notes / comments

[Armenian]

Re: notes / comments

[skhara]

Re: notes / comments

A picture speaks a thousand words?

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, August 06, 2007
***************************************
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
**********************************
“Most people are bastards, and everything is bullxxxx.”* These are the last words of George Black, a member of the Canadian financial elite, who is said to have committed suicide. From now on whenever I enter an Armenian discussion forum on the Internet…Strike that! Forget I made the connection. Unfair to my fellow countrymen.
Goethe’s famous last words: “More light!” What did he mean by that? Some think he wanted his servant to open the curtains of his bedroom window. Others think by “light” he meant reason or some such elevated metaphysical concept. If the second, it sounds so damn pretentious. I prefer Black’s last words. No ambivalence there. Down to earth. To the point. My style – rude, negative, nasty.
*******************************************
FOOTNOTE
***********************
Tom Bower, CONRAD & LADY BLACK: DANCING ON THE EDGE (London, 2006) page 20.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, August 07, 2007
******************************************
QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
**********************************
Why do you bother writing for idiots who insult you?
Smart readers don’t need my two cents’ worth. They may even be ahead of me in the sense that they keep silent because they have resigned themselves to the fact that ours is a hopeless case and no amount of reasoning will change anyone’s mind. Either that or they don’t give a damn one way or the other. But there is another and more personal reason why I persevere: I too was an idiot when I was young and pretended to know better when all I did was recycle a propaganda line. But one can’t stay young forever. Sooner or later – and I hope, with my help, sooner rather than later -- they will have to outgrow their present stage and confront reality.
How do you know they are not old enough?
I don’t judge people by their chronological age. I judge them by their mental age. You see, the danger in propaganda is not that it misleads people but that it makes them stupid.
#

[Lucin]

Re: notes / comments



A pile of shit would also concretize this thread as well.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, August 08, 2007
*******************************************
CRAP AS NEWS
******************************
We read the following in IT’S NOT NEWS, IT’S FARK: HOW MASS MEDIA TRIES TO PASS OFF CRAP AS NEWS by Drew Curtis (Gotham Books, 278 pages, 2007): “Everyone claims to want real news, but no one really does.” That may be because people prefer fiction to fact, and illusion to reality.
Our Armenian-American press today is controlled by political parties and big money, that is to say, it is thoroughly pro-establishment. Who speaks for the underdog? No one, perhaps because almost every other institution is busy collecting money for a noble cause. Every other day I get a letter printed on fancy stationery and fancier letterhead that ends with Comrade Panchoonie’s favorite punch line: “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money). My guess is, for every underdog we have two fat top dogs in the charity business.
Next time you read a headline that says so many thousand or even million dollars were collected for a good cause in the Homeland, try to find out, if you can, how much of it ended in deep pockets and how much went to charity. We collect money for myriad causes, except one: investigative reporting. And why? Because we prefer crap to news.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, August 09, 2007
**************************************
FREE PRESS, ARMENIAN STYLE
**********************************************
You are of course free to say whatever you wish, provided you say nothing against God and capital -- make it, Capital and god – I mean benefactors and bishops – because, like everyone else, we are financially dependent on the generosity of our benefactors, and because bishops represent god on earth, and who would dare to criticize god? Besides, bishops, or rater their secretaries, provide us with a regular stream of press releases about their activities, projects, and recent developments dealing with the community, plus verbatim texts of sermons, in addition to buying advertising space for such things as Oriental rug sales, banquets, kefs, picnics, and so on and so forth. Get the picture? Criticizing them would be like biting the hand that lays the golden egg. As for our bosses: pretend they don’t exist. They are publicity shy anyway. Most Armenians don’t even know who they are. And remember, your job and mine depend on their say-so. One wrong word and we are out. Otherwise, as I said, you are free to say anything you want about the Genocide, provided of course you make it absolutely clear we had nothing to do with it, except for contributing victims. Perhaps I should also mention some subjects you had better avoid, subjects like solidarity, for instance. Solidarity is a subject best left to our editorialists, they know how to handle it. But just in case you are cornered or stumble into it, say we are all of it; it’s the opposition that’s against it. We are not the dividers, they are. We have always been for solidarity – 100%, body and soul. Same goes for all our other problems. Put the blame on the opposition. But otherwise, as I said, you must feel absolutely free to say whatever you wish, because ours is a free press, and we live in a democracy that considers free speech a fundamental human right…and all that crap.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, August 10, 2007
*********************************************
ABRACADABRA
******************************
Americans fought their bloodiest war in defense of solidarity. Have we shed a single drop of blood in defense of our own? If anything, we have done the exact opposite. Our tribal leaders and their dupes have killed one another to keep us divided. Does anyone know how many Armenians have been killed by fellow Armenians in the name of this or that dime-a-dozen ideology – make it, propaganda line – that has since been exposed as a Big Lie? To cover up the devastating consequences of their tribal policies, our dividers are fond of evoking historic, social, and cultural conditions and forces beyond their control, when all they have to do is take a good look at themselves in the mirror. I am beginning to suspect our favorite word is abracadabra, and our favorite mode of perception is self-assessment. We say, “We are smart. Abracadabra!” and lo and behold, we convince ourselves our single-digit IQ has performed a quantum leap to the stratosphere. We say, “We are nationalists. Abracadabra!” and we compound the felony by convincing ourselves we qualify. And when someone points out the fact that we are no better than a bunch of inbred tribal morons, we call him an enemy of the people, a traitor to the cause, and worse, a Turcophile!
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, August 11, 2007
****************************************
AN HONEST ARMENIAN
***************************************
The first time I met an honest Armenian I thought he was nuts. I grew up in a ghetto inhabited by refugees whose central concern was survival in an alien environment in time of war – not exactly conditions favorable to the abstractions of literature and philosophy. To a hungry man, it has been said, a loaf of bread and a pair of boots are more important than the complete works of Plato and Shakespeare. Those who could read, read AZAD OR, an Armenian language daily whose fourth (and last page) consisted of obituaries, announcements, and advertisements. As for books: I grew up in a house with a single book, a dilapidated elementary school anthology. It was at the age of thirteen and in Italy that I discovered the world of books and met Vahé Esmerian, a cousin twice or thrice removed. He spoke of Dostoevsky (whose GAMBLER I had just read) and Alishan, the greatest Mekhitarist scholar and poet (“a mental masturbator”), Marx, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and many others. My first reaction to what he was saying was confusion, disorientation, and astonishment. If he is right, I thought, everyone else I had met until then must be wrong. If he is honest, everyone else must be either a dupe or a charlatan. Was that possible? I could not make up my mind. But I sensed that in his presence, the world became a less incomprehensible place and life ceased to be one damn thing after another.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, August 12, 2007
********************************************
WHEN IN A HOLE…
*******************************
Garbage must be disposed, mediocrity rejected, fear of reality exposed. A community that fails in these endeavors is doomed. A singer sings to entertain, a comedian delivers lines that generate laughter, but a writer writes even when what he says neither entertain nor amuse his readers. The function of criticism (and all literature is criticism) is to expose contradictions, to say in effect, when you are in a hole, stop digging. Socrates was condemned to death because he exposed the ignorance of his fellow Athenians, and his fellow Athenians, the very same Athenians at the apex of their Golden Age (5th century BC) retaliated by silencing him permanently. Because Athenians were too vain and arrogant to face facts and admit their failings, they entered a long period of decline and disintegration never to rise again. They were conquered by such upstart barbarians as Macedonians, Romans, and Turks. A thousand years after Socrates, two of our greatest historians, Khorenatsi and Yeghishe (5th century AD) warned their fellow Armenians they were on the path of self-destruction, and they too were ignored; and what happened to the Greeks, happened to us. Now then, go ahead, rationalize, prevaricate, and deceive yourself all you want by blaming our defeats, tragedies, and present problems on historic, geographic, and social conditions beyond our control. Go ahead and continue to dig…
#