notes

[Guest arabaliozian]

Tuesday, October 29, 2002******************************Trading insults with individuals is a waste of time. Why insult a single individual if you can insult a whole class of them? Why insult fools or charlatans if you can expose them? *Is calling a fool a fool an insult? Not if he is a loud-mouth brainwashed moron who thinks he is smart enough to insult far better men than himself. *Is calling an anti-Semite an anti-Semite an insult? Not if he pretends to be the soul of tolerance and supports bloodthirsty fanatics with a genocidal hatred of Jews. *Am I being undiplomatic? Allow me to reply with an anecdote. When warned not to spit on the floor, Diogenes is said to have spat at his host’s face explaining he could not find a baser receptacle.*According to Confucius, if you recompense hatred with love, then how do you recompense love? I am quoting from memory but you get my drift.*I once met an Armenian who bragged about the fact that he was born in a house with a thousand books after which he proceeded to demonstrate his total ignorance of a thousand and one subjects. Gide was right when he said: "It is when we brag that we expose our limitations." If only braggarts were smart enough to keep their traps shut.*There is knowledge and then there is Potemkin-village type knowledge whose sole aim is to dazzle the uninformed. I will let you guess as to the value of this type of knowledge.Wednesday, October 30, 2002*******************************When asked to suggest a good name for a future Hollywood star, Humphrey Bogart is said to have replied: "How about Dungg Heap?" Does Cher know the Armenian word for urine?*The name of Diogenes came up recently. It is said that when caught masturbating in public and in broad daylight and reprimanded by passersby, he explained: "I wish I could satisfy my hunger too by fondling my belly."*If you were to ask: "What are you doing here? Haven't you got anything better to do?" I would reply that I am gathering the material for a book. But perhaps you don't consider that a worthwhile enterprise.*About the Pope and contraception: If in a thousand years the population explosion reaches unprecedented and unforeseen dimensions, what then?…*One of my cousins despises me because he thinks writing is a silly game of mirrors and smoke played by idle people incapable or unwilling to do anything useful. He is a taxi driver. His contempt for writers is shared by many, and I don't mean charlatans, mullahs, ayatollahs, bishops and archbishops, but also commissars, partisan editors, merchants…. Do you want me to name names? The trouble with that is that by naming one or two or even twenty-two the rest may think of themselves as beyond criticism.*The Turks will never admit responsibility for the Genocide. There is no power on earth that can open the mind of an Armenian that has decided to keep it closed. You may not see any connection between these two statements, but I see them as two sides of the same coin. *If you are familiar with Hindu religious art you may agree with me that one culture’s pornography is another culture’s religion; or, to put it more succinctly: it takes all kinds.*"Our Father Who art in heaven." This sentence makes no sense to a Buddhist because Buddhism is a godless religion. Did you know that the number of atheists exceeds the number of both Christians and Muslims combined?LATER*****************As a boy Gourgen Mahari spent a number of years in an Armenian orphanage. In his memoirs he quotes extensively from the diary he kept there. Here are two typical entries: *"Ardash’s mother came today and found Ardash. She wept. Ardash wept too. The orphans came and they too wept. The young ladies of the orphanage came and wept also. We all wept. And of course I too wept. We had a wonderful time."*"Something very nice and strange happened today. Miss Nazig and I went to her room and saw our reflection in a mirror. Beautiful no? she said. Yes, it was beautiful. And then she said: Who is taller, you or me? And of course she was the taller one. And then she said: And now give me a kiss and go to bed. I kissed her. And then she said, Kiss me here too, and here. And I kissed her. It was a day unlike any other today."*Had he written in English, Mahari would now be considered a precursor of Gertrude Stein and Hemingway. *A Turk once wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper and said his fellow countrymen have been unfairly accused of many crimes against humanity but the truth is the West had committed similar and worse crimes in the Middle Ages. When no one objected to this line of reasoning I wrote a letter to the same editor and said: The West had somewhat advanced since the Middle Ages and perhaps the time was ripe for Turkey to do likewise.*When the son misbehaved, the Romans slapped the father. Roman jurisprudence was not big on the insanity plea either, as the following legal maxim may suggest: "Let him who sins when drunk be punished when sober." In this connection let me also mention George Bernard Shaw who believed insane criminals should be punished much more severely because they were more unpredictable and dangerous to society. What about bloodthirsty fanatics willing and eager to kill and die in the name of God?*What happened to our Baronians and Odians? Would anyone dare to write like them today? Has something gone seriously wrong with our sense of humor? Were we more open to satire under the Red Sultan? You may not think of such things but I do.Thursday, October 31, 2002******************************A rose may be a rose but a war is not just a war. A recent study states that as many as two million German women (aged 12 to 80) may have been raped by the Soviets at the end of World War II. As a result, cases of syphilis, botched abortions, broken marriages, suicides, and illegitimate children (most of whom were abandoned) rose dramatically in postwar Germany. On being confronted with these statistics, a Soviet diplomat by the name of Michael Grabar is said to have dismissed them as hostile propaganda and commented: "Everyone tries to rewrite history in his own way." According to some Armenian historians and pundits, this comment also applies to our own historians.***Spinoza tells us good and evil have no objective existence because they are not properties but relations. Ask any victim and he will tell you otherwise. Bear with me and I will give you my own explanation of good and evil. Astronomers speak of the visible universe thus implying there may be another that so far has remained beyond our vision. Others speak of parallel universes. How many? Is it two or two thousand? Or perhaps an infinite number? Will we ever have the answer to this and similar questions dealing with the dimensions of reality? Now then, if we compare the immensity, majesty, infinity, and eternity of the universe and its creator, a hundred million years are as a fraction of a second. It follows that all of human history acquires such petty and insignificant dimensions that good and evil vanish into nothingness. If you find this and similar metaphysical speculations boring, I for one will not disagree with you.*Count Dracula was not the bloodthirsty monster portrayed in Hollywood movies, states a Canadian academic,who after visiting Rumania eight times has written a book on the subject. Dracula was and remains a national hero to Rumanians because, the good professor informs us, he impaled his enemies, including women and children, on sharp sticks. His enemies, in case you didn't know, were Turks.Friday, November 01, 2002*******************************If we were to list and add up all the blunders and crimes committed by organized religions, we shall have to conclude that there is no limit to human arrogance and gullibility – arrogance on the part of the few, gullibility on the part of the many. Where there is a sucker born every second, there will be others up to no good.*A snake may shed its skin but not its venom. Keep that in mind next time you think of forgiving and loving your enemy.*A man who refuses to open his mind: in what way is he different from the king of Greek mythology who blinded himself?*Not to understand in a world where others understand is bad enough, but what is infinitely worse is to reject explanations without even considering their validity.*United we stand, divided we fall. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Just because the solutions to our problems are clichés, it doesn't mean we should reject or ignore them. On the contrary. What is the use of novelty or originality if it leads us to procrastination and perdition? Does a man of faith reject the daily repetition of familiar prayers?*Some fools may be shamed into silence but not fools who are also persistent buggers. Obvious, you say. But sometimes it pays to repeat the obvious.*Should I be flattered that far wiser men than myself continue to read and reject me? Am I a threat to their magic spells and abracadabra?*On the subject of nationalism and patriotism: let us rise from the abstract to the concrete (as our friend the Marxists used to say): let us speak of specific nationalists and patriots. If the man is good his patriotism will also be good. But if the man is bad…. Hitler was a dedicated nationalist and patriot and it was Stalin who called World War II the Patriotic War – he even authorized the publication of such patriotic/nationalist writers as Raffi (banned until then) in order to promote his war effort, which claimed 350,000 Armenian lives.*To be evil and to think of oneself as a paragon of virtue: the tricks men play on themselves are without number. Lunacy, they say, feeds on itself; and neither the depth nor the width of hate can be measured.Saturday, November 02, 2002********************************The first time I criticized Canada in the presence of Canadians I was kindly told to go back where I came from. Where did I come from? Greece, the cradle of democracy that even in its Golden Age (5th century BC) executed, persecuted, and drove into exile some of its ablest men as surely as Stalin’s Kremlin; and more recently its political career veered from corrupt monarchy, to corrupt democracy, civil war, and a coup d’etat by a fascist junta.*Because fools have always outnumbered the wise throughout history, the wise now prefer to keep silent on the grounds that it is better to be ignored than crucified, poisoned, and assassinated.*We are carefully educated to demonize our enemies as surely as they are educated to return the compliment. In short, we are products of the same system. *After reading Raffi’s KHENT as an orphan, Gourgen Mahari writes in his memoirs, he couldn't sleep, and he thought of Queen Semiramis (Shamiram in Armenian), the corpse of an old Turkish woman, and a black cat. It was midnight. He got out of bed and wrote a poem whose last line read "Let me lie in your arms and die." If Mahari had written in French he would be identified as a precursor of Breton and surrealism.*Writing has this in common with running a bordello: you cannot always choose your clientele.*Learning from your enemies is the best revenge. What have we learned from the Turks? A great many things except solidarity. What have they learned from us? They didn't have to learn anything: they were our lords and masters; they used us.*I prefer the braying of an ass to the speechifying of a partisan, and the bark of a dog to the sermon of a preacher. A wise man once said that the Pope and Martin Luther reminded him of two whores discussing chastity.*To crap on someone else’s thoughts does not make you a better thinker.