WINNING AN ARGUMENT — ARMENIAN STYLE

Another tactic that never fails is to make an assertion so untenable and asinine as to make your adversary give up in despair and disgust. Three examples of such assertions that have been leveled against me follow:
“Armenians are incapable of hatred.”
“The only reason people quit their homeland and emigrate to foreign lands is greed for more money.”
“Criticizing Armenians in English in an open forum on the Internet is akin to treason.”
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Armenians cannot engage in dialogue because their aim is not to get at the truth or to learn from one another’s experience and understanding but to assert their intellectual prowess by being invincible in argument. So what if in the process they expose themselves as inbred morons? For perennial losers, victory trumps all other considerations.
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We like to speak of “the Armenian wound.” What we carefully avoid mentioning is that more often than not this so-called wound is self-inflicted.
If we are at the mercy of unprincipled mediocrities today it’s because we betrayed two generations of our ablest men to alien authorities. We could not betray all of them because in the Diaspora free speech is not thought of as a capital offense.
As a result, those who survived were either silenced or treated as parasites and nonentities whose sole contribution to our welfare as a nation was empty verbiage. After all, who has ever heard of a chef who can cook pilaf and shish-kebab with words?
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It has been said that for the shoeless, happiness is a pair of shoes, not the complete works of Shakespeare. Likewise, for the starving, happiness is a loaf of bread, not the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. And now that we are neither shoeless nor starving, can we really say we are a success as a nation or a diaspora because we are progressive, civilized and smart? And if we are smart, why do we take pleasure in uttering  inanities?
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