notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, October 20, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS
**********************************
Don’t judge a man by his opinion of himself
or a political party by its propaganda.
*
You may hope to be forgiven by a Turkish enemy
but by an Armenian friend, never!
I speak from experience.
*
Whenever I disagree with an Armenian,
every Armenian who agrees with him
becomes my enemy.
*
African proverb: “Until lions have their historians,
tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.”
#
Friday, October 21, 2011
*****************************************
GUESSING GAMES
**********************************
An unforgettable line from a forgotten American movie:
A lecherous hombre with a foreign accent
to a scantily clead sexy teenager:
“I want to balanga you with my bonnie johnnie.”
My guess is, as children that’s how we learn languages:
we may not understand the words
but we can guess their meaning.
As when in winter a man shivers and says,
“I am cold,” for instance;
or when he says “I am thirsty”
and is given a glass of water.
But as we grow older,
we seem to lose that particular faculty.
*
One of my favorite xxxish jokes goes something like this:
Two old friends meet on a road somewhere in Russia
and after a brief exchange one of them says to the other:
“You tell me you are going to Minsk
because you want me to believe you are going to Pinsk,
but I happen to know you are going to Minsk:
Why must you always lie to me?”
#
Saturday, October 22, 2011
*****************************************
ON THE ETIOLOGY
OF GENOCIDE
**********************************
“There is nothing more valuable than our honor!”
declared a Muslim in Montreal
after murdering his three teenage daughters
because they had boyfriends.
(It is to be noted that he called it “treachery”).
There it is: the perfect justification
for killing defenseless civilians.
*
After dismissing me as anti-Armenian,
less than mediocre and totally unprintable,
they demand solutions from me.
They must be in deep %#$&
and they expect us to believe
we never had it so good
because we are in the best of hands.
*
Fear of free speech might as well be
synonymous with running away from the truth.
*
Mel Brooks: “Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger.”
This may explain why sadists outnumber masochists.
*
Chinese saying: “The great man is a public misfortune.”
*
Japanese proverb: “A wise falcon hides its talons.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, October 23, 2011
*****************************************
POLITICS
**********************************
The secret aim of all propaganda
is not to spread lies – be they small, middling, or big –
but to convince you to believe
your brain is a useless organ;
and it becomes useful only when authorized by the state
or a central authority.
This may explain why fools have as many certainties
as the wise have doubts.
Speaking for myself: my only certainty is that
when fools are in charge,
war and massacre are sure to follow.
*
What a book one could write on politics
as the art of deception.
*
Kemalism in four words:
“Fez, no. Yataghan, yes.”
*
No one will ever accuse me
of taking myself seriously.
On more than one occasion
I have identified my role in our collective existence
as that of a @#$%-disturber.
*
A statesman is a politician who has done one right thing.
#
Monday, October 24, 2011
*****************************************
EARTHQUAKE
**********************************
It must be obvious by now that
the regime in Ankara has invested more money and manpower
in rewriting history and in persecuting Kurds
than in providing safe housing for its citizens.
*
THE RICH AND THE POOR
************************************
The rich like to believe the poor are lazy
and the poor like to believe the rich are greedy.
Who is right?
As far as I know no pundit has so far
dared to suggest that
we owe the present global economic crisis
to the laziness of the poor.
*
A ROLE MODEL
****************************
Crime doesn’t pay?
But it paid and paid handsomely to Gadhafy
for almost half a century.
I wouldn’t be surprised if future dictators
adopt him as a role model.
#
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
*****************************************
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
**********************************
We are expected to believe that
our revolution at the turn of the last century
in the Ottoman Empire was a success
even if the patient died.
*
Propaganda is designed to flatter the vanity of a few
even if it means insulting the intelligence of the many.
*
What Talaat and chief executive officers
on Wall Street have in common is the certainty that
if the law is on their side
they can get away with murder.
*
Richelieu: “If the poor are too well off
they will be disorderly.”
It follows, the poor must remain poor for their own good
and in the name of law and order.
*
Pushkin: “Where there is a trough, there will be swine.”
The only reason textbook on political science
don’t begin with that line is that
all educational systems are controlled by politicians.
*
Proust: “The pleasure an artist gives
is to make us know an additional universe.”
#
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
*****************************************
SUMMING UP
**********************************
After six centuries of servile subservience
a sudden eruption of violent uprisings.
I dare anyone to suggest that
our collective destiny has not been shaped
by cowards and fools.
Treating them as heroes with good intentions
is to forget that hell is paved with them.
*
Bullies at the mercy of bigger bullies:
that just about sums up our present leadership.
Dzour nesdink, shidag khossink!
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, October 27, 2011
*****************************************
REFLECTIONS
**********************************
There is a dupe, a coward, and a bully in all of us.
That’s the only way to explain world history.
*
Q: If you were an animal,
what animal would you be?
A: A vegetarian tiger.
I hate predators.
They are the commissars of the animal kingdom.
*
Good writing consists in deleting.
Silence can be more eloquent than
a torrent of rhetorical verbiage.
A history of silence will have no quotations.
*
If there are homophobes it may be because
they were traumatized by serial pedophiles,
among them such authority figures as priests.
*
After every line I write I ask myself:
Why should anyone be interested in this?
What if he already knows or understands what I am saying?
What if he is ahead of me when it comes to certain ideas
and experiences?
#
Friday, October 28, 2011
*****************************************
SOCRATES
********************************
When asked where he came from,
Socrates is said to have replied:
"Not from Athens but from the world."
And yet, when he was condemned to death by the Athenians
and was given an opportunity to escape,
he said he’d rather die in Athens
than live anywhere else.
*
BEETHOVEN’S SHADOW
********************************
When Vahe Berberian once suggested that
Beethoven’s somewhat overblown shadow
unfairly eclipsed the reputation and worth
of many other equally great composers,
among them Boccherini,
Paul Jungmann, the quintessential German –
blond, blue-eyed, intense, unsmiling – said,
one should not speak such nonsense
in the presence of children.
Forever after music was never discussed in his presence.
*
PROPAGANDA AND LITERATURE
********************************************
All our problems must be ascribed to our enemies,
our propaganda tells us.
The enemy is us, literature reminds us.
And propaganda is more popular than literature
because no one likes to be told
he is a fool or a pervert bent on self-destruction.
#
Saturday, October 29, 2011
*****************************************
ON LOVE AND DEATH
********************************
Love is an arrow, marriage a boomerang.
*
Where there is love
there will be a pierced, broken, shattered, or shish-kebabed heart.
*
There is a Greek myth
whose intent is to emphasize the fact that
the woman you love
and the woman you marry are seldom one and the same.
The critical passage in it reads:
“No lovely naked bride awaited him
on the marriage bed,
but a tangled knot of hissing serpents.”
*
Your children will break your heart
as surely as your parents (when they die).
*
I first fell in love at age eight
with my schoolteacher.
She married another,
had a nervous collapse,
attempted suicide,
and became physically unrecognizable,
by which time I was nine and in love with another –
this time a coeval.
*
My dictionary defines “passion” as “suffering.”
*
The woman you love
and the woman you cease to love –
what a difference!
Not just black and white
but everything and nothing.
*
According to a Frenchman,
“the heaviest body in the world
is the woman you have ceased to love.”
*
After mentioning a dead person
it is customary to say, “may s/he rest in peace,”
when it is not the dead that are in need of peace
but the living.
*
Stendhal, the author of ON LOVE,
one of the best books on the subject:
“All my life I have always seen what I imagined
rather than reality.”
*
And Tolstoy: “In the presence of others,
women – especially when they are young –
pretend so skillfully that no one can see them as they are.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, October 30, 2011
*****************************************
BROTHERS
********************************
The West has its share
of dupes, fools, fanatics, racists, skinheads,
serial killers, child molesters,
and chief executive officers –
in short, hoodlums and hooligans –
as Turkey has its share of denialists.
It’s beyond me why anyone in his right mind
would expect them to be morally superior.
#
Monday, October 31, 2011
*****************************************
OVERPOPULATION
********************************
In my lifetime alone
world population has increased
from three to seven billion.
Scientists tell us the planet cannot sustain
this rate of growth.
Contraception is the only solution.
So far politicians have done nothing in that direction
because they don’t want to offend the Catholics.
But I believe the Pope is as much to blame
as film producers who glamorize sex
and treat pregnancy (if at all) as if it were
an alien, disconnected, and rare condition.
#
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
*****************************************
REREADING TOYNBEE
********************************
After Shakespeare, he is for me the most quotable English writer.
But whereas Shakespeare is universally admired,
Toynbee continues to have more enemies than friends,
especially among his fellow English historians,
probably because he exposed their mediocrity.
In that sense, he reminds me of our own Zarian.
I love Toynbee’s ideas; but what I love even more
is his Mandarin prose.
*
ON GOD
*****************
“I believe that Man has been given the capacity to see God, and I believe that this is the summum bonum towards which all creation groans and travails.”
*
THE CHOSEN
************************
“The xxxs, the Japanese, the British ‘sahib’, the Nazis…all seem to me to have been chosen by no one except themselves.”
*
ON HIS CRITICS
************************
“Their pummelings have given me a mental massage that has loosened the joints and muscles of my mind and has set it moving on a new course.”
*
A GOOD QUESTION
*********************************
“If the Turkish atrocities could be explained as anachronistic outcrops of a residual savagery in the hearts of recent proselytes to a Western
way of life, how was a Western historian to explain the apostasy of Germans who were native-born children of the Western household?”
*
ON PATIENCE
************************
“A capacity to suffer fools gladly and to do this with gusto, not as a martyrdom, but as a fine art which the practitioner can practise with zest.”
#
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
*****************************************
IN THE NEWS
********************************
Until very recently
Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad were as close
as “kolo kai vraki” (bum and pants).
Today “one of Ahmadinejad’s advisers
stands accused of raping 340 virgins during the last year.”
Not even a writer with the fertile imagination
of Gabriel Garcia Marquez could have written such a sentence.
For more, much more, on the subject,
see Abbas Milani, “Desperate Dictatorship,”
(THE NEW REPUBLIC, Oct. 6, 2011, page 30).
*
Peace is wonderful.
Friendship is great.
Love is best.
But one must be a pervert of the worst kind
to love creeps like Khamenei and Ahmedinejad who,
after conspiring to commit countless crimes against humanity,
end up hating each other.
*
Where there is too much talk of God,
can the Devil be far off?
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, November 03, 2011
*****************************************
SWAN SONG
********************************
If you have any hopes,
prepare yourself to see them shattered.
*
The source of all my problems?
I value honesty above everything else.
So much so that
I’d much rather listen to the braying of an honest jackass
than to the seductive song of a phony nightingale.
*
When it comes to painful experiences
I have the memory of an elephant.
As for happy ones:
I can’t think of a single one that did not end badly.
*
The first thing I did when I came to Canada
from war-torn Greece was to buy a loaf of bread
and a cup of coffee.
The bread tasted like @#$%
and the coffee was so hot that it burned my tongue.
After that everything went downhill.
*
The only thing that cheers me up these days
is the prospect of death.
#
Friday, November 04, 2011
*****************************************
PARALLELS
********************************
In an interview published in TIME (Oct. 10, 2011, page 64),
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
has this to say on the Israelis:
“As long as they refuse to apologize for the nine people
of Turkish descent who lost their lives
on the flotilla, as long as they refuse to pay compensation
to the families and as long as the embargo on Gaza
has not been lifted, the relations between the two countries
will never be normalized.”
*
On President Bashar Assad of Syria:
“It is impossible to preserve my friendship
with people who are allegedly leaders
when they are attacking their own people,
shooting at them, using tanks.”
*
It can truly be said of Erdogan and Turks
that they are a clear-cut case of the blind leading the blind.
To my Turkish friends and readers I therefore say:
“See you in the ditch.”
#
Saturday, November 05, 2011
*****************************************
ON INSANITY
********************************
In his biography of Alexander the Great,
Plutarch writes:
“One of the largest and most handsome lions,
which was kept in Babylon
was attacked and kicked to death by an ass.”
*
Shaw may be right:
the insane should be punished more severely than the sane
if only because they are more unpredictable and dangerous.
*
And speaking of insanity:
if you are in love,
you should remind yourself at least once a day
that your beloved is less a real person
and more a product of your imagination.
*
I don’t agree with a reality that makes crooks wealthy
and honest men poor,
and because I speak of this reality,
some of my readers hate me
as if I were responsible for everything
that has gone wrong in their lives.
*
Subtract imagination from love
and the result may be closer to contempt than affection.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, November 06, 2011
*****************************************
METAPHYSICAL REFLECTIONS
************************************************** ***
If God knows neither fear nor doubt,
can He really understand man?
*
When we speak of God
it is useful to remember that we speak of Him
not as He is but as we conceive Him to be;
and it is a serious blunder to conceive of God
in our own image.
*
We may have the answers to the most important questions
only after we die. In that sense,
death may be not an end but a beginning.
*
To God past and future are one
and both might as well be a fraction of a second.
*
What if the Big Bang as we know it
is only the last bang in an infinite series of bangs?
*
Everything we say about God is based on hearsay evidence
and therefore inadmissible.
*
God and men are more fiction than reality.
*
Reality (or God or Truth) is so different
from what we imagine it to be that
if the two ever met
they would not recognize each other.
#
Monday, November 07, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
************************************************** ***
To go down into the gutter with your adversary
is almost to agree with him -- if not with his words
than with his way of life.
*
No Armenian writer loved his fellow Armenians
as much as Khachatur Apovian – and he committed suicide.
*
I don’t criticize ideas;
I criticize their absence,
*
In a controversy to be silent
is to support the status quo.
#
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
*****************************************
HOW MANY ARMENIANS?
************************************************** ***
We have more questions than answers.
Who qualifies as an Armenian?
What if half of Turkey is half Armenian?
Because an Armenian girl was legally raped as a teenager,
does it follow that her offspring
acquired the national identity of her rapist
who may have been himself half Armenian?
An Armenian who is against us,
is he not more Turkish than Armenian?
A Turk who is with us
is he not more Armenian than Turkish?
If to divide-and-rule is enemy action,
do our dividers qualify as Armenian?
How many of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors
(who support only one faction) qualify as Armenian?
If we say only Armenians who are for solidarity
qualify as Armenian,
who will dare to say he is against solidarity?
If we preach solidarity and practise divisions
do we not speak with a forked tongue?
Can an Armenian who speaks with a forked tongue
qualify as a human being?
Confused?
You should be.
i am.
Who said reality is easy to figure out?
#
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
************************************************** ***
After a disaster,
those who are partly or wholly responsible for it,
will come up with a thousand reasons why
the disaster was inevitable.
Don’t believe a word they say.
Their priority is not to understand and explain
but to mislead and deceive.
Their aim is not to learn from history
in order not to repeat it,
but to salvage their powers and privileges.
*
To say where there is power there will be abuse of power
is like saying where there are people
there will also be the law of gravity.
*
Haves and have nots?
It would be more accurate to speak of
bloodsuckers and their victims.
*
Deceivers and dupes?
Even better: predators and herbivores.
*
Class warfare?
I suggest telling bloodsuckers
to minimize their intake of blood
does not qualify.
*
There are many things that can be seen
even by a legally blind man,
but most of us are so carefully and consistently indoctrinated
that we are willing to testify under oath
we saw nothing.
*
Sh*t happens because most men are sh*ts.
And more often than not
a deceiver is as much of a sh*t as a dupe.
*
Voltaire on the origin of religion:
“From the meeting of the earliest scoundrel
with the very first fool.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, November 10, 2011
*****************************************
YOUR CHOICE
************************************************** ***
There are no new or original ideas.
We are all in the recycling business.
I like to believe I have at no time recycled fascist crap
in the name of patriotism or religion.
*
Faith is gut-driven.
So are dogmas.
Where the brain is marginalized,
disaster is sure to follow.
*
Where there is faith,
there will be intolerance.
Where there are dogmas,
there will be heresies.
Where there are heretics,
there will be persecution.
You may now draw your own conclusions –
or confusions.
Your choice.
#
Friday, November 11, 2011
*****************************************
LIES
************************************************** ***
Where there is power
there will be propaganda;
and where there is propaganda
there will be lies.
*
We are told again and again that
our Church played a key role
in the survival of the nation.
Listen to Raffi:
“Our clergymen preached patience to us
thus promoting subservience to the point of slavery…
they have always been against individual freedom.”
*
As recently as the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin opposed independence.
*
In Manuel Sarlisyantz’s A MODERN HISTORY
OF TRANSCAUCASIAN ARMENIA (Leiden, 1975, page 326)
we read:
“The pro-Soviet Archbishop Tiran Nersoyan was, in 1944,
appointed from Etchmiadzin to be
Prelate of the Armenian Church in North America.
He endorsed Communism as ‘leading to a Christian ideal’
and had written that
'what the clergy is…on the spiritual level,
the Communist Party is on the worldly level
of politics and economics.'”
(See T. Nersoyan, A CHRISTIAN APPROACH
TO COMMUNISM, [London, 1942, page 29].)
#
Saturday, November 12, 2011
*****************************************
LIES (II)
************************************************** ***
Very early this morning
when I was half asleep
I heard someone say on the radio:
“We havent’ had democracy in 20 years.”
And I thought, we haven’t had it for 2000.
*
More often than not
our choice is not between truth and lies
but between big lies and bigger ones.
*
The cowardice of the many
and the stupidity of the few:
that’s the only way to explain our past.
The rest is propaganda.
*
And now that I have spoken the truth
I deserve a horse with which to gallop off
in all directions
in a cloud of dust.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, November 13, 2011
*****************************************
ETHOLOGY
*****************************************
Pick a man, any man, from the gutter,
give him a title and a regular salary,
and forever after he will say
he never had it so good.
One reason I write as I do is that
I was spared that kind of treatment.
I was born in the gutter and my guess is
I will die in it.
I am not complaining.
Things could have been much worse.
What saved me was pure luck.
No one ever bothered to give me a title.
As for salary:
what I was offered was never above minimum wage.
Had it been above minimum wage
I may have chosen a different path
and I would now be on my way to the devil.
#
Monday, November 14, 2011
*****************************************
WHERE I STAND
************************************************** ***
There are advantages
to being a third-rate minor scribbler
living in the middle of nowhere.
To begin with you are left alone.
Your readers are so few in number
that if you alienate one of them
it doesn’t feel like you have lost
half of your income from royalties.
*
By contrast, consider the case
of an Armenian-American academic
with a regular salary and a captive audience.
Not only will he be careful
not to say anything that may be construed
as critical of God and capital
(make it Capital and god) in general
and benefactors in particular
(one of whom may be subsidizing his “chair”)
but also anyone who may be remotely connected with them.
In short, he will support the status quo
and pretend we never had it so good
because we are in the best of hands.
*
During the Ottoman and Soviet eras
our poets wrote odes and panegyrics
to sultans and commissars.
Habits die hard.
“Treason is in our blood,” said Raffi.
So is cowardice.
Hence the scarcity of dissidents
and the overabundance of brown-nosers.
#
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
*****************************************
CHUCK YOU, FARLEY!
************************************************** ***
“You call yourself a dissident?”
said a (Soviet-Armenian) writer from Paris.
“Did they throw you out of your home and homeland?”
No, they didn’t because they couldn’t.
I was born and raised on foreign soil
and my home was mine, not theirs.
The contempt in his voice was such that
I understood why in their eyes
we will never rise above the status of “aghber.”
*
Because I try to be honest and objective
I am dismissed as pro-Turkish by some of my readers
as if being dishonest were an integral part
of the Armenian identity.
*
I must get used to the idea that
some of my fellow Armenians are so wrong
that they challenge all concepts of wrongness,
so that one could say they are not even wrong!
#
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
*****************************************
THE 99%
**************************************************
There is no such thing as a belief system
without childhood indoctrination.
Eliminate indoctrination and the chances are
a belief system will collapse
into an abyss of absurdities.
*
It can truly be said of dupes that
they are the 99%.
*
On the radio this morning:
“Pakistan today is ruled by criminals.”
An American pundit:
“Almost everyone in Washington is on the take.”
*
He who admits to being a dupe
will not admit to being a coward, a liar, and an idiot.
*
Workers of the world unite?
Even better:
Dupes, idiots, and victims of the world…
*
What belief systems do is
convince idiots they are smart,
barbarians they are civilized,
and the scum of the earth they are the Chosen.
*
You think I am being cynical?
Allow me to confide in you:
Reality is worse!
*
Sigmund Freud: “The first human
who hurled an insult instead of a stone
was the founder of civilization.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, November 17, 2011
**********
YES IM ANOUSH HAYASTANI
(TO MY SWEET ARMENIA)
**********
How sweet was it to the poet
who wrote that line?
After being betrayed to the authorities
by his fellow Armenians,
he committed suicide
by banging his head against the wall.
Many others were shot in the neck
or driven to Siberia.
If you say all that happened in a different era
and under a different regime, I say,
regimes may change
but the scum always rises to the top.
*
There is a sultan and a commissar in all of us.
If we ever undertake the task of
de-Ottomanizing and de-Stalinizing ourselves,
how many of those who are in power today
would remain in power?
*
If you are one of those readers
who think I have been consistently wrong
in my judgment of my fellow countrymen,
all I am prepared to say in my defense is,
I have at no time violated anyone’s human right of free speech.
Can you say the same about the status quo
in whose defense you speak?
#
Friday, November 18, 2011
**********
CONFESSIONS OF AN IGNORAMUS
**********
Do we have a constitution?
What does it say about free speech?
Is it for it or against it?
If it’s for it,
why is it that some of our ablest intellectuals
live in exile?
What about a Supreme Court?
Do we have one?
Who are its members?
What do we know about them?
Are they for or against fundamental human rights?
Do we have dissidents?
How many?
Who are they?
How many members of the present administration
are former KGB agents?
*
We are told most American senators and congressmen
are millionaires, sometimes even multimillionaires.
What about their Armenian counterparts?
Do we have anything resembling
the Occupy Wall Street movement in Yerevan?
*
A few years ago the Canadian spy agency
called me and said they were going to send someone
to interrogate me about our present situation.
I said I was the wrong man for such an undertaking;
it would be a waste of their valubale time;
I was only a distant observer;
I knew little or nothing about specifics.
They disagreed.
They said they read my commentaries in the Armenian press
and they considered me an expert on the subject.
An excpert?
An expert!
They must be joking.
They were not joking.
If they were interested in names
I could be of no use to them
because I didn’t even know someone who knew someone.
What kind of expert was I
if I had more questions than answers?
*
And if so far I have made no effort to know more
it maybe because in this case
ignorance may indeed be bliss.
#
Saturday, November 19, 2011
**********
ARMENIAN LITERATURE
**********
Canadian literature is rumoured to be dreary.
By contrast, Armenian literature is not even rumoured
to be defunct or non-existent.
*
One advantage in being non-existent is that
no one bothers to spread the rumour that it is trash.
*
The only people who take Armenian literature seriously
are Armenian writers who take themselves seriously.
*
The central concern of Armenian writers
who take themselves seriously
is to expose the mediocrity of all others.
*
“Yes im anoush Hayastani.”
I should like to see one of our poets producing a sonnet
titled “To my sweet fellow countrymen.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, November 20, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
**************************************************
A headline reads:
“Should Some Bankers Be Prosecuted?”
The obvious answer is, of course!
Gross incompetence is penalized in all other lines of work.
Why should bankers be immune?
Is it because as the 1%
they control 99% of the power?
*
A typical passage in the article reads:
“The federal government has been
far more active in rescuing bankers
than in prosecuting them.”
And why?
Because the 1% can afford politicians,
the 99% cannot.
*
What is American-style democracy
if not the fascism of capitalists?
*
When we demonize Turks
we forget that angels and demons
are creatures of our imagination
and that in reality some Turks may well be better or wrose,
but none of them is an invulnerable being
beyond our reach.
*
Sartre is right:
in human relations
magic plays a more important role than
reason, common sense, and experience.
Where imagination enters,
misconceptions are sure to follow.
*
All popular ideas can be easily and safely contradicted
and they have been.
One could even say,
thinking consists in exposing contradictions.
#
Monday, November 21, 2011
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AS I SEE IT
**************************************************
Once, recently, when I said something to the effect
that our treatment of writers
has been worthy of barbarians,
it was the barbarians who were eager to prove me right
by hurling insults at me and in general
behaving like hoodlums on the warpath – as if
that was the only way they knew
how to prove me wrong.
*
"For a smart man you can be very naïve!"
a trial lawyer, who is also a good friend, tells me.
I don’t know about smart
but I am worse than naïve
when I get emotionally involved.
Emotion reduces a complex reality
into a one-dimensional extension of ourselves.
Emotion, writes Sartre somewhere,
attempts to change the world by means of magic.
What could be more primitive?
*
The most beautiful spectacle I have ever beheld
was a sunrise from a seventh story hospital window;
and to think that the purpose of a sunrise
is not to provide man with beauty.
#
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
*****************************************
THE HUMAN CONDITION
**************************************************
It’s not Armenians against Turks,
Germans against xxxs,
xxxs against Palestinians,
or Cain against Abel.
It’s man against man.
If the world were populated
by a single race, nation, or tribe,
the number of wars, revolutions and massacres
would remain constant.
*
God created man.
God also created the Devil
and the Devil belongs to no race, nation, or tribe.
*
Organized religions are maneuvers
designed to allow one to sit at the right hand of God
and to behave like swine.
*
God created time and space.
What would stop Him from creating
an infinite number of other dimensions?
*
God created man.
He must have been bored stiff.
What other possible explanation is there?
#
Why are you so tough on your fellow Armenians?
I am asked once in a while by concerned readers.
I am not tough on Armenians.
I am tough on deceivers, dividers, and bloodsuckers
regardless of nationality.
I am tough on all victimizers.
Now then, identify yourself please.
Are you a victimizer or a victim?
If you are a victim, why do you object
to my speaking up against your tormentors?
*
Dupes are not born but made
and what makes them is childhood indoctrination --
brainwashing for short;
and if you say you were not brainwashed
i will say, that's because
those who brainwashed you
were successful in convincing you
you were being educated.
#