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  • Re: elegy

    ENJOY
    *************************
    Silvio Berlusconi at a press conference:
    “I will now take questions from the men;
    from the girls, phone numbers.”
    *
    MY FIRST FAN
    *********************
    My first fan was a Bulgarian poetess
    who needed a translator
    and thought I knew Bulgarian.
    *
    LOVE
    ****************
    True love makes you ask:
    “How did I manage to live without you?”
    *
    The world would be a better place
    if everyone heard someone say
    “I love you” at least once a day.
    *
    STATUS QUO
    *******************
    The only way to be positive about us is by recycling the propaganda of our 1%.
    *
    WOMEN
    *************
    We need women in politics
    if only because they will never say
    “mine is bigger than yours.”
    *
    OLIGARCHY
    ************************
    Long before oligarchy in the Homeland,
    we had oligarchy in the Diaspora.
    *
    A RULE WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS
    **********************************************
    Where there is a high unemployment rate,
    there will also be a high rate
    of poverty, emigration, and prostitution.
    One could even say
    poverty, emigration and prostitution
    are our most important exports.
    *
    Have a nice day!
    #

    Comment


    • Re: elegy

      READING TOYNBEE
      ************************************************** **
      On racial superiority:
      “The xxxs, the Japanese, the British 'sahibs', the Nazis...all seem to me to have been chosen by no one except themselves.”
      *
      On critics:
      “Whenever a reviewer is tempted to treat an author as a dart-board he should remember that the missile which his hand is itching to lance is not a dart but a boomerang.”
      *
      On chauvinism:
      “Self-idolization is most flagrantly in evidence, not as a self-adjudicated reward for success, but as a self-exculpating compensation for failure.” (I think of these lines whenever I hear one of our charlatans bragging about our celebrities and achievements.)
      *
      “The egocentric illusion has always beset every living organism in which an ego has ever asserted itself.”
      *
      On pessimism and optimism:
      “The truth is that Valéry's pessimism and Gibbon's optimism are, both alike, rationalizing of feelings that are irrationally subjective.”
      #________________________________________

      Comment


      • Re: elegy

        FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
        **************************************
        Einstein: “Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
        And consider Gandhi who borrowed all his ideas
        from Hindu scriptures, Tolstoy. Thoreau and Ruskin,
        among others.
        *
        On the day a childhood friend became a fund-raiser
        and a member of the Party he became my enemy,
        or rather, I became his.
        Once upon a time we were both slum-dwellers.
        He is now as prosperous as a rug merchant.
        *
        Never underestimate the cunning of fools, dupes, and idiots
        who say we need solutions, not critics,
        because they know no one will ever dare
        to go up to a boss, bishop, or benefactor and say
        “You and your kind are at the root of all our problems.”
        *
        Success and Armenian literature are mutually excluysive concepts.
        If you want to live longer as a writer,
        identify yourself as a failure,
        come to terms with that reality,
        and you may be allowed to reach middle age.
        #

        Comment


        • Re: elegy

          SCUMBAGS
          *********************************
          The greatest achievement of our 1% so far: replacing the “red” genocide with its “white” variant and brainwashing our children to repeat the phony mantra: “We don’t need critics, we need solutions.”
          *
          On more than one occasion I have come face to face with the unspeakable contempt with which our 1% treats the people, including our academics that pretend their spittle is rain.
          *
          The moral of our millennial history: “If you insist on behaving like an idiot, don’t be surprised if even your own brother treats you like xxxx.”
          *
          I repeat myself? I have a solution to that problem: Stop reading me.
          #

          Comment


          • Re: elegy

            ON ACADEMICS
            ******************************
            The trouble with academics is that
            they don’t say what must be said,
            and when on those very rare occasions they do,
            they bury it beneath a mountain of verbiage.
            *
            And speaking of mountains:
            Propaganda is not an argument but a gut reaction
            immune to reason and common sense.
            After all, who would dare to argue against Mt. Ararat?
            *
            The greatest discovery our academics have made in America is that
            there is money in massacres.
            *
            We are not idiots but we have been systematically moronized.
            Don’t ask me to explain the difference
            because I don’t have easy answers.
            The best i can do is to say that
            we value education but our system is rotten.
            #

            Comment


            • Re: elegy

              HAIKU
              *****************************
              The word “original” has two contradictory meanings:
              something new and something so old
              that it goes back to the origins.
              In that sense there is nothing new
              in what I have been saying
              because there is nothing new
              in greed, arrogance, stupidity, and criminal conduct.
              *
              First they preside over the depopulation of the land,
              and then they promote tourism.
              Our situation may be summed up in a haiku:
              “Kopeks we have,
              dollars we need – Citizens,
              you can have ‘em!”
              #

              Comment


              • Re: elegy

                ON A NUMBER OF THINGS
                ****************************************
                ON WINE
                ******************
                My tastes are simple – too simple,
                according to some friends
                who are no longer friends.
                My favorite brand of wine is the cheapest.
                I remember once, after a sip,
                a friend had this to say about its bouquet:
                “It has an aftertaste of gasoline.”
                *
                ON BREAD
                *******************
                A friendly reader once remarked
                that I was the best thing that happened to Armenians
                since the invention of sliced bread.
                He had no way of knowing that
                sliced bread is the first thing I tasted in Canada
                and I hated it so much
                that I almost puked.
                *
                ON TOURISM
                ************************
                Who would have imagined that
                there would come a time when
                our greatest tourist attraction
                would be a Turkish mountain.
                You say Ararat is quintessentially Armenian?
                I say, yes I agree provided you also agree
                that America is an Indian continent.
                *
                ON ARMENIANS
                ***************************
                Contrary to rumors,
                I am not anti-Armenian.
                I believe there are good Armenians.
                I have met one or two of them myself.
                *
                ON BEING POSITIVE
                ******************************
                You don’t like what I say?
                You want more positive assessments?
                I can do that but it may cost you.
                This is America where everything has a price.
                It will cost you and it may well be
                above your income bracket.
                #

                Comment


                • Re: elegy

                  LABELS
                  *******************
                  Next time you ask yourself the question,
                  “How can one Armenian do this to another Armenian?”
                  consider the fact that, like all nations
                  with a long history of subservience to brutal foreign regimes,
                  we have been so thoroughly bastardized that
                  the chances are our 1% is more odar than Armenian,
                  and, in the words of one of our elder statesmen,
                  some of them may even be: “Turks
                  who speak Armenian fluently.”
                  *
                  If an Armenian is half-Kurdish
                  (the Kurdoghlanians come to mind),
                  Azeri, or Turkish and if he has political ambitions,
                  it goes without saying that
                  he will do his utmost to cover-up that fact.
                  He may even trace his ancestry
                  all the way back to the Mamigonians and Bagratunis,
                  who, according to our own historians,
                  were not Armenian.
                  *
                  I am not implying here that all pure-blooded Armenians
                  (assuming such beings exist) are gentlemen.
                  What I am saying is that “Armenian,”
                  very much like “American,” “Canadian,” and” Australian,”
                  is a meaningless label especially when used
                  in reference to honesty and personal integrity.
                  #

                  Comment


                  • Re: elegy

                    FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
                    ******************************************
                    If I were to name our greatest failing
                    it would have to be self-deception.
                    Centuries of subservience and degradation
                    followed by massacres and deportations
                    have taught us to live by lying to ourselves
                    because the truth would be unbearable.
                    *
                    Among Armenians, writers are figures of fun
                    unless of course they are dead,
                    in which case they are treated
                    with the respect due to all cadavers.
                    *
                    I once heard one of our senior academics
                    refer to one of our benefactors
                    as” Baron,” (Baron Jack S. Avanakian)
                    and to Gostan Zarian as “degha” (boy).
                    I may have mentioned this before
                    but some things bear repeating.
                    *
                    Rabindranath Tagore: “And because I love this life,
                    I know I shall love death as well.”
                    #

                    Comment


                    • Re: elegy

                      NOTES / COMMENTS
                      ****************************
                      We are double victims of our own incompetence
                      and someone else’s sadistic greed.
                      To emphasize one at the expense of the other
                      is to misrepresent reality.
                      *
                      Does the 1% create or kill jobs?
                      As always in economics,
                      there are two schools of thought
                      and only God knows the answer;
                      and in His infinite wisdom
                      He has consistently refused to share it with us.
                      *
                      We justify our failings with lies
                      and we forget that truth is
                      the quintessential survivor.
                      *
                      Chinese proverb: “Even the best hunter
                      finds no game in an empty field.”
                      *
                      Danish proverb: “Unanimity is the best fortress.”
                      *
                      Hungarian proverb: “The wife of a careless man
                      is almost a widow.”
                      *
                      Anonymous: “Men and women, women and men:
                      it will never word.”
                      #

                      Comment

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