer is bad, the faster the better.” * So many mediocrities achieve celebrity these days that the challenge is to remain anonymous. * Don’t make the mistake of adopting a single pseudonym like Oshagan and Siamanto because your readers (assuming you have any) will forget you even when you are alive and kicking ass. * Leave preaching to preachers – they get paid for it. To be an Armenian writer in this day and age means to be an unemployed and unemployable misfit in a land devoid of all benefits and entitlements. * Never underestimate your readers’ ignorance and contempt for knowledge. I have met elder statesmen who in a sane environment would be classified as inbred morons. * Be prepared to be insulted and dismissed as a bullshitter by bullshitters like Romney and Ryan. * A nation needs dupes more than it needs dissidents. This is as true of Turks, Russians, and Yanks as it is of Armenians – especially Armenians. * And now let us pray! # Saturday, October 27, 2012 **************************************** BROTHERS ************************ The other day a gentle reader pointed out to me that Armenians who have were born, raised, and lived in alien environments for more than a century and a half could hardly qualify as Armenian. Some truth in that. * In America we have been Americanized in less than a century, in France Frenchified, in the Balkans Balkanized, in many other countries assimilated to the point of extinction, and last but not least, in the Ottoman Empire we were Ottomanized. (on occasion I am myself been called “Baliozoghlu” and identified as “a piece of shit” by my brothers in the Homeland). * Who is an authentic Armenian? Does he exist? Not an easy question to answer. If you say, surely Armenians born and raised in the shadow of Mt. Ararat may indeed qualify as authentic Armenians, may I be allowed to point out they too have been to some extent Russified, Sovietized, alienated, and dehumanized as thoroughly as the rest of us. * And now, let us rise from abstractions to facts (as our Marxist brothers used to say). Let us consider their authenticity in the light of historic reality. Whereas in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 our intellectuals were betrayed by a single Armenian, in the USSR two generations of our ablest men in all fields of human endeavor were betrayed and shot by our own Stalinist leadership – the very same characters, may I add, who are now in charge of our destiny as a nation. * When post-World War II Armenians immigrated to Armenia, they were called “aghber” (trash) by these very same authentic Armenians, and lived (very much like themselves) in constant fear of betrayal. * Which is why I feel justified in saying nothing can be as misleading as judging a man by his birthplace? A man should be judged not by his country of origin but, in the words of a wise American, by “the content of his character.” The rest is propaganda. #