notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

THINGS I WAS NEVER TOLD
AS A CHILD
***********************************************
There are three kinds of men:
wolves, foxes and hyenas.
*
Believe nothing you are told.
*
Think the worst
and you won’t be far from the truth.
*
“My integrity is important to me.”
He means his income bracket.
*
If you step in the right direction,
don’t be surprised if they call you “vicious.”
I speak from experience.
*
I say this for your own good.
He means his own good.
*
Love is a trap designed by the Devil.
*
Men at the top:
even when they speak the truth they lie.
*
Not just the white man
but all men in all the colors of the rainbow
speak with a forked tongue.
*
Nobody knows everything about anything
and he who says he does is full of xxxx.
*
Wisdom consists in saying
what every thinks but is afraid to say it.
*
Organized religions and ideologies are rackets
and sermonizers and speechifiers racketeers.
*
Tyrants are not born but made
and what makes them are idiots like you and me.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

PET PEEVES
*****************************
American popular music.
*
Men and women with guitars.
*
The word leader.
I prefer public servant and I equate “leadership qualities”
with crypto-fascist tendencies.
*
Long answers to short questions.
*
Sermonizers who speak of God
as if they were personally acquainted with Him.
#
THREE FAVORITE SAYINGS
(freely translated from the Turkish)
**********************************************
“Among ten men nine are sure to be women.”
*
“Don’t over-analyze, you may expose the xxxx.”
*
“When the house is finished, death enters.”
#
A UNIVERSALLY VALID FIRST LINE
IN A WORK OF FICTION
*******************************************
“I fell in love with the wrong woman (or man).
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

CAIN AND ABEL
********************************
Abel must have been a self-satisfied idiot.
Again and again he failed to recognize the fact that
his brother was a born killer;
in the same way that, as a species,
Homo sapiens (make it Homo ignoramus)
has consistently refused to admit that
it has been and continues to be at the mercy
not of peace-loving vegetarians
but of warlike and bloodthirsty cannibals
who speak of peace and the brotherhood of all men
even as they slaughter innocent civilians.
*
Closer to home:
consider our genocide as a case in point.
Even when repeatedly warned by countless observers –
both Armenian and foreign –
we continued to cling to the illusion that
we were invulnerable
because God and the Great Powers of the West
were on our side.
*
To say that our genocide fell on us
like a thief in the night
is not just a lie but a Big Lie
whose obvious aim is to perpetuate the illusions
that we are in the best of hands
and we never had it so good.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
********************************
No crime goes unpunished.
The execution of Socrates
and the decline of Greece are connected.
So are the crucifixion of Christ
and the persecution of xxxs.
American arrogance and Vietnam.
Indiscriminate massacres
and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
And closer to home:
contempt for selfless intellectual labor
and our status as a nation
in perpetual decline, degeneration, and disintegration.
In popular parlance,
“No one gets away with nothing.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

PARALLEL LIVES
*****************************
Stalin’s father, his latest biographer tells us,
called his mother a xxxxx and tried to strangle her.
In revenge, Stalin did to Mother Russia
what his father did to his mother.
*
There are no accidents
and no unintended consequences in history.
Everything that happens – everything!
including every comma and semicolon –
is carefully planned and executed
if not by Homo sapiens (make it, Ignoramus)
than by the atomic structure of the universe.
*
A HISTORY OF DISINTEGRATION
******************************************
Countless invisible particles in our bodies
cooperate in order to keep us alive and healthy.
If one of these particles takes the wrong turn,
illness and death follow.
*
Life is a complex network of operations
that breaks down when consensus
(which means moving in the same direction)
ceases to be a central concern.
Our history in a nutshell.
*
HEBREW PROVERB
*******************************
“If force doesn’t work, use more force.”
The same applies to reason and common sense.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

ON EQUALITY
**************************
All men were created equal.
Ever since then their first and most important priority has been
to introduce and legitimize inequalities.
Masters and slaves.
The 1% versus the 99.
Bosses, bishops, benefactors and dupes.
*
HAS THIS BEEN SAID BEFORE?
*****************************************
Or rather: has anything worth saying
has not been said already,
more than once?
*
MEMO TO WRITERS
******************************
You want to make friends?
Avoid politics!
Write instead about the mutual torments of love.
*
ON PROPAGANDA
****************************
To write against propaganda means
to make enemies of the 1%.
If on occasion I write about politics it may be because
I was fifteen when I first read THE IDIOT
and adopted Myshkin as a role model.
If you want to blame somebody,
don’t blame me; blame Dostoevsky.
*
HAVE YOU HEARD THIS ONE?
**********************************************
An old man goes to his family doctor and says:
“Doc, I have been experiencing episodes of impotence.”
“How often?” the doctor wants to know;
and the old man replies:
“Seven times last night and five times this morning.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

TURKS VS. YANKS
************************************
Are we better off without Turks?
Under the Sultans we produced a literary renaissance
and giants like Baronian, Zohrab, Odian, Zarian,
Oshagan, Zabel Yessayan and many others.
In the land “of the brave and the free,”
only Oriental carpet dealers, fund-raisers,
fornicating bishops, Turcocentric ghazetajis,
a thousand academics whose number one concern
is number one, and multi-millionaires
who like to see their names on walls.
*
Have I said this before?
Probably, but not as often as first nation this
and first nation that!
I am not saying Turks are better than Yanks.
What I am saying is
I loathe liars as much as I loathe bloodsuckers.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

PREACHING HOPE
TO THE HOPELESS
*****************************
The hidden message
in preaching hope to the hopeless is this:
Do nothing because
there is nothing you can do.
*
If Armenians are quitting Armenia
by the thousand and the million
it may be because they have given up all hope;
and they have given up all hope
because hope has played a sinister role in our history.
In the Ottoman Empire and for 600 years
we hoped for the best and were rewarded
with a series of massacres.
Something similar happened in the USSR under Stalin
and his successors, the oligarchs.
*
To those who say we need solutions, not critics, I ask:
Has it ever occurred to you that your own elimination
may well be the only solution?
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

IF I WERE A WOMAN
***********************************************
If I were a woman in Armenia today
I would write about sexual harassment.
If you say there is sexual harassment everywhere,
I say, there are also many women
who have written and continue to write about it.
How do you explain the almost unanimous silence
of women in our homeland?
*
If I were a woman in Armenia today
I would write about men who behave like swine.
If you say there are such swine everywhere,
including the most progressive and civilized countries on earth,
I say, yes I know but some of them
have been and continue to be
exposed, ridiculed, and disgraced.
*
If I were a woman in Yerevan today
I would write about the scarcity
– or is it total absence – of women in politics.
*
If I were a woman I would not write
about nightingales serenading the moon,
sonnets on the eternal snows of Mt. Ararat,
lullabies, romances, and above all,
I would not ridicule or look down on men
who dare write about these and other scandals
on the grounds that sunshine
is the best disinfectant.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Q/A
*************************
Q: What do women and intellectuals have in common?
A: They have a better chance to survive as concubines.
*
Q: What did Sultan Abdulhamid II
and Gulbenkian have in common?
A: An unlimited number of concubines.
*
It is to be noted that at the beginning of his career,
Gulbenkian worked for the Sultan --
his role model.
#