Posted by pancho from customer-148-233-78-70.uninet.net.mx (148.233.78.70) on Wednesday, January 01, 2003 at 1:09PM :
If there was any doubt that Assyrians could hold their own in the Arts in the modern era, we put that notion to rest. I don't mean just in producing Assyrians who can paint and sculpt...or who focus primarily on Assyrian themes...I mean getting up there...up with the other people out on that World Stage we must aspire to if we're to avoid disappearing after all these centuries. As an added benefit, and to fly in the face of all those who claim we don't exist...we've secured official recognition for our ancestry from the government of a major US city...monuments don't lie, and it says right there on the Ashurbanipal..."Presented By Assyrians". Why else would we have gone to so much trouble and expense if not certain of who we are, and determined enough to say so publicly.
Though the cost of the Ashurbanipal wasn't much when compared to what other monuments cost, it was a lot to raise from Assyrians...and not because we're cheap, but because we don't trust or believe in these sorts of things. You can convince us that bandages, medicine, food and schools (in Iraq) are important...especially if the people are at Death's door...but come to us with culture and art on your mind and we're liable to skin you alive or laugh you down at the least. It WAS a big deal. It was, that is, so long as it hadn't been done by any of us...then just as soon as Assyrians did it, we decided it must not have been any big thing after all. That's because we don't believe in ourselves AS Assyrians. As Assyrians who can find "grace" through acceptance by others, white people of Germanic descent especially...we believe. But in our ability to make something Assyrian of ourselves, to bring something Assyrian out of us and place it there for all to see...we have little faith.
Atour Golani knows better than to presume to design any part of a Ford car he isn't trained, qualified and authorized to...but in sculpture, the shmuck feels perfectly fine welding an artist's pieces any way he sees fit. He wouldn't dream of embarrassing himself as an engineer working for a paycheck for the Man...but as an Assyrian, dealing with other Assyrians, he has no qualms and no reason to, based on our past experience and dismal expectations of what it means to be Assyrian, to ever hesitate before committing one godawful blunder after another. That's because he doesn't know what actual and effective pride means when it comes to things Assyrian or even personal... only what it means as an American trained engineer working for an American company, in America, making American products for American money...with which he buys the leisure time to "Lead Assyria".
Janey says their experience with me will turn them off from ever working with artists again. Good. Think of all the artists they'll spare. My cousin Robert DeKelaita, who's crying up one side of Chicago and down the other about how I cheated him, took money and never delivered sculpture...tells me he not only was an artist himself, but that even now he's working with Assyrian artists...REAL artists, not like me...meaning ones who will allow him to treat them as he sees fit. Let him, they deserve each other.
We can be doctors, lawyers, teachers, politicians, etc. because we have to adhere to non-Assyrian standards and function in non-Assyrian institutions peopled by mostly non-Assyrians, which is the only way we manage to appear barely human...and we can do that as well as anyone when we have to...when we can't get away with the usual mediocrity and bathos we excel in. We are PROUD in private, where our "pride" feels safe in sticking its pathetic head out and where we demand total, unquestioning acceptance from each other... and when not readily or eagerly given, we denounce the person as a traitor, a sell-out...one who has no pride as an Assyrian because he wont eat shit and wash it down with Wilfred's own, estate bottled, Zindapiss. What we CAN'T believe we can do is make something Assyrian of ourselves, AS Assyrians, because to do that we'd have to get a better dictionary than the one Hanna and Peter use...we would have to EARN our pride for a change, and it would mean doing it "out there", where everyone can see and comment and "attack"...something these heroes, intellectuals and warriors of ours are deathly afraid of...because they KNOW they can't make a valid case for themselves unless they're talking to themselves in closed forums...jerking off in other words. That's the missing bone from our collective head...that's what I accuse Christianity of doing to us...making us lose faith in our Faith...in our selves...in our Heritage, Replacing Ashur with Jerusalem. The light went out of eyes when we turned away from Ashur.
We have produced part-time and amateur Assyrians in place of the real thing. If they had to feed themselves based on the quality of their Assyrian work...they'd starve. And when they sense that someone else can do it, they struggle mightily to put that person down or turn him or her off, in order to keep their status at the top of the dung heap they've made of us, the only thing they can sit atop of and get an "elevated" view from, that doesn't stink more than they do. But as engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, cops and robbers, they do well enough. Then, after a day doing "real" work, they come home, roll up their sleves and get down to their hobby, the work of their "hearts"...Assyria. And a shabby heart it is. It shows in every convention they run, every champagne brunch commemorating mass murder...every dance or concert they organize...every art show they stage in the cafeteria of a grammar school, in every poetry reading where an Alphonse feels as qualified to bray as any jackass in the old country.
Abram came from Mesopotamia, up there where we hail from. His wife, Sarai was also from Ur of the Chaldees...his son Issac, therefore, was one of us, as was HIS son Jacob, hell even Ishmael who gave us the Arabs was one of us. The three Patriarchs, their wives and children, cattle, dogs and donkeys were all of Mesopotamian stock originally...so what? Everyone I've asked to give me a specific benefit or value in Christianity, over and above Judaism or our own religion of Ashur, can point to nothing unique to Jesus...except the promise of an everlasting afterlife that no one can describe and that would drive any reasonable person insane after a month let alone for all time. But just that, the promise to not ever die, no matter what hell one must endure before dying and after...was all the gift he brought. Incidentally Christ's message was the Jewish Messiah's promise of victory here on earth, a return to the Garden and to peace and prosperity on earth, in ways in which the average person understood and could relate to...not some vague "looking into the mug of Yahweh" for eternity...while playing godawful instruments somewhere up on a cloud. Grow up! Enough of Assyrians in their National Diapers.
Christians have turned all that into a conviction that Christ brought kindness and charity to the world...to a pagan and heathen world bereft of those articles. That with Jesus came the revolutionary idea of being kind to children, to ones parents...of not stealing... telling the truth, of helping old people to cross the road etc. No such thing. There was kindness and goodness and sweetness well before Jesus came. He brought the idea of an afterlife forever...that's all, and even that wasn't particularly original. But the killer, literally, was the more you suffered and were scourged on earth, the more your reward later. This "later" business is what did us in. It didn't impress or faze the Romans or Byzantines any...or the Western Christians of Europe and the New World...hell no, they went on killing and raping and stealing as they had ever done, as they're doing to us rght now...with the added benefit that they get into heaven just as easily as those they send on before them...because god is "forgiving". Either that or he has a soft spot for mass murderers and baby killers, having given us the best example of one by his own behavior. These Kick-Ass Christians, of which the Nazis were the best example so far, get the best of both worlds...while only we, among all the shmucks of the world, accept the idea that our salvation lies in our degradation, in getting our asses kicked for "His" sake, for the sake of a slightly un-Orthodox Jew from Israel.
Which brings me back nicely to the monument of Ashurbanipal and the increasing opposition of those who would set themselves up as spokespeople for us, including the Church. These people are not conditioned to accept any true greatness from Assyrians AS Assyrians. They in their own way are as dismissive and damning of us as are the Europeans who see us only as barbarians and ruffians. Assyrians are "great" to slaughter, after having been great at slaughtering, sort of a divine retribution, a pay-back for all that infamous killing we supposedly indulged in. Christian Assyrians make good pets and docile workers...they're loyal to whomever pays their hire, even when the rent consists of a willingness to betray what remains of their Homelands, while protecting the modern state of Israel...where "their lord" came from....unable to keep a roof over their heads they have been able to move in with others by being completely un-objectionable, wiping themselves out in ways "enemies" never dreamed of. Take the glorious irony of calling on a "proven" villain like Saddam to build us schools in "Arab" Iraq, as proof that we're exquisitely and passionately committed to our dear language etc., while we haven't been able or willing to build anything in America...where no one stops us and there exist all sorts of foundations and agencies that would help. Who is jerking whom off?
The whole monument thing was a potential disaster for those who lead us by the nose. It was a way of asserting our right to take pride in ourselves TODAY...and not just for what our gloriously heathen ancestors created 4000 years ago, and NOT by building another church. It was a way of replacing whining and cringing and begging for recognition...of our dead usually...with an assertion of our existence through our ability to help care for our Heritage by breathing some pride into it and our children OURSELVES. We were for the first time DEMANDING recognition as our due, not pleading for it. This sort of thing could make us uppity...I know it made me that way and I was half-way there already. Seeing that we could get onto the world stage for what we achieve today, especially by starting with our own beginnings and skipping entirely the Christian thing in honoring one of our ancestors, was pretty heady stuff. Left unchecked this could lead to all sorts of wonderful/awful things...because our pride and self-confidence and expectations and standards, AS Assyrians, would be raised in the process...would have to be even before we began... when we're only supposed to be proud and brag about how many of us got killed uncomplaining, even singing while our children were butchered before our eyes. Learning to find comfort or take any satisfaction in the slaughter of our own innocents by the knife prepared us to watch them die by neglect in the West...where there are no "enemies" except Jackie Bejan, Nimrod, Golani and our own parents and priesthood.
The most determined thing Nimrod ever did was to keep the Shumirum Monument out of Chicago...to keep it from eclipsing whatever it is he thinks he does for Assyria...to keep it from lifting the veil of boredom that settled on our eyes long ago, as we try to keep awake through yet another rally about the greatness of Assyria and the AUA, rallies at which even Nimrod can't keep awake... filled to bursting with the vain and empty claims of pride in an ancestry we only bring shame to in the modern era. After the Shumirum was installed...how much more clearly would we see Nimrod and his shuttle flights to Geneva for what they are...nothing. Jackie and Nimrod both saw in the Shumirum the chance to elevate themselves...something they could only have managed by first degrading the work itself...and that could only begin by humiliating the one who made it. That sixty thousand plus Assyrians in Chicago still allow it to happen pretty much defines what Assyrian pride consists of in the West. Yet every hero and patriot and expert in Chicago and Ceres, Detroit and San Jose has all sorts of ideas and suggestions and demands on Saddam Hussein, for what HE should do for US.
There was no way in hell the same arrogant bastard of an Assyrian who started this thing was going to bend his neck to another Assyrian...when he wouldn't do it to anyone else. No way I was going to take marching orders from that great baby Nimrod...or the dwarf of Assyria who works at Ford when he isn't leading this Grat Nayshun. And I sure as hell wasn't going to hand my balls over to the Jackster to add to her collection, up there on the wall of their game room in the place of honor, next to Lincoln's. It was in the cards...inevitably so...once any one of us got the taste for standing upright...off of his or her friggin knees, palms raised in eternal supplication and that whole filthy business...there was going to be trouble in Assyria...Diapers were going to get soiled, shorts twisted out of shape...hotel lobbies would become battlegrounds and church parking lots the stage for epic confrontations.
Once you get a taste of freedom, you can't go back...certainly not willingly. I scared the crap out of peple running on crap for years now...and with the crap scared out of them...they have little else to show. I didn't have to do all that much...they were filled to bursting with shit long before I got there, and just like the person standing at the edge of a great cliff, whose legs fairly spring to disaster at a mere touch...the sphincter muscles of the Leaders of Assyria were all set to let go at the slightest goosing.
I'm gone already. It's going to have to be others who take us forward from here. I just want to tell you all that it feels great...being really alive, I mean.
-- pancho
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