Posted by panch from ? (64.79.4.3) on Wednesday, May 15, 2002 at 10:40AM :
A year and a half ago I went on aina to see if there was any interest in reviving the Shumirum for Chicago. Peter shot back that this issue was of no interest to anyone but me...that it was a "money thing" between John and I...a private matter that concerned no one else.
And the guy wonders why he has to give his awful poetry away free. This is a Poet? This is an Assyrian? This is understanding...awareness of symbollism and all that stuff? Or, like most Assyrians who love "democracy", is this a person who sees the world through dollar bills?
I'd already been paid...if money was ever my aim. Could he see no benefit coming to Assyrians in Chicago from having a monument of their own? No benefit to all of us to begin to be represented in the national consciousness of this country, that knows all about Kurds and Swamp Arabs but still nothing of us?...to become a part of the cityscape...maybe a backdrop to a film or two?
Or is the point for all of these pointy headed people...that we are NOT to go beyond the mediocre, because even at that dismal level...Peter can't generate any interest in his slop...what would happen to him and others who dabble in GRATNESS if we recognized the real poets among us...if they gained national or international reknown?
What would happen, is what these leeders and thinkers of ours, who wish to keep us in Diapers, crave...that we remain a backward, ignorant, uncultured, unlettered, unsophisticated people who will thereby have no expectations, great or otherwise...who will remain easily impressed by used cars and jewelry and ill-mannerd clothes... who will stand by apathetically while they thunder and roar and strutt themselves around the back rooms and lobbies of hotels and motels once or twice a year. That and go on discount vacations to Spain to issue declarations and demands to no one in particular.
This is the destiny they have mapped out for us...and these same shmucks are going to get concessions from an America...or a Disneyland? Who is kidding whom...and who is playing with people's lives and the hopes and aspirations of children of ours?
And the person or persons who would stop this travesty is the troublemaker? The persons capable of lifting our standards to the highest levels in time, they are the troublemakers?
Let the trouble begin.
-- panch
-- signature .