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[Guest arabaliozian]

THIS AND THAT********************The brain may compromise but the gut, never!***A better understanding of the past means fewer surprises in the future.*When I was young I entertained many ambitions. But old age has taught me humility and acceptance of my own limitations. My main goal in life now is to puncture the swollen egos of our self-satisfied swine. As for changing things: I leave that to our megalomaniacal morons with messianic ambitions.*Sometimes it may seem as though I were a voice in the wilderness, but I am not. Armenians who think and feel as I do happen to be in the majority but they no longer care to raise their voices, or, for that matter, to identify themselves as Armenians.*William Goldman: "Life isisn'tair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all."NOTES AND COMMENTS*****************************Verdi may have been right: fame is a commodity manufactured more by enemies than friends.*A phony is a phony because he is convinced by assessing himself as an honest man or by projecting the image of an honest man, he will be perceived as an honest man. He fails to see that he is a phony exactly because his convictions are phony. It is our convictions that make us what we are and not the other way around.*To how many of my critics I could say: "You don’t understand me budon'tnderstand you: you are myself thirty years ago."*If only I could convince my fellow Armenians that it is not necessary to hate a fraction of your fellow countrymen in order to qualify as a good Armenian.*When asked what I do for a living, I am tempted to reply, "I am in the business of being misunderstood.""Any money in that?""None whatever, but plenty of insults -- Turkish insults: because when an Armenian insults, he insults like a Turk!"*The irony of all ironies: to prove himself a good Armenian he behaves like a Turk.Sunday, August 25, 2002*****************************"Who gave you the right to call yourself a poet?" the Soviet judge demanded of Brodskybefore sending him to Siberia. The Soviets, like all fascists, did not think of themselves as violators of human rights hostile to literature. On the contrary, they promoted literature and subsidized writers; and because they loved and respected ideas, they also considered their duty to silence charlatans, mediocrities, and pornographers. Or so they expected the world to believe. In reality, they supported unreadable and now unread mediocrities and persecuted Nobel Prize winners (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky). In Armenia, they promoted the worst and murdered the best; and they did so with the full cooperation of Armenians. We like to believe that first the Turks  and later the Soviets systematically exterminated two generations of our ablest writers. What we avoid mentioning is the fact that they did so with the full cooperation of our own Bolsheviks and fascists.. *We preach love but we prefer to practice hate. Saroyan comes to mind. He loved mankind but hated his own family. He loved mankind so much that he even felt sorry for the Turks.*When I went into this business, my ambition was to share my feelings, experiences and convictions with my fellow Armenians: to be, in a sense, a tiny piece in a vast mosaic of other feelings, experiences and convictions. I have since come to realize that some of my readers (surely the most persistently hostile and vocal) are quintessentially anti-mosaic: one color (brown for recycled crap?) is good enough for them. If it were up to these fascists and former Bolsheviks, Armenia would be better off with a single political party and a single leader whose title would be neither nakharar nor king but sultan: His Serene Majesty Sultan Jack S. Avanakian.As the old saying goes: "You may take an Armenian out of the Ottoman Empire and the USSR but you cannot take the Ottoman Empire and the USSR out of an Armenian [make it, Turkish gypsy]."LATER [25 August, 2002]***************************To be honest in a dishonest world means to be in a no-win situation. If I were to flatter my readers, I would be dismissed as a brown-nosing liar. If I were to speak the truth I would be insulted by phony chauvinists. If I were to recycle partisan propaganda I would be selling my soul in exchange of what? Not even dung!  Because Thomas Mann emigrated to America in the 1930s, he was called a traitor by his fellow Germans. Had he stayed in Germany the world would have accused him of being a Nazi sympathizer and a collaborator. As a youth, Charents was a Tashnak; when the Communists won and the Tashnaks lost, he became a member of the Communist Party and glorified the Revolution. We all know what happened to him. Gostan Zarian was neither a Communist nor a Tashnak; if anything, he was anti-Communist and anti-Tashnak. But he loved his homeland and that’s where he was buried -- both metaphorically and literally. *Moral: If you have Armenian readers, you don't need Turkish enemies.Tuesday, August 27, 2002******************************The idea of democracy was discovered and practiced 2500 years ago in Greece, but very few countries practice it today because political leaders, and elites in general, have a thousand ways of deceiving or intimidating the masses into thinking their regime (which may range from the most brutal tyranny to the most corrupt authoritarianism) is better than democracy, that is to say, the rule of law.*Loyalty: this word reminds me of a dog that barks at you even when you have no designs on its territory or master.*To "belong" only for the pleasure of looking down at those who don't belong: the things men do to entertain a false sense of superiority.____