Thursday, July 12, 2007
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DEATH IN VENICE
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What do I, a bookworm, know and understand about the real world? Next to nothing. This truth hit me again when I visited Venice recently and returned home a thoroughly disappointed man. The Venice I remember was a respectable old lady. She is now a bordello madam. Even Venetians are getting the hell out of there. In my time the population was 350,000; it’s now only 50,000. Everywhere you see boarded up windows and doors. My alma mater, Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael, is now a hotel. San Lazzaro, the island of the Mekhitarist order, has become a museum. Not a single seminarian or monk to be seen anywhere. Don’t get me wrong. In appearance Venice is the same – the bridges, the canals, the architecture, the narrow alleys, the gondolas, the vaporetti (water busses)…they are still there. What’s no longer there is the spirit of place, the soul of the city. Compared to the Venice of fifty years ago, the Venice of today is as lifeless as an embalmed cadaver. This is something I had not and could not have foreseen.
What do I know and understand about the workings of reality? But then, what did “the best and the brightest” under Kennedy know, or the neo-cons under Bush, or closer to home, our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire know when they plunged the nation into conflicts that resulted in the needless death of countless innocent civilians? And what do our Turcocentric pundits know today?
What is history if not a long catalogue of blunders committed by arrogant, self-righteous, ignorant frauds that divide mankind into friends and enemies and implement a policy of kill or get killed?
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Friday, July 13, 2007
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NAPOLEON AND GANDHI
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They fascinate me because they pulled the rug from under potentates, that is to say, bloodsucking mediocrities parading as leaders of men and representatives of God on earth. The means they employed were different but the end result was the same.
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Only moronized people idolize leaders. Like all rules, this one too has its exceptions – Lincoln and FDR come to mind. But they too sat on a throne of blood. As for Napoleon and Gandhi: I see them less as leaders and more as destroyers of emperors, kings, princes, maharajas and similar riffraff.
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I am not in the business of solving problems but in exposing those who stand to lose the most if our problems are ever solved.
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Paul Tillich: “Life could not continue without throwing the past into the past, liberating the present from the burden.”
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Saturday, July 14, 2007
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DEFINITIONS
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Politics: the art of manipulating the masses by means of lies.
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Literature: sharing perceptions.
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Chauvinist: a fanatic with 20/20 vision for his enemy’s failings and total blindness for his own.
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Turcocentrism: a school of thought that says our most important concerns, hence our welfare, inner balance, and identity, revolve around Turks.
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Which reminds me of a friend who, after urging me to change my last name, delivered the following comment: “As long as you bear a Turkish surname, you admit to having been branded by them.” And I thought: If only it were that easy to erase six centuries of subservience and all traces of Ottomanism by acquiring a new name!
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