homeless hagop: still homeless in cyberspace
..two decades back, some six years before we would hear about the Internet, when big hair was fashionable and English literature was focused on apathy and indifference in the affluent America of the Reagan era, a group of young Armenians, fresh out of college, picked up their Hi8 cameras to show their community what was ravaging the homeland and what the diaspora needed to confront. There had been an earthquake, massacres in Sumgait, and talk of independence, and a weekly show called Horizon would bring these stories to KSCI TV in Los Angeles every Saturday at 5:30 P.M. courtesy of the Armenian National Committee. In those days of a somewhat lost innocence and naivety, when the sons and daughters of the diaspora were tipped that there was a homeless Armenian living on the streets of Hollywood, the would-be filmmakers and reporters took the cameras out after midnight to track down a man named Hagop. We gave him food, interviewed him as if he was an exotic animal in a zoo, then reporte...