Rick's November Tirade
Not Just Another Obscure Ethnic Group
Nations are a lot like people: they can be soulful or expedient,
overbearing or submissive, dutifully diligent or devoted to
merriment. They're given to bouts of sulking, squabbling, boasting,
violence and even madness. They hold grudges and, when their
grievances aren't redressed, tend to seek bloody vengeance like
cuckolded Jordanian husbands. Their vanity can be insufferable,
whether they're nuclear superpowers or sheep-infested Balkan
republics.
Nations have their neuroses, too. My own ancestral homeland,
Armenia, can serve as a prime example. For most of the past century,
this ancient Caucasian tribe has been struggling to emerge from a
long funk brought on by a combination of crushing disasters and
classic self-defeating behavior.
Armenia has always attracted more than its share of misfortune,
the way trailer parks seem to lure tornadoes: we're looking at a
nation reduced by history to a patch of stony turf the size of
Maryland, sitting astride one of the world's most irritable seismic
zones, nearly devoid of natural resources but amply surrounded by
malevolently grinning enemies, an island of Christianity in a sea of
Islam, its people decimated by genocides and scattered to the winds
like dandelion seeds. An earthquake ten years ago leveled numerous
cities and towns, killed over 25,000 and sent thousands more packing
for steadier ground. But somehow the nation has clung to its
nationhood for three millennia.
Newly independent after seventy years of frustrated submission to
Soviet rule, Armenia should have been embarking on a national
renaissance. Its scientists should have been raking in Nobel Prizes
and its celebrated brandy should have been warming the innards of
connoisseurs around the world. Instead, the Soviet era is beginning
to look like a lost golden age.
A recent war to reclaim the independence of a neighboring
Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan – though stunningly successful as a
military operation and a triumph of national grit – drained the
country's resources, and a resulting blockade severed its links to
vital supplies. Residents of Yerevan, the once-elegant capital, had
to resort to felling trees in the city's parks for fuel during the
brutal Armenian winter.
So yes, my old fatherland has borne more than its fair share of
woes. But it continues to perpetuate those woes in a manner that
makes me shake my head in sorrowful cynical bemusement. The recent
murderous attack on its parliamentary leaders was just the latest
evidence of a palpable kink in the national psyche.
The most common adjective used to describe Armenia is
"beleaguered" – like Job, like Republicans at Berkeley,
like a corporation in dire need of a turnaround before its share
price sinks below the one-dollar level. It's an appropriate
adjective for a nation in trouble, but it misses the psychological
underpinnings of Armenia's peculiar plight. I submit that the story
of Armenia is that of a gifted underachiever, thwarted by
unfortunate circumstances and an unhealthy dose of self-sabotage.
It used to be said in the Middle East that it takes five Turks to
outsmart a Greek, five Greeks to outsmart a Jew, and five Jews to
outsmart an Armenian. I have a sneaking suspicion that this adage
was coined by Armenians, but the fact is that we've always had a
reputation for mental acuity. Why, then, have we produced no writers
of international repute other than the sadly forgotten William
Saroyan? Why so few movie titans, famous scientists or world-class
figures in any field? We're a small nation, yes – but so are the
Jews. Yet on any roster of worthies listed in descending order of
eminence, you'd have to scroll past five hundred Jewish names before
you've dug up a dozen notable Armenians.
You'll find successful Armenians by the bushel in every
respectable profession – doctors, lawyers, dentists, engineers,
academics, classical musicians. But our diligent professionalism is
both our strength and our curse: you won't encounter any Armenian
earthshakers on the order of Freud, Beethoven, Darwin, Copernicus or
Galileo. Dr. Kevorkian has his admirers, but he's an odd bird – a
lone misguided renegade – and not exactly a name for the ages.
The Armenian mindset, on the whole, prizes respectability above
originality. Our literature is mainly religious, historical or
soaringly nationalistic – no magnificent word-conjurers like
Shakespeare or Rabelais in our midst. In our community a successful
jeweler enjoys more prestige than a struggling essayist, as perhaps
he should. Our newspapers are filled with obsequious profiles of
"internationally renowned" orthodontists and plastic
surgeons. ("Internationally renowned" is always a badge of
validation among Armenians; it means that others must approve of
us.) At social gatherings you see the men conferring in small
flocks, penguinlike with their short necks, dark suits and genial
rectitude. They crave respectability as if it were made of the
finest Swiss chocolate.
This driving need for prestige lies behind the Armenian tendency
to puff up our significance, at least among our own people. We have
to keep reminding ourselves that we were the first Christian state,
that Armenians developed the rudiments of Gothic architecture (The
clustered pier! The pointed arch!), and of course that Noah's Ark
came to rest on our own Mount Ararat, which now looms wistfully out
of reach just across the Turkish border. We Armenians haven't
forgotten that Lord Byron praised our language as the one to use
when speaking to God. Armenia gave apricots and cherries to the
Western world, and the Garden of Eden was presumably located,
according to the best evidence, in – well, you can probably guess
where Armenians claim it was located.
I studied history in college at least partly to uncover what I
could about the distant past of my ancestral land, and what I
uncovered thoroughly demoralized me. We were there at the beginning,
all right – yet only as a footnote nation, always on the periphery
of the action but never in the cockpit. When I'd look up references
to Armenia in the index of a history book, what I'd invariably find
was something like "the emperor's army advanced through
Cappadocia, Pontus and Armenia." Only one Armenian in history
– King Tigran the Great, who ruled from about 95 to 55 B.C. –
ever imposed his will on the world at large, carving out a brief but
spectacular empire for himself before the Romans rolled in and
snatched most of it away. Yes, there were some mighty Byzantine
emperors of Armenian extraction, but they considered themselves
Greek – and nobody would recognize their names anyway.
It could be that Western historians have simply overlooked our
plucky little civilization; after all, most of them can't decipher
our texts. It could be that we haven't had the chance to rewrite
history our way, because we've generally been on the losing end of
it. Whatever the reason, Armenia has had to settle for an occasional
walk-on role in the cast of nations. For a land so ancient to be so
marginalized would be enough, you'd think, to make us a dour and
cynical tribe. Yet somehow we're eternally hopeful of proper
recognition, of due respect, of PRESTIGE.
It wounds the Armenian ego when people confuse us with Albanians
or Rumanians. We're not just another obscure ethnic group, after
all. Yet the fact remains that there are individual CELEBRITIES who
enjoy greater name-recognition than Armenia. Not only megastars like
Madonna and Tom Cruise, but semi-entities like Howard Stern, Celine
Dion and even Geraldo Rivera, at least in America, are currently
more famous than our 3,000-year-old nation. For that matter, so are
the Toronto Blue Jays and USA Today. So are Hostess Twinkies and
Amazon.com. So is Purina Dog Chow.
You won't glimpse any Armenian characters in American movies and
television, or, for that matter, more than one or two bona-fide
Armenian actors per generation. (We're too congenitally sober for
the loose-limbed antics of show business.) Nobody other than an
Armenian knows what an Armenian accent sounds like, or that we have
our own 36-letter alphabet, or that "rice pilaf" is an
Armenian concoction. We tried for decades to bring the bestselling
novel "Forty Days of Musa Dagh" (about a heroic resistance
by Armenians during World War I) to the big screen. A low-budget
version finally surfaced and didn't produce a ripple; I believe it
finally made the rounds primarily at Armenian civic functions.
You're looking at a nation that desperately needs a good press
agent.
But if you want to understand the demons that bedevil the
Armenian psyche, you have to see beyond the mere sting of undeserved
obscurity. The pivotal event in Armenian history – the swirling
vortex of despair that continues to suck the life out of the nation
eighty years later – is the notorious "alleged" genocide
that took place in the Turkish Empire during World War I.
Out in the dusty and remote Armenian provinces, on the high
plateau between the Black Sea and the mountains of Kurdistan,
something catastrophic happened: over a million Armenians – men,
women, babies and all – were abruptly butchered or driven into the
Syrian Desert to perish from thirst, hunger and exposure. That much
we know.
Armenians claim to have proof that the massacres were
deliberately instigated by the Turkish government as a systematic
plan of genocide – the first such mass-extermination of the
twentieth century. Several leading British and American observers at
the time corroborated their claim.
Meanwhile, the Turks insist that any Armenian victims were
unavoidable casualties of war – that they were collaborating with
the Russians to secure their independence and had to be transported
from the area. No doubt it's true that a small minority of Armenian
radicals were agitating for a breakaway state. Still, when
two-thirds of a nation's population is expunged from the land of the
living, you can reasonably conclude that the victims weren't simply
bad travelers.
At the close of the war, a tiny sliver of historic Armenia
enjoyed two and a half years of freedom before being whisked into
the Soviet orbit. That downsized remnant, further trimmed by Stalin
as if to tweak our famously majestic noses, formed the outlines of
today's independent Armenian republic.
What used to be Turkish Armenia is now a vast and arid wasteland,
the scrubby haunt of Kurdish herdsmen who stable their flocks in the
ruins of our ancient stone churches. Just as the windswept landscape
is devoid of Armenians, the Turkish revisionists have banished us
from their history books as well. Read any Turkish-prepared guide to
their nation and you won't find a trace of that troublesome vanished
race.
Armenians, even more than Jews, are slow to forget past
grievances. The Jewish people at least have had the verve and vision
to engineer their own triumphs in the wake of their Holocaust. They
keep reminding us of the past, yes – but they push forward with
astounding vigor. They make waves and enjoy the turbulence. They
create bestselling books and blockbuster films and stunning medical
breakthroughs. Most important, they've built themselves a thriving
nation in their ancient homeland.
Armenians still seem paralyzed by the dark events of World War I
– partly because of the Turks' refusal to acknowledge the
massacres, and partly because of our own childlike sense of wounded
justice. That damnable sense of justice: It's not fair, we keep
repeating to ourselves. How can we move on when we've been so
grievously abused? We'll build more Genocide monuments, push more
Genocide commemoration bills through Congress, establish an
international moratorium on Genocide.
We're like rape victims whose minds are permanently and
needlessly fixated on an incident that should finally be relegated
to the past. We flagellate ourselves and continue to dwell on our
sorrows.
I grew up with the knowledge of Armenian victimhood; we were the
Genocide people, better known for our manner of dying than our mode
of living. I used to bristle at the woeful passivity of it, at the
plaintive bleating in our newspapers, the accursed inability to
publicize our plight, the NEED to publicize our plight at all. I was
more concerned about our future. In college I'd delight in drawing
maps of a Greater Armenia as it expanded to its historic dimensions
– and, for good measure, deep into the Turkish territories beyond
our homeland. The establishment of a new independent republic in
1991 filled my jaded heart with hope; we were, finally, free to
become something other than well-dressed victims.
I should have known better. Prolonged squabbling over the status
of Karabagh – that Rhode Island-sized Armenian enclave trapped
within the borders of Azerbaijan – has virtually destroyed the
economy of the infant republic. Wild dogs and mafiosi prowl the
streets of Yerevan. We're in a dizzying descent from our former
status as the most prosperous and forward-looking of Soviet
republics to something like a Middle Eastern version of Rwanda. Our
annual Gross Domestic Product was recently calculated to be on the
order of $600 per capita.
Then, suddenly, came the ghastly news that a handful of fanatics
had gunned down eight of the top officials in the Armenian
government, including the prime minister. Apparently these
self-professed liberators had come to avenge their countrymen, to
eliminate the "bloodsuckers" who were making life
miserable for the people. One can see why they might have been
disgruntled with their leaders. Plenty of good people around the
world are disgruntled with their leaders. But they generally don't
express their disgruntlement by mowing them down with semi-automatic
rifles; if that were the case you'd have to step over corpses piled
three deep in the aisles of the U.S. Congress.
We Armenians have long been a disputatious race; factionalism and
assassination are mother's milk to us. We've endured endless years
of religious and political infighting. We can't even agree on how to
pronounce half the consonants in our own alphabet; one man's T is
another man's D. That a nation so small can be so maddeningly at
odds with itself is cause for consternation.
Yet my own experiences with Armenians have been anything but
discordant. They glow warmly with the memories of savory old-country
meals, grilled shish-kebabs and bowls of fruit served on summer
evenings, gentle grandparents bouncing round-cheeked babies on their
knees, dark vivacious women bustling about the kitchen, amused old
men playing backgammon together on a hotel porch, kindly priests
with white goatees sitting down to dinner with the family, childlike
maiden aunts holding us spellbound with their tales. How can a
people so full of love be so confoundedly hard on themselves, on
each other?
It's worth noting that while Armenians typically love children
and bond to their families for life, a disproportionate number of
our people tend to remain single – at least in America. It could
be that our Asiatic innocence makes it hard for us to adjust to the
convoluted intrigues of American social and business life. But I
suspect that Armenians simply aren't prolific breeders. Something in
our genes militates against the propagation of our ancient traits on
an epic scale. We'll never be an India.
Maybe nature can detect the self-defeating behavior of a tribe
and work secretly to thwart its reproductive success. That would be
a wanton crime, not only because we've been hanging around this
planet since before the time of Homer, but because we have so much
to offer – not the least of which is one of the world's most
glorious and underrated cuisines. The loss of our ambrosial
anoush-abour alone would make our disappearance an irreparable world
tragedy.
But I seriously doubt if we're about to disappear anytime soon.
Armenia has managed to survive as a nation through the worst of
times, outlasting the Assyrians who fought us in the mountains south
of Lake Van, defying the army of Alexander the Great, somehow
enduring the wavelike onslaughts of the Persian, Roman, Byzantine,
Arab, Mongol and Ottoman empires.
We're a smart and tenacious tribe. We've proven time and again
that we can take a beating and come back for more. Now we just have
to learn to stop beating ourselves.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
