Posted by pancho from pool0223.cvx24-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.210.223) on Tuesday, December 03, 2002 at 6:38PM :
I don't dislike Nimrod or Jackie or Atour Golani...not at all. I think what they did to my work was despicable...
They're welcome to lead Assyria any way they want to...write what they want...run their organizations the way they want to. I could sit down right now and have a drink with Nimrod and Jackie...not Atour, I couldn't bear to look him in the face...he wouldn't look into mine either...but then he never could make eye contact...not with me anyway.
What upset me was the way each of them insinuated themselves into the projects...first as fans...then friends, then supporters...and before you could say "Bomb Iraq" they tried to place their hands all over what they only saw as a potential feather up their own arses.
I marvelled...it took my breath away to see how quickly and shrewdly they hustle for themselves. I think they all thought they'd met a kindred spirit...a hustling soul brother...and were in awe of how I managed to "get" that much out of Assyrians. Jackie used to brag she could get "her" people to lay out $10,000 anytime she put out the call...that may be, but there wasn't a damn thing she could do or make anyone would have paid her any money for...well, except the obvious and that sure as hell wouldn't have brought in that much.
I don't know who fucks for Assyria anyway...I know we Assyrian artists get fucked BY" Assyria" all the time.
I never meddled with these people...went on my way and if they wanted to buy or "help", I assumed it was for love of the work or the cause. By the time I realized that their cause was really and truly themselves...I was so tangled up and identified with them that it spelled disaster. Whatever they said about me was believed because people assumed they must know me...which is why my father would never allow an Assyrian into our house...he knew they would use that proximity...use the few details they gleaned by nosing around to build an entire case out of you...claiming to "know" you well...and their all time favorite..."he revealed his TRUE colors".
I have a third cousin who's just becomming a lawyer. He voluntered to help where he could...but I warned there could be a price to pay. His response was instructive...maybe it explained his willingness too help in the first place...he said, "don't worry, I'm never taking an Assyrian client".
I may not like that sentiment...may wish it wasn't the case...I'm sure he wishes it wasn't that way either...but it's all too true...way too many times. It isn't just a grumpy response...or cynnicism...it isn't personal pique either. There is a great big enormous boulder of truth in it.
Had I to do it over again I would never have allowed the AUA near the Shumirum...never agreed to be the go between and buy land in Mexico for Lincoln...and I would NEVER have befriended Jackie...just sold to her...and through an agent.
Assyrians have to be treated a little like toxic sludge...it isn't that they mean to glow in the dark and cause ruptures and tumors...it's just that they have such a woeful self image for which their only remedy so far as been a bombastic and compeletely unwarranted sense of self-importance...layered over and under by the most pathetic self-pity...that they don't know if they're coming or going...and are best to be avoided or handled only through a barrier.
But that isn't to say these people are typical...not at all. They've just made of themselves the only show in town, and then only because the rest of us ran out of that town screaming one night and vowed we'd never come back.
I went back in, made myself vulnerable and got bushwhacked by them. Served me right of course. But...someday, if enough of us do it at one time...we'll run them out. And the best way to do that is build another town entirely...the one they live in is rotten to the core and wont last much longer. Their hope is that when the town settles into dust...there wont be another one and a finer one.
That they can be, the last "Great" Assrins.
-- pancho
-- signature .