Posted by pancho (148.244.221.215) on November 24, 2001 at 12:26:53:
It will not be engineers. It will not be doctors or lawyers or accountants or teachers or car dealers, businessmen and women. None of these people will save this Heritage of ours from disintegration. And it will disintegrate, it has been for generations…we just can’t see it because the very senses, the instruments, we would need to recognize the ruin…are themselves become ruined…you wont know when you go senile or Alzheimers sets in…because your mind can no longer tell the difference between being senile and not being senile…because it IS senile.
The spirit, the soul and pride you need to have spirit, soul and pride…have been robbed from us, so much so that we don’t understand what it is to have real pride, not the false kind…to have a clean and open soul, or a spirit that soars and doesn’t cringe in a corner somewhere. You can’t understand what I am saying because you can’t understand what I am saying…not any longer, if you ever could. I didn’t always understand it either.
You can’t even begin to see where your better self is if you’ve traded it away to begin with for Heaven or gold. We have to “get right” with this Heritage…with BetNahrain, or we are doomed…and if we are, then we might as well trade it in for Disneyland as anything else. You have to earn it, to deserve being Assyrian. Coming out into the world somewhere between a turd and vomit, qualifies you for nothing.
Only the Arts will save us. Only writing, painting, sculpture, dance and music will breathe Life back into the place where our souls used to be. The engineers and the rest would rather avoid that re awakening of our souls…as would the clergy who first killed it in us. I don’t blame them either…it is tempting to have an almighty being ready to sign the check…they just picked the wrong one all these years.
The Arts are the greatest hope we have, and the greatest cause for worry among our leadership and the majority in our community. Assyrians have become accustomed to being servile…to coming up sideways and obliquely, as dogs do when they try to win you over. And we need to win people over…people and countries…for who else will provide the protection we were stripped of long ago. This fawning over America we indulge in as new found patriots of a land that took us in and found ways to use us…is only one more in a long history of betrayals…of slanders we have been taught to heap upon ourselves, families, children and Holy Lands. As Christians we learned long ago to secretly despise our ancestry, the better part of ourselves, if there ever was one. Even as Christians we have managed no more in 2000 years than to be ignored.
William Daniel, a poet and writer, composer and musician, linguist and historian, ended his life flat broke living on the charity of others in backrooms and extra closets where people tuck away what they’d just as soon forget. And he became increasingly difficult to deal with because he felt unloved and unappreciated. I always thought his biggest mistake was focusing entirely on our community, not going to New York or Los Angeles…writing music for television or the movies. I told myself I wouldn’t place such a burden on our people as to expect them to know where their best interests lay, as a Heritage. But I am coming dangerously close to doing so myself.
William is safely dead, at last, and people can eulogize him and weep and shake their heads at our loss. Hannibal Alkhase is still with us, still warm and witty and profound…but just as unappreciated as William was. Hannibal Alkhase offered to teach the children of Turlock Art at no cost to their parents or the community. All he asked was to be allowed to use the Civic Club, the place that has been used to funnel money for years to a series of corrupt administrators who pass the presidency and the bingo earnings back and forth among themselves. Hannibal just asked for a room and for the parents to supply basic art material…taken from some of the money they were far more eager to play bingo with…and they told him he would have to be willing to clean the bathrooms there in return. In return for what…for providing some dim semblance of culture and refinement to their own children.
Our community hates the Arts and the artist. It despises the thinker, the intellectual, the dancer, the poet…anyone who deals in freedom of expression and thought. That’s why their support of America, no matter what it does to their own people and families, is so strikingly odd. They understand nothing of the great promise that is yet America…only that they have a job and can live in the reflected glory of a country and a political system they would ruin in a minute if they had their way. Just a job and the security to go to church is all we have ever been taught to aspire to. To think or create beyond that shakes the very foundations of this shakey Heritage. The present leadership has taken over the task the last several ones have given themselves for years now. Their function is to further help bury us. They don’t know that, they don’t mean to perhaps…they are just afraid…the Arts can do that to hollow people.
The Hammurabi Monument is dead. There will be a sigh of relief from many in our community, the majority certainly. The Shumirum Monument before that was completed at least, though it too lies dead in a warehouse. Never let anyone tell you that Assyrians can’t match anyone in any field. It is only in allowing ourselves to be ruled and spoken for by incompetents that we excel…but we are very good at other things too. I proved my point…if the right person is willing to put in the work…for years if necessary and forego any semblance of security or hope even…but persists in a dream no matter how impossible it seems…there are within our own community the people and resources to build such monuments…and more. But you have to be worthy of those people, those few who have all but given up themselves, but whose heart and passion may yet hope to support something fine and noble.
These monuments were never about ego or money…they were about our feelings about ourselves as a people…what we thought we and our children deserved. I sensed early on that there was a strong undercurrent of self loathing among the majority of our people, papered over by a layer of false pride so thick you could cut it. This hatred of all things grand and noble, this penchant to sit in the crossroads, complaining and protesting and whining like mangy dogs whose owners didn’t even want them any longer, has been instilled into us as something desirable and all we are capable of…and it kills the spirit in our children. When one of them chances to escape…someone like Rabel Schmoel, we are there waiting to humiliate and hurt, insult and degrade him back into the fold…the smothering embrace of an all encompassing mediocrity that is squeezing the very life out of what little remains in us.
I didn’t lose anything by all of this…I gained a perspective into us few people have had the opportunity to cultivate. It remains only to bring the accused to court…to see how the country and the world will respond when it knows of us these people and what they have done. I will be writing about all of this in the days to come There are lots of things left for me to do.