Letter to an American Agonist

“What the United States shares with Athens is not the pretense of democracy, or any other feature of the content of her tradition but, rather, her citizens’ uncommon commitment to contesting it.”

A few summers ago, I remember reading about the life of Nubar Ozanyan (nom de guerre), a compatriot and a professional communist incendiary who had been killed during the Battle of Raqqa while fighting for Rojava against the Islamic State. Not at all a bad way to go. He had also sojourned at the First Palestinian Intifada, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Armenian reclamation of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. With some notable differences, a person dear to me has a similar curriculum vitae: I recently heard news of his return, in the ebb of his life, to a familiar front.

The most infatuating American feature is a permanent, generalized restlessness.

These days, I am not alone among diasporan Armenians having felt the gravitational tug of the old country at war and the shame of not quite having the courage to speed towards it. You have felt this same twinge if you have ever run away from any fight. Conflict—material, metaphorical, internal, interpersonal—is vitality; to evade it is counter-human. If asked to describe their lives monolectically, both Nubar Ozanyan and my intimate would choose the Armenian word bāykar, or struggle. Its true synonym is the Greek agon—intensely active, unlike the supine English derivative “agony.” From sports and war to theatre and politics, this trait was omnipresent in the classical world. Nietzsche evokes its spirit in modernity, but a great agon had already begun less than a century before his birth.

The most infatuating American feature is a permanent, generalized restlessness. I could not have known this in late 2012 when I tottered to the United States (overconfident after two rather uneventful years in the Cypriot military). Plenty of important ideological contests blazed in the convivial Midwestern community I joined then and, when they did not, one did one’s best to start them. The atmosphere was flammable, I happily found later, in the Mountain West and on the East Coast too. The past half-decade in this country may have just happened to feel particularly tense, but the evidence suggests that conflict is as American as the Montana sky. And we are better off for it.