Here we go.

It is New Year in Armenia today. Nine months earlier the calendar turned, but September 1, or 2, or 3 is really when change happens here.

In the air. In attitudes. In emotions.

Baseless. Ignorant. Hateful.

Where are those three words when you need them?

Not in Washington, D.C.

Surely, not in Ankara, Turkey this April.

They were in Dresden last weekend, rolling off the lips of my hero and president, Barack Obama, and the words were truthful and surgery sharp and divided sensible people from fools who think accepting history is one of life’s options.

Baseless. Ignorant. Hateful.

Where are those three words when you need them?

Not in Washington, D.C.

Surely, not in Ankara, Turkey this April.

They were in Dresden Friday, rolling off the lips of my hero and president, Barack Obama, and the words were truthful and surgery sharp and divided sensible people from fools who think accepting history is one of life’s options.

When, at 8:01 a.m. Wednesday in Yerevan, the television I’d been psychically tethered to all night announced that Barack Obama had been voted the next President of the United States, the image in my head replaced the broadcast on CNN with footage of a childhood that added relevance to the vast historicity of the moment.

Tow-headed and not yet mindful that a world existed outside the narrow one in which I toddled, I stood on a stool in an Alabama public square to drink from one of two water fountains. Turns out that the one I’d chosen for refreshment from the summer heat was marked “Colored”. Had I known, I’d have stepped to the “Whites Only” bubbler. Children don’t know. Bless them.

As the Placebo President, George Woops Bush, winds down the great American nightmare that started with an election he didn’t win and concludes with the whole world losing, his administration continues to the end to miss opportunities. Having lost the War on Terror, Washington is hardly doing any better fighting the War on Error that can’t be bought off for even $700 billion.

You’d think Yerevan is far enough outside the D.C. Beltway to be spared the shrapnel of an imploding empire built on greed and deception. But no. My Erebuni beer (the “Official Beer of ArmeniaNow”, should market distributors be reading) now costs 350 drams – nearly 30 percent more than three years ago – and I’m not blaming beer-making oligarch parliamentarian arm wrestler Gagik Tsarukyan. No sir, I’m dropping the mug at W’s doorstep.

I have a friend whose daughter was born with a hearing/speech handicap.

Sorry if the word “handicap” offends you. But in Armenia, any such disability is indeed that. Here, being afflicted means being estranged at best, mocked at worst, and in only the rarest of circumstances, accepted.

I’m working hard at finding the sympathetic path toward the outbreak of “hunger strikes” currently en vogue in Armenia.

Background: The current regime is still oppressing, imprisoning and generally making life unpleasant for significants who were on the wrong side of last February’s crooked presidential election. There are bastards on both sides, deserving of whatever they get. Only this is universal: There are men in jail who shouldn’t be, and men free and in force who are more at guilt than the detained for crimes against the state.

I have the terrifying pleasure of living with a five-year old philosopher.

A year before she reached the seasoned maturity that now reveals itself in alternating identifications with Barbie and/or Scooby Doo, her analytical skills emerged while a morning fashion crisis loomed over whether she’d be more kindergartenly stylish in her purple or in her turquoise tights.

Prompted by some toy that found its way to the top of the mountain of plush and plastic that is her world, Barbie Doo engaged in a debate with her mother over what animals are called.

I’m not good with numbers, so am liable to huge misunderstanding about percentages, etc.

That confession at hand, here’s my question:

If Levon Ter-Petrosyan got only 21.5 percent of the vote in the February 19 election, why does his cause deserve all the attention it has created and all the trouble it has stirred?

Hard wired and soft brained and with a courageous misunderstanding of our own place in life, a man I called “the Doctor” and I broke laws and damaged psyches, sideswiping our way through long nights and airless days long ago, that somehow leave me thinking of him as I stand in a Yerevan park trying to communicate with an Armenian Jehovah’s Witness.

One famous binge of behaving poorly required our participation (the Doctor and me; not the Jehovah woman) at a mid-Chicago institution called the Weed. At an hour I don’t often see anymore unless occasioned by a bladder or a deadline, we reached the establishment astoundingly in better shape than those who’d already put their wheels down there. To reach our perches we had to step over a large man having a rest squarely in mid-floor. “That’s Butchy”, the Doctor said. “Resident drunk?” I asked. “No, he’s the manager.”