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[arabaliozian]

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Monday, November 05, 2007
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THE COBRA & THE MONGOOSE
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The best things in life are free, they say. They also say, you pay most for things you get for nothing. Flattery, for instance, may be free but it can also come with a heavy price, especially if you believe it.
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You tell a fool he is smart and he will think he is infallible; he may even adopt a criminal career thinking he will never get caught. Hence, the more than a thousand Armenian inmates in Los Angeles prisons. I am reminded of the cobra that got so used to biting rats that it ended up biting a mongoose.
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Differences of opinions among us are so radical that we might as well be aliens to one another. Instead of counteracting this dangerous trend, our speechifiers and sermonizers encourage it. Only when it comes to raising funds do they emphasize the importance of brotherhood.
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A writer does not choose his readers, in the same way that a law-abiding citizen does not choose his mugger.
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“Who remembers Armenians today?” Well, what about Biafrans? Who remembers them? I suspect not even Armenians.
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[arabaliozian]

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Tuesday, November 06, 2007
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TOOTHLESS DOGS AND PROPHETIC GOATS
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Whenever I am insulted anonymously or from a safe distance, I think of the old Armenian saying: “A toothless dog always barks from a distance.”
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There is more common sense in our people than in the wisdom of our bishops. Hence the saying, “If there were wisdom in beards, goats would be prophets,” and “Better a wise delinquent than a foolish saint.”
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Willed ignorance is the kind of ignorance that is freely chosen because it is thought to be to one’s advantage. People who know or ought to know better but pretend otherwise are like the jackass that “travels to the Holy City forty times but it still comes back a jackass.”
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You may think of reading and writing as harmless activities. Medieval xxxish scribes who copied the Holy Scriptures knew better. “A single misplaced word or even letter, they said, “may mean the destruction of the world.” The bloodthirsty disposition of men is such, however, that even when copyists do a perfect job the result may be war and massacre. Millions of people have died because someone at the top of the food chain did not understand what he was reading, or he understood but pretended not to. What could be more clearly and unequivocally stated than “Thou shalt not kill”? And yet, at one time or another theologians have justified and legitimized torture, war, and massacre in the name of the Almighty.
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At the source of all our divisions and misfortunes search for the “fool who threw a stone into a well and forty wise men could not haul it out.”
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Hagop Baronian: “Do you want to dine and wine to your heart’s content every day? Be a bishop.”
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Rick Bayan on bosses: “The alpha male in a tribe of baboons.”
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Neshan Beshigtashlian: “Priests wear black cassocks because they are in perpetual mourning, and what they mourn is the death of the human being within.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Wednesday, November 07, 2007
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GULBENKIAN, MIKOYAN,
BARONIAN & PARAJANOV
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My BREWER’S DICTIONARY OF MODERN PHRASE & FABLE quotes “Mr. 5%” (Calouste Gulbenkian) as having said it was “better to have a small slice of a big cake than a big slice of a small cake.”
The M in “MiG” we are further told stands for Mikoyan, the G for Gurevich, and the “i” means “and” in Russian. I am sure our aghbers from the Homeland know all this already, but their aghbers in the Diaspora may not.
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Speaking of what we know and what we don’t: There is a type of Armenian who knows more about Turks than about Armenians, and the only thing he knows about Armenians is that they were massacred by the Turks. I once asked one such specimen if he knew anything about Armenian literature and he said he did not. Had he read a single Armenian writer, I asked next, and he replied he had not. Someone must have told him reading Armenian writers is a waste of time because none of them will tell him anything he doesn’t know already, even if what he knows is nada.
VIVA LA REVOLUCION!
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Speaking of Armenian writers: in the introduction by one of our pro-Establishment pundits to an English translation of Baronian I read that Baronian had been so nasty in his depiction of his contemporaries in Istanbul that he fully deserved to be betrayed to the Ottoman police. Is it conceivable that no one, not even the translator, bothered to point out the fact that this pundit was legitimizing betrayal?
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Another case in point: Speaking of Parajanov, I remember one of our chic Bolshevik elder statesmen saying: “He was a syphilitic homosexual and a black marketeer. They should have sent him to the Gulag and let him rot there.”
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As you may have guessed by now, I am not one of those who says, if it’s ours, it must be good, or my country right or wrong, or my mother drunk or sober.
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[arabaliozian]

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Thursday, November 08, 2007
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OUR PROBLEMS & THEIR SOLUTIONS
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You tell a self-assessed leader of men that he couldn’t even lead a mutt to the nearest fire hydrant, or a self-assessed genius that he doesn’t even qualify as an inbred moron, and you will not only fail to convince them but you will also acquire an enemy for life. I speak from experience.
We may not know or understand one another but there is one thing we can say with some degree of certainty and that is, we are not who we think we are and no matter how hard we try we will never be.
Identity, image, meaning, truth – these are poorly defined concepts that we assume to be certainties within our grasp. Hence the endless controversies, arguments, misunderstandings, conflicts, and ultimately, wars and massacres. From Diogenes in search of an honest man in broad daylight, to semanticists studying the meaning of words, and philosophers exploring the meaning of meaning: we swim in a sea of uncertainty and we expect to be believed even when we don’t believe.
The hardest part about solving a problem is not finding its solution but acknowledging its existence. A problem that is (a) clearly stated and (b) acknowledged is almost solved. These two conditions will never be met in an environment dominated by sermonizers and speechifiers who speak with a forked tongue, and ghazetajis whose central message is, we have no problems because there is nothing wrong with us. The problem, you will be informed, is not with us but with the Turks. Armenians who know better however will tell you the Turks are not our real problem; our real problem is the Turk within. The Turks divided and ruled us for six hundred years. Who divides us today if not the Turk within? If we have failed to solve our problems so far it may be because our speechifiers, sermonizers, and ghazetajis, have consistently refused to acknowledge its existence.
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[arabaliozian]

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Friday, November 09, 2007
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PAPER TIGERS AND DRAGON SLAYERS
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Our revolutionaries in their Ottoman phase may plead not guilty on grounds of inexperience, naïveté, the overconfidence of youth, or even insanity. But what is one to make of their present Turcocentric phase and after a century in which to ponder and reflect on their blunders?
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If I were to define our Turcocentric pundits, I would say they are paper tigers that like to identify themselves as dragon-slayers, or harmless aghbers who think Armenian history begins and ends in 1915, or Wizard-of-Oz types full of sound and fury signifying vochinch…
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The greatest concern of a man in power is to establish his legitimacy perhaps because he knows it to be a figment of his febrile megalomaniacal imagination.
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And speaking of megalomania: to quote the Bible is not the same as quoting God. Neither Moses nor the prophets were gods. They only spoke in His name. So did Mohammad. If God ever writes a book, there will be one and only one version of it. Because God neither rewrites nor edits, neither does he abridge or expand.
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Once in a while, to cut me down to size, our philistines like to remind me that I am not the only Armenian writer who has been rejected or ignored by his fellow Armenians. To which I can only say, “That is why I speak with the strength of many.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Saturday, November 10, 2007
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THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE
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What we call reality is an infinite number of facts and factors some of which go back to the origin of the universe. A narrative, by contrast, is an artificial construct that consists of a carefully (even if unconsciously) selected number of facts and factors with a specific aim in mind, such as a plot, a thesis, or the truth, or rather a version of it. Even a so-called objective and impartial narrative is based on a very limited number of facts that are emphasized at the expense of others that are ignored or covered up or shunted aside as marginal or irrelevant. This may explain why there are as many versions of the past as there are historians. This may also explain why man cannot create a single worm but he has created ten thousand gods.
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For every belief system there will be another that contradicts it.
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For every truth there will be ten thousand doubters and twice as many liars.
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In politics, fiction is referred to as propaganda.
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If you have a receptive audience, it’s amazing the amount of b.s. you can dish out and get away with it.
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In a book titled ON BULLxxxx, a contemporary American philosopher asks: “Is the love of truth itself merely another example of bullxxxx?”
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MEMO TO OUR EDITORS
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In the Op-Ed page of our paper this morning a headline reads: “Press freedom is still just a dream in some countries.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Sunday, November 11, 2007
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WORSE THAN A CRIME
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“It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.” The French diplomat who delivered that line was not talking about our genocide but he might as well have been. It was a major crime on the part of the perpetrators, no doubt about that, but it was also and above all a colossal blunder on ours – a blunder in so far as we let it happen by making ourselves vulnerable to them, by freely choosing, as it were, the worst case scenario, and this notwithstanding the many warnings, previews, trial-runs, and rehearsals of 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909. And what is even more incomprehensible to me is that to this day we ignore or cover up that aspect of the Crime perhaps because we care more about our image than about understanding reality, as if political leadership meant leading the people to hell and pretending it’s for their own good, or like shepherds, leading the sheep to the slaughterhouse after protecting them from wolves. Don’t think for a single moment that I am making unreasonable demands on our leadership. Neither am I asking for greatness or vision or prophetic insight. We don’t need learned scholars or eminent historians or charismatic leaders to point out where we went wrong. What we need are honest men with common sense willing to place the interests and welfare of the people above their contemptible little egos. This is not something that requires two or three generations, as our pro-establishment dupes like to say. This is a decision that can be taken in an instant. And speaking of two or three generations: once in a while I watch the Armenian hour on TV emanating from Toronto, mercifully only once a week. Most of it consists of videos of half-clad and heavily made-up girls dancing and gyrating provocatively in the manner of their best American counterparts. And I cannot help reflecting that if these zilli cheltiks can learn to mimic the worst that the West has to offer, why can’t our leaders learn to emulate the best or even the average?
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"Our political parties have been of no political use to us.
Their greatest enemy is free speech" Gostan Zarian

[zourna]

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"Zilli" sounds thoroughly familiar, but what about "Cheltiks"?

[arabaliozian]

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Monday, November 12, 2007
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THE LIGHT OF REASON
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It has been observed that on recovering their sight, blind men take refuge in dark rooms. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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An Armenian poet and academic from Yerevan, during a visit to the U.S., made fun of our Turkish surnames. Later, he was exposed as a prominent member of a mafia dynasty. What does that prove, you may ask. Simply this: a man will cling to any flimsy idea to assert his superiority over his fellow men.
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To believe someone in authority means to allow him to recreate you in his own image.
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When a friendly forum moderator once asked me if he should delete an offensive comment dealing with my person, I said, “No. Free speech allows everyone the same right to make an ass of himself in public.”
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All political leaders have adversaries and the chances are what these adversaries say about them is more objective and therefore closer to the truth than what they and their partisans say about themselves.
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Insults have a longer lifespan that compliments perhaps because they are more solidly rooted in reality.
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"Our political parties have been of no political use to us.
Their greatest enemy is free speech"
Gostan Zarian

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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THE ORIGIN OF ALL SINS
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5:45 AM
What if we never quite outgrow the infantile misconception that we are the center of the world? What if most of our problems and aberrations stem from our inability to realize that so is everyone else? What if belief systems, ideologies and their perversions, such as racism, nationalism, and fascism, enjoy ready and wide acceptance because they are extensions of this misconception? My God, my Country, my Leader, Mein Fuehrer, Heil Hitler!
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We sometimes forget that misconceptions are luxuries obtained at a very high price. Consider racism or the myth of the Chosen People or the Superior Race. By dehumanizing “inferior” races we dehumanize ourselves. Hence the spectacle of a superior race behaving like inferior swine. What if nationalism is nothing but collective narcissism? What if fascism and intolerance of criticism and dissent are based on the phoniest of all assumptions, namely that we are beyond criticism, that is to say, infallible, which is an attribute of God and of those who speak in His name even as they go about doing the devil’s work?
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6:30 AM
I read the following quotation of the day by W.R. Inge in our local paper: “The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.” In other words, you cannot have a normal or a healthy child in a sick environment and an educational system with a perverted value system.
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10:20 AM
Writes Orhan Pamuk: “Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers…” (See OTHER COLORS: ESSAYS & A STORY [New York, 2007] page 237.) Armenian translation: Living as I do in an environment that honors its bosses, bishops, and benefactors at every opportunity but refuses to acknowledge even the existence of its writers unless they are murdered by the likes of Talaat and Stalin, or they are dead, buried, and permanently silenced…preferably in a previous century…
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