Social / -Isms

Another Lousy Day for Heroes? Part II: Oppressions Birth Heroes, Corporations Breed Gods

2011-09-22T20:17:00.014+08:00

Read Part One here: Another Lousy Day for Heroes?: A "Counter-Reification"

MARTIAL LAW.
Yesterday, the media marked the 39th anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of such a rule in the Philippines on September 21, 1972, a hardy rule that would officially remain until 1981. Clearly, media was trying to serve us a historical lesson towards stating a renewed "never again" slogan. And under the government of Noynoy Aquino, this commemoration had more than just an "official" context. Just a month ago, the government and media remembered the August 21, 1983 assassination and death of Benigno Aquino Jr., with tributes and quasi-tributes, while weeks previous to that, the birth of Corazon Aquino was celebrated, all this under the happy watch of the Noynoy Aquino government. Now, notice that in the time of Gloria Arroyo's corruption-tainted and subtly oppressive government, when media outlets commemmorated the martial law declaration and Ninoy Aquino events a clear warning (to both government and ourselves) seemed to be embedded in the message of the remembrances. A "never again" warning context.
(Somewhere else this week, not covered by television, certain parties were also commemorating the assassination and death of the leftist leader Leandro Alejandro on September 19, 1987, a date only over a year into the transition centrist/coalition government of Corazon Aquino.)
But on the 21st of September, 2011, a Marcos supporter was stating a certainty on TV, viz., that Marcos' martial law was a necessary part of history, as if to push an apology for future conditions wherein a "never again" slogan might have no weight. And perhaps he's right. For, after all, like all devices available to governments, martial rule is a valid option for governance. Gloria Arroyo's February 4, 2006 Proclamation 1017 declaring a state of emergency was a quite recent though short-lived quasi-use of this option. But now-a-senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr., also interviewed for his take, said his father's recourse to the state of martial law for the Philippines is all in the past now, is all history, and the nation needs to move on.
Now, to a citizenry, or a group opposed to its own government, martial law goes beyond being a mere encyclopedic dot on the calendar of history. It is likewise a state of collective emotional agitation replete with dynamic action, with individual as well as community stories attached to the tensive atmosphere such a declaration brings into its indefinite timeline of revolutions. And so, the "never again" slogan continues to carry with it the viscerality of a felt funerary song.
But now comes the question. What if all these people who've experienced Marcos' martial law are to all grow old and consequently die? What happens to history? Will Proclamation № 1081 be but an encyclopedic dot to Bongbong Marcos' version of necessary history?
How will the social causes managing their anti-Marcos and anti-martial rule positions manage their hero-symbols? Will those symbols stand the test of time?

CONSIDER THE present.
Despite the emotional portrayals of martial rule, and despite present time being under the reign of Noynoy Aquino's supposedly social liberal government, Martial Law is but now a phrase that looks so distant to Mega Manila's Generation Y and Generation Z (the latter sometimes informally referred to as the Business Process Outsourcing generation), almost a mere segment or part in a two-hour semi-fictional entertainment movie.
Still, because that movie segment was part of history, there will be people who would see the necessity of portraying hero characters for that segment period. Hero characters they would be qua individuals rising above the rest in the pursuit of liberty from Ferdinand Marcos' governance of impunity.
Thus we continue to celebrate today the names of Benigno Aquino Jr., Lorenzo Tañada, Jose Diokno, Jovito Salonga, Gerardo Roxas, among many others, and later-part anti-Marcos elements of the resistance continuum, including Edgar Jopson and Corazon Aquino.
So much has been written about these people who have supposedly sacrificed a lot. Paeans, tributes, and---finally for the already deceased---eulogies. Public markets have been named after them. And notice that those who were with them but fell from grace under Corazon Aquino's government have been downgraded to mere mentions. Until, of course, they could come out of the wreckage, such as People Power Revolution hero Juan Ponce Enrile, seeming to regret their prodigality from Father or Mother Society. All this is understandable.
All this is understandable because heroes, after all, are measured not just by their contributions and their forgivable flaws, but just as importantly by their symbolic significance to the times, their continuing affiliation in the eyes of those who need to appreciate that symbolic affiliation. . . .
Always in relation to the times.

HEROES.
Like all nations in the world, we champion our heroes qua symbols of our resistance and courage within our physical or philosophical territories.
Heroes are a vital part of the maintenance of nationhood (and countryhood). They are also a vital part of governments and governance. They would even be of use to the advancement of a certain image for products circulated in consumerist society and the business sphere.
And so it is natural for nations---and the spin doctors of ruling groups---to elevate heroes of the day or of a period of reign to hero worship status.
And since heroes are a vital part of governance as well as a government's marketing slogans, press releases, press conferences, and ceremonies, governments allocate budgets for heroes who have to be accorded necessary spotlights, billboards, TV documentaries, books and newspaper columnist odes as well as holidays in the calendar.
Social liberal governments have their heroes, conservatives likewise celebrate their own. All of these heroes, dead and living, complete with awards and prizes and honorary degreees and tribute books, are placed in our social altars of ideological struggles. Communist countries, too, have their big Che Guevaras and lesser heroes (e.g. the comrade who gave more than the state's fair share of the harvest during a state of food crisis).
We, in our day, continue to have our own sports heroes (individuals and teams). Economic heroes (whoever started the "OFWs as modern-day heroes" concept had a political philosophy in his head). Champions in the broadcasting world. A religion would have its saints that advance its own avowed virtues and achievement foci. And as comfort to the inaccesibility of certain dreams, or as tools for the catharsis of anger, or as inspiration for certain dreams that need to be elevated to the status of demigod dreams, society is advertently or inadvertently provided its superheroes and quasi-superheroes by dreamer graphic novelists and cinematic aesthetes.
Quasi-superheroes? They're the ordinary products of a pseudo-realism portraying ordinary people who could nevertheless survive bullets of enemies with the help of agimats and simple prayers.

IT IS good to have heroes. But it is better to be aware of why they are there.
Records of heroes in ancient struggles, as well as status quos, can be seen today in the tracts of ancient tribes and city-state civilizations.
The Greeks advanced their own religious demigods of the Greek hero cult. Laying aside the Rastafarian Jah, present-day equivalents would be what we celebrate today as the more realistic saints. They are individuals in our faiths with human but extraordinary records supposedly unattainable to most of us who might be placed in similar extraordinary circumstances. Well, at least this is what we are told repeatedly, as if it is impossible to witness the heroism of an entire army corps placed in an extraordinary situation of fulfilling a war mission. You can't make demigods out of 40,000 men landing on a beach defended by enemy machine guns, can you? A figure or figures must stand for the collective as a sort of synecdoche for focus. A thousand posthumous medals would have to do. A dozen would be better. One would be best.
Attached to the cult hero is the notion of self-sacrifice. And so, like the Son of Man who died for our sins, Jose Rizal and Ninoy Aquino purportedly "died for the Filipino people", with emphasis on this slogan being made to mean that their deaths were half self-planned. We will be constantly told that Rizal had no "selfish" motives in everything he did, no "childish" emulation of big brother Paciano's "heroics", no love for the "cool rebel" tag or no anger at what the Spaniards did to his mother and the Rizals' properties, no literary and other ambitions for accolade, no, none of those theories. Or, even assuming the factuality/veracity of some of those, there's hardly need to mention them. Everything he did was for the Filipino people, even his being sent away to Madrid in 1882 by the "political rebel" Paciano---to spare Jose, perhaps, from the crackdown on males during a time of a burgeoning nationalism after the Cavite Mutiny in which young Paciano was being suspected of having played some part---was not for the family but to prepare Jose for a future wherein he will serve country and people. This is the grand narrative being sent our way that, for me, bawdlerizes Rizal, the nationalist movement, and the extent of the oppressions that Rizal already felt when he was asked to drop Mercado from his family name upon enrolling at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila.
Another highlighted mark in cult heroism is courage. Again with Rizal, the doctor's volunteering to be exiled in Cuba instead of in quiet Dapitan is not deemed worthy of much mention. On his way back to the Philippines after the order for his arrest was served by the coup of Archbishop Bernardino Nozaleda, he may have refused opportunities to escape, truly a mark of courage, but how this may have a connection to his signing a manifesto disavowing the Katipunan while in jail at Fort Santiago is also not discussed much, for certainly the courage element must not be contaminated with impurities. It is as though soldiers who march to war have nothing but anger in their hearts, with nary a gram of fear.
All this is understandable, of course, for the cult of personality is the modern alternative to ancient as well as modern-religious apotheosis. Definitions of cult of personality agree that it arises when an individual---or his top manager---"utilizes mass media, propaganda, or other methods, to project an idealized heroic public image through unquestioning flattery and praise." (Wikipedia) Notice also that almost all book definitions of the phrase associate it with dictatorial personalities. The definition of personality cult itself among Western books seems to deny the power of democratic media to create personality cults within the bounds of marketing subtlety, whether advertent or sub-advertent. The preferred Western terms would be Max Weber's more neutral "charismatic authority" or otherwise the more pop-culture-friendly "celebrity". It is as if celebrities are not managed by people, and as though charismatic authority is not itself manage-able to form cults and a cult following.

"HERO" COMES from the Greek word heros, meaning "protector".
Before Joseph Campbell presented his monomyth system, there was FitzRoy Somerset, 4th Baron Raglan. In his The Hero, he systemized hero myths and proposed the unusual requisites for a hero's conception---culling from the Biblical Moses story (which in itself has parallels in Mesopotamian and Babylonian literatures), Raglan drew that firstly, in the shaping of a heroic myth, there's an attempt made by a powerful male at the hero's birth to kill him; then he is spirited away; then he is reared by foster-parents in a far country. Later he meets some mysterious death, often at the top of a hill, and his body is not buried, and he leaves no successors, and finally he has one or more holy sepulchres.
Rizal owned the sword of Damocles early in life. Threatened by his Mercado family name, he was told the story of the moth who gained the luxury of knowledge but was in the process burned. Rizal was soon spirited away to Madrid and "reared" by his brother Paciano and friends in Europe, the Philippines, and inside the Philippine government and the Church. Later he met his "mysterious" arrest, and equally "mysterious" death sentencing under Nozaleda's instructions (commencing in his execution at the edge of the Bagumbayan field [now Rizal Park] facing the sea). His son died in Dapitan. His mother looked for his body after his execution. He has a number of statues in so many municipal plazas, his sepulchres.
Ninoy Aquino's story does not fit very well into this design, but there had been many attempts to kill his ambition; he was spirited away to prison, and much later to the US, with Marcos himself as his jailer and foster parent. With foster-parent and fraternity-mate Marcos intermittently ill from a lupus disease, Aquino was mysteriously assassinated (on top of a plane stairway, dropping to a runway tarmac). His dead body's bloodied face was not washed and was displayed in a church for everyone to see. Salvador Laurel was not deemed a perfect successor. His display in church led to the public beatification of a folk Joan of Arc in the person of his wife Cory Aquino, his living sepulchre, which would birth a thousand more sepulchers.
FitzRoy Somerset's systemization is almost an endorsement of the hero.
But then came Hegel. Inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder, he proposed that a hero is a product of volksgeist, or the unique collective "spirit" all peoples and nations possess. This place-spirit is married to the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the time-spirit. Émile Durkheim would have another phrase for this, describing a similar concept he called the "collective consciousness".
In late 19th century, in reaction to such hero personifications as those presented by Thomas Carlyle's portraits of "heroes, hero worship and the heroic" in history, Karl Marx proposed that history was actually determined by social forces operating in "class struggles", certainly not by individuals. Even Herbert Spencer, who was a proto-champion of libertarianism and the classical-liberal individual, in his criticism of the state's patriots wrote that "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. . . . Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."
In late 20th century, Michel Foucault's philosophy on history described history as the science (or art) of the "sovereign" class or niche, a science which has to be reversed by popular discourse.
There were others who would contend with the hyperbole accorded to individuals' roles as subjects in history---Lucien Febvre, Marck Bloch, Fernand Braudel, among them. In his take, Braudel gave proof that geography, economics and demography played a more decisive role in history than the feats of individual historical subjects. Foucault and Louis Althusser would provide more heterogeneous layers of factors determinant of history.
In an essay by William R. Thompson titled "The Lead Economy Sequence in World Politics (From Sung China to the United States): Selected Counterfactuals", Journal of Globalization Studies, Vol. 1 (2010), num. 1, pp. 6–28, the author suggests that in developing counterfactual history, with its attempts to examine hypothetic scenarios of historical development, the hero attracts attention because of those scenarios' asking about what would have happened had the historical individual under scrutiny did not exist. This thus renders faith in a hero's heroism . . . how should I put it, via negativa.

TODAY, IN the face of eulogies concerning dead heroes, some of us may ask or may already be asking: What drives an institution, say the Church, to call someone a saint? What drives a hero's, say Corazon Aquino's, emotions to do the heroic? Why do we need saints and heroes? Why do they have to be from the upper class, at least in our literatures?
I have no quarrel with the idea of Cory Aquino or Ninoy Aquino being acknowledged as leaders of a people's struggle. I have questions about their followers' obsession with the concept of sainthood and heroism, almost synonymously taken. It's similar to the obsession with slogans and symbols overwhelming all concern for the details. I could write a book enumerating the many ramifications of this shallowness. A eulogy to a hero may be commendable for being not without content, since many eulogies are, but for the present days---or for all days---we should trouble ourselves with more takes on the ingredients of every gram of content, and less with the packaging of heroes. Were some essays not eulogies or eulogy-looking, for all their good intentions they'd be essays around a hero-person's packaging.
Now, critics of heroes, on the other hand, may be critical of certain of these heroes' inaction on certain causes or issues or dates. But critical from what angle of a mission? Are their issues the mother issues? Is the Hacienda Luisita issue, for instance, really just a Hacienda Luisita issue or an issue about the Aquinos concerning Hacienda Luisita? The mother subjects are blanket land reform, agrarian reform, progressivist takes on these issues, social liberal takes on these issues different from the progressivist approach, post-reform scenarios, and so on, and they involve characters more numerous than the Aquinos or element-targets of a certain party. The hero's role in these issues ought to be judged according to our treatment of the several hypotheses concerning the issues. Sure we can report on the details of a struggle, any struggle, as it progresses, that'd be exciting to read about, but what about the objectives of the struggle itself? What about the merits and demerits to the issues themselves?
Sure, a hero's critic may have demonstrated virtue from his/her end, with missionary projects of value to his/her civilization. And that'd be good for him/her and us. But, again, what would be the objective not of his/her actions but of his/her criticality? Is one's objective merely to take down, say, Noynoy Aquino's "our hero" or "our champion" standing in the eyes of a public answering polls as per the demand of, say, a contending Nacionalista Party? Or is it to truly promote the cause of, say, human rights, out to fight any government's shortchanging the progress of the cause, whether that government is a conservative or liberal or progressivist or socialist or libertarian one? Journalism is good, but there's also such a thing as selective journalism, black propaganda journalism, latent advocacy journalism, not to mention bad journalism, that in the process of their practice could actually only be validating a process of hero-packaging by virtue of their opposition to pour more attention to details, details of the issues and causes surrounding these heroes and anti-heroes who---in the first place---are only players in the quest for triumph or defeat of the larger causes.
Consider "progressives" who aligned themselves with the Nacionalista Party of Manny Villar and Bongbong Marcos. Definitely worth talking about, that one, for instance. And you'd wonder why no one among the critics of the Aquinos' heroism in the journalism profession is. And, sure, Pres. Cory Aquino may indeed have "self-limited her greatness. She ended her service to the Filipino people where the interest of her clan, friends and supporters began," as a Facebook view states it. That may actually be true. But should that be true, it should be nothing more than a manifestation of what happens when emotional critics become leaders. Such leaders would look for an economic ideology on the job, sometimes finally finding one on their last week in office. That's one reason why we ought to rather read criticism that tackles details instead of those that paint abstracts we already know, or abstracts by way of selected specifics. For the hero or non-hero ought not to be the issue, it's the issue that ought to qualify someone's heroism or non-heroism within it.
The hero is not alone. The writer-critic is part of his heroism, if not the definer of that heroism. The critic derives all his judgments from a confession of his causes as well as a confession of the heroes he seeks to fight with him for his causes.

NOW, I have no quarrel with the nationalism and patriotism of upper class elements. I say our beef ought to be with the very fact that the masses can easily be exploited, duped, conscripted. Some people's nationalism and patriotism are not going to be enough panacea for our liberation, unless niche nationalism want to perpetuate a tradition of martyrdom. I am talking about empowerment, wherein the educated upper middle class and upper class doesn't have to be the ones to always lead everyone, I'm talking about leadership that can derive from anywhere.
Now, Marx and Foucault aside, is everything in life about class struggle? Well, in relation to what I wish to say and whether I'm talking about a class struggle issue or not, I'm going to say no and yes. For by empowerment I do not mean empowerment for acquiring leaderships. I mean the empowerment of followers via their access to an awareness and a knowledge of the issues around which their heroes have operated and/or continue to operate. This is the reason why we ought to keep on harping on details, details, details. Without tackling the devil in the details, heroes---be they upper class liberators or rags-to-riches new liberals---will forever be tagged as heroes in a shallow way, with the effect of hiding the operative grand narratives and reifications on their persons. Without these details, heroes can---as indeed they often do---become emblems for power and cultural manipulations.
Let me give you a final example. Manny Pacquiao is a Filipino sports hero. He has become a symbol of possibilities for the Filipino race. And yet, an examination of that simplistic grand narrative would birth questions. For instance, is he really representative of Filipino industry? Could it be that while he was struggling in the gym to be able to prove to everyone that he can rise in the sport, his gym-mates were laughing at him? If that was the reality of his history, then our symbolism should crumble. He has failed to become the symbol of average Filipino ambitions in the gym. And yet, should Pacquiao qua emblem be deemed usable, we will continue to be fed some corporate-driven lie that we can all make it in the boxing industry or any industry if we work hard (sipag), if we have persistence (tiyaga), never mind the other details that we can just leave to luck and the employment and wage-slavery systems of mainstream social activity.
So, to explain further my point on followers' awareness (or lack of it) of the issues and themes around a subject-hero, and how this can be deemed a class issue by itself concerning hero-metanarratives (not necessarily upper-class vs. middle class), may I invite you to examine your own role among the social forces that were operating in "class struggles" (whether you belong to the working class or the small business entrepreneur class or the factory-owning class). What could have been if the likes of you had not existed or were in short supply? What could have been if your hero was not there? Or, what could have been if it was you placed in his/her position of privilege, the privilege to become a hero? Or are you a hero now?
Conversely, what could have avoided your hero's martyrdom? What was your part among the social forces operating in "class struggle" that made that martyrdom or death or assassination possible? Despite that, are you a hero now still?
Finally, are you a hero-worshipper or are you a part of a collective of heroisms?
Whatever was/is your role, it will have played a part in an unfolding history leading to a future declaration of martial law. [END]

Photo of newspaper cover borrowed from http://www.gmanews.tv/story/172811/martial-law-activists-now-ready-to-tell-own-stories

Miss Universes and "Universals"

2011-09-19T16:38:00.014+08:00

1. No such thing as a stupid question, only a stupid situation

FIRST things first. There's no such thing as a stupid question.
Even Lea Salonga's supposedly inane question to Miss Angola Leila Lopes (who'd go on to win the Miss Universe crown this year), dubbed by CNN.com feminist columnist Jessica Ravitz as "the dumbest question in the universe," isn't actually all that dumb if you put everything in context. "If you could change one of your physical characteristics," Salonga asked Lopes, "which one would it be and why?" According to Ravitz, ". . . it's absurd to be dismayed that a question like this would be posed at a beauty pageant. In my worldview, the mere fact that pageants exist is absurd. And I'm not alone."
Well, I don't think she gets it. Context is everything, and, in this case, Salonga's question---actually all the questions were pre-written by the pageant committee and assigned each judge, says Salonga---was "a standard beauty contest query" that should only nudge us in our turn to ask about the motive behind the asking. Salonga hit the nail on the head when she wrote to CNN, "At the end of the day, it wasn't so much the question asked but the manner in which it was answered." After all, weren't all those questions asked during those Miss Universe pageants in the past designed to primarily test how a candidate might respond to future "stupid" questions that are going to be hurled her way in yacht parties she'll be attending as Miss Universe? Look at it this way, if you are to apply today for an account executive position at an ad agency, a position servicing that agency's stupid clients, and you wax philosophical during your interview about the world today as though you were Bell Hooks, I'm perfectly certain you wouldn't get the job.
My Facebook friend JCA said, "But I guess the shallowness of the questions is telling of how the organizers view their contestants." That's almost a given, similar perhaps to how designers and fashion show organizers view their adolescent models. But, again, that truth would still have to be put in context. After all, what use is the Miss Universe contest and winners to, say, Mr. Donald Trump, in the first place? The most creative and most introspective mind potentially useful to a long life of struggles in the business world never does win the "apprentice of the year" prize in Trump's The Apprentice (U.S.), does s/he, the same way that the best singer does not necessarily have to win the American Idol of the year plum. At the Miss Universe, it's not really the questions and the answers to any question that matter, it's the delivery, as Salonga rightly observed. Otherwise, the Miss Universe Q&A portion would be traditionally done in an interrogation room with cameras and would invariably last the length of a David Letterman Show interview, complete with a band to break the boredom. That is, a faux pas of an answer here could always be clarified or retracted there. Nobel laureates, after all, don't give quick answers, do they? We do not measure their intelligence by the swiftness of their replies nor by an absence of an "uhhhm, well". And as for defensiveness, Hillary Clinton's has no place in the Miss Universe contest, yet she's universally counted as one hell of a charm.
To recap, the Miss Universe position is an account executive or account manager position. It's a low, starter's position in high society. There's no way Filipino ad industry stalwart Emily Abrera could now win a Miss Universe spot, is there? I'm not saying, of course, that pretty-faced account executives can't possibly know anything about, say, Edward Said's postcolonial theories. I'm just saying they'd seldom be allowed to use that knowledge in their financial district jobs.
But, still, there's definitely room for improvement regarding JCA's concern, reiterated by her friend Lea: "If the Ms. U. organizers are the ones preparing the questions, aren't they also underestimating the intelligence of their judges?" Well, Lea, Donald Trump underestimates the intelligence of everyone in the whole universe. But, then again, you and JCA are actually right. So that presently it might be useful to suggest to the Miss Universe owners that perhaps, next time, Miss Universe contestants can come onstage in office attire for the Q&A portion. Or, if still in their gowns and in a pose, maybe while holding a wineglass, so for these candidates to be able to feel a sort of corridor meeting or yacht party situation in their heads, within which role-playing they could be led to display their real brains beyond those by merely smiling, nervous candidates onstage who have to pass a stupid test while a klieg light burns. This role-playing segment might have an effect likewise on the question-writing staff. . . . Now, even if we are to adapt this role-playing sort of Q&A segment to an in-their-swimsuits situation, supposedly a more frightening experience, the candidates can still be rendered wet and in the process of drying themselves with towels while being asked their questions, if only so that our ideal resultant could be achieved. I can assure you, such role-playing---whether with gowns or swimsuits---would break the ice. Because any candidate necessarily placed in a situation of utter nervousness when confronted with a question needing a quick answer cannot predict how her posing in front of a lot of people in an uncomfortable gown or Speedo can affect her alertness. Even a female Einstein would be trembling in that situation, and would likely feel as though she were in a Guantanamo prison being played on by a bunch of US Marines. When the most intelligent candidate fails to come through that nervous field, she gets demerits and ultimately fails to grab the crown. The merely charming and merely most diplomatic wins.

2. No such thing as an easy question, only easy situations

NOW let's go visit the question for Shamcey Supsup, who would become this 2011 contest's third runner-up: "Would you change your religious beliefs to marry the person that you love? Why or why not?"
Some were saying this was a tad more difficult than the one given to Miss Angola. But, if my backyard statistics is right, most said this was way too easy, the too-obvious answer being a quick no.
A Philippine Star write-up titled "How they would have answered that question" interviewed five former Filipina beauty queens. Interestingly, or not surprisingly, depending on where you're coming from, all gave that "obvious answer" in varying modes of articulateness.
But was it really an easy question deserving of an easy answer? I believe an easier compound question would have been something like: "would you change your political beliefs to marry the person that you love? Why or why not?" But even then, putting aside the submission element in it, any answer is actually correct. "No," if one's beliefs are deep and passionate and utterly personal, "yes" if one's politics is shallow or if one has the heart of a spy. Now, having written that, I wonder if we could apply the same formula to the question for Supsup. "No," if one's religious beliefs are deep and passionate and utterly personal, "yes" if one's religious beliefs are shallow (cafeteria or cultural) or if one has the worldly heart of a multi-cultural syncretist. As for the submission part, there are a lot of reasons why one would do that. A certain tribe might require a would-be spouse's religious conversion for him/her to gain access to a conjugal wealth which might include a chain of hotels or oil derricks. Uhm, Mr. X, would you change your religion in order to marry Paris Hilton? Not that easy a question now, is it?

3. No such thing as one Universe, only universals

STILL on Supsup, my Facebook friend J- called his friends' attention to an ABS-CBN report which seemed to have been oddly written. The report zoomed in on Supsup's admission that her boyfriend had actually changed his religion for her. She is a "Christian", she's supposed to have said, and her boyfriend was formerly "Catholic".
J- wrote: "Since when were Catholics not Christians? Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big Catholic but we were the first Christian church!"
I had to correct J-, of course, with my modest knowledge of Christian history, thusly: "Actually the first Christians were the Jewish Christians before there were even Gentile Christians. The Jewish Christians included the Corinthians, the Ebionites, the Elcesaites, the Essenes, and the Nazarene/Nazoraean sect. Then, the first post-Jesus Jerusalem church was established by James the Just (some say with Paul), the leader of the Jewish Christian Church (Catholics insist with Peter as the "Rock" and "Chief Shepherd"). Then, even before Peter and Paul could arrive in Rome, Eastern Christianity was already being established in Asia Minor in what would later branch out to become the Church of the East, the churches of Oriental Orthodoxy, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Eastern Catholic Churches, and the Saint Thomas Christians. Even the Early Church in the Roman Empire, the prototype of the Latin Church of Constantine I (that was itself proto-Catholic), cannot be said to have already been the Roman Catholic Church as we know it today. The Roman Catholic Church, as we know it today, actually started when it was established by the emperors Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian II in 380 AD, when Latin Church Christianity (instead of the other Christianities, like that one by a group that would later be called Gnostic Christianity) was declared as the empire's state religion. This was at the same time that Damasus I was the Pope (who reigned till 384), when the Roman aristocracy started to take over the Church at the start of the decline of the Roman Empire. Damasus commissioned the Vulgate translation of the Bible, the early Roman Catholic Bible, and called for the Council of Rome during tensions with Bishop Nectarius of Constantinople."
Notice that I always modified "Catholic" with the adjective "Roman". J- Facebook-liked my comment and thanked me.
J-'s friend A- joined me, saying: "Of course not. You're not the first Christian church."
Notice A-'s use of "church". She didn't write "yours is not the first . . ." but "you're not the . . ." Bear that in mind, because Christian authorities would repeatedly teach that the church is neither that building by the marketplace nor that institution with a flag but the people, the following of Jesus. That following can exist without a church building or a flag, and thus A-'s use of the word in her clause "you're not the first church" makes complete sense.
J-'s friend JC chimed in, refuting my and A-'s offers, saying: "The first Christian church was the Catholic Church. Other Christian churches were just offshoots and splinter groups. Isn't this true, Kuya J-?"
Another of J-'s friends, JBC, also joined us: "Regardless, all Christians believe in one Judeo-Christian God. Why do we have to argue about who came first when, at the end of the day, we all believe in the same divine entity?"
JC had to add this: "Sure, dissension happened. But the original is the original."
"Go ahead," I wrote. "If you think the Roman Catholic Church was established in 12 or 30 AD or thereabouts instead of in 380 AD by Theodosius, suit yourself, JC, I wouldn't be surprised. Nonetheless, JBC is right."
J- Facebook-liked this, but so did JC, adding: "Thank you!"
JC also Facebook-liked another comment from another of J-'s friends, Father V-, when the latter entered the conversation. Father V- wrote: "That's quite a splintered understanding of what the church is," referring to my splintered understanding. "When one associates the Church with a mere political faction, because Paul did this or Constantine did that, one cannot get the full picture of what the Catholic church is all about. This is seeing the church as a mere institution. But the Church is more than just a human society, and it's more than just a title. The Church, Catholic and apostolic, began when Christ brought it into the world, founding it upon his apostles, especially upon Peter. This is the Christian Church, which is only One, and which subsists in union with Peter and the successors of the apostles, who have kept the faith whole and entire despite the passage of time, despite the errors of the centuries."
This is true, too, at least for 2nd-century claims to universalism and for claims to continuity from the church of Jesus' Apostles, for even when Protestants use the word "catholic" (with a lower-case letter c), they also use it not to refer to the Catholic Church alone but broadly to the Christian Church (regardless of denominational affiliation) and all believers in Jesus Christ all over the world, across all ages. Therefore, put aside Father V-'s Roman Catholic "especially upon Peter" emphasis and Father V-'s institutional claim that the Christian Church as One subsists in union with Peter. Put aside all the Romanism, and you'll be able to imagine the idea of inclusivism in catholicism (even via Catholicism), wherein one can embrace even those who believe Mary Magdalen was Jesus' right hand instead of Peter (Gnostic Christians, for instance).
Now, JC loved what Father V- wrote, writing: "Yes, Father. Got it! We are the original."
Well, if universalism (or "catholicism") also means being inclusive and Father V- would nod his head in agreement, then obviously JC couldn't have gotten it.
I wrote, "@Father V-: Would that it were so," and I meant that the Catholic Church was not also---or was not firstly---a political entity with a divisive history and policy, "then the world would have been a much better place."
"JC and A-," wrote J-, now seeming to have changed his mind about his post, "being 'first' is beside the point, is it not? The decorous bearing of the matter is, we are a Christian church, too. Right? :)"
JC Facebook-liked this.
"Ok," he wrote, "the Catholic Church is a Christian church. Christians are followers of Christ. Catholics follow Christ and his teachings . . ." and so on. I thought that was that with JC.
Father V- came back: "By the term Catholic, meaning universal, we mean that Christians follow and believe all of the doctrines taught by Christ handed down to His Apostles by way of Scripture and tradition, teachings necessary for one to fully heed the call of Our Lord to holiness. In this sense, to be truly a follower of Christ, one needs to be catholic, universal."
JC and another A- (A2, let's call him) Facebook-liked this. Actually, there's almost nothing worth protesting against in this statement if only the Father wasn't confusing "Catholic" with "catholic" in his explanation, almost as if to hide a logical fallacy (the 'God is love, love is blind, therefore God is blind' kind of logical fallacy) to service a metanarrative.
I had to call A-'s reaction to this: "@A: By your comment above, I gather you're Protestant? If you are, then by Father V- you do not follow and believe all of the doctrines taught by Christ blah blah blah, you can't fully heed the call of our Lord. You are not a true follower of Christ. The only way by which you can be that is by becoming C/catholic, by becoming 'universal'."
Father V- promptly answered my satire with a confirmation: "Well, basically that's what being a disciple is, right? It basically means following everything that the Master did and said and taught. Otherwise, what kind of disciples are we? By the word 'Catholic' (Father V-'s capitalization, not mine) I'm referring to a reality, not a denomination. We don't call ourselves catholics (Father V-'s lower case, not mine) for nothing. The name Catholic stemmed from the fact that in the Reform worked by Luther his followers broke away from Christian teaching and praxis, selecting those that were in accord with their personal beliefs and ideals and rejecting those with which they were not in accord."
JC Facebook-liked this. Well, put aside the Father's confusing catholic with Catholic, as if catholicism or universalism is exclusive to Catholics. Lay aside the fact that Martin Luther was mainly questioning the papacy's corrupted adherence to the bright ideas concerning Purgatory and the selling of indulgences. Put aside the fact that Luther was only seeking reforms (thus Reformed) from within instead of from without, but kicked out instead by the corrupt Catholic hierarchy of his time. Put aside the fact that to imply in our time that Pope Leo X's indulgences salesmen were following Christian teaching and praxis could be tantamount to qualifying and reiterating Pope Leo X's virtue on these same indulgences-selling during his time, and thus for our time. Put aside the fact that to call Pope Leo X's corruption as "within Christian praxis" could reintroduce a scandal. Put all those aside, . . . if only because Father V- was not yet finished with the Luther question.
He continued: ". . . this is far from the logic of discipleship; the disciple is bound to his master insofar as his master is concerned. Either he accepts his master totally, and all of his teaching and the practices that he has taught him, or he is no follower of his. This is perfectly logical, and this is more so true of Christianity. When the Lord came among us as man he showed us the Father; by His teaching and actions he instituted the norm by which his followers would be known . . . this was entrusted to his Apostles, who---because of their ministry in the Church of Christ---continue the presence of Christ on earth."
I see. From a self-contradictory explanation of catholicism as exclusive to Catholics (contradictory because while claiming he was not speaking of Catholicism as a denomination Father V- was at the same time equating catholicism with loyalty to Catholicism, in which case JC was right in Facebook-liking Father V-, for it would seem that Father V- does not include inclusivism as part of his "catholic" context), Father V- now moves to a second stage, that of equating Luther's hatred for Pope Leo X with a hatred for Jesus, as if Pope Leo X's sins and Jesus' virtue are one.
Father V- was not done.
He continued: "There is no need to be polemical here, by the way, Jojo Soria . . . what I'm trying to express is, that being a Christian necessarily means that you have to accept all of the teachings and commandments of the Lord, whether they are in accord with one's taste or not. This in Greek and in English amounts to being---what it means to be---"katholikos" or catholic. . . ."
"@Father V-:" I wrote, "If there's no need to be polemical, then why have you and I become polemical? Was it perhaps because there was a need for it? Where did that need come from? Could it be that the polemics just grew from nowhere? If it did, then do you mean that when I write I'm being needlessly polemical, but when you write you're not being polemical but yet need to be for my enlightenment? If that is your approach, I'd fully understand the consistency."
"Hahaha," my Facebook friend J2 butted in at this point. "Polemics," she wrote, "all but polemics."
I wasn't exactly sure whether J2 was referencing Father V-'s polemics, my polemics, both our polemics, or the entire humanity's polemics, so I just Facebook-liked what she wrote, since it looked polemical in itself. :)
"No," Father V- instantly wrote, "I'm just explaining things from my end. Honestly, I had no intention of being polemical. In fact, aside from the fact that I just wanted to share my view, I got interested in the topic, since expressing it here also enlightened things up for me. As a student of history I'm beginning to see that there's more than meets the eye with the term 'catholic', that its being fundamentally synonymous with 'Christian' was penned even long before the Reform; it goes way back to sources of the Christian faith."
I Facebook-liked this.
"Anyway," Father V- continued, "if it seems to you that we're being polemical to each other, then this won't serve us any good . . . aside from the fact that I was just trying to give reason to anyone who calls me, to give an account for the hope that is in me (cfr. 1Peter 3:15), I was beginning to see it as a stimulating conversation, both based on reason and on faith, which always need to go hand in hand in the search for the Truth that liberates. Anyway, frankly I got something from this. . . . Peace :-)"
I Facebook-liked this.
"Pacem in terris," I wrote, "as Pope John XXIII would have it. :)"
Father V- Facebook-liked this. JC didn't.
Well, not everyone among Roman Catholics ever liked what John XXIII and his Second Vatican Council tried to introduce ("to restore unity among all Christians, including seeking pardon for Catholic contributions to separation"; "to start a dialogue with the contemporary world"). Not everyone in the Church likes the idea of reconciling or breaking bread with Protestants and the Orthodox churches, much less with other religions which Pope Benedict XVI controversially is trying to realize today in spite of his conservatism. Pope Paul VI, who would continue John XXIII's mission, was another Vatican liberal, but not everyone heeded his apology for Pope Gregory's having turned Mary Magdalen into a prostitute via a simple sermon, if Catholics today are even aware that that apology and a series of revisions concerning Mary Magdalen ever happened. Not everyone in the Church liked John Paul I too, who didn't last long in the papacy. And John Paul II, who voted against a lot of tracts in John XXIII's Second Vatican Council, is probably the most loved Pope in the Roman church today, partly perhaps for his having continued facets of John XXIII's efforts, as in the area of trying to reconcile with the Jews and other Christian sects. Pope Benedict XVI, a close confidant of John Paul II, seems to want to continue John Paul II's efforts to extend just facets of the Second Vatican Council tracts---specifically that one seeking a dialogue with other religions. . . .
But if Popes could marry, if Pope Gregory VII hadn't required clerical celibacy, then John XXIII would probably have been the sort of Pope who wouldn't mind marrying a Protestant. And I don't think that would be because his religious beliefs were shallow or that he was a syncretist. He was, rather, the one most open to differences, the one with an open ear.
In short, he was the first to respect the various catholicisms (universalisms), in effect fulfilling the embrace of the catholic doctrine of inclusivism. He was the Vatican's Stephen Hawking, who might have theorized that there is no one universe, but universes which finally are all the same, wherein hypertravel through cosmic wormholes can be done. He was the Vatican's company merger guru.

NOW, what has all this got to do with Shamcey Supsup and her formerly-Catholic boyfriend?
Well, picture that scene again when Hollywood actress and contest-appointed judge Vivica A. Fox asked Supsup her question. Then, picture that moment when she answered the question. Now, put her boyfriend in her place, in a sort of scene from a Mr. Universe pageant, with him being asked the same question. His answer, of course, would be something like "I already did."
If Supsup can embrace her boyfriend's secular heroism or sacrifice at the same time that she would preach an adherence to religious loyalism among females, we could surmise that Supsup is either sexist and another religious bigot who considers other religions as crap (Roman Catholicism perhaps as anti-Christian instead of Christian for putting Church laws above Christ's laws, according to some denominations), or . . . she believes there is no one Universe but a bundle of valid universes that could access one another in mental hypertravels via physical wormholes of acceptance. Matter turns into anti-matter and becomes matter again in some other universe, then vice versa, all perfectly acceptable. Nothing is illusion anymore, everything is embraceable. So that by answering her question at the pageant with what she had or what she could come up with, she was also recognizing that stupid questions are really only stupid situations, that easy questions are really only easy situations, and that the Miss Universe is really just a construction of various beauty queen claims to various valid universals. Remember, the first requisite of beauty pageants is congeniality, not basketball-like adversity. Its objective heaven includes yacht parties. So, therefore, you just tell people what they'd want to hear and save them the trouble of religious faux-universalist noise.
That quick choice I can understand. Even Facebook-like. [END]

Photo of Shamcey Supsup borrowed from REUTERS/Nacho Doce as used at http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/213018/20110913/miss-philippines-2011-shamcey-supsup.htm

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Why Are We Writers Shallow?: A Voltairian Exploration

2011-09-14T14:57:00.020+08:00

My friends' Facebook walls have been calling everybody's attention to F. Sionil Jose's quoting of a well-loved former senator in his latest column essay on Philstar.com titled "Why are we shallow?" Okay, the essay has my attention, and now---having nothing better to do---I'd like to offer my own conjectures regarding what's behind all this rampant shallowness Jose is talking about.
But first things first. The idea of Filipino shallowness that visited the novelist-columnist came from a friend of his from another Asian country, an idea which initially floored him. Then, recently while watching a presentation of Asian dances with former Senator Leticia Ramos-Shahani, Jose observed that there was but grudging applause from the audience for the stylized movements of a stately Japanese dance while a near-standing ovation was accorded to the energetic jumping in the Filipino-cum-Vietnamese tinikling. Jose said anyone can learn the tinikling in 10 minutes, and Senator Shahani was supposed to have asked, "Why are we so shallow?"

Well, let me see, we have been shallow for centuries.
It was probably one of the things the Japanese hated us for, the reason perhaps why they treated us and our women like the Chinese during World War II, because we couldn't understand their dances which they didn't have the time to elucidate on for our modest collective comprehension. Meanwhile, our long-standing enthusiasm for the tinikling only demonstrated this alleged shallowness, because---as Senator Shahani would know---we as audiences often approach the dance with merely the eye of tourists, laughing and clapping only at the dancers' meager feat of avoiding the bamboos. Senator Shahani, being a Sorbonne University Doctor in Philosophy in Comparative Literature, would know that there is more to the dance than what my favorite cooking television personality could drunkenly and metaphysically say about it in the Vietnam episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations Season One. There is definitely something about the rich presence of thick bamboos in this feasting dance, as well as about the allusion to the tikling bird of the rallidae species and the tikling farm traps made of bamboo, the erotic and taxing accelerando rhythm in the fourth quarter of the dance, its relation to Philippine martial arts and tribal war dances, its possible role in Leyte among Bankaw's people prior to the Bankaw Revolt. However, we are not all trained to be dance historians, much less as semioticians, to ever get---or want---anything more than the fun we're already getting from the tinikling at face value. In fact, we didn't all have that privilege of getting to know anything about our own dances, much less the Odori, and so we remain shallow.
As Jose's foreign friend would say, this shallowness is manifest even in our major papers. I'd read the Philippine Star, for instance, and what would I get? Apart from F. Sionil Jose's column, there's practically nothing to read in there except the comic strips, the classifieds for preferably female applicants, and the boring crosswords and sudokus. It's a total waste of recycled paper. Another Star columnist, the poet and novelist Alfred Yuson, was probably wryly acknowledging this shallowness in his newspaper after he was indirectly asked for his opinion about Jose's column and assumptions: "Shallow shallow me. Shallow me wherever you may be... tra-la-la...," he said.

Our universities and colleges are all to blame for this epidemic of shallowness.
Instead of putting much emphasis on the culture of Late Antiquity, they spend too much time teaching our preppies everything about the binary structures of HTTP cookies used to hack the CIA headquarters or eBay with, or the way Florence Nightingale would assist a doctor performing a burn debridement or escharotomy, which all totally mean nothing to either Heraclius or Phocas. Look at the Hindus, for instance, even while often high on bhang lassi their continuity with their past would be retained through the centuries, so that even today you can see sacred cows still plowing their own dung on the cobblestones of Jaisalmer Fort. And the Buddhists of Thailand---who up to today can perform sacrifices of not dirtying one's soul with the mud of modern economics, relying solely for their food on the age-old charity of a modern-day profiteer with a store. So why, oh why, don't our universities and colleges bring back all that Greek that up to now is being studied in Greece, or all that Latin that up to now is still being studied at Pontificio Seminario Vaticano, for God's sake?
The classics teach us wisdom. The Web teaches us nothing but wiki-knowledges about protons and American Idol winners. Thus the arrogance of TV personalities who have been fed these wiki-knowledges by their scriptwriters, mistaking these bits for wisdom. The classics' wisdom lead us to Western culture and all its metanarratives of superiority over tribal wisdom, which we---if we could only immerse ourselves in these holy waters---could in fact use to build our own counter-reifications.
This failure of ours to appropriate the wisdom of Western culture has in fact led us to a level of ignorant arrogance, a broadcaster's type of arrogance, that is unable to see the role each of us is playing in the system, be it the system of government or the system of citizenship. All we can do now, therefore, is lean on the luxury of slogans and abstractions and sweeping views that are averse to the devils in the details. Thus the vicious cycle of crab-criticalities that are, being crab-criticalities, by themselves averse to criticalities. We thus end up hurling invectives at each other, calling each other stupid and ignorant and shallow, while each is without a desire for the hard task of discoursing further on rococo details of qualifying truth (the way either Michelangelo or Michel Foucault would feel happy about) regarding the fisherman's son's inability to comprehend the basics of TESDA's electrician's course or his ability to call Mike Enriquez's confused conservative or progressivist politics crap.
We have chosen to be Westernized and yet not Westernized enough. Our embrace of democracy fails Karl Popper's dictum of owning likewise the responsibility of accepting "obsolescence" when it comes in an open society. We hold on to our animist faith concerning the divinity of our persons assigned seats of authority, be it as government authorities or culture authorities, and own nothing but a confirmation bias in favor of our ability to call anyone and everyone shallow. Western culture, if only we studied it well, would have taught us the rigors of rationalism, so that instead of sweeping conclusions regarding ourselves we could slowly tackle each man's behavior the way Spinoza tackled God, as an individual expression in a dynamic equation. Because of this inability, we have been reduced to behave like writers pretending to be sociologists, with nothing but the rhetoric of fallacies that we mistake for social science. We are thus rendered shallow---unable to see who we are, those mere writers, and the limits to what we can do.
And if only we had Romanized ourselves well, the way South Korea has Americanized itself well, we would have armed ourselves with the capacity to hurl crockery at the quackery of Restorationist and evangelical voices on TV. If we had been Romanized enough, we would see---beyond Latin-American liberation theology---the superiority of Vatican to these discards of Calvinism and the Great Awakening. Look at South Korea, its perfect Americanization has shaped the prosperity theology of the Yoido Full Gospel Church. Meanwhile, our Catholicism is not as strong as the death threats of an Opus Dei follower on the artist Mideo Cruz in our supposedly open-ended society.

Thus, we are rendered shallow.
And so we fail to see the shallowness of media as product of the subconscious plan of the local Illuminati to keep the status quo, wherein education remains the privilege of the post-Gomburza children of former caciques and public education is the shame hurled on the laps of Jesus' working class.
We are rendered shallow. We can't use our pens to expose the real identities of the jokers on morning radio who are on a secret mission to destroy the seeds of social liberalism in the service of network-owning bosses with holding companies with interests in the fuits of conservative elitism.
We are now eternally shallow. We can only choose to ignore the fact that all that entertainment fodder is what goes on in the drawing boards of corporate profiteering and, in surrender, we proceed to ourselves write shallow exegeses about our own shallowness, contributing in effect to the perpetuation of such profit-motivated mass dumbing.
We: you, with me, are forever shallow. So we can only spit on our neighbors who can't understand our essays in English. We are totally shallow. We can only complain about their Tagalog-based intellectual incapacities deriving from our missionary and patronizing teaching-in-English failures. We are shallow. We can only ignore the fact that we are not Belgium divided into a French-speaking territory and a Dutch-speaking territory but Belgium divided into several languages inside our every territory and spot. We are shallow. We can only close our ears to the fact that linguistic differences are often also class differences. We are shallow. We can only close our eyes to the reality that the lower class aspires to become the middle class and upper class, and the upper middle class and upper class aspire to become Americans and Europeans.
We are, safe to say now, shallow, and so choose not to write about the cost of sending our kids to schools that teach how to read, about the price of books, the language of books, the stupid marketing and distribution of books, the inaccessibility of books, the technological variations on the concept book.
We are shallow. We continue to debate on the virtue of books, hoping to find enlightenment for everyone, while the sidewalk downstairs aims for the depths of our garbage, deeply hoping to find bread. [END]

UPDATE:On September 26, 2011, Jose uploaded a new Philstar.com column piece titled "A reply to you out there who disagree with me": click here to read.

Men of Irony (sa Buwan ng Wika)

2011-08-31T08:20:00.002+08:00

FOR those of you who don't know who he is, Representative Sergio Apostol is that new Liberal Party balimbing who quickly switched parties in post-election 2010---when Benigno Aquino III won the presidency---from the then-ruling Lakas Kampi CMD party where he was also a recurrent lawyer for then-embattled president Gloria Arroyo. (Himself, then, as evidence of the existence of ironic twists in things.) He is also of the Waray people from Leyte province, but is no stranger to Metro Manila having been a national legislator since his ruling-Kilusang Bagong Lipunan Party days in the Marcos-era Batasang Pambansa. What I mean to say in this paragraph is that I don't trust Sergio Apostol when he implies, as he did last August 24, that he can neither recognize Filipino as an official language (which he hadn't touched since his early days in the legislative halls) nor understand it very well. I, too, am a Waray, by the way.
But let's assume that Apostol speaks the truth, having myself been witness to Silliman University professors who could not speak/understand much Filipino, preferring to teach in English and sometimes in Cebuano. Riding that assumption would help us understand Apostol when he tried to revive at past 5 in the afternoon of August 24 the debate or national issue around Filipino as an official language. Apostol was demanding---in English---that Representative Arlene "Kaka" Bag-ao (Akbayan Citizens' Action Party) answer Apostol's interpellation, on the pending and controversial RH Bill, in English instead of in Tagalog/Filipino. Although at first the two lawyers argued over Filipino's current position as an official language, with Deputy Majority Floor Leader Magtanggol Gunigundo (Lakas Kampi CMD) insisting that it is an official language and presiding officer Maria Isabelle Climaco Salazar (Liberal) ruling that the parties can proceed in whatever language they choose to use, and with Apostol later threatening to demand an interpreter if Bag-ao does not relent, Bag-ao did finally agree to answer the interpellation in English. But not without Apostol's stance's being called deplorable by party list representative Antonio Tinio (ACT Teachers), which speech Apostol promptly rebutted in plenary session. (Read the ABS-CBN report here)

COINCIDENTALLY, an essay titled "Language, Learning, Identity, Privilege" by Manila Bulletin Newspaper Online writer James Soriano was posted, supposedly at 4:06 AM, also on August 24. The essay would get much more notice among Facebook aficionados than Apostol's rant, I'd say with about half of its readers agreeing with the author and the other half getting quite offended.
The essay presented (once again) the reality about the English language as that language used by the privileged class in our country. But yet also as the language of learning, and ironically too as the language most used by the country's media of education as well as the textbook/book/newspaper/magazine publishing industries. Ironically, I say, for isn't education presumably one of the state's activities geared towards socializing learning instead of propping up elitism on its social pedestal? The real situation of the Filipino language, on the other hand, was presented as that intra-social class everyday-medium of communication used in the streets and on free TV, but largely ignored by both the education system as well as by the law profession and the corporate boardrooms. There's another irony there, for isn't the legal practice meant to serve justice for all instead of justice for a privileged few? And do boardrooms really argue in English over their advertising materials in Tagalog? . . . There may be questionable entries in Soriano's essay: I'd say doctors and nurses in the operating room actually converse in Filipino or Taglish more than in English or Englog, but I'd also say the presentation was mostly quite right on the money, especially with lines such as "(Filipino) might have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the language of the learned". (Read the Soriano essay here)
My friend the painter Marcel Antonio was the first on Facebook I read to be in agreement with that essay's presentation of reality concerning our languages, even defending the essay as one that actually used the ironic stance with its doublespeak to those who he thought didn't get it. "This article, particularly the writer's unapologetic privileged positioning, will surely draw a lot of haters. What is scary, though, is he might actually be right," he wrote. Guerilla journalist and writer-editor Jenifer Aquino agreed that the essay was indeed a work of irony. "It's a sarcastic note that's meant to slap all the 'feeling elite' elements in this country. Ako gets ko ... yung iba, malamang hinde. . . . He's right," she wrote. "Just yesterday," the painter wrote back, "we were watching (Rep.) Mitos Magsaysay (Lakas Kampi CMD) berate Sec. (of the Presidential Communications Group) (Ricky) Carandang in the vernacular (during the hearing on the budget for his group); I imagine the rhetorical effect would be less if she argued in straight English. Mas may talas ang Tagalog, mas gusto natin ang bigat ng dilang kanto kaysa sa mala-coñong dila (that speaks Konyo or Coño English or Englog). . . . I'm hoping that you are right, Jen, that the sarcasm isn't lost on his readers. Sometimes I think most of us are not too appreciative of irony, much more various forms of sarcasm like understatement."
Allow me now to interpolate unto this manuscript of comments in the vernacular (that Rep. Apostol might deem abominable), Mitos Magsaysay-fashion. My view would lean towards an affirmation of Soriano's points in his web of irony.
But as regards Soriano's irony itself, ito ang masasabi ko riyan. Isa sa mga pinakamahirap i-handle ang irony. Si Alanis Morissette kinantyawan dahil di raw niya alam kung ano ang ibig sabihin ng "ironic" nung sulatin at kantahin niya ang kanyang awiting pinamagatang "Ironic". Muntik na rin di maisama sa In Utero album ng bandang Nirvana ang kanta nilang "Rape Me", dahil di raw klaro ang irony sa kanta, sabi ng mga execs ng DGC Records-Universal. Nakakatawa pa, nung makumbinsi ng banda ang mga executives na iyon, ni-release ang single CD ng "Rape Me" with a B-side song called "Moist Vagina". Ang tanga-tanga talaga. Wonder what the irony was in that. Ironic, di ba?

BUT let's get back to the main issue.
Let me focus on those guerrilla English words that are appropriated by an expanding education not based in the English language but in Tagalog/Filipino. Again, let me argue in the vernacular, Mitos Magsaysay-fashion:
Assuming this writer James Soriano was not being ironic but just being honest, tama ka, Marcel Antonio, ang final line ng article---"So I have my education to thank for making English my mother language"---is still right on the money. At kung ating aalamin at sisiyasatin, kahit ang mga Tagalogero na hindi Inglesero ay mag-a-agree na kailangang bigyan-pugay ang wikang Ingles. Ito ang matagal ko nang sinasabi sa mga kaibigan kong purists, na automatic nationalists daw by virtue of their purism, na ang totoo niyan, ang majority ng mga Pilipino sa Tagalog Luzon ay Taglish ang salita at di nila naiintindihan ang mga tula sa purong Tagalog ni Lope K. Santos. Ang labandera namin, maraming English words at phrases na ginagamit na galing TV at showbiz. Ang mga ka-banda ko sa Groupies' Panciteria ay hindi naman mga galing U.P. Conservatory of Music or U.P. Department of English, pero kumukunsulta ng mga tipa sa gitara galing sa mga websites ng buong mundo, at hindi ko pa sila narinig na nagsalita na wala man lang Ingles sa kanilang bawat pangungusap, kahit man lang sa mga simpleng tanong gaya ng "kuya Jo, may noodles ba tayo riyan?" Ibig sabihin, lahat ng tao rito sa bansa natin, nakakakuha ng edukasyon gamit ang mga salita ng English language. Pakinggan mo na lang si Ka Gerry Geronimo sa agriculture show niya sa TV, parang ako magsalita rito, nag-so-sow ng maraming seeds ng appropriation ng English words para sa Tagalog ng mga magsasaka ng kasalukuyan at ng future. Nakarinig ka na ba ng mag-aayos ng dingding niyo na Tinagalog pa ang concrete nail? Kung di ako nagkakamali, sabi ng makatang si Virgilio Almario sa isang preface o foreword ng isang Tagalog/Filipino - English dictionary, pag ang Ingles na salita ay ginagamit-gamit ng Tagalog na tao sa pananagalog niya, Tagalog word na rin iyon. Dati babaguhin natin ang spelling, tulad ng "driver" to "drayber". Ngayon, hindi na, especially na maraming girls dyan ang pumapara sa driver para maibaba sila sa corner. Ang mga bata sa elementarya ay binibigkas ang bagong alpabeto ng wikang Filipino thus: "a, b, c, d". Wala na ang dating "a, b, k, d".
Pero, on the other side of the coin naman, totoo ngang me mga may kultura na nagsasabi sa kanilang mga sarili na "mas superyor ako dahil marami akong alam na Ingles kesa sa mga tao sa kalsada".
Aktwali noon pa 'tong presumption ng superyoridad na 'to e. Noong panahon ng mga Espanyol, sabi nila, "mas superyor ako dahil mas marami akong alam na Espanyol kesa sa mga tao sa labas ng aming bahay na bato". Kung tutuusin, inferyor ang pananaw ng nagsasalita ng gayon dahil ininvade ang utak niya ng kulturang Espanyol. Ang indibidwal na nag-Tagyol o nag-Espanlog ang superyor, dahil siya ang kumuha ng makukuha niya sa mga lenguwahe na nakahain sa buffet ng kaalaman.
Kasi lahat naman ng languages may kanya-kanyang kakaibang yaman, maliban pa dun sa mga "talas" na unique sa kanila. Marami kang makukuhang kaalaman sa wikang Ingles. Gayun din sa wikang Tagalog/Filipino. Anong African language ba 'yon na may napakaraming tawag sa ulan, gayung sa Tagalog me buhos at ambon lang? Isa pang classic example ang Eskimo na may napakaraming salita para sa "snow" at "ice". Ayon sa isang writer ng Miller-McCune magazine sa kanyang report na pinamagatang "Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas": "This suggests language systems don’t merely translate universal ideas into different spellings; they encode different concepts. And when we lose a language, we risk losing those concepts." Kaya, bakit nga ba natin lilimitahan ang isang tao na gustong mag-aral ng as many words as he can keep in his skull's hard disk and who wishes to be able to use them in his daily grind as he speaks to the taxi driver? Unang-una, komunikasyon naman ang objective, di ba? Oo nga't di mo malelectyuran ang taxi driver tungkol sa metanarratives ng colonial literature, kahit purong Tagalog pa ang gamitin mo ("metanaratibo ng mga likha at literaturang kolonyal"), pero di ka lang maiintindihan hindi dahil wala siyang alam na Ingles kundi dahil hindi niya alam yang mga bagay na pinagsasasabi mo. Buti pa pag-usapan niyo na lang ang mga spark plugs na patok at ang iba't-ibang tread ng gulong, baka ilibre ka pa niya sa "flag-down fare" mo.
Kasi naman, labas sa Kongreso at sa broadsheet journalism, sa mga tao sa araw-araw---tulad ng mga tao sa mga airports---hindi isyu ang language. Ginagawa lang 'tong isyu ng mga ayaw makinig sa sinasabi mo.

NOONG August 26, naglabas ng parodic essay ang Singapore-based writer and blogger na si Kat Nisperos sa wikang "Bekimon" (baklang jejemon) o swardspeak sa kanyang Facebook Notes page. Kinontra nito ang gist ng essay ni Soriano by translating his essay to become his/hers. Read the essay here.
Do read, however, Nisperos' nota bene regarding his essay, which offered an apologia against judging Soriano's person and person-qua-social-symbol, quickly campaigning for a more magnanimous view, preferably one taking notice of a larger issue. Why the post-Note note?---I ask. Would it seem that there had been readers of Nisperos' essay who mistook his humor for being one by a deeply-offended voice? Ironic, di ba? Dahil isa raw sa mga rason ng pagsulat ni Nisperos ng essay na ito was to "put a lighter note on the entire issue, because too many personal attacks were being made against James".
Oo nga't kung pagbabasehan lang natin ang parody ni Nisperos ay tila di niya binasa ang essay ni Soriano bilang isang ironic take on an issue. But, nonetheless, his/her essay demonstrates amply well na maraming wika sa Metro Manila, at lahat ng ito ay sources of knowledge. Ang maraming niches dito, whether these involve population segments drawn around social classes, regional classes, various small groups, or whatever, are more diverse than we've come to expect. There are the jejemons that offend some. There are the pure Tagalog speakers that preach Iglesia ni Kristo gospel truths. There are the bus conductors with three-voweled Visayan accents that would forever be the butt of Manila sitcom and mahjong jokes.
But yet, Metro Manilans are deemed as belonging to one nation instead of as a compendium of mini-nations or intra-nations or nations within a nation.
Which should make us conclude, based on this fact alone, na tulad ng mga tao sa mga airports hindi nga dapat isyu ang language. Ginagawa lang itong isyu ng iilan dahil ayaw nilang makinig sa mga sinasabi mo, kahit ilang dekada na silang nakikinig sa wika ng mga tulad mo sa plenaryo ng cosmopolis.
(Oh, and kasama na rin do'n ang mga sinasabi ng wika ng Irony. At ng wika ng plain humor.) [END]

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ADDENDUM (September 2, 2011):
Tila ngang me irony sa essay ni Soriano, ito'y ayon sa kanyang bagong sanaysay dito: click dito. May mga di naniniwala. Nasaktan sa mga sinabi niya sa unang essay. Ganun kailap ang irony, ang claim sa irony, o ang absence ng irony na sabi ng ilan ay naroon. Pero sabi ko nga sa taas: "sa nakararami, hindi isyu ang wika. Ginagawa lamang itong isyu ng mga ayaw makinig sa sinasabi mo." Ano ba talaga sa palagay ninyo ang sinasabi ni Soriano? Ano ang sinasabi ninyo? Tila tatlo ang naging isyu: 1) ang Filipino language bilang simbolo ng bayan na sing-tatag sa puso tulad ng bandila o ng imahe ni Hesus ng Nazaret, 2) ang privileged class na tulad ni James Soriano kuno at ang pagkantyaw sa wika ng may wika, at 3) ang irony. Tapos na ang buwan ng wika. Setyembre na, ang pampitong buwan ayon sa mga Romano at sa astrolohiya. Subalit walang pumapansin sa pangalan ng buwan na ito, kahit narito na tayo sa Kalendas Januarius. Pa'no kasi, sa mga tao sa kalsada sa araw-araw, hindi isyu ang pangalan ng buwan. Ginagawa lamang itong isyu ng mga taong ayaw ng nasisinagan ng araw.
Subalit tila ngang me depekto sa depensa ni Soriano sa pangalawa niyang sanaysay. Dahil tila nalimita niya ang isyu sa dadalwang wika lamang, ang wikang English at ang wikang Filipino (o academically-expanded Tagalog). Sabi ko nga sa main essay ko sa taas, ang mas angkop na deskripsyon sa wika ng nakararami sa Tagalog Luzon ay Taglish. O sabihin na nating Tagalog pa rin. Ngunit hindi ito ang Tagalog na mababasa mo sa pangalawang sanaysay ni Soriano. Ito ang Tagalog na maririnig mo sa TV.

Another Lousy Day for Heroes?: A "Counter-Reification"

2011-08-29T06:31:00.011+08:00

ARE you still worth dying for? asked this poster that made the rounds of Facebook walls last August 21, a day commemorating the death of Benigno Aquino Jr. (better known to us all as Ninoy Aquino). Today as we celebrate National Heroes' Day, many of our dead heroes might have to flaunt a similar question, "Have you, whom we died for, been worth it?"

Let's zoom back in on Ninoy.

Beyond being just a nickname attached to an airport's name and behind its acronym, NAIA, Ninoy is also deemed a cult hero by many an admirer. Not just a national or political hero, but a cult hero, in the Greek hero cult sense, almost a saint in some Catholic people's minds, much like Elvis Presley is a cult figure to many at Graceland's gates who don't necessarily have any idea about Elvis's musical and socio-political significance when he exploded on the scene.

Now, in case you've been wondering, I started this blog because of an issue around the tag of heroism, specifically on Corazon Aquino. There was this dispute on film critic Noel Vera's own blogsite about whether Corazon should/could be called a hero, which question inspired me to put up this, my own opinion blog. Click here to read that blog post of mine.

I do not plan to end this blog any time soon, but I feel I need to come full circle today on that hero thing there. Full circle, because this time around our subject-persons shall also involve Corazon's husband, Ninoy. I hope I would be able to contribute my own five-hundred pesos worth into that above virtual poster's eternally-hanging question, with a focus on the issue of qualifying hero-ness, and attempt thus to once and for all chip in on a final definition.

In light of all the doubt regarding the fixability of this country of ours, I shall have to answer that question---"Are you still worth dying for?"---thus: To be inspired to continue, all you need to have, really, is a firm belief in an ideology and an outcome, perhaps inclusive of a people reacting to that ideology and outcome. For a man/woman will die for an ideology or a hobby or passion, never for a people devoid of a connection to that hobby or passion. So much so that a man/woman will die for a hobby even regardless of whatever reaction from a people, even regardless of an absence of people. To the human psyche, it's the ideologies and serious passions they carry that are always worth dying for, not a people, unless it's one's spouse or kids or kin or parent or a God.
It is possible that Ninoy, a student of history, was not being presumptuous about where the people would pick up from where he'd leave off should he die. It was just his "hobby," his passion, his science, his art, to want to be a liberator, regardless of a people's appreciation. The spurts of applause would have been a bonus. He was serving what was in his heart and mind, what was in his idea of the role he assigned to himself.

On the other hand, it is also possible that he had ideas of his death as the ultimate sacrifice for realizing his dreams, half-desiring it, in the same way that Jesus of Nazareth saw it was only through his martyrdom that the Christ movement of love could spread beyond Galilee into Asia Minor and onwards to defeat the Roman philosophy of conquest by Might, the same way that Gandhi thought British violence toward him might be the only way by which the world could finally realize British oppression was real. It is possible that Aquino desired a suicidal finish, perhaps aware of a hero's monomyth requiring a final heroic Return. Better die for a monomyth than merely a heart surgeon's report.

But, in these above persons' cases it would still be simplistic to carry the slogans "died for a people," "died for our salvation," "died for India," unless of course we believe them (especially Jesus of Nazareth) to be gods or demigods. These slogans may seem to us to serve our causes' heroes and icons, but these slogans actually ignore the psychological reality of what there was in it for our heroes too, which in the end denies them (and us) the possibility of the existence of their own "selfish" dreams. The reason we declare persons our heroes is not by reason of their being Heroes per se, in spite of us, it is because they carried the same torch we carried within our own "selfish" dreams and/or struggles, dreams and struggles these "heroes" were only able to translate into action or able to fulfill, action and fulfillment that the rest of us did not have the privilege or position or wherewithal or perhaps even full courage or full indifference to achieve.

The problem with simplifications like "died for his people" is it turns our heroes into emblems instead of symbols. Symbols are symbols of something, a cause, an ideology, a fight. Emblems are flags or seals the meanings of which are forgotten, becoming no more important than the blinding metanarrative of slogans used around a rationale for a fiesta budget allocation. In such a simplification, it is not a surprise to watch Ninoy become just Ninoy, a face, a color, during a holiday. It throws away his detailed dreams for us to the sidelines, dreams that we shared with many for our communities. It may even deny the fact that Aquino was aiming for a Christian socialistic formula for Philippine progress, a conscious or unconscious denial the conscious/subconscious intent of which is to reduce Ninoy to a corporate insignia on a shirt.

WE'RE all passionate about how not to trivialize the personas of our heroes, true. But we are often divided on which metanarrative to take in order to avoid the trivialization. My own possible anti-Greek Hero Cult metanarrative says people are made up of dreams---politicians, scientists, artists denounced by the Church, imperfect saviors, authors of insulting novels, and so on, their heroism all consisted of dreams. I'm saying it would be an offense to their personas to be reductivist, turning them into instances of our own Romantic metanarratives to become these perfect heroes, as if Saul Bellow's lovable returning antiheroes with blemishes had never come back to haunt late 20th-century literature. I'm saying I prefer remembering my heroes as people instead of as Raphaelite statues devoid of a realistic story.

Most people's one and only---for being the most popular---version of Ninoy Aquino is quite valid on paper and may even be the truth. Maybe Ninoy was indeed a freak of nature. It may seem sentimental to me and psychologically simplistic, but I'd respect this version of their hero. To me, however, Ninoy is a hero of a different vein, a hero of realism instead of Romanticism. This would be according to my own metanarrative which could be the reification in contrast to their truth. It may be that my version of Ninoy is wrong and theirs is right, and should that be, I am only human.

Be that as it may, my version of Ninoy would not be a version, for it shall not be linear as a single movie about him but more like diptychs of transparencies placed over each other, with other people's images intertwined with those of his, appearing and fading and reappearing in a dynamism of counterfactual histories. I've been told by my Philosophical Taoist faith that the greatest sin one could commit against God is to simplify him in a box. I avoid the same sin with my enemies, for war-art reasons. I'd certainly avoid it with my friends, with whom a familiarity could easily lead me to be judgmental over mistakes. But I'd especially avoid it in my appreciation of my heroes.

"Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great."---Mark Twain

MY main beef with the Romantic metanarrative is in its resultant effect of hyping up the heroism of vaunted figures while downplaying the heroism of others, especially the heroism of nameless middle- and lower-class efforts and martyrdoms. This metanarrative would look upon the vaunted heroism as a rarity, a god-like character placed in a few human receivers of a para-human gift. This appreciation is to me the intellectual and linguistic equivalent of assigning political royalism into certain niches of society and these niches' own people, which, in turn and ultimately, denies middle and lower classes of the possibility of having that same character of courage. This intellectual royalism, therefore, would easily imagine and convince itself that we ordinary Filipinos would not take the martyred path Ninoy took, were we given the same situation and privilege.

My counter-narrative would be that I daily see people around me taking their own modest "martyred paths." Modest paths of martyrdom or near-martyrdom, they may be, but martyrdoms nonetheless the modesty of which could anytime turn into martyrdoms of scale, depending on how history will take care of twists in its own plot via the volksgeist/zeitgeist phenomena of historical development. A scientific version looks upon Joan of Arc's story as one that started as an insane proposition, but one that historical necessity and political opportunism found a vehicle in for the mutual attainment of political success. The same with Hitler, whose little, demented anger started a runaway train to near-success and fateful infamy. In short, never underestimate the modesty or smallness of ordinary martyrdoms.

But people around us mostly take their own daily martyred paths not because they---or their managers---are consciously planning (them) to become martyrs or heroes, but just because it is in their self-assignations, what they think is their job or their duty or their role on Earth to do what they have to do. I don't mean political paths, I merely mean daily paths consisting of such mundane stuff as risking the majority's denouncement because it is in one's faith or belief or philosophy to do whatever it is one is about to do, risking one's job because what he plans to do is---according to his heart---his obligation and is the right thing to do, risking assassination because he has to fight his union's fight that needs to be fought, risking whatever else. Some of these ordinary risks do result in death, but one such death wouldn't be because of a suicidal plan, like the plan of secular martyrdom many Ninoy followers would like us to think Ninoy drew. The risks are taken just because they are what are in the heart at the moment of deciding the path, like the quick decisions we make upon modest passions, like the ones we choose to take with little serious hobbies. The deaths wouldn't be self-planned; in fact, in everyday martyrdoms, threats---whether of death or hunger or whatever---are ignored, because they are always deemed out of the question, laughable bits of information. They are mere unrealistic worries by the spouses. For, look, even the tabloids report daily of "heroic" deaths over little things, as with "Lalaki Nakipagtagaan Sa Karaoke Bar Dahil Lang Sa 'My Way'".

BUT, of course, it's the martyrdoms of corporate scale that we celebrate, and we would---in our hierarchy designs---award one persona a national hero assignation (number one), the others pigeonholed into a roster box consisting of secondary national heroes (still an exclusive roster), and yet more as mere 'heroes'. Macario Sakay is a mere virtual hero on the sidelines, not fit to be placed in the exclusive roster, for reasons anyone could easily muster.

That's why I prefer today's holiday name, National Heroes' Day, even as it fails to refer to which heroes it is celebrating. I would have preferred "Cry of Pugad Lawin Day," so to commemorate not an assignation to abstract referents but a collective act and will. Collective, I say, for a national heroes' day like today ought to be celebrating leaders of a communal heroism, with those heroes raised as prime symbols of a . . . well, a collective cause. Because, in our day, we've turned our heroes into emblems, good men unto themselves. Instead of being symbols of good leadership within a collective cause, they've become symbols of themselves.

This is reflected in our own support for our living politicians. We start by supporting a political figure who is standing for our fight, our cause, with us doing so because this hero of the moment is speaking our language and telling our story. Later in the day, especially once we are ourselves entrenched in modest positions within our hero's newly-won leadership, our stand for a cause quickly turns into a stand for the political figure himself, he who may have already left the original cause. We, in our turn, often consciously leave our original cause with our hero, or otherwise delude ourselves into believing our hero is still in the cause, . . . in effect turning that hero to be not the vehicle for a cause but himself and his holy persona as the new cause unto himself.

To repeat, in countries such as ours, heroes stop becoming symbols of a people, they become emblems of themselves. In front of these resultant icons, we proffer to society and offer that theirs alone have been the existing speech-cries of freedom, theirs alone the blood spilled worthy of a spotlight.

3
And so we have the polymath Jose Rizal who is that freak of nature, whose character level has been played up so much so that it can be deemed unattainable to the ordinary man, unattainable even to one placed in extraordinary situations. It would be impossible for the son of a fisherman from Samar to have similar poly-interests that could result in poly-expertise given some background of poly-privilege and poly-support.
I do not know how Che Guevara is taught in Cuban universities, but in the West, when people talk of Che Guevara they cannot escape quoting the Che's glorification of his people's courage, the people that he led and yet belonged with. But yet, in this probably unconscious Western strategy of empathizing with Che's popularity, Che also becomes a sneer object, for being the popular hero of a duped people and, as well, being no better than his fellows whose parallel courage he was merely a parasite of. Though his pretty face would be on the T-shirts of new bohemians from New York to Milan today, mainstream Western society would yet label this communist a cruel, vain villain who merely used the masses for an ambition. And so, in contrast, the heroes of Western countries and their Westernized nanny states (like ours) are placed not amidst the people but above them. In the case of Rizal and Ninoy Aquino, these are heroes portrayed as gods whose followers can only aspire to become. The followers are assured that they will never be those heroes of theirs, and worse, could never have been, even if they had already all this time been.
A musical by the progressive songwriter-composer Gary Granada opens with the song titled "Sino Ka Ba, Jose Rizal?" In this song alone, Granada depicts the alienation of Rizal's persona from the ordinary man's perspective, a result of years of success with the hyping up of Rizal's freak individuality that would elevate him to the level of an unreachable god. Meanwhile, when people sing a paean towards Ninoy Aquino with the slogan-line "hindi ka nag-iisa!," two levels of meaning explode on the table. The first level says, "you have followers in us, we are one with you, and will die for the country too." The next level says "you, like Jesus, are our unreachable savior who single-handedly fought our fight, and we worship you in return because of that sacrifice."
This attitude towards heroes not only denies heroic achievements their flaws, it makes a mockery of those achievements, a caricaturesque depiction of their development in sympathy with the people (and the people's own efforts), and finally provides a strategy upon a servile society that cannot be expected to save themselves or fight for themselves. This strategy has been feeding us with the lie, through our Heroes and the cult of personality, that we ordinary citizens have never really fought, never will, and will always be needing hero-demigods to perform their fateful monomyths upon us.
Again, that's why I prefer today's/tomorrow's holiday name, National Heroes' Day, even as it fails to declare which plurality of heroes it is celebrating. Again, I would have preferred "Cry of Pugad Lawin Day," so to commemorate not specific personalities of our imagination and their historical apotheosis but a collective act and will with their own counter-apotheosis for the record. But the Romantics won't give it to us on a platter, of course, and, in order to maintain that hidden class-driven linguistic and hegemonic version lording it over the concept of a singular hand called "the Hero," will always be ready to resist any form of counterfactual history upon It. [END]

Photo of Cry of Pugad Lawin Monument borrowed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pugad_Lawin_013.jpg
Photo of poster "Are you still worth dying for?" specifically borrowed from http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=p.274372495910046&type=1
Photo of Jose Rizal borrowed from http://www.antifornicator.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Jose_Rizal.jpg

Moving On, In Hindsight, and Predicting the Future of Art

2011-08-22T12:41:00.021+08:00

1. Moving forward, ano ba dapat ang artist?

IN TV host and social critic Lourd de Veyra's show on AksyonTV called Word of the Lourd, he tackled the recent brouhaha over an installation art displayed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, a brouhaha instigated by the media and taken up mainly by devotees of the Catholic faith. My distant cousin, whom I constantly applaud with much aplomb on this his show, implied a preference for "moving on", however, which caught my questioning attention. He intimated that the country has bigger problems to tackle than this, this being an issue in art, that field far removed from the concerns of mainstream society.

I do not mean to judge or make assumptions about my cousin's stance or stand on the issue itself, pero "Let's move on" ang operative formula na ina-apply ng marami nating kababayan sa mga isyung hindi natin nareresolba/mareresolba o di kaya ayaw nating resolbahin.

Sinasabi ko ito dahil, sa isang perspektibo, may mga facet ng isyu akong nakikita kung saan puwede kang mag-apply ng resolusyon. Hindi rin ako sang-ayon na nagkakamali ang media tuwing tinutuligsa o tsinitsismis nito ang "maliliit" na bagay na hindi pinapansin ng masa, dahil ang mga journalists, tulad ng mga tsismoso, ay may kani-kanyang political agenda o socio-educational mission base sa kanilang mga kultura at bias.
Off the bat, isipin natin ang isang facet nitong isyu. Ang tanong: ang exhibition bang ito ay magiging malaking isyu ng journalismo at intelligentsia tungkol sa estado kung ito ay hindi state-sponsored art o kung hindi man ay art na dinisplay sa isang state-sponsored venue? Kung ito'y dinisplay sa Ayala Museum, mag-rarally lamang ang mga deboto laban sa mga Ayalas, di ba, at ang mga Ayalas at Zobels lamang ang magiging isyu.
Oo nga't maraming malalaking problema. Pero isa din do'n ang problema ng attitude ng estado towards institutionalized religion. Isa din do'n ang problema ng pagdedesisyun nito sa kung saan dapat tinatapon ang pera ng bayan at sa kung saan hindi dapat. Panahon na na ang isang liberal na gobyerno ay magsabi na ang pera ng estado ay hindi dapat nakikialam sa paggawa ng art. Panahon na na ang artist ay hindi maging artist na boses ng estado kundi artist ng sarili niyang pagkatao bilang indibidwal o miyembro ng isang niche ng lipunan.
As a corollary argument, kung censorship din lang ang pag-uusapan, may karapatang i-censor ng estado ang anumang art na pinagawa ng pera nito. Even after the fact of the artmaking.

OO NGA. Bumisita si dating First Lady Imelda Marcos, ang asawa ng dating diktador na si Ferdinand Marcos, sa CCP exhibition, at ang ngayo'y isa nang Representative ng House of Representatives ay naglabas ng kanyang pagkamuhi sa nasabing artpiece.
Pero, in relation to Imelda's oft-quoted slogan "the true, the good and the beautiful", coming as it seems from the perspective of a royalist ideology, tingnan naman natin ang sarili nating mga konsepto ng truth, goodness at beauty from our own respective contending ideologies. I-iimpose din ba natin ang atin sa bayan? Sasabihin din ba natin sa tao na magbayad sila ng buwis para masustentuhan natin ang mga art at artists na may bersyon ng ating truth, ng ating goodness, ng ating beauty ayon sa ating ideology? Kung oo ang sagot natin, ano ngayon ang pagkakaiba natin kay Imelda?
Bilang isang social liberal at isa ring kritiko ng Roman Catholic policies at dogma, dapat akong magdiwang sa tapang ng artist na si Mideo Cruz at ng mga art sponsors niya. Subalit ayokong gawin ang ginagawa sa akin ng mga kalaban ko. Dahil forever bang pag-aagawan ang CCP at National Commission on Culture and the Arts ng mga ideologies? O, in the US' case, forever bang pag-aagawan ang National Endowment for the Arts ng mga liberals, conservatives at Tea Party-ites? Ano kaya kung itumba na lang natin ang mga pinag-aagawan na 'to. Kung tayo, bilang mga social liberals o progressives man, ay nakikiagaw kay Imelda, ang stalwart ng Philippijne royalist ideology, wala tayong pinagkaiba sa kanya. Pare-pareho tayong gustong magdikta ng ating estetiko sa buong bansa.
Dahil bagamat ako ay isang liberal, alam ko rin na ang liberals ay hindi ang buong bayan. Kung ang ating asta ngayon ay, "kaming mga liberal ang hari ngayon, hawak namin ang CCP ngayon, kami ang masusunod, art namin ang masusunod", aba huwag tayong magrereklamo kung sa mga darating na taon na si Bongbong Marcos naman ang presidente, ay sabihin niyang "o, mga royalist na naman ang may hawak ng CCP ha, art naman namin ang masusunod. Back off kayo." (This is assuming, of course, that Bongbong Marcos won't surprise us with a future sudden reconfiguration of his person from being a defender of his father's record to being a real champion of the masses and the country's coffers' integrity and strength, should that be possible.)
"Raise the banner of liberalism in order to attack it, and advance fanaticism, and ask people to become Pilosopong Tasyo. LOL," the novelist and activist Ninotchka Rosca proposed on Facebook regarding this possibility.
I'm okay with that. The eternal struggle of raising banners is fine with me. Even hundreds of years of war might be fine with me. Even a state of civil war might be acceptable to me. Still and all, I'm still against state sponsorship of the arts and the arts profession. On this issue, at least, I'm one with Newt Gingrich. LOL.
But yet, be aware that many Republicans don't exactly want the NEA abolished. They just want it governed by conservatives who would put up evangelical art.

2. In hindsight, what is art, who is it for, at ano ang matalinong art?

STRANGE THAT in novelist F. Sionil Jose's philSTAR.com column titled Hindsight, he would have had the opportunity to get a "perfect view in hindsight" (two weeks after the controversial CCP exhibition opened) and yet came up with nothing original, nothing different from what the protesters against the exhibition had to say (were continuing to say). In short, it was as if Jose was out with it merely to announce on which side he was, and taking the case of the protesters instead of the exhibition's supporters' side (or the supporters of the exhibition's rights' side) at least in the query area of whether the exhibited installation art was art or not. He clearly voiced his support for the protesters through the title of his column article, "The CCP Jesus Christ exhibit: It ain't art".

Ahem. Okey. Mga kaibigan, naalala ko tuloy.

Isang araw kasi noon, nagpatugtog ang kaibigan kong FM radio deejay ng Pearl Jam grunge sa radyo nila, kaya tanong ng station manager niya, "ba't yan ang pinapatugtog mo? Mawawalan tayo ng listeners nyan." What did my friend do? Did what was expected of him, played the '70s folk-rock band America's "A Horse with No Name" followed by James Taylor's "Your Smiling Face". "Yan ang rock," sabi ng station manager. Pagdating ng dapithapon, nag-inuman kami ng kaibigan ko at buong gabi naming tinalakay ang definition ng rock music. Napunta kami sa new wave music, kung saan chinallenge ang idea ng pagka-rock nang walang electric guitar, at sa kung saan-saang dako pa ng genrefication. Kinaumagahan, nung ako'y magising sa aking hangover, isa lang ang na-realize ko. May isang milyong definition ng rock music. Pero nakatulog lang uli ako, at doon naman sa dako ng aking paglalakbay habang tulog, napaniginipan ko si Prof. John Lennon na minumura ang estudyanteng si Kurt Cobain. Sabi niya, "ano ba yang pinaggagagawa mo, Cobain? Pakinggan mo ang 'Woman' ko. Ganyan gumawa ng kanta, okey?" Uhm, pa'no ba alisin ang hangover? Uminom na uli ng isa pang bote pagkatapos sumuka? Parang ganon nga yata. Uh, you were saying?
Where was I? Ano bang argument pa ang sasabihin ko sana? Oh, yes. Sabi ng isang Facebook friend of a friend, "Unfortunately, the intolerant side won't even let you finish a sentence by instantly pushing the usual 'shut up', 'bobo', 'bastos', or, worse, the 'gaba-an' threat as well as death threats." Tuloy ng kaibigan ng kaibigan ko, "It baffles me how anyone can just throw the word 'bobo' around when you need several intelligence tests to accurately come up with a conclusion. Even then you need to establish if these tests are culture-fair pa, and then there's EQ vs IQ . . . "
Where was I? Oh, yes. Sa bus nung isang gabi, sumakay ang isang barkada ng mga estudyanteng high school. Ang lalakas ng boses! Sabi ng isa, "si ma'am yun." "Gago, hindi si ma'am yun," sabi naman nung isa. "Si ma'am yun, bobo." "Ulol, kitang-kita ko ng mga mata ko, gago ka ba?" "Tarantado ka," sabi ng isa, sabay batok sa kaibigan habang sila'y nagtatawanan, "hindi ako gago, 'no. Alam ko ang hitsura ni ma'am, tanga ka pala e." . . . Mahabang kuwento 'to, pero sa madaling salita, dumating din sila sa kanilang paroroonan, silang maiingay na mga gago, at wala namang nagalisan o nasabunutan ng buhok. Buti pa ang mga high school, sabi ko sa sarili ko, pag gumagamit ng mga salita galing sa social science, walang intolerance. Lahat ng "bobo", "gago" at "tanga" ay "kaibigan".
But, to be fair, Jose never used the word "stupid". Instead, he only used the words "immature", "juvenile", "ridiculous", and phrases like, "lack imagination", "don't think hard enough", among other implied hellfire of judgmental language.
Hanggang dito na lang ba ang usaping ito? Sa side ni Jose o ng kanyang kinikilingan ay ang truth o artistic truth, at ang kabilang side ay ang kabobohan? The name of the Truth, the Good, the Beautiful . . . Amin?
Ang sinasabi pa ni Jose, ang artwork installation art daw dito sa exhibition in question ay copied art, lacking in imagination or originality. A gimmick, then! And should go back to the drawing board.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Isang gabi, nag-daydream ako na isa akong critic na kelangan me sulatin. Di ko alam saan ako magsisimula. Ah, biglang sabi ng epiphany area ng aking utak, may titirahin akong mga derivative art. Ewan ko kung ano ang nangyari, pero napunta ang panaginip ko sa pinagsasasakmal ko ang isang derivative art sa di ko alam na dahilan. Oo, hindi ko alam ang dahilan. Hindi ko alam. Ang alam ko lang, wala akong sinabi sa sangkaterbang iba pang derivative art, o sa sarili kong derivative art. Para akong tambay sa kanto na may nakursunadahang iisa lamang, at di ko alam ang dahilan.
Now, it may be that no one's awaiting my opinion on this or that anybody even reads any of my opinions in this blog, but let me just clarify to those who have stumbled into this that, in contrast to Mr. Jose's unclarified position, I'm neither on the side of the Church of Caiaphas (which is what I've come to call the Catholic Church authorities' temple of corrupt behavior) nor on the side of the sons of Christian aniconism. I'm just a man on a bus petting a historical hangover.

PARDON MY attempts at wit. Wit is a play/movie about cancer.
I mean, God forbid the Gabâ (instant or imminent bad karma). Or death threats. And so I say to you, to Christians like myself (cafeteria Christian though I am) there ought to be no death, no darkness, no end. And yet we put out with holy water the fire we stoke for Joans of Arc? Nakaka-puzzle ang death threats (o ang mga tipong death sentences ng Opus Dei sa mga nobela ni Dan Brown hahaha), dahil dapat hindi parusa ang sickness o death sa Christian philosophy. Ito kaya ay patunay lamang na maraming Christian gurus kuno ang walang pakialam sa mga turo ng kanilang hero?
"Sana gaba-an kayo," sigaw ng mga deboto, gayung sabi ng kanilang hero, "love your enemies." Tama nga naman si Hero. Di ba't ang iprinopose nya noong thesis ay ang anti-thesis sa Roman philosophy ng Might? Sabi ni Hero, hindi Might for Might, kundi Love ang magpapatumba sa kaharian ng Tatay ni Caligula.
Pero tila mali ang metaphor natin dahil lalabas dito na ang iilang iconoclasm ngayon ay gawa ng mga pagano at "Romano" ng ating panahon. Di ba't si Hero mismo ay ang iconoclast ng Judaismo ng kanyang panahon? "Wala akong pakialam sa sinasamba nyong Templo ng kabuktutan," tila sabi niya noon, "itutumba ko yan at papalitan ko sa loob ng tatlong araw."
Dapat na nga yatang tumbahin ang CCP ng "Caiaphas-approved art lamang ang puwede at ipapako sa krus ng media ang susuway." Itayo muli ang "templo ng tao at ng puso" na hindi gawa ni Imelda kundi ng bawat simpleng bato sa kanto! At dapat hindi ang The Rock ang punong-kritiko!

PARDON MY attempts at wit. Dahil sasabihin lang ng mga deboto, aha! ang witty sa sineng Wit ni Mike Nichols ay namatay sa cancer, buti nga. Gabâ. Ang isa pang friend of a friend na nag-witty mimic sa exhibition art na pinag-uusapan natin dito ay biglang na-ospital dahil sa isang pamamaga sa mukha. Isang supporter ng exhibiting artist in question ang isinugod sa ospital ang anak. Well, let me say this. Lahat ng tao---may sabihin man laban sa Simbahan o wala---ay nagkakasakit o namamatay. Kaya nagtataka ako kung bakit itunuturing na Gabâ ang sickness at death, lalong-lalo na ng mga deboto na dapat ay unang nakakaalala sa mga turo ng kanilang martir na nagpakamatay.
Should this attitude towards Gabâ or retribution among the Church's faithful to be viewed as a koan cum puzzling paradox, Christianity's history being replete---as I said---of a constant burning of its own people whom it would later pronounce as its saints? Jesus of Nazareth himself, let me repeat, was an iconoclast at Caiaphas' Church.

PARDON THE depth of my subtext. My bad. History makes bad ad copy. Unless, of course, its strategy is to provoke questions. And my friend, the veteran journalist-activist Sylvia Mayuga, says there's good news about the CCP. That "things are changing as we speak; issues are being clarified, starting with ourselves." Well, remains to be seen in what direction of defining goodness it has chosen to move on towards. For putting aside my usual contention against the state's role in supporting art-making activities beyond museums and libraries maintenance, let me cite an example of an ill-advised direction from my point of view.
A friend of Mayuga's echoed and reiterated lines of argument coming from those whose moral standpoint have been offended by the art in question.
"Freedom is not absolute . . . carries with it a sense of responsibility," says one recurring line. This is true, and that is the reason why we have laws, statesmen, legislators and lawyers on the one hand and warlords and assassins on the other. The "one hand" as well as "the other" provide society with the parameters, the "one hand" with the letter and/or wisdom of the law and the state, the "other hand" with violent/death threats.
And, true, the artist must have a sense of responsibility. But firstly a responsibility to himself and his cause, be it the cause of evangelical art, Marian art, punk art, bad art, or whatever. Restraint must be, but in fact is, part and parcel of the process of art-making wherein decisions of what to include and what not to include are a constant. But the question now is: who should nudge an artist's propensity to allow excess or shyness, himself or the state? Who shall have the post of the measurer of excess or non-excess? Him? Me? You? Your mother? F. Sionil Jose? The Pope? The majority? The minority? The individual? That is the question.
"Junk art is no art," true. Unless your art is "junk art" (subgenre of "found art"), which---after the conscious self-labeling or admission of the label---might qualify an art genre category assignation unto itself, and thus to be read according to its elements. It escapes Jose that in the same way the sonnet is its own art enjoyed differently from the way one enjoys the art of the novel, so installation art is itw own niche art different from the elements of craft-driven painting. So, abstract expressionism or minimal art are their own painting genres with concerns different from the concerns of photo-realism. This, in the same way that noise rock is an artistic musical genre with elements separate from and independent of the standards of easy-listening Bing Crosby. So, therefore, the question now is: Who shall be appointed to the post of being the measurer of "artful"-ness and "artless"-ness? Critics? Artists themselves, as their own best critics? Me? You? Your mother? F. Sionil Jose of PEN International? The Pope? Catholics? The Opus Dei? Protestants? Gnostics? Agnostics? Aniconists? Engineers? Psychiatrists? Haute cuisine chefs? Manicurists? That is another question.
"Ethos" and "merit" were words flagged down by Mayuga's friend. But these concepts shall forever be debated on the surface of the earth as well as in the bunkers, and liberals and conservatives (in society and in art) shall forever be at each other's throat. Bearing this in mind, one can now go out into the day and clearly decide on his responsibilities---firstly to his faith, to his politics, or to his art.
Well, okay, some others would say firstly to the state, to the majority, or to his death-threatened family, but I would leave that to the bearer of his own mind who, in the end, will have to make up his own mind, . . . whether he decides on his responsibilities at the point of a gun or the point of a resolved point.

I HAVE always been of the belief that free society has encumbered the individual with responsibilities that go with his freedom. The individual has to exercise his sense of measure in his quest for survival within the laissez-faire traffic of thoughts and decisions and actions in the social environment consisting too of others' freedoms. And so, in this society, responsibility readily resides in the individual. However, the state, for as long as it subscribes to the tenets of democracy that seek to protect the freedom of the individual, would have enacted laws that affirm as well as protect the equal freedoms of each one. Thus, freedom of expression, thus freedom of religion, and so on and so forth. Ideally in a free society, a society such as what the United States' laws and many European countries' laws seek to maintain, the state only interferes when an exercise of one's freedom hinders another's. For instance, one may deem it his right to cross any part of the highway at any time of the day, which may in turn hinder vehicle owners' right to a free-flowing highway devoid of potential human roadkill. The state would, and often does, interfere in such simple problematiques. However, when one spits on the name of a religion or a religious practice without hindering that religion from exercising its freedom to exist, it should be a no-brainer that the state cannot and must not interfere. Thus, the UK did not find it difficult to say that Salman Rushdie, who many Moslems deemed insulting, had the right to insult, even as the state did not share his "insult" (many mosques are allowed to exist in England).
And so now, we go to a suggestion to put up authority bodies akin to the Union of Soviet Writers passing judgment on the oppressive words of the Alexander Solzhenitsyns of our place and time. Regulation of artistic practice is being peddled as an attractive notion. Does this notion negate the ideal of a free society? I believe it does.
True, when I agreed above that individual freedom does have its responsibilities, I did not only mean to allude to such Karl Popperian dictums on an open society as the individual's duty to be aggressive with his opinions while always on the ready to accept his obsolescence, I also meant to allude to the individual's sense of measure, restraint, and other social considerations. This sense may include such choices as civility, giving the other space to save face, avoiding provoking emotional limits, and so on. But in no way was I implying that I'd be in on the idea of forming authority bodies to police individual freedom. Thus my question, "who will decide for the individual, your mother?"
The Union of Soviet Writers was one such "collegial body" as some have suggested for the Philippine democratic environment. It was appointed by the state to police individual writers. But it was perfectly understandable for the Soviet Union to come up with that, because the then-Union's concept of democracy was not intended for the individual but only for the collective. I, as a poet and fiction writer and blogging critic as well as a citizen of this republic, spit on the idea of any Philippine collective or committee deciding for the individual. Certainly we have fellow artists and fellow citizens as well as critics and self-appointed critics on blogs who have been given by the state their own freedom to denounce and malign an artist, but the denounced artist's own rights cannot be trampled on by their own respective freedoms.

OH YES, certainly there is that other option in a free society that is also mentioned as an ultimate course of action for those who've been offended by the CCP exhibition. Yes, indeed, there is always that option for legislators to turn the state into freer atmospheres or less free atmospheres.
In the United States, for instance, some Republicans have been demanding that the state sponsor evangelical prayers in public schools as well as the putting up of statues by stalwart evangelical leaders of the pioneering era in public school campuses. That is certainly going in the direction of more freedom for evangelical devotees at the expense of Moslems, Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, and so on, who are themselves paying their taxes to the state. Do states do this kind of stuff at all? Yes, they do this all the time. And that is why there is always a see-saw of leaderships in the history of democracies, also because of citizens' demand for either more freedom or less freedom for others as time progresses or regresses. In our own state and time, for instance, we do not allow the freedom of the pornographer to exercise pornography, at least on paper. We do not recognize homosexuals' right of access to civil marriage. But at the same time, we have other freedoms that other democratic states don't have. Hundreds of barangay governments allow dog owners to turn our streets into canine toilets. Local peanut butter manufacturers are not policed by aflatoxin level guidelines. Philippine companies are allowed to discriminate against jobseekers by reason of their sex, religion or age.
And so it is up to us as a nation of citizens, either by plurality voting perhaps or by the power of reason and mutual respect decided on and trickled down by a representative democracy, to decide whether we want more freedom or less freedom in certain areas of our social existence and co-existences. Many do demand more "order", as some of those anti-CCP exhibition guys would put it, while many others also demand more freedom, recognizing perhaps that there is (or can be) order in the plurality of voices in our land. While some of the latter would allow that they might consider the requirements of civility in criticality, others are firm in their conviction that even such exercises as aniconism, iconoclasm and even downright artistic insults in art have a place in an ideal democracy.
Again, it is up to us as free individuals cum collectives of a free nation and open society to decide now whether we wish to diminish or expand our neighbor's roster of freedoms. And ponder, likewise, the consequences of any reduction or regulation.

NOW, CERTAINLY I could not avoid mentioning above the notion of violence and death threats resorted to as options by certain individuals in our society. For the very reason that THESE WERE RESORTED TO in the case of Mideo Cruz by certain apologists, I believe, of the Roman Catholic Church. Some say these threats were an Opus Dei crusade's signature, others say these were merely prank calls by Cruz's personal enemies. Whatever they were, they were there, and to assume---among those claiming they are bashing Cruz's art alone---that these external dynamics are not part of the art is precisely to go back to the New Criticism belief in the integrity of the artwork ("what pertains only to the artwork") independent of the social space it inhabits or invades. But while this independence is often called forth for a judgment of the artist qua artist, those guys contradict themselves by calling in such writings as a George Steiner essay on literature, society and the inhuman or such lines as those from Albert Camus on moderation and excess, calling these good discourses on the "reach of literature" and "(by extension, art)". Incidentally, if I remember my Camusian and Sartreian existentialism correctly, wasn't it a philosophy that tried to throw responsibility back to the individual away from the state and moral authorities? Wasn't Camus' The Fall a portrait of one such moral authority in the process of questioning his own morality?

"WHAT'S THE bottomline?" the friend of my friend asked. "If we're to establish limitations on art and its expression, why? Is it at all possible to simplify matters into pros and cons/cost-and-benefit analyses? Are our fears and concerns about not putting limits on expression valid or not?"
"May cons siyempre, pare," sabi ko. "If you're pro-X you're bound to hear extreme pronouncements against your stand by the anti-X and pro-Y. But the pros of an open society outnumber the cons. No one will stop you from putting out your own pronouncements against the stand of the anti-X and pro-Y. Most important of all, while it is hard to listen to the outbursts of a position in conflict with yours, it is far harder to live in a place where we keep each other from talking."
Let me put up this proposal, I continued. What if we follow our other friend's suggestion and start applying that on Facebook, wherein a committee will have to review all opinions bordering on insults before one can press the Enter key. You want to try that experiment? Okey ako do'n. But we should all be ready with the consequences. There will be a struggle to occupy seats in that committee, and God knows where it might all lead. Northern Ireland? Constantinople once again?
"What I don't get here is why these lawmakers are putting more stock in prosecuting someone who supposedly 'hurt' sensibilities, totally overlooking the fact that somebody else actually threatened his life, destroyed property, and attempted to commit arson---what if the CCP burned to a crisp because of what he did? So it's perfectly understandable for people to threaten someone's life, maybe even take his life and burn his property if 'sensibilities' are offended?"
Yan ang problema sa batas na yan na nagsasabing di mo puwedeng insultuhin ang anumang relihiyon, habang binibigyan natin ang relihiyon ng karapatan na insultuhin ang sinumang indibidwal, sabi ko. Ang isa pang problema dyan, wala akong alam na legislator na hindi beholden sa relihiyon at sa hatak ng boto ng institutionalized religion. Kung meron man, iilan ang sasama sa kanya sa pagpanukala na ibasura ang may kiling na batas na ito?

3. Art from now on, ano ba?

WE ARE all Barthes.
But first, my friend the painter Marcel Antonio is right, the artist has the responsibility to manage the contextualities and impending contexts of his art, even---or specially---when the artist intends a free contextualization of his imagery vis a vis a plural or potentially antagonistic society. We might recall the machinations of absurdist plays, which---while they pronounced the absurdity of existence---yet structured themselves in order to communicate those absurdities, in essence negating absurdness by packaging absurdities in consumer-friendly tetra paks of orderly categorization. Some absurdists were aware of that contradiction.
Yet Mideo Cruz is also right in saying he can't control the audience, taking---I'd like to think---after Roland Barthes' extremist (?) assumption that each man reads a thing differently or that a man can read a thing in various different ways at various different times. Still, Marcel might still ask Mideo, "did you intend to control the audience in the first place?"
I know where Marcel is coming from. We might take as an example the marketing of CDs or movies. A US version of a rock star's album would be tweaked to include another song in exchange for a removed song for its UK release. A band would refuse to play a popular song of theirs in certain areas of the world for reasons sometimes only privy to their managers and promoters. A Filipino movie that premiered in LA might be retitled and resubtitled for Cannes. In short, artists or their managers do manage contexts or impending contexts.
Still, Mideo by Barthes would be right, for managers are sometimes surprised when their tweakings result in more controversy rather than the pacific atmosphere their engineering minds expect to find.
So, what does this Mideo Cruz affair finally give us as a final context?
Let us consider the old New Criticism approach to the artwork as integral to itself removed from the authority of the artist. Think, for example, what might have happened had Cruz died of dengue after putting up the artwork without anybody except CCP authorities knowing about this departure. Certainly we would still be screaming for the artist's explanation, placing that absence in the context of the art. Later, we may become aware of the artist's demise. We would then find ourselves recontextualizing the art with that outside "old/new" reality attached: with, say, the artist's "death as gabâ" context, for one.
Yet others might crop up, shouting celebratory slogans, declaring Cruz a hero of aniconism or even an inspiration to the ire of Islamic terrorists who do not read the Qur'an and dismiss all Christian icons as imageries of the infidel. Cruz would not be there to announce his distance from any such cause.
Could Cruz's constant refusal to answer intent part and parcel of his art? Is he feigning ignorance in order to test the extent of the Filipino audience's ability to weigh things? Is he being a pollster-artist? We don't know.
Whatever the artistic intent, what does this affair finally give us as its final context as it evolves in the culture and zeitgeist of our land and amidst our people's minds?
To me and my humble semiotics, it is finally a test on our democracy. It goes beyond mere questions of taste that say, "punk rock is just noise and Bing Crosby is real music" or "this is bad art and Marian art is the pinot noir of Philippine artistic achievements." It asks, furthermore, questions on the role of icons in Philippine Christian worship, the role this worship plays in Philippine state laws, and the state of Philippine politics today in relation to religious hegemonies. That is to me the final achievement of Cruz's work. It could be that he didn't intend that, but like you and me, who in this debate had been interested in what the artist wanted to say?
We are all Barthes.

NOW, WAY before Barthes was born (1915) there was Marcel's namesake, Marcel Duchamp. A urinal is supposedly bad art, mundane boring item. Put that in a gallery, however, and it becomes poetry ("Fountain", 1917).
Barthes proposed that the mind has its own galleries. Like Duchamp, we can pick any bad art or ugly art or tramp art and turn that into brilliant art according to the reading of our mental galleries' considerations.
I wouldn't, for example, be surprised if Barthes announced this imagery above as illustrative of the Catholic Church's crucifixion of the penis on top of the Christ (albeit the penis is now hard as wood) in the Church's present campaign for abstention and against masturbation. The Christ, meanwhile, while used as cross is further miscast as behind all this penile crucifixion.
Nor be surprised if Barthes is to invoke a feminist take on the image as representing institutionalized Christianity as that phallic, male-centric movement for gender mainstreaming. Which, incidentally, was what Cruz---in an online magaizne interview---actually said was what the artpiece was all about.
But Barthes is his own Barthes, separate from the Barthes in the artist. Many of our Catholic friends are a different collective Barthes altogether, with their own take on things. Thus their declarations of wanting to take over the state and barricade the bill of rights for their rewriting, towards the reification of their metanarrative.

WHILE WE'RE on Barthes, I'd like to call attention to his The Pleasure of the Text, wherein he made an effort to demonstrate a way by which reading can escape both the clutches of the vicious Left and the bourgeois Right. His vehicle of choice? Hedonism. Further, in A Lover's Discourse, he sought to come up with rhetoric that would veer away from socially-dictated meanings. He would essentially fail in both of these efforts, however, in the same way that Mideo Cruz (assuming he's also on this same path) failed to extricate himself from social contexts in a punk-like hedonistic immersion in supposedly "socially freed" image-making.
Still, the point is not so much in the success or failure of the effort. It is in the effort, which by itself presupposes the existence of social dictators of meaning from which one seeks to escape. The furor over the effort only braced the point of that hegemony's existence.

A FRIEND of several friends commented, "I'm getting tired of this whole Brouhaha! Couldn't people just get a life?"
To which I said, "I wish the continuing furor over the artwork (yet for exhibition elsewhere) by some Catholics and media personnel would listen to you and leave art alone to exercise its freedom to 'blaspheme' anything and anyone. But, no, they had to help art get a boost and a new life in the popular stream by being our talent manager and designing this 'scandal'. They could've just ignored the artpiece and enjoyed Mompo wine with pesto bread and Parmiggiano-Reggiano cheese, after which they might have had all the time to have siesta before the next Day of Obligation mass to be attended by the mayor's daughters."
Another friend of a friend of a friend, meanwhile, said, "The artist is mad at Christianity. There's a sure sign that it's in his system."
To which I offered, "I cannot speak for the artist but I can speak for my own reading of the artwork, as only I could and perhaps should for those interested. For there is such a thing as 'aniconism in Christianity', in contrast to aniconisms elsewhere, which therefore makes it not an extra-Christian attitude but one which had been at work within Christianity. Its manifestations is most remembered in Early Christianity before 325 AD, in the Byzantine iconoclasms of the 8th and 9th centuries (730-787 AD and 814-842 AD), in 16th cenutry Calvinism, and in 16th and 17th century Puritanism, but is definitely present in our century most notably in Christian Fundamentalism. It might be more apt to say the artwork is 'mad at Christian imagery, especially Catholic imagery'."
Now, assuming this reading of mine (one of a few other readings I could muster) jives with the artist's own intent, what now?
It's about time artists wake up to the reality bite of The Death of the Author, if they haven't already. That death can be for real, without being literal. Because art from now on shall be that struggle between the artist's silence outside of his art and the collective audience's noise within their own metanarratives.

F. Sionil Jose photo borrowed from http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=716740&publicationSubCategoryId=79
Art installation fragment photo borrowed from http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2351116256560&set=a.1142395559298.22078.1209724241&type=1

Aquino's and Everyone's Lacuna

2010-09-29T10:05:00.014+08:00

THE NOYNOY AQUINO administration’s opponents had had quite a field day during the week of the Manila hostage crisis of August 23 and the week after. Apparent current spokesman for Gloria Arroyo’s presidency, Elena Bautista-Horn, released the most glorious claim no one else had had the daring for—that the bungled assault wouldn’t have happened had Arroyo been president. As for the Aquino party’s $54 hotdog lunch in Washington, she said, “That may be good for keeping travel costs low. For our part, we kept the number of hostage deaths down.” Never mind the beheadings in Mindanao, the disappearances the police couldn’t solve, the apparent executions in Quezon City by a police team, the internally and externally disputed police report on the Glorietta mall explosion, the Lakas Kampi CMD-Zaldy Ampatuan-Alberto Agra connection, among many other police- or DILG-related puzzles, during Arroyo’s watch. Never mind those, because those aren’t the point. Or are they? Should they be?

photo borrowed from Inquirer.net

Horn's claims are not surprising. In fact, Horn's attacks are the kind of attacks we should expect from the Arroyo party hereon in, to the next senatorial and presidential elections. You see, any “mistake” the present government is perceived by popular wisdom (or by broadcasters Erwin Tulfo or Mike Enriquez) to have made will be exploited by the current opposition as material for the propaganda war of politics, especially so as most people in government today and from the recent past put premium on political gains over governance. The aim of such voices as Horn’s is simple: get Lakas Kampi CMD back into the game and help it become the ruling party once more in the 2013 elections, and especially in the elections of 2016. The job, therefore, is to portray the Aquino government as inexperienced, inept, and whatever else popular wisdom would allow. If the sound bites accumulated are to prove not enough propaganda artillery for the coming campaigns to service such new warfront voices as Popoy Lagman’s Lakas-leaning brother’s, then just you wait—the Lakas Kampi CMD machine will patiently keep watch.

And, lest you think it’s all going to be an exciting exchange concerning principles, well, it’s not really going to be that kind of battle, though everyone has principles (good and/or bad). It’s just going to be primarily a battle of propaganda sound bites, as I said. An example is Edcel Lagman’s complaint that Aquino’s State of the Nation Address this year didn’t even address the future of farmers. Anyone familiar with the news, present as well as recent, would be quick to note that that could not exactly have been a complaint of a cause, so to speak, for otherwise Lagman would already have been championing farmers’ plight during the height of the Fertilizer Fund scam under Arroyo’s government and or while other Arroyo-term farmer-related issues (like the rice over-importation issue) were hugging headlines. Party principles have been hogwash in this country, only sound bites seemingly have need for principles, at least for the duration of their delivery, and mp3 files of those sound bites or YouTube clips are more important hereabouts than e-books on history.

So, expect the sound bites war to worsen as the Aquino administration marches on and 2013 looms.

BUT, FOR HIS TURN, what should Aquino do, given this not-so-impossible threat of a Lakas Kampi CMD return?

Well, some other president might contemplate changing the charter so he could extend his stay at the Palace beyond his term, or whatever else changes could be made to his advantage. Aquino, if he were that other president, might even contemplate designing an ambush or a mall-bombing or a massacre to be able to declare martial law and proceed from there. Or, well, maybe something more novel than those already-gasgas scenarios from our mental History Channel.

Here’s what I have to say about Aquino extending the term of his type of governance/government. For Aquino can actually change the country’s Governance Constitution without changing the Government Charter. Here is one way. . . .

BUT, FIRST, let me just note down this fact. Noynoy Aquino’s supporters had it wrong when they thought the Aquino triumph in the May elections was a signal moment for a historic turning point towards renewal and revolution in the life of the Filipino. Perhaps for a temporary turnaround, yes, but I dare say it’s not gonna last forever.

Call me a liberal killjoy and a son of the gods of pessimism, but bearing witness to my killjoy attitude is the majority’s election of Aquino in May 2010 not really as the lord of social liberalism but primarily only as the persona with the celebrity potential that ran against the diminished value of Erap Estrada’s celebrity worth. It’s all been like a TV ratings poll, really, with the majority acting as casting directors for the tragic-comedy series called Bansang Pilipinas in its 112th season. As proof of that mere-entertainment valuation, consider the majority’s avoidance of a different manner of valuation, a more ideological form of valuation. It was an avoidance that found them not voting for Aquino’s senatorial candidates who arguably shared Aquino’s political/social/economic philosophy (excepting already familiar names like the Drilon and Guingona and Recto and Osmena family names, being family names, and so names that should sound much like Padilla or Quizon or Cuneta-Concepcion of the showbiz-royalty-laden Pinoy star-studded mind that has in turn created a sort of feudalism of naked, meaningless names).

So what am I saying? I’m saying this is proof enough of the freshness—in the eyes of the majority—of the liberal packaging that some (only some) Liberals' supporters have been so crazy about on Facebook. To the Filipino majority, Liberal means nothing more than Tide or Sony or Coke and Pepsi, it’s just another naked brand. The majority is really, has always been, more interested in the brands and the new models of some old brand. And the parties don’t want to do anything to change all that, not even the President’s Liberal Party, it would sadly seem.

Which should lead our present conversation to the next level, which is the level where we discuss the necessity of selling what needs to be sold for Aquino’s type of governance, for it to be able to extend its term.

AS I SAID, the potential for the return of Gloria Arroyo’s centrist or quasi-rightist or neo-liberal Lakas Kampi CMD, or Estrada’s pseudo-liberal Puwersa ng Masang Pilipino, into the national ship captain’s helm, five years or so from now, will get brighter as Aquino’s critics accumulate mistakes and “mistakes” to report on and successfully sell these to the intrigue-welcoming open media industry and media-opinion-worshipping masses. There is now the wide possibility of Lakas Kampi CMD’s return in the coming local elections in 2013, because this time it will be on the attacking end, exploiting the ideology-less and can’t-get-no-satisfaction masses’ momentary expectations of instant gratification.

Impossible!—pro-Aquino optimists would tel us—because a hefty number of local and national politicians formerly with the Lakas Kampi CMD’s approach to things are now with the Aquino camp’s approach to things, if not as Liberals, then at least as “program allies”. And there you go. Therein is the charm of the virtue of openness in our politics that nurtures the seeds of the averrhoa carambola (balimbing) like bees attacking flowers or squirrels acorns. This balimbingism is not entirely due to politicians themselves, many of whom only ride the tradition for pragmatic reasons; it is often what our party-political system requires.

Many a leader has in fact welcomed the advantage of this openness. The reform-minded Aquino camp itself exploited this openness for the furtherance and expansion potential of its support base during the pre-May election campaign period. Now in power, it has also rightly become like a softened Vatican open to the possibility of welcoming to its fold “rebellious” Francises of Assisis formerly allied with Gloria and Mike Arroyo’s heresy. And so it is as if we have become a nation replete of Miriam Santiagos who are open to the job of defending Erap Estrada’s policies today and Gloria Arroyo’s tomorrow, with everyone’s media-friendly Santiago-ish sound bites open for any partisan hiring. The media themselves ride on this circus; the sound bites make news which in turn rake in profits.

It was more astounding in the other camps. Manny Villar of the Nacionalista Party exploited this openness during the election campaign by appropriating the integrity of both the Right and the Left for his party’s platform, a platform which was as abstract as a slogan for a bank’s TV ad or a World Bank press release brief. And the Right and the Left exploited the invitation in turn, again for pragmatic reasons. Lakas Kampi CMD, during their stint at the helm (which almost extended itself had it been given the chance to), also embraced the advantage of this openness, hauling in—to complete their roster of allies—such people as the former stalwart of liberal thrusts, Edcel Lagman (the brother of the slain leftist Popoy Lagman that we mentioned above), even while it advanced in what many in the media’s opinion-wielders regarded as Arroyo’s single-minded neo-liberal mission to rake in as many contracts for her party’s friends.

So, how can Lakas Kampi CMD or the PMP possibly come back?—many Liberals are wont to ask. Simple. It’s been done before and it can be done again. As people in the past forgot the charges against Marcos and Estrada and accepted the possibility of their innocence, thus delivering Imee and Bongbong and Imelda to the august halls once again and almost delivered Erap instead of Aquino to Malacanang once again, so will the people forget all the charges against Gloria Arroyo’s government and accept the possibility of the Arroyo camp’s innocence. All the opposition has to do now is to bring the criticism and propaganda against Aquino’s camp on, and keep bringing it in to the media battlefront. The media will be all too happy to welcome any party’s headway in the marketing race to 2013 and 2016. The media, after all, are business entities whose first worry is the performance of their shows on the ratings wall, the country be damned.

SO, TO GET BACK to our topic now: how can Aquino’s camp avoid this return of its ideological nemeses and keep its ideological utopia on top? Will it fall into the same trap that Fidel Ramos and Gloria Arroyo and Erap Estrada attempted, which was—to repeat—the facile cop-out of changing the national government charter so terms can be extended, as if that would guarantee their parties’ long acceptance in the parliamentary runoffs? It remains to be seen. But there are possibly other ways. Here is one way.

You see, dedicated though Aquino seems to be to his principles and aims and vision of good governance and an empowered populace, he can actually transform his own person too. Or transgress, if you will. And I don’t mean in the context of Richard Gordon’s and Bayani Fernando’s mutual “transformers” self-label that tickled some pink with the promise of an Olongapo- and Intramuros- and Marikina- and EdSA (or EdlSA)-looking archipelago. I mean into something more spiritual beyond the merely technical. I mean the transformation of his personality-selling to become the selling of a philosophy, a philosophy the people can take in like a religion instead of merely follow like a yellow traffic light sign because they like Noynoy’s yellow personality at the moment of its novelty.

That transformation can actually be done if the Aquino administration gradually distances itself from the positioning of Aquino as mere redeemer from a fleeting problematique into the positioning of Aquino as leader of a philosophy and religion. For all intents and purposes, Aquino’s philosophy can be deemed liberal, specifically social liberal, and not just because he now belongs to the Liberal Party of his father. And it is this philosophy that not just Aquino but his followers has to start selling if his type of administration and his type of followers are to maintain their position as the ruling ideological class of the present. The ideology is there, but it is still in need of a label and a selling scheme.

Why do it? Firstly, not to do it is to say that only Aquino carries the Aquino spirit and belief, and so be damned his senatorial slate, let’s sell Aquino alone for only Aquino is Aquino and there is no other Aquino than Aquino himself. To sell the Aquino philosophy as a movement with a specific set of transparent agenda is to sell the movement itself, of which Aquino is merely the charismatic celebrity symbol. To sell this philosophy is to transform Aquino from being a personality figure cum celebrity name into a mere synechdoche of a movement’s beliefs. To sell this philosophy, and free Aquino from the image that he is one of a kind, is to aid Aquino’s philosophy from the threat of dying with him when he begins to fade away. To sell his people’s and supporters’ philosophy is to sell a party, a movement, a dream army, complete with a hierarchy of leader-heirs who share the dream of the army.

If the Aquino camp can succeed in selling to the public this philosophy label upon itself, and I don’t mean just the label or just the slogan that follows the label but the basic tenets of the camp’s beliefs and dreams, then Aquino would have been deemed served well in his possible dream of extending his term beyond 2016, free of the threat of the return of a contending political philosophy of governance or mal-governance. For with that marketing success will come the near-guarantee that the next Liberal Party senatorial and congressional candidates can carry themselves onstage as stars in their own right, not needing the shallow valuation of a casting director majority with a weird sense of measure but the only the determination of a visionary director of a dreaming majority with a sensible sense of measure.

And, can PR and ad firms stand up to this challenge? Or would they, too, sell back to Aquino’s camp the virtue—whatever it is besides their facile personality-selling comfort zones—of the status quo marketing scheme.

IN WRITING this, I am of course also betraying my leaning towards the liberals and my seeming abhorrence for all things Lakas Kampi CMD. Betray like Judas likewise, for in exhorting the liberals to upgrade their market value, it is to be acknowledged that parties like Lakas Kampi CMD or the PMP can in fact initiate the same moves towards the same direction, even create some headway over a slow-to-decide liberal movement, selling their respective philosophies over and above the personalities that carry the party or movement or mission to which they belong.

In short, this sermon-piece could be providing an advantage marketing view to just about any party that decides on this transgression of the traditional, should it be interested in extending itself beyond its present status into an expansive horizon which it can either continue to serve and/or exploit.

In the meantime, the masses—themselves devoid of philosophies—eagerly await a new religion as we speak, one that could physically and mentally deliver them from all evils. Should the liberals or the conservatives fail to give them their due, God knows what Nazi group can easily fill in the lacuna.

Golf, a synechdoche of the land reform problematic

2010-08-19T10:28:00.046+08:00

THAT tiny picture up there is a shot of the Hacienda Lusita Golf and Country Club, of course, but let's begin our story with a smaller symbol: Jun Lozada. Jun Lozada was hero of the year in 2008, hero qua symbol of penitence and reversed loyalty. He became the new Saint Paul the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines refused to champion during the Senate hearing on the NBN-ZTE-gate (which Gloria Arroyo's DOJ and Ombudsman seemed to have wanted to turn into a hearing on Lozada's heresy in their turf instead). Luckily, the Jesuits of Ateneo de Manila University and the La Sallians of De La Salle University were there to protect Lozada's newfound saintliness.

One thing we are forgetting, however, is the other Jun Lozada, the Jun Lozada who loved to play golf and live the high life. We saw in the bright camera lights Jun Lozada the truth-teller, the one who couldn't tell a lie, the dude who loved Jose Rizal. Today, we lay aside the fact that he was a penitent precisely because he used to be one of the privileged guys, raking in funds here and there for perks unbeknownst to you and me. He played golf and ate expensive "hamborjer" at that Wack Wack Golf and Country Club for the wang-wanged. To dismiss this Lozadian facet is to dismiss Saint Paul's past and merely look at the saint as the brave expansionist for the Jesus club. To dismiss such facets is to forget to share Paul's and Lozada's repudiation of their respective pasts. To dismiss those is to dismiss that other significance.

NOW, I've seen great golfers and golf teachers talk on TV and I must say I have nothing but great admiration for their lot and the sport as a sport, especially for the men and women who've played those entertaining historic games on the sports cable channels. I've seen a Travel Channel take on the Scottish hills, on the origin of the sport, and can understand its relationship with the landscape (the Scottish landscape).

However, there is something that Karl Marx taught everybody, and I mean everybody (in the same manner Che Guevara's One Latin-Am-ism or Guevarism taught everybody something, including the Interpol). I don't just mean the Marxist virtue of having a social security system or Government Service Insurance System or the Marxist entertainment to be derived from looking at the politics behind the production of an artwork. The Marxist lesson I'm talking about proclaims that in everything is politics, or, conversely stated, that there's politics in everything.

And so, golf as a necessarily political presence in our pop culture must likewise be read as having a symbolic/semiotic value, and I mean a value within our polity (as against an intrinsic value independent of its surround which, in Marxist criticism, is a deny-er's cop-out). It is by this prompting that I must say golf as such, as a necessary semiotic signifier, deserves a second serious look beyond the analyses of ESPN. Never mind that Golf is often denigrated to mean "game off limits to females", since, apart from being untrue, there are today arguably more female golf athletes representing Asian women in the major circuit than there are men. Jennifer Rosales and Dorothy Delasin are familiar Filipina names in the LPGA, whereas a Filipino has yet to achieve a PGA championship.

And never mind that in subcultural rock music society golf is frowned upon as a Republican game, nearly throwing eggs at Hootie and the Blowfish in the '90s and only forgiving the elderly Neil Young for being elderly.

I'd like to encourage an independent assessment of the game's context today, in the Philippine setting, an assessment that is ideally non-partisan. And though I know there's been some opposition to golf in many countries including non-tropical ones like France and Japan and Scandinavia, I'd still be happy with having a look at how golf may represent a semiotic something, as it were, in the Philippine body politic worthy of our opposition to it as citizens living in the armpit regions.

First, one of the basic complaints against the golfing sport derives from environmental activism, concerning water supply usage for the hectares of must-be-green-grass. And although this has always been promptly countered by many an articulate golf course owner by referring investigating reporters to a well or mini-reservoir built within the course for its own use, still the water table supply must be spread democratically, and so on and so forth, and that's not even mentioning yet---say the activists---the "organic" dye that goes into the already Strontium 80-laden grass that can't be meant for cows, with the elements in the mixture, too, going into the soil composition as well as the atmosphere, and so on and so forth, oh, I must stop.

I must stop. I must stop, for I'd much rather have beef against the implication of land usage for golfing purposes per se. It is certainly an implication that completes itself vis a vis the contradictory policies of Philippine governance.

WE are a country rightly or wrongly running a land reform policy, for one, and a human settlements department in government, secondly, tasked to address the squatters and the migration-of-the-homeless problematique. And here we are, flaunting the idea that wide tracts of land, as long as their owners don't declare them as agricultural land, can either delay these properties' usefulness for some future industrial leasing, or otherwise use now for the golfing elite minority's pleasure under the guise of tourism or shoring up the real estate boom. Some will say that by this picture alone golf becomes a symbol of one side of a governance contradiction. For while land reform and the human settlement program are progressive in intent, tourism and industrialization are a different set of priorities altogether. But I say, we must not stop there; we must move on, to conjecture upon the anatomy of that contradiction as a possible monster produce of sheer Hypocrisy.

In the Marcos era, much government talk was disseminated against the presence of idle lands, a campaign of course which turned a blind eye to Marcos' fronts and Marcos' Kilusang Bagong Lipunan Party's members and their own teeming tracts of idle property. Hypocrisy in this country does not merely find symbolic amplification in sports, say, the golfing sport. No. For Hypocrisy is the sport.

Farm estates in the United States are owned by private individuals or private companies instead of Hacienda Luisita-style "corporate" systems with former tenants for new incorporators, and maybe because hypocrisy is not a tradition in American agriculture. On the other hand, we've heard about the many problems posed against Philippine land reform, or Japanese land reform for that matter.

For example, one claim has it that national agricultural objectives have not been achieved hand in hand with the Philippine land reform plan. The contending argument, on the other hand, goes that agricultural output was never the program's objective to begin with, the umbrella objective being political instead of economic. For surely, if the program is being moved by an economic thrust, then we'd have a problem with the alleged reality that many farmers are not necessarily guaranteed of a better life with land reform, which is a euphemistic way of expressing the dread of an opposite resultant. Unless perhaps the farmer converts his land to more profitable industrial leasing, in which case the land reform program qua agrarian reform would have to be deemed as having lost its purpose, success may yet prove to be elusive. Or would the program really lose its "redistributionary" objective this way? As long as one practices "charity" in his feudalistic heart, it shouldn't matter now what the recipient of one's goodness does with his new property.

Others argue that land reform as a philosophical direction must be consistent and extend itself as a philosophy into factories and the services industry, for---after all---many families have had several of its generations serving under some same manufacturing dynasty, an ad agency's janitorial division for that matter under some same agency owner's family.

Should the land reform philosophy extend stock options into this area of what could be a new labor-friendly national GDP?

BUT this is not a piece aiming to instigate a resurgence of debates on the land reform program and philosophy, lest I be mistaken for somebody sounding apologias for the landed. This is rather, and I hope you'd believe me, a light examination of and/or rumination on the enveloping philosophy of our republic itself and its regard for land ownership and that ownership's responsibilities, whether they involve reformed land or not.

An individual who owns a thousand hectares of farmland must subdivide it to tenants who have the option---helped by tax money---to buy the little pieces, so they can have their own little grape plantations. Well and good, at least for the utopia. But an individual who owns a thousand hectares of land not used for the production of pectin-rich vegetables can actually still exploit his area as he pleases before the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program catches up with him, and I am reminded of Lucio Tan's long-idle hectares in Quezon City beside homeless squatters.

Agricultural farms up for land division/distribution. Golf courses. Agricultural production programs. Idle lands. Put two and two together and you have a picture of contradictions, perhaps deriving from a hypocritical lying elite culture, perhaps from a country's non-philosopher-kingship devoid of an integral wisdom that may serve as soul for the never-ending pornography of naked slogans. This non-philosophy has churned a religion of evasiveness, and its gods have been playing golf.

HOWEVER, I would like to say that perhaps the Filipino habit of throwing in the towel might someday swerve to more proactive attitudes of Davidian defiance, especially now that a liberal government has been installed.

Let me start with the "moderate" form of such a defiance. I could, for example, beyond wallowing in disgust, propose a sublimating potential for the golf sport in the tropical setting. I have in mind, for instance, a possible "progressive" value for golf as a social item, one that will address instead of ignore its Philippine setting wherein a democracy is struggling to empower itself over a long-established plutocracy. I could start with the proposition, and perhaps a new millionaire can be created by my suggestion, that standards for golf course bunkers, roughs and other hazards can be upgraded to include forest trees, ponds containing edible fish, with the fairway areas occupying less acreage than the rocks and weeds or even a fruit grove or corn area to be placed in, on, and around them. I'm talking about what modern parlance might dub as "extreme golf". Unacceptable, perhaps, to the traditionally conservative crowd that make up golf country club memberships, but then there are always industry companies like Virgin or Pixar or Sari-Sari Store willing to take up the slack of contentment and tried-and-tested business formulas. The new golf course of the future can now begin to look like this forest photo here.

This new, one might say liberal, type of golf might not mind venturing into earth-friendlier and necessarily people-friendlier redesigns of things we've come to accept, inclusive of pricing. Following the examples of Henry Sy, et al., and I don't mean their relationship-with-labor record, "extreme golf" investors can profit from membership volume instead of from a conservative neo-liberal marketing of exclusivity. It's about time we cease behaving like fearful loyal subjects to a fearless royal class; let's liberate golf as though this were France in 1799!

After all, the world has changed. And if we are to learn anything from this new phase---in the same manner that we've learned that centrist governments only tame, while fooling, a people, and that rightist governments that play conservative golf actually merely promote contesting communist and Muslim insurgencies---, it is that the latest world order demands a rehash of our concepts of a Promiseland, one less from trickle-down economics perhaps, lest we wake up one day to find all our neighbors acting like terrorists with clubs, shouting defiance towards our golf clubs.

But here's the disclaimer. Given our tame general populace's outlook which has long learned courage to fight only the little neighborly fights among themselves, the above grim down-with-Marie-Antoinette's-head picture is pretty unlikely. Golf courses will continue to blossom, agricultural tracts converted under our noses to industrial estates or resorts and subdivisions, and the hypocrisy will give way to a new comfortable utopia of Imeldific investing by the nouveau Imeldas. Fine utopia. Or should I say rampant myopia?

And the masses that will suffer will never know what hurt them, and they'll continue to murder themselves with petty bickerings, unable to protest against those beyond their education's comprehension. Even as many say we've always had a socialist tendency as a people, always expecting government to take care of us and blaming government for our ills, yet our magnificent elite shall continue, yet again, to flaunt a self-centeredness that recognizes the reality of the tamed "socialism" of our people that has been amply uneducated by our educational policy, unable therefore to find the art of war. But this is risky. How long will our children be safe from the surprises of sudden terrorist or criminal recruitments? Might we already have sown the seeds of such a subculture? Are we continuing to farm such a field of seeds? When wealthy Chinese-Filipinos and Spanish mestizos and new Malay-brown billionaires display their privileged delight in a golf course, dismissing Jun Lozada's example of repudiation, will a small-minded waiter who has had the all-too-common racist impression that Chinoys are an anti-labor Kuomintang lot, all millionaires myopic as East India Company, . . . will he plant the ire of a neo-Nazi in his spirit? Would his racism be checked by Chinoys' and mestizos' better presence in Rotary Club medical missions, say, for free breast cancer checkups on municipal grounds?

Golf. It's going to be a game off limits to Filipinos. And by Filipinos I mean to include the homeless and the squatters and the communists. As well as the political opportunists/climbers. As well as the ordinary men and women of the village or town or city who drink the communal water, slosh in the global-rain puddles, try to understand the word "freedom" in an ever-decreasing ground space for their fenced-out habitation.

Game off limits to Filipinos. That's what we're playing. And there are still 18 holes to play before trophy day, in case we reach it in this Philippine open.

SO, . . . yeah, well, one could say all the above simply amounts to inciting to rebellion instead of some simple semiotics and free political cum social cum cultural analysis, but I believe we all must address such issues as this regarding an exclusive sport one day, the same way we are addressing the exclusive private wangwang today, for it also somehow represents the latest glaring conflict of philosophies between today's two contending parties: the ruling Liberal with its supposed new Aquino social liberalism and the rest being one with their supposed conservatism or pseudo-liberalism. The new liberals' philosophy, it seems, is aimed at calling for a defeat of the things that sow the seeds of terrorism and rebellion and that plant such trees as Jose Maria Sison and Nur Misuari, and is aimed further at the thought that toppling rebellious trees is not enough (not enough, for given the rich soil for seeds, many similar trees will always be ready to replace toppled ones). Given our elite that has learned---from the time of our Spaniard conquerors on to the time of our turn-of-the-century American invaders, our Tojo masters, as well as the eras of the Aguinaldo and Marcos and Erap and Gloria movements---to test the limits of the average Filipino's patience, the new liberalism's order would be easier said than done in our geopolitical reality.

It behooves us, then, to play on with this game of g-o-l-f, which will eventually gloriously bring us to wherever it will when it does. Gloriously, I say, because it would be beyond the lip service of doomsayers like me.

So, okay, then. Let's go back to business. What's your handicap? ♦

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Author's note: This essay is adapted from a 2004 column I wrote for the now-defunct provincial e-zine Bananacue Republic.

Readings related to golf and the Philippines I'd recommend:

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Photos borrowed from:

http://www.thefilipino.com/golfcoursesinthephilippines/ - Hacienda Luisita Golf and Country Club
http://coconuter.blogspot.com/2008/02/scandal-tainted-nbnzte-deal.html - Jun Lozada
http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/poli/current/ug/modules/marx.html - Karl Marx
http://www.hootiegolf.com/news.asp - Darius Rucker of Hootie and the Blowfish playing golf
http://blogs.knoxnews.com/pineda/2009/09/living-under-martial-law-part.html - Ferdinand Marcos
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=733434&page=20 - Lucio Tan
http://thenextreporter.com/jg/philippine-election-2010-results-benigno-noynoy-aquino-iii-leads-presidential-race-wide-margin/086496/ - Noynoy Aquino
http://www.dnrec.delaware.gov/OpenSpaces/Pages/ForestPreservation.aspx - forest
http://timeslikethis-wrigley.blogspot.com/2009/06/squatters-in-philippines.html - squatters in the Philippines

The Usual and the New

2010-08-10T18:11:00.012+08:00

Here come the fiery tests. Noynoy Aquino’s government is being tested, nay, now under its own supporters’ microscope. Among liberals and progressives in his camp, the question now on the table as the issues of the year accrue is this: how liberal is Aquino’s liberal government?

The young Aquino administration has proven its liberal resolve to make the laws on the road and in the taxation front equally applied to everyone, and this was applauded with aplomb by a refreshed public almost with the same enthusiasm the people of France hurrah’d and hooray’d toward Napoleon I’s arrival on the scene to battle with the rule of the new anti-people, the French Directory. Aquino’s liberals are well on their way, too, we believe, to make heads roll over certain missing funds, certain overspent funds, and “funds funneled to feed” (FFF) the greed of GOCC executives.

So, how liberal indeed is the liberal government of Noynoy Aquino toward the new issues of the month?

Beyond the technicalities within legalese, the pilots’ as well as the looming flight-attendants’ strikes at Philippine Airlines exhumed old questions about Lucio Tan. Facebook discussions on this extended to similar issues concerning Henry Sy and the typecast on the entire niche of wealthy Chinese-Filipinos and their alleged collective attitude towards labor, the manipulability of loopholes in the Labor Code, and the manipulability of the enforcers of this code. So, the question is, how will Aquino’s liberalism try to make its reformist mark on the labor codex of this country, and/or on its strict enforcement? Will it even try? If it doesn’t, will the liberals stamp an x in a box on their list of characteristic liberal approaches that Aquino has ignored, their idealism checklist for/on him?
Comes now, too, the Hacienda Luisita issue on a redux. We’ve heard the explanations before, about how the land’s debts can’t be transferred to its farmers before they’re paid, for otherwise the farmer will have to pay those debts (the argument further goes that it’s the banks who won’t allow such transfers until the debts are paid, the trust having been with the original debtor and not with any debtor-to-be to whom the trust might be transferred). The claim goes that this problematic spurred the stock-distribution scheme. But, again, beyond the technicalities that legalese can muster, and beyond a Supreme Court decision on the stock distribution’s legality, how the liberal Aquino government will define its liberalism upon this issue is quite interesting, especially on allegations concerning the conditions around the property’s purchase in the 1950s. Where will this liberalism rise to the occasion? Where will it choose to close its eyes?
And what about the media’s progressive stance: how does that play into Aquino’s administration of this problem? Or, have the media really been behaving like progressives in their coverage foci and their questions? First of all, what’s the difference between a 20th-century social liberal and a progressive (whose tenets are essentially social liberal)? Is it true that whereas the liberal (which really means the 20th-century moderate social liberal) would root for people empowerment without dismantling the capitalist, or even feudal, framework of industries, the progressive social liberal’s position is for total liberation? With the latter, then, is it for total, unquestioned land distribution—CARP fund availability or none—in and away from the feudal sphere, and—by extension—total worker empowerment in the manufacturing and services sphere? Assuming that these are wrong assumptions about the present dynamics of the moderate liberal view versus the progressive liberal view, still the question remains: how will Noynoy Aquino’s liberalism define itself in its Wikipedia page as consisting of and consisting not of? These are the suspenseful questions on the table.

On which issues/questions is Noynoy Aquino a liberal, on which a conservative (or conservative liberal)? On which issues/questions is he more than a mere liberal, thus a progressive? Liberal Party stalwarts, insiders, wannabes, pretenders, and volunteers, ready your paper with the boxes. This is one for the Red Book.

These are not just questions for the mere labeling of factions within an organization’s dynamics that one can use for any future realignments or reorganizations—as it’s done in professional basketball for the allocation of uniforms and colors within a season—for these questions are essentially ideological. To demonstrate their seriousness, let’s examine the ideologies.
It may be assumed, rightly or wrongly, that a liberal—in contrast to a progressive—would regard the land reform policy itself as wrong. American farmers who may happen to be liberals (e.g. Jimmy Carter) own hundreds of acres of land for their corn or wheat or barley or cotton or cattle; could this be why American agriculture is relatively healthy compared to the agriculture industry of nations heavy on the issue of land reform? What has Japan’s “emancipation of farming land” done to Japan’s rice industry, in turn to its parliament eternally threatened by the votes and support of the rice-farming lobby? Will we become a nation feasting on ramen made from imported flour instead of rice porridge when land reform is finally perfectly enabled? Will most of those emancipated land end up as backyard gardens for subdivision homes? Will our economy suffer the same destiny Zimbabwe reached after its own hopeful land reform? These are questions a social liberal may share in bannering along with conservatives. Land reform may not exactly be the panacea for national wealth that many hope it will be—they might say—but merely perhaps a momentary distributive cop-out for the temporary satisfaction of land-reform ideals. For even the Keynesian economist might ask, “will land reform bring the national economy more harm than good?” Here, the social-liberal economist would share the conservative point of view that taking care of the big industries is necessary for taking care of the national wealth that in turn will trickle down—by its large effects and contributions to the GDP—to taking care of the little people.
But, in contrast, it certainly wouldn’t mean that the progressive point of view as regards land reform is merely emotional, would it? E.g. hovering around such rationales as “a right to dignity,” etc., that economic science may view as more sentimental than rational. For progressivism has always been of the view that national wealth is not as important as the well-being of individuals, for in the well-being of individuals lie national strength. (In ultra-radical progressivism, called communism, the individual farmer’s well-being is often questioned by democratic governments, because although communist farmers are given tracts of land to till, their harvests do not entirely belong to them but mostly paid to the state.) Progressives, in putting a premium on the extension of property rights to the smallest individuals instead of to corporations, would essentially have no qualms proposing the ideal of a nation of sari-sari stores over a nation run by malls and mall grocery stores. A nation of small-scale industries and little farms does not exactly give you a worse economic standing in the world than a nation run by big business, they’d say, if we can only refocus our economic science on a holistic plane (one that might take into account diverse factors including the environment) instead of on the usual GDP-reliant angle. That progressive proposal may be workable—with adaptations and emendations to avoid Mao’s micro-economic faults, as much as it would try to veer away from Deng’s macro-economic globalization revolution.
(Here, the conservative will butt in, to say that a nation run by progressives will only provide our country a weak military because of a weak center, as if the tax-evading big business sector in our country has churned out a sophisticated military as had been allowed by their conservative patrons.)
But assuming that Aquino’s liberalism has that above question on land reform, it certainly cannot afford to repeal—even gradually—land reform laws, or even discourage the current national belief about land reform. Knowing that, how will it go around the issue, then? Will it dance the same dance the past conservative governments of Macapagal-Arroyo, Estrada, Ramos and Marcos (and the past coalition government of Corazon Aquino) danced to keep the small farmer from getting his tract of land for free or quasi-free? Will there be more rally dispersals? And will Manny Villar’s Nacionalistas ride on this weakness to push the propaganda portraying them to be the real champions of progressive ideals, never mind that their billionaire leader has hardly displayed any progressive direction in either his role as a legislator or as a land acquirer/investor?
But this is not a blog of interrogatives about other people and their quirky alliances and flip-flopping ideologies. This is mainly a question blog about Noynoy Aquino’s liberalism and how far it will go in advocating the liberal tenets that have so far distinguished him from the conservatives we’ve been so used to and have gotten tired of.

Photos borrowed from:

http://www.philippineselections.com/election-pool/will-you-vote-for-noynoy-aquino-for-president.php/comment-page-5 -- Noynoy Aquino
http://dateline.ph/?p=5108 -- PAL strike
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/nation/view/20100810-285874/Bishop-slams-land-deal -- Bishop Pabillo

A Labeling Revolution

2010-07-12T14:54:00.075+08:00

1. Well, well, well! Wangwang-less! (Noy be blessed? Till when?)

IN PAST blog and non-blog essays (namely “A Battle of Faiths (or, In Defense of Journalism)”, “Devil In The Details”, “How A Million-Peso Dinner Triggered A New Religious War In Our Barangay”, and “Philosopher-Kings Are Dead”), I discoursed on a culture of context-poor faith acting as the motor of our appreciation—as a people—of political personae and their actions. And being driven mainly by faith, what we in general see served on our country’s political table often—if not always—redound to the level of myths we can’t eat. Our constant frustration and disappointment with every new government is proof enough of the existence of those myths.

How do we get out of this state of being entrapped by our faith in mere faiths into the arguably more stable light of reason? The election of Benigno Aquino III as the new president of our republic has in fact offered a signal ensuing moment for us to mend our ways and attitudes toward politics as a whole, away from the recurring post-election desperation and cynicism we’ve been accustomed to feeling in relation to politicians. Not because Noynoy Aquino, as he is often referred to by our nickname-happy punditry, promises to be the Sole Savior of our Sinking Motherland, by which I mean the Lee Kuan Yew hero who can single-handedly rewrite Filipino political culture into something more respectable and respecting, no sir; his election is significant to a progressing evolution because the semantics around the events and people (people including his voters as well as detractors) that catapulted him to becoming the symbol of an anti-corruption dream-direction carry the signs of an elusive answer to the questions we don’t even know if we asked. What are those questions? Well, how could we have asked them? All we had and have to really go by was/is faith.

Let me go back. In previous essays carrying this view of mine, I have alluded to our support of a politician as one that starts first with that politician’s support of a cause of ours (be this support real or merely claimed). When each of us starts to paste our respective souls to our favorite politicians’ soon-iconic media names, however, we quickly forget the primacy of our cause and take it for granted—nay, forget as well—that our politician and our cause are seldom synonymous; we leave it alone that our politician can leave our cause anytime he/she wishes. And, when that betrayal of our cause does happen, we still end up supporting the politician anyway, often giving him/her the benefit of the doubt, that doubt aided by his/her speeches disclaiming all rumors of broken promises. Our support goes on forever, each of us turning a blind eye to news reports that our politician left our cause from the git-go, on day one of his sitting in office in fact. We attach our sentiments to his/her persona, face and name by faith, armed with the crusading belief that any evidence of this betrayal placed on the table is a mere manufacture of envious others, and so, being used to exercising faith, we promise ourselves that nobody can fool us away from the luxury of our faith in our Sir or Madame. It doesn’t matter that we suffer, for we can always reason that our suffering is not due to Sir’s/Madame’s actions or insincerity but to the harassments on his/her person by opponents (a faith especially harder to topple when those opponents have been effectively labeled, either correctly or by PR black propaganda, with the crass tags of former evils). We might even occasionally refuse to admit that we are suffering, looking at the loan-subsidized and constantly costly privatized crumbs that go our way as blessings courtesy of Sir/Ma’am, crumbs for which we offer camote and saging to Sir/Ma’am as tokens of our gratitude. In short, in our country, our faith in and loyalty to our personally-chosen politicians, chosen by fitting them to our beliefs and prejudices and shallow perceptions of goodness, take precedence over our loyalty to our causes. To us, the fulfillment of our cause will not be up to us but to the god we appointed to fight for us. Our loyalty, thus, is primarily hinged to these gods as permanent symbols of our causes, gods that become impossible for us to unhinge our sentiments from in the same way that sinning popes continue to star in the altars of our prayers.

It is no wonder, then, that while many among us regard the now-former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (along with her administration team) as the corrupt enemy of the people, many too still regard her as the intelligent and competent symbol of reform that we should have allowed to mother us all for an indefinite period of new reformation. The latter group of people in the populace did swallow the sermon that Arroyo’s “economist” tag was enough of an emblem attached to her blouse as symbol of a capacity to liberate, never mind that there are multiple schools of thought in economic science or that her opponents were themselves economists. It’s not the tag, after all, that we attach our loyalty to, it’s the person, or the PR myth about the person, and it so happens that any tag will do for the PR machines that spin truths. The same with Joseph “Erap” Estrada’s case. For while many continue to accuse him of being a mere tool of special interests during his term, interests, that is, coming from Chinese-Filipino secret chambers of commerce, perhaps more in our population still believe him to be the champion of the poor that he has to this day unwaveringly claimed to be. A battle between faiths still surround the name of “Erap”.

And now, the faithful majority has elected Noynoy Aquino with the faith that here is a soul who will be our liberator from the claws of corruption that had forever been haunting our islands and cities with their scratches on the nation’s coffers and bank vaults. Well, well, well. I say, that faith—assuming it’s rightly placed—will not be enough. For salvation cannot be up to Aquino alone, it will primarily be up to us. What do I mean?
It’ll always be up to us because all faiths are guided by numbers, and the fact of numbers’ significance to faiths wakes everyone up to the reality of the war of conversions for numbers. This is no Baruch Spinoza math; it is simple reality the Catholic Church can attest to. But wait. Oh, no. Am I now saying faith is not that burly after all, being yet vulnerable to the sweet campaigns of conversions coming from all sides? Oh yes. But, remember, a conversion to another faith does not liberate one from faith, it merely transfers a person to another faith. Let’s put it this way. Let’s assume you are for the political religion of Noynoy Aquino. Wouldn’t it be possible for you to be persuaded later that the Aquino faith has been a hoax and it has actually been the Lakas-CMD faith that has always been the religion of all heaven for you, after all? If such a conversion is possible, how so? Well, it is not merely possible, in our parts it is always probable precisely because that’s how faiths operate, and faiths exploit disappointments and sadness and ennui. Add to that, faiths do not require too much questioning, they only require you to close your eyes and sing all your suffering to the walking Warlords of our Roman empire who might have new answers to the people’s old grievances. And so, like Moses’ flock, we might as easily jump on a new future carriage carrying, say, Gibo Teodoro’s New Galing and Talino Heaven, to which we’ll sell our souls for a new hope. A never-ending hoping on the treadmill of our nationhood has become our curse.
I say it is time we liberate ourselves from the peddlers of faith and become the preachers of our own fate. Let us rid ourselves of our propensity to lean on faith and faith solely and start carrying the crusading bullets of reason and intellection. Whoa, whoa now, you say—given the state of our masses’ education, is this even possible? Well, let us redefine education. If by education we mean our schools, it will definitely be impossible, and even if made possible we might have to wait a few more generations before anything happens. But a holistic (others prefer the spelling wholistic) view of education would acknowledge that the media (TV, newspapers, tabloids, radio) actually occupy a higher position in the dissemination of information/education than our impoverished classrooms.

So our liberation cum answer can come from the media and how the media behave here on out. For more than the schools and churches, the media have been the primary culture changers in our society, as in many other societies. The media could lead the way, instead of them being led by the dog-chain of PR spins and sound bites. But wait again, you say, no way can this happen, for the media is profit-motivated, thus more slaves to what the people want to hear than leaders in pushing for what the people ought to think. But, you see, reader, I’m not talking about a re-programming of networks’ programming, or a reformatting of newspapers’ formats, but only a reworking and rethinking of network broadcasters’ and paper news editors’ approach to politicians and their claims. You see, often enough media broadcasters think it their duty to merely record a politician’s self-descriptions, claims and proposals from an arranged press conference, they leave it to easily-thwarted reporters’ questions (thwarted by prepared answers) or otherwise to editorialists to deconstruct those very claims.

Now, sure we know that headlines make the news, and deconstructions bore us with the details. Sure we know that people are only interested in abstracts, and the more abstractly hysterical a politician is on TV the more exposed he/she is as a voice, and a voice qua voice is often enough to earn our trust. A voice. We want our politicians loud, but we hate deconstructionists. For us, sound bites and slogans and heard voices are symbols of political workaholism and admirable obsession, and the most effective deconstructionists who earn our smiles are only the untrained ones dinning the inuman sa kanto whom no one believes in anyway. In fact, it’s been the slogans and sound bites that have been carrying our votes and been raising politicians and actors and all sorts of Tagalog-speaking characters the masses could understand into the pedestals of power and authority! We know all that.

But. What … if?

2. Labeling a Labeling Revolution As Such

WHAT IF we propose to replace all those slogans—“Philippines 2000”, “para sa mahirap”, “strong republic”, “galing at talino”, “kung walang kurap walang mahirap”, ad nauseam—with the more critical and more organizing labels and categorizations and pigeonholing tags that could come from our end? That is, what if we do ourselves one better than being mere consumers of slogans not merely by becoming slogan-questioning sorts (hard to do, considering the influence of faith) but by affording all politicians the courtesy of labels as a requisite on our citizenship? That would be empowerment, indeed, wouldn’t it be—for now we’ll be the ones to be questioned with our labels’ correctness/precision instead of us forever questioning the articulate PR slants of politicians that we could never corner with our piecemeal views.

Enter Noynoy Aquino’s election. And what does this have to do with our politician-pigeonholing revolution? Good question.

You see, it has largely gone unnoticed but many in the Aquino presidential campaign had started to appreciate the word “liberal” and began to ask whether “liberalism” is indeed what the Liberal Party today represents. Before they could even answer their own questions, they were already posting the Wikipedia page on “liberalism” on their Facebook walls as a way of sneering at the election losers or celebrating their party’s triumph! The Wikipedia entry on “Liberal Party (Philippines)”, you see, does describe the party as a “liberal party”, with that phrase-noun linked to the page on “liberalism worldwide”. And so I thought, wow! This could just be the start of a new culture in our country’s politics, a culture hungry for—and consequently knowing—what parties and their members actually represent and what they do not.

And so one of my friends entered a proposal to (possibly) LP members/followers/supporters on a Wikipedia discussion page to define the extent of the Liberal Party’s liberalism, if it is liberalism that the party represents, and to add “Ideology” and “Recent Issue Stances” sections on the wiki on the party, … to which proposal a likely member of the party replied, “Hell, yeah! Bayanihan tayo to renovate this page into a Liberal Party history and information page”.
In contrast, by the way, the Wikipedia article on the Nacionalista Party describes that party as a conservative one, even going so far as to claim that its platform “corresponds somewhat to the Republican Party in the United States” (a mainly conservative party), linking the word “conservative” to the wiki page on “conservatism”.

The article on Lakas Kampi CMD, meanwhile, describes that party as a “centrist” party heavily influenced by “Christian democracy”, appropriately linking those tags to the pages on “centrism” and “Christian democracy” respectively. That party is also described as influenced by “Islamic democracy” and “populism”. Now, these positions seem to be what the party regards as appropriate labels for its ideology “focused on economic growth and development, stronger ties with the United States, creation of jobs, and strong cooperation between the executive and legislative branches of government”. Could this special focus on the United States be what the party word “Kampi" might be alluding to as its permanent kakampi? If so, in what way is it pro-American? By what policies or bills? The page also states that its “Christian and Islamic democratic” principles can also be understood to promote an “advocacy of a shift from the present presidential system to a parliamentary form of government through constitutional amendments” as well as “establishing peace talks with Muslim separatists and communist rebels”. This party democracy boasts of being “distinct in its ecumenical inclusion of Muslim leaders in its political alliance”.

Anyway, I thought, wow! If these tags and labels on our local parties are right and precise, then maybe the parties’ and their leaders’ and members’ actions can be rationalized by these labels’ proposed ideologies and strong economic beliefs. With these labels, therefore, perhaps Gloria Arroyo’s decisions described by many as corrupt and evil would only be corrupt and evil for as long as the one describing them as such believes the center-right or conservative or neo-liberal beliefs that prompted these decisions in the first place are corrupt and evil beliefs by themselves. In which case of understanding labels, therefore (should we hasten to resort to this labeling habit), the question of faith and belief would not anymore hang from the neck of our people’s perceptions but shall be pinned this time to the tie or blouse of the politician’s perceptions of the right and wrong position. This would mean that we would already have had our politicians cornered, pigeonholed, and judged according to their faiths and judged accordingly by us as right or wrong or evil, depending on our respective political leanings. That is to say, if we’re liberals we’d look at conservatives with suspicion, and so on and so forth. This is coming quite a long way—wouldn’t you agree?—from our previous categorizations that derived solely or mainly from blindly taking in, by faith, what our politicians told us they were (pro-poor, left-leaning, right-leaning, etc.). Now, it will be up to us to tell them what they are by what they say and promise to do and the alliances they enter into, and consequently they’d be prompted to initiate their own honest self-descriptions before us that would yet have to pass our review and approval; they would have to pride themselves on the label cum commitment they decide to wear, labels which the public can themselves weigh after hearing these ideologies’ new stalwarts speak.

So, by labels, we’d have known our politicians better by their positions in the categories and charts. For instance, Noynoy Aquino’s reaction from the beginning to the question/protest concerning the proliferation of private wang-wangs can be read by our present process of understanding political actions and policies as mere kowtowing (at the outset) to the masses’-by-the-media’s desire (or the media’s-by-the-masses’ desire) for street reform; that is to say, a mere media-friendly kowtowing that may be temporary and should be expected to fade away in due time. However, if we are to attribute such an act or policy or directive to the concept and philosophy of liberalism, assuming Noynoy Aquino is truly a liberal and the Liberal Party inspiring him is truly a liberal party, then we might appreciate the directive as liberalism’s attack on the tiniest symbols and manifestations of elitism, therefore liberalism in action spurred by the liberal principle established by Napoleon I espousing “equality under the law for all men”; this, presumably, as an act to counter the long prevalent conservative principle that have been promoting conservative Strong Republic ideals as “the persistent image of society as a command structure in which the responsibilities of leadership can be exercised within the framework of a strong state manifested in divine-right royalism” (Robert Eccleshall).

3. Deliberating Liberations

A LABELING revolution can also liberate us from our nagging frustration with ourselves. One such frustration is that one expressed over a recurrent disunity among us, whether in an organization meeting here or in a gathering of Filipinos abroad. Contextualizing and defining the processes of the disunity can in fact lead us to identify the root cause—it is by this identification that we can arm ourselves with the contexts necessary for action when action is called for. After all, enjoining the wrong Filipinos abroad or in Manila for the right cause will always be frustrating and a waste of time.
Basically, my point is that I don’t believe we’re more disunited than the Americans or the Swedish or the Japanese or the Nauruans. We just don’t know, being obsessed with the idea of unity, why we are disunited and where we are not united on. But democracy does not demand unity, only openness, according to Karl Popper, which means we can only demand unity from the right Filipinos for the right cause. The “Filipino nation” concept, like the “American nation” concept, must not be forced in our minds to compose an image of pagkakaisa but instead allowed to live as a co-existence of mini-nations within the nationhood composite. Unfortunately, we seem unaware of our divergences, due to our shyness from what could be a more intelligent labeling and bookkeeping habit. And so a need to contextualize our mini-nations, so to avoid being frustrated by our seemingly recurrent taste for disunity while ordering a plate of unity.

I mentioned in the second paragraph of this essay an unnoticed but significant progression cum evolution presented by the Noynoy Aquino entry into executive governance, a progression with the potential for opening Philippine politics into contextualizations. This is a positive development because it is precisely what Philippine politics is in dire need of. Let me specify.

If indeed from now on it should be possible for politicians and the media (mainstream and not) to present such concepts as being liberal (along with definitions of liberal and conservative or neo-liberal economics and/or neo-liberal politics), armed with these concepts and ideas on TV discussions, we should be able to quickly answer and discuss such questions as why Lakas Kampi CMD’s center-right conservative leadership through Gloria Arroyo was so focused on taking care of the corporate elite (or some in that elite) instead of the bottom. We could easily answer that those policies had to be so and were natural because those policies are precisely what conservative economics and politics are all about! Conversely, we can also now easily begin to discuss how liberal the Liberal Party is—is it as liberal as Paul Krugman is or more liberal than him or liberal in another way? Why did Manuel Roxas et al. form the Liberal Party from out of the left rib of the Nacionalista Party? Was it because they belonged to the liberal wing of the party and thus would by logic simply be increasingly alienated by the party mainstream's nationalist conservatism? And is there a conservative wing (conservative liberal) in the present Liberal Party? Does Mar Roxas belong to this conservative liberal wing? How? To which wing would the Floirendo family belong to in the party?

PAUL KRUGMAN

It is through such contextualizations that we can also begin to see why certain Filipinos and Filipino groups, abroad or at home, cannot be one on certain approaches to improving the national welfare. For there will always be those Filipinos who believe we're always better off taking care of the top so their welfare can trickle down to the bottom (conservative), and those who think the country would always be best served continually by a liberal approach, taking care of the bottom first or equally to pursue a high satisfaction rating and pave the way for a comfortable investment environment for the top.

It is lacking these contextualizations that we witness a society where it is no wonder even the Left would be divided on, say, Manny Villar, whose elusiveness remained strong because of an elusive contextualization process in our political media. Was/Is Manny Villar a conservative? Nobody seemed to want to ask this. Was/Is he a pawn of the World Bank? Was/Is he a pawn of his own special interests? If so, why would the leftist Bayan Muna keep an alliance with him, even while Villar nurtured an alliance with the son of the ultra-right dictator Ferdinand Marcos? Would one of the American socialist parties make an alliance with the predominant Reaganite wing of the US Republican Party? Why not? Is it because socialism is the opposite pole of pro-banks and pro-oil conservatism? Should one of them enter into that sort of contradictory alliance, what might be the reason? Should conservatives and socialists alike forgive both party leaderships for the reasons they might cite?

Of course the majority of labels qua contextualizations are not as hard-edged as, say, Nazism. A politician might be a liberal towards one issue and a neo-liberal towards another. Thus there are conservative liberals just as there are liberal conservatives. But always, always, quantification of one's liberalism and conservatism is possible, and thus contextualization proceeds with degree measurements. Or one might argue a contention as to when liberalism or conservatism is and when not over an issue (I, for instance, believe it is not conservative but liberal to liberate the state from the idea of supporting artists with subsidies, this kind of support being a practice of monarchic systems). And the people, more than the politicians, need to be guided towards this labeling science or art, if only because it is a more intelligent way of understanding a politician and ourselves beyond the usual “mabait, mapagkakatiwalaan, matalino, may kakayahan, para sa mahirap” crap.

To paraphrase: our frustrations with the disunity of Filipinos, here and abroad, can be contextualized to thus make it easier for us to understand why one Filipino group would rally for X and rally against Y while another goes in the opposite direction. Filipinos are no more disunited than Americans, Israelis, Japanese, or Indians, let me say again. We are simply too contained within the concept of the Filipino nation as a coagulated blob that has to live up to this utopia of coagulation. I’ve always respected the fact that there are all sorts of Filipinos.

So, as regards the “tribalism” or the “me first”-ism often cited in cultural critiques of Filipino crab behavior, let me acknowledge that, indeed, many times the “me first”-isms causing divisions in Filipino organizations can be simplified and dismissed as just that, attitudinal or personality crab “me first”-isms. But if the intelligentsia can help our country's politics put things into better order, let me say again: this intelligentsia can start with the labeling and categorizing of political people to thus be able to understand their actions beyond dismissing everything as mere crab “me first”-ism. This roster of labels will be our people’s guide to understanding and measuring motives, ideologies, flip-flops, integrities, passions, and obsessions.

With the labels, we can begin to delineate ideologies and causes and also consequently guide our organization leaders accordingly. For instance, with those labels we can, once again, here ask Bayan Muna as a leftist organization why it allied itself with the Nacionalista Party known to have a conservative platform. We can begin to ask why a senator flip-flopped a thousand times on an issue or in his/her affiliations, and we can begin to examine the motives, whether simple filial greed or something more ideological, behind factions involved in an organizational infighting. We can behave like social scientists instead of mere scribes of organization leaders’ PR wishes, and the better for us if we do.

And why should this labeling be looked on as a revolution? Well, politicians and organization leaders (from parties ruling or opposing) in our country have long denied us clarity and ideological transparency, allowing themselves the liberty of changing their masks whenever and however they wish. It’s our duty now to label them and their actions as being this yesterday and being that new one today. Our labels will discipline their support of and opposition towards certain policies, positions and personas. Because if we are indeed our leaders’ bosses, as Aquino proposed we are and should be, we better start with 1) knowing what each of us as well as each of our leaders are, 2) making sure they either remain what they are or change to something other depending on our labeling opinion, and 3) avoid being frustrated by all infighting and resort to using the social-scientistic privilege of labeling the various stands. That labeling privilege is not just our right; it is also our duty as bosses with voices.

4. Revolutionary Rules

BUT JUST as any revolution succeeds through discipline, a labeling revolution must be aware of its own obligations and responsibilities.

For one, it must be correct or precise and self-critical. For instance, we might find it easy to label a politician as an advocate of an oligarchic conservatism, as is the wont of certain left-leaning pundits concerning elements of the landed elite. But self-criticality might lead us to ask whether this linguistic obsession is correct. Why attach the label merely to the old landed gentry? That would be as if the new landed gentry (e.g. Manny Villar) as well as the new corporate moguls or their puppets in government and politics cannot apply the same evils of oligarchic governance in the new economics! That presumption would be a shame.

Then there’s the necessity to identify fake self-descriptions. One might easily label Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino as a “populist” or left-of-center party on the shelf of categories, meaning pro-people, consequently pro-labor, etc. However, certain parties would protest that such a categorization might be biased and incorrect, considering perhaps their alleged knowledge that Joseph Estrada of the party (who formed the party) governed during his term with conservative-like favors to the Chinese-Filipino elite of the country, or that one of his first directives upon sitting in office was to order the government to withdraw its claims on billionaire Eduardo Cojuangco’s stakes at the United Coconut Planters Bank. If that’s the allegation, the party’s category label would then be deemed questioned and might have to be reworded to “ethnic conservative” or some such new label to sublimate it from the pejorative and accusatory label of pseudo-leftist.

Another obligation of the labeling science or art is the responsibility to constantly define the labels, even redefine wherever and whenever necessary. But would this ever be necessary? Isn’t it automatic of labels to demand meaning? Read the next paragraphs.

5. Advancing the Advantages

IT MIGHT be feared that a media-sponsored labeling revolution will result in a mere transfer of faith from a person’s name to a category label. But this does not acknowledge the fact that whereas persons operate from the aura of enigma and charisma pushed by subtle PR blitzes, labels have their own enigma maintained constantly by a demand for definition, redefinition, and reiteration of details. And so while it is true that faith can never be removed even with the presence of labels, faiths are nonetheless exposed to the space of reason when labels are constantly validated by their dynamic contents. For instance, some labels—like old inappropriate music categories (e.g. the easy-listening music of Perry Como)—will have to be relegated to rare occasions where they can still belong (e.g. nostalgia party needs), or they may simply go entirely obsolete. Or they may adapt and reinvigorate themselves to fit the times (Michael Bublé and Harry Connick as the new “standards” and “big-band” music icons, “neo-nationalism” in Germany or the United States as reactions to immigration or increasing racial woes instead of being representative of some other older frustration, etc.). Other labels, meanwhile, will float above trends and dictate the direction of the future, perhaps even spawn a multiplicity of sub-labels, like heavy metal rock music’s later birthing of progressive metal, death metal, nu metal, and so on.

The presence of labels, once introduced, will also be inescapable. A politician (or even any ordinary Filipino within an organization) should find it necessary to wear his label with pride. A politician may protest that a label placed on his person is wrong, but he cannot avoid labels altogether. He would then find it necessary to wear one he likes, for he would need it to make it in this new archipelago of labels. Set up thus, the labels will make it easy for us to keep track of the politician’s actions and decisions according to the label he committed himself to wearing. Thus, for example, leftists who betray their leftism would either have to be kicked out of the roster or invent their own kind of neo-leftism. In this new republic of labels, loyalty to a label will be the new rule for each label’s following.

And so politicians from now on will be proud of what they stand for, the way conservatives in the United States are proud of being conservatives (even to the point of claiming conservatism as the real American way, against liberalism which they say is the way of the traitor if not of the devil). On C-Span a caller said he’d always vote conservative Republican. When another caller countered that Republicans only cater to special corporate interests, the Republican caller asked, “so what? If we don’t take care of corporations first, where will our workers get a job?” Liberals would find that proposition funny, but you get my drift. Liberals, too, are proud to be called liberals and consider conservatism to be un-American. A liberal economist like the Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman proudly titles his New York Times blog “The Conscience of A Liberal”.

Now, the difference this tradition of self-labeling brings would be tremendous. This would already mean that with the labels, politicians will be required not only to be loyal to and proud of their causes but also to avoid being primarily loyal to their deceptions. Not that there won’t be such types of people or deceivers; a lot of embarrassments to both the US Democrat and Republican parties from the distant and recent past can now be arranged on a giant picture frame. But it’d definitely be easier to track such betrayals from within the check and balance of causes politicians have committed themselves to.

In short, from a politics of personality we would have been liberated or at least sublimated to embrace now a new politics of philosophies. These philosophies will become the new gods whom the politicians shall serve, whilst previously they only subverted causes to gather a bevy on their selves’ charismatic wangwang-nesses.

6. Finally, Chasing After the Choices

SO IF Noynoy Aquino is indeed a liberal, we may ask now how he might—as a liberal—address the current water crisis, for instance, and the entire issue of climate change and its impact on such large communal objects as dams for drinking water supply, irrigation needs and electricity generation. This early, Aquino intimated his openness to the idea of studying, at least, the practicality of nuclear power plants—this, despite early warnings from seismologists. If that alternative is approved in the high rungs of our government within the next six years, how then is the liberal stand on nuclear energy different from that of Mark Cojuangco’s Nationalist People’s Coalition’s pro-nuke environmentalism via Loren Legarda? No different, it would seem. But if the conservative approach to these issues is traditionally to merely pay lip service to adaptations to climate change in order to service corporate welfare and consequent profits, might the liberal approach be what would consider alternative water and electricity sources only in so far as these would benefit the masses and their future generations primarily and the industries only secondarily? And what about Edcel Lagman’s RH Bill? Would it take a different context under liberal supervision from if it were implemented during an election year under a secretive and disbursement-hungry conservative team of elite plunderers?
Context is also important in relation to how we as ideological partisans approach principles. For example, regarding the issue over the supposedly high principle of anti-nepotism, conventional wisdom preaches that nepotism per se is evil, regardless of who is sitting in office. Those who carry the flag of this wisdom, especially taking note that many who do are without confirmation bias, say that nepotism is a form of corruption, wherein families of supporters are rewarded for their support, and where as a consequence of that nepotistic decision families of supporters ought to have the magnanimity to refuse offers of an office. This is hogwash, of course, again a produce of our wont to disregard the schools of thought within nepotistic decisions. Everyone who participates in an election expects something in return: the ordinary voter vouches for the candidate who offers him a better life, while technocrats, including a family of technocrats, would support the candidate who offers them or their idols (or perhaps their entire families) the opportunity to implement their professional utopias outside of the paper to create revolutions in reality. Let’s go to specifics:

Were I a conservative royalist, for instance, I would definitely not have minded had Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo appointed Mikey Arroyo as Secretary of Finance were he armed with the ability to run the office, and Dato Arroyo as Secretary of Defense were he too gifted with the technical capacity. I wouldn’t mind because as a royalist I’d be loyal firstly to the principle of divine right royalism as a necessity for strong governance (or a strong republic), and would look upon the principle of anti-nepotism as inferior to the first. If, on the other hand, I were a liberal, I might protest the nepotism, and might demand that president Arroyo appoint better-qualified people, and ludicrously express a preference for liberals to run these offices. Ludicrous, right? Ludicrous, because I in my turn—as a liberal—wouldn’t be minding John F. Kennedy’s appointment of his brother to the Executive Secretary post. I wouldn’t be minding it if the entire cabinet of any liberal president is occupied by close friends and relatives of that president, even if I knew there are professors better qualified for the posts, not only because I could reason that this might be because the president hardly knows the professors, but also because as long as the appointees are all liberals with liberal principles, I would be satisfied with the thought that the principle of liberal governance will be served. . . . But, then again, of course I could also protest my president’s appointments. And should I protest, I would only have been in a position to do that, because if there’s anyone who’s in a position to protest certain liberal appointments by a liberal president, it wouldn’t be a conservative, it would have to be an insider of the liberal mob who might have his own preferences for an effective liberal governance. The same with a conservative president. Were it a liberal mob protesting, say, a conservative Gloria Arroyo government’s appointment of, say, business mogul Enrique Razon’s people to specific positions in the departments of finance and budget, that protest would be ill-placed. Here, the liberals ought to protest not from the inferior principle of anti-nepotism but against the more crucial principle of conservative royalism itself lurking behind the nepotismic decision. The principle of anti-nepotism will always, always be inferior to the higher principles of the philosophies that run our lives.

But back to the contexts of Noynoy's new administration qua our present choice. If his idea at the get-go of a wangwang-less elite following the same rules as the lowly pedestrian was already a manifestation of liberalism in action, soon followed by such other bright, possibly-liberal news as government’s identification of a lending mogul’s tax evasion practice, the crowning liberal argument for this present young administration so far would of course still be the series of announcements concerning missing public funds and hefty and possibly-illegal disbursements of same from such entities as the PAGCOR by elements of the previous administration. These series of announcements, contextualized herein, would suggest that the liberal way is the anti-corruption, anti-graft way averse to the allegedly conservative way of raining public-fund favors on 1) industry people friendly to the conservative government and 2) government people who showed friendliness toward the industry friends of industrialist-friendly conservative governance. If that contextualization is exact, then we shall have to see (and note) how a liberal government would run after such conservative corrupt deeds, and ask ourselves whether liberals are better at doing this policing than alternative conservative factions who may be as pro-industries as their fellow conservatives but are intolerant of corruption and selective favors (assuming of course such a conservative faction with some such Claro Recto morality still exists in our country).

Corollary to this vigilant thought, we might ask further whether a liberal is in an ideal position to investigate the corruption of government by corporate elements (corporate elements who may be in government themselves or merely friends of those in government seats), considering that liberalism is supposedly readily averse—ideologically, at least—to the premium placed by the conservative ideology as a whole on industry moguls. Within the same corollary field, we might ask whether it is possible for a conservative faction opposing another conservative faction to be truly opposed to the idea of favoring certain industry corporations, considering that conservative ideology itself is an ideology presupposing the necessity of favoring industries for development to be determined by the government. This presumption of such a necessity is already quite a temptation, a liberal would argue, being that such freedom accorded the government to make such determinations is almost a license for that government to extend its determinations of favor to certain special interests, with such micro-favors legally defensible as favorable in turn to the health of the industries determined by that same government as needful of development and favor.

In short, it should often be a tall order for a conservative to convince people of conservative governance devoid of favors to certain special interests. However, distant and contemporary historical facts all over the world show that very often conservatives are not exactly having such a hard time convincing people of their ideology’s morality—perhaps because people don’t much know the definition of conservative politics and policies, and secondly because the zeitgeist would every so often simply present the conservative ideology as the only workable or hope-offering one during a seeming failure of a liberal view at either the reins of governance or in the winds of media noise.

Given the above identifications, however abstract and sweeping, of the two major ideologies of policy, it figures, then, why the conservative ideology of politics and policies is often quite the magnet for people in politics who also are people in industries—say, the sugar industry or the banking industry. Or to powerbrokers who can employ a charismatic, sweet-talking pseudo-liberal to serve in government for their companies’ interests. Not that people in industries cannot be liberals. Mar Roxas, for instance, a son of scions from the sugar industry of the Western Visayas (an industry now and again purported to be a prime beneficiary of state sovereign loans procured by both liberal and conservative governments), is also known as Mr. Palengke, a dogtag designed to refer to its owner as a champion (or dawg, as American blacks would say) of policies that place the clamors of market consumers over and above the clamors of manufacturers and producers of consumables. Whether that tag is precise or not, Roxas’ high place in the Liberal Party as that kind of dawg accords him the challenge of high liberal expectations to be The Man.

Is it harder, therefore, for a liberal to exist in the world, given these expectations and the difficulty of fulfilling them? Is it easier for a conservative to live life, considering that his/her beliefs has him/her primarily answerable to the sponsors in the corporate and trading world than to the millions of the masses, given too that these corporate expectations are often easier to deliver (by way of both legalese and PR journalese)? If Noynoy Aquino’s is therefore a true liberal government and Gloria Arroyo’s was a true conservative George W. Bush-style one, can we say that it would be harder for Aquino’s government to fulfill itself, given masses’ and mass media expectations, compared to a conservative government for whom masses’ and mass media opinions are traditionally of no consequence to its manipulation-savvy spinners with higher conservative priorities than addressing the majority’s cries?
Well, yes, and no. True, it’s harder to please a people than a bunch of friends, but given that both liberalism and conservatism are faiths as well as data-armed beliefs, elements from both philosophies carry their principles as “the right thing”. Armed with their belief of the right thing and deed, therefore, liberals cannot be assumed to have a harder time in government than their conservative colleagues. For regardless of their popularity or unpopularity, both parties unwaveringly rest in the assurances of their ideologies’ standards of measure, and so therefore—whatever the outcome—the liberals will walk away when it’s their time to walk away with the belief, happy or sad, that they did the right thing. They will exit in the same way Gary Olivar did, hailing, chin up, all the things that happened under the Arroyo style of governance as the best to ever happen on and to the Filipino nation.

We, the general polity, meanwhile, will do our part from within these ideologies. But our part in these in the future shall hopefully be not as “screwed up” as it is now, as my blogging friend Lila Shahani put it, for presently we are still in the process of labeling our leaders and their philosophies according to data from our memories, a process we have at least recognized as necessary now; necessary, that is, that we may neither be eternally duped by more pseudo –ists to come nor become unrecognizing traitors to the very –ists we should be rallying for instead of against.

I have long been puzzling over why protest rallies today display more of those “party-list” banners than placards announcing their specific protests, or at least as many. Now I understand. For it is indeed ripe for us to henceforth pick our heroes not by their commercials on TV, nor by their slogans, nor by their insulting jingles, but by the flags (and philosophies) they belong to.

Until our democracy and democratic practice learn to get to that next level, it’ll always be game over for us all, and we’ll continue to be our leaders’ labeled “jejemons” at the online election game instead of what we ought to be and can be from now on—their indexers in our own labeling revolution. [END]

Image sources:

Noynoy Aquino photo from http://quierosaber.wordpress.com/2009/08/21/
Gloria Arroyo and Joseph Estrada photo from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1063976.stm
Gibo Teodoro poster image from http://quierosaber.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/
Liberal Party logo image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_(Philippines)
Nacionalista Party logo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacionalista_Party
Lakas-Kampi-CMD logo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakas_Kampi_CMD
"No wang-wang" logo image from http://www.facebook.com/pages/Isumbong-Mo-Ang-Wang-Wang-Dito/135376786480462
Paul Krugman photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
Photo of NP senatorial candidates Satur Ocampo and Liza Maza with NP’s Manny Villar and Bongbong Marcos in inset from http://www.phillyimc.org/en/worse-crime-–-electoral-politics-ndf-and-cpp-philippines
Pwersa ng Masang Pilipino logo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwersa_ng_Masang_Pilipino
Bayan Muna logo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayan_Muna
German neo-Nazi flag from http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/de}naz.html
US Republican Party logo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_States)
Nationalist People's Coalition logo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalist_People's_Coalition
Mar Roxas photo from http://www.marroxas.org/about.htm
Gloria Arroyo photo from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gloria_Macapagal-Arroyo,_Davos.jpg
Gary Olivar photo from http://2010presidentiables.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/gary-olivar-malacanang-spokesperson-5-thumbs-down-on-kris-aquinos-tears-will-hurt-teodoro/
protest rally photo from http://www.arkibongbayan.org/2008-08Aug13-DOLEpicket/pix/EPSN7864.JPG

Scratching our heads

2010-01-11T14:25:00.045+08:00

The next Congress session (on January 18) approaches. Then, today, a TV news announced a survey result showing a 92% disapproval rating for the Reproductive Health Bill, Rep. Edcel Lagman’s law seeking to decrease the annual population growth through a drastic sex education program, a birth control program, and so on.

Ordinarily, as a left-leaning liberal I would be saddened/angered by that news and throw in my support for this bill, popularly known as the RH Bill. For instance, I could easily take off from Al Gore’s desire—for the sake of the planet—to force the Third World (and even the US and China) to discipline its procreative proclivity and thus stop its bent to “increase and multiply.” I should be in favor of the bill, especially as we Filipinos recurrently have the privilege of being firsthand witnesses to how urbanization and squatting and metropolitan garbage wreak havoc on the waterways of our metropolises and how overpopulation hampers all efforts to balance unemployment with investments. For while my 50-ish uncle gets an on-the-spot job offer to be a warehouse foreman at a Toronto sidewalk while merely out for a cigarette, the unemployment rate in our country and cities are decidedly too unhappy. The population growth rate in our parts has also sadly provided a ready rationale for the mass production of drinking water by way of those uncomfortable dams, uncomfortable firstly to the families of slain tribal protesters who were against the building of certain of the dams, but just as uncomfortable to those towns in those provinces that keep watch on the spilling level of a dam every time it rains. Damn those dams. We’re daily uncomfortable about our electricity supply, too, with all its foreign loans and environmental burdens. That, along with the capital’s highway-maintenance high-budget spending for the daily rituals of transporting citizens from points of departure to points of arrival and vice versa (the questionable concept of commuting workers to established business districts), causing in turn air and space pollution, all of which cull their rationale from overpopulation’s never-ending need for “modern” solutions. Biodiversity zones are invaded; food production is threatened; sanitation becomes a headache; and beggary becomes the bric-a-brac on our boulevards.

But despite my sympathy for these situations that call for a quick check on the burgeoning population, I also know of other public management policies in conflict with the ideological point of view around that checking. Current economics governing global economies of scale, for instance, would have a different utopia that’s almost in communion with the Christian churches’ embrace of the mushrooming Earth population. These economic beliefs, which are a way away from economics of climate change mitigation, jump for joy at the sight of any new or booming market populace, thus implying that the more market there is the merrier it is for industries and world trade. Religion’s own approval of population booms have a similar-sounding reason: the more converts there are, the bigger the collection for servicing what religious institutions claim to be God’s words. But such favor for a continuing population increase is not necessarily limited to market economics or religion. Statesmanship, such as those in countries like New Zealand and Canada and Germany, lament their states’ declining or aging populations and explicitly invite not just a labor force from without but immigration as well, in order to add laborers to their industries and new taxpayers to the states' national welfare; this can definitely be deemed pro-“increasing and multiplying” by itself.

I do not necessarily cater to global economics favoring the treadmill of consumption and production as the measure of progress and development. Yet I, too, may temporarily side with the Church’s as well as economics’ and sparse populations’ stand on the advantage of expanding followers/markets/laborers/taxpayers. Though it won’t be for the same reasons.

My stand would more be from the vantage point merely asking the following questions:

Taking the persons-per-square-meter measurement, is there really overpopulation in such ill-spread populations as that in the Philippines? High growth rate, yes. But is that reality also being used as a self-comforting alibi for the past and present administrations’ failure to distribute wealth (entrepreneurial capital and knowledge) as well as farm or industrial lands?
Conversely, would population control play such a big part in the solutions currently being designed for these countries’ problems, or would it just add itself later to the national roster of problems as a singular solution? For instance, would programs at decreasing the population, assuming it is to achieve drastic results, produce likewise a future German-like problem in our archipelago, wherein the decline of a lower class results in the decline of a local labor force? Would a, say, drastic decline in population enable us to collect bigger VATs and other lower-consumer taxes, or would it hamper our debt servicing reliant on taxation culled from middle-income consumers instead of big business? Would the decline of the lower class and the rise of the middle class, ratio-wise, necessarily produce healthy industries or cottage industries, or would it be wanting of a lower class (with low-standard education constantly fooled by cartels) to exploit, producing in turn a barter-like neighborhood economy circling the middle class subdivision, in short a slowed-down consumer society? Would we, then, need to import labor? Isn’t China’s rising superiority as a global manufacturing hub precisely due to the presence of such a substantial amount of cheap labor?
Even from the point of view of environmentalism and the war against climate change, is overpopulation really the culprit qua people numbers or is it more the state managers’ corrupted inability to radically create policies that would dispense of our unhindered use of fossil fuel? Are the daily traffic jams, for instance, to blame or is our managers’ refusal to throw out the window the old habit of daily transporting millions of workers to business centers manifest of a deeper root of the problem?
I reserve this number for—I trust—many more questions my readers, I know, would have the intelligence to ask in regards to the overpopulation claim. For while a city zone might display a good example of this overpopulation, Metro Manila being currently the fifth most populous urban area in the world after Tokyo/Yokohama-Delhi-Seoul/Incheon-Jakarta, hectares of an idle land owned by a national billionaire in a province could still sport an Eden for yet-to-occur nature exploitation. National Geographic reports that although the world’s population will soon reach 7 billion, that number can actually be fitted into the L.A. area if the elements are arranged elbow-to-elbow, concert-audience-fashion. We often refuse to acknowledge that ample land and wealth in our islands exist—land and wealth often wrested away by some lawyer-manufactured title or political savvy, sudden properties illustrating an equally burgeoning landscape of inequity and exploitation combined with goon politics and elitist legalese.

Certainly, the above questions will remain unanswered by the people who have handles on those problems. That is, problems other than those to do with the population, I mean problems directly having to do with these handlers’ disregard for the general population cum nation. For it is because of this disregard that the ship we call the state continues to resemble the sinking ferry whose captain is blaming the passengers overloading the low-priced rear of the boat for the sinking, after these passengers’ insistence at the pier to have the right to board was welcomed by the ticket seller at the pier booth. This captain will ignore the fact that selfish profit was really the culprit that allowed such overloading per trip that could have been managed via a distributed right to board across the ferry’s many returns. Rep. Edcel Lagman (Lakas Kampi CMD) could have authored a bill on such profiteering at the helm. And, in this instance, it is erect profit—not just the ordinary non-prophets of Christian hypocrisy—who could find good use for a condom.

True, there are poor parents who scratch their heads at the sight of new pregnancies, even as they follow Church teachings regarding the celebration of and respect for new life. And true, it is doubtful that there are many such parents who follow Church teachings regarding new life. Most Catholics ignore Catholic teachings on virtue, understandably since these virtues are usually taught via brief litanies in the echoing cathedrals where priestly words scatter inside the architecture like unrecognizable bird chirps (I always say the Church’s main problem is less scriptural than architectural). Church followers mainly go to church for selfish materialist prayers. Many who have memorized all the Catholic feasts are not necessarily familiar with the details and contexts of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth; whenever they are, these teachings usually function in the faithful’s lives as no more than texts impossible to apply in the daily practice of clever free enterprise with an overpricing bent.

And so, I admit, it’s not surprising to hear in this Catholic country of ours reports about rising abortion cases. Or even news about teens at Catholic high schools caught petting or—worse?—copulating inside a car in the school parking lot or the principal’s toilet. If this is to be judged as a moral failure in society, whose first failure would that be, then, the parents’? Never the Church’s?
So let me defend population control programs for a minute here. For perhaps population control programs are there merely to try to pick up from where this Church failure to check its flock left off. And though these would yet get the Church’s whipping in the media as the sinful programs of government, we should not forget that the teen fornications we were talking about above were occurring in a Catholic campus rather than a Population Control Commission office. Sadly for the Church, while it recurrently and conveniently condemns any birth-control or sex education program of any government (keeping mum, though, on the advertising of sex in mass media), it also cannot control rampant sex among its followers and authorities, and thus, by this guilt perhaps, refuses to believe that high school freshmen already know more about sex—thanks to mass media, the Internet, and quasi-legal video piracy—than they’d care to learn in a sex education class.

But this Church failure is really understandable. For the Church itself—behind its media claims to virtue—is not really that serious about sins. When Catholic schools honor students whose generous parents receive special pointers for their kids’ exam reviews, are we not talking about sin? When sex runs rampant in the sacristies, are we not talking about sin too? When the Church picks on a political movie with breast exposures (like Schindler’s List) while closing its eyes on porn tabloids and its ears on the sexist and racy jokes of bad comedy movies (without breast exposures, yeah, but starring “wholesome” stars from privileged families subliminally bragging about their exploits), are we not talking of hypocritical selectivity or even perhaps bribed corruption? As the Church continues to campaign against the immorality of the RH Bill, some of its students and authorities somewhere shall continue to copulate, exploit, molest, or rape, and some of its orphanages even perhaps continue to reek of intermittent abuse. And though these illicit activities inside religious institutions may be exceptional cases, the fact remains that—despite their efforts—the Church has largely failed society as a whole and, evidence suggests, sporadically in their own backyard as well. And as for the claim that its Christian morality has always been frustrated by secular governments, history reminds us that the Church’s past (and somewhere present) role as both religion and government does not exactly give it a better record. We are not even saying anything yet about the Church’s own stand on secular government corruption going on under its very nose or at the other end of the hands it daily embraces as its donors.

In this sense of failure we could regard the Catholic Church especially, along with business economics and its jet-setting habits, as both conservative and liberal institutions. Both being knowledge institutions seeing nothing wrong with the virtue of “increasing and multiplying,” they could be said to cater to the seminary philosophy regarding the semen and the egg as apple fruits of that tree where no fruit is allowed to be thrown away and where no apple is allowed to remain uneaten. The semen must only be allowed to come out for procreation, thus banning even simple masturbation of the genitalia, and the woman’s monthly production and disposal by menstruation of a reproductive egg in the womb must be considered an original sin. This philosophy rumbles on with wrath, even as priests themselves may not just be scratching their penis heads in their bedrooms but be conspicuously masturbating their palates with excessive gustatory delights (the fruits of seminarian parents’ contributions to the seminary pantry), their eyes feasting on excess paintings and antiques and gold-plated altars, their ears overly ridden with imported Italian music none of their parishioners could afford to either download or appreciate, not to mention their Sunday rests with their bishops’ four-wheel-drive trips to vacation spots of their choice.

Still and all, however, after all this fact-baiting about the Church—as well as about business economics—set on the table, we can still say that they are right in admonishing us that it is not so much the fault of the teeming population that it’s unable to feed itself either equitably or amply. They are right in saying that this is really someone else’s fault, with them playing a merely supportive role.

For, often indeed, it is the fault of the overpopulated tribes’ chiefs, whose families and friends have for so long been allowed the better regions of the forest to hunt in, while the rest of the copulating tribe were only allowed nothing more than crumbs as prizes for their wage slavery and consequent obedience in the jungle. Such has been the case, in fact, nowadays in this age of unhindered corruption and graft (inclusive of continued fraudulent loan-getting), that the RH Bill should neither become the point of headline contention nor the hype-object of a headline solution. Not because no amount of family planning programming will change the Filipino belief in pag-aasawa and a necessary pag-aanak, but because—without meaning to agree with the Church’s argument—I in this serious light can only regard the RH Bill as stooge-like Edcel Lagman’s mere token for a singular solution, the head of the government he has supported having proved itself not really up to scratch with better and more effective answers for satiating the elite's greed and capping the semen of poverty growth.
Therefore, why give him another law from which he can demand another funding (not necessarily for), knowing the party he belongs to to be the family of the tribal chiefs we were talking about above? And this being an election year. [END]

Image borrowed from:
http://www.afad-online.org/mbi/mbi_p41.jpg

Brief sermon about a future “Xmas” and happy new year

2009-12-21T22:35:00.038+08:00

Our country may be in the Northern hemisphere of the tropics, but the winter solstice is not as heavily noticed here as it is in the more northern zones with winters, is it? Thus, in our country, any celebration on the 25th of December—should it be in reference to a solar deity—ought not to make any sense, as should not any other special tropical communion with nature during the entire month of December. In ancient Rome, December 25th was celebrated as the birth of the solar deity the Unconquered Sun (Dies Natalis Solis Invicti), because that day was seen by the Julian calendar as “when the duration of daylight first began to increase after the winter solstice” (Wikipedia). The winter solstice occurs sometime between December 21 and 22.

Even before the post-winter solstice feast, the ancient Romans would already be celebrating the Brumalia festival, which was a copy of the Greeks’ Lenaia festival, lasting for one month and culminating on December 25. Brumalia was in honor of Bacchus, the god of drinking and merriment, with festivities often occurring on the eve of December 24. Note that in Latin the word bruma means “shortest day” or “winter solstice.”

Yule or Yule-tide, meanwhile, was a pagan festival of the Germanic peoples, which lasted from late December to early January. The festival Yule or Jul was later placed on December 25 after the adoption of the Julian calendar in that part of ancient Europe.

During the Yule season, the Germanic Druids brought into their homes evergreen trees to signal the oncoming plentiful fruitage in their groves. They hung apples and fruits on their tree, lit candles on it as symbol of the sun’s informing on photosynthesis. And as a way of saying goodbye to the wintry days as well as the year past, they burned the trees’ trunk parts in a ceremony called the Yule Log.

Now, before we try and discuss how Emperor Constantine’s time may have appropriated the above Greek and Roman and Germanic feasts to merge with his newfound Christianity (the earliest Christian Christmas celebration having been traced to 330 AD during Constantine’s reign), let’s consider first the birthplace of the God (or to the Arians, the god) of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth.

You see, a visit to Bethlehem, Palestine, in winter will tell you that temperatures could range from 1 to 13 degrees Celsius, and if we are therefore to follow the teachings of Christian fundamentalists it would indeed be hard to imagine shepherds and their sheep braving that cold night temperature to be with the stars above their sheep in the snowed-on rocks. Some of these preachers emphatically argue that December could not have been the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. But Mac McCarty, my Pentecostal preacher-friend, says that’s ethnocentric, offering that if one “knows anything about shepherds, especially in temperate zones and, worse, places like New Zealand,” he’d know that there is nothing at all strange about shepherds being out in 1-to-13-degrees-Celsius weather. “The colder the weather, the softer the wool!” he explains.

Still, bearing that in mind, let’s go back to Constantine. You see, the Bible was written after Constantine. In the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the Canon of the New Testament, the authors wrote: “The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is, from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council.” No wonder Oliver Cromwell abolished Christmas Day! It might also be noted that the earliest canonical Gospels, those of John and Mark, have no account of the nativity of Jesus, and the Tridentine Council would happen in the 16th century yet. Therefore, if the Emperor Constantine and early Christians had proceeded with the symbolism associating the Nazarene’s birth, presumably not known then, with the Yule season, for symbolic purposes or for purposes of pacifying the pagans and Roman religions celebrating Saturnalia and facilitating their assimilation into the new official religion of the Emperor, the decision would have been logical, considering that any implication—from any Gospel about Jesus’ birth as witnessed by shepherding shepherds—that it all occurred in summer had yet to be composed during that period of the declaration.

So, it wouldn’t have been those early Christians’ fault to have Jesus’ birthday pinned to this donkey of a date. It would instead be the fault of later Christian leaders who allowed the thought to continue that Christmas occurred during winter. Symbolic, it would be, sure—at least for those who were/are able to experience the winter solstice, including Rome and Bethlehem, since religious expansion to tropical zones was not yet the order of the day. But even here in the tropics, in the centuries after the Thirty Years’ War and the religious expansion race, late December could still be an apt symbolic spot for a messiah’s birth, given that this season proceeds to the celebration of a New Year complete with the present tradition of hurling fireworks to the skies to meet a new dawn. Never mind that the Jesus birth in a new dawn context is often obscured by our quirky New Year celebrations and events, quirky as when Filipino Christians become Chinese Buddhists or Taoists on New Year’s Day, dangling those handy red feng shui books and round fruits.

Philippine Christmas Today

In truth, these days, the original context of our Christmas celebrations, like all other contexts in our country’s daily ceremonies, has been drowned out by a different religion called Christmas economics. The more elitist one’s Christmas economics is, the better—that’s the new holiness. In fact, certain formalities can be heard to scoff at the use of “Xmas” (considered vulgar) in favor of the more official and formal “Christmas,” never mind that “X” is the first letter of the word “Jesus” in Greek or that “Christmas” is actually the bastardized spelling of “Christ's Mass.”

In fact, Christmas doesn’t mean anything anymore other than a valued season for monetary fluidity and dynamic liquidity. Gifts exchange hands, or charity is activated with the potential for tax rebates, and streetside bankers’ loans are acquired for celebratory purposes, the food trade as well as the church trade both at a high. This economics’ exact parallel in Jesus’ time was the rapid one that occurred during the Passover, with hard-earned currencies exchanging hands near the temples to pay for the hefty sums Caiaphas extracted from the faithful’s cleansing of their feet at the Sanhedrin-sponsored Old Temple Jacuzzi pools.

In our time, caroling has also become a vehicle for juvenile as well as organizational beggary, Christmas trees a symbol for China's and SM department stores’ plastic superiority, and the midnight mass—like any other Catholic mass celebration—an opportunity to pray for a new washing machine and to guffaw at the neighbor's fashion sense as well as gossip on the beautiful and the ugly at church.

But charity above all is loudly expressed, especially the Philippine elite’s charity events which have traditionally put a premium on “giving” and “sharing” over and above that other form of charity promoting the giving and sharing of the ability to give and share. In our market economics, that latter is called socialism and is deemed anti-Christian.

Meanwhile, as I write this, Mayon Volcano is expressing its own season with Alert Level 4 hoisted upon the residents of Albay province, denying many Bicolano Christians the opportunity to share in the material holidays. But politicians on the campaign trail for the 2010 elections are promising the electorate with abstracts devoid of details, acting as the poverty-stricken nation’s new messiahs, and the recent involvement of the Arroyo government-coddled Ampatuan clan’s Maguindanao provincial dictatorship in a massacre case has—despite all the Judasian faux arrests and hypocritical speeches—yet to show real progress in bringing justice to the victims beyond Pontius Pilate's white-, I mean, hand-washing. I say hypocritical speeches because those speeches from Malacañang Palace seem to deny having not made a similar effort to investigate the killing and abduction of Maguindanao teachers during the election of new senators for the Arroyo empire in 2007 AD.

And because Christmas has become an economic more than a religious festival in our country, those devoid of the privilege to share, because of a financial inability, won’t be able to share, and some are already despairing over this inability. So, now, I—being one of those with that inability—shall venture to share my thoughts about bringing back the old contexts for potential present evaluations with the hope that perhaps I can help revitalize virtuous and valuable contexts for a more aware society, should that be possible.

Our country’s kowtowing to the traditions of the Northern Hemisphere is apt symbol of how colonized we are through our culture, and the only way by which a tropical Christian nation can counter-colonize an invasive Western Christian culture (along with its symbols) is to contextualize, and then aptly and quickly re-contextualize, those same traditions. Let me offer some such potential re-contextualization in three ways.

1. The Jesus Christ Way

Firstly, the Christian context, which I already mentioned above but which we can repeat here: even with an awareness of the controversy surrounding the Nazarene’s birth during this month, placing his unknown birth’s celebration in this month can actually still be considered universally appropriate due to its proximity to New Year’s day, with all that day’s trappings in trying to meet a new dawn manifest as potential signifiers.

Christmas can then be considered a sort of season for thanking one's Lord for the year past as well as a season of prayers for a progressive year ahead. (Or should we delete those last five words and deny having anything in common with the prosperity theology of the Yoido Full Gospel Church?)

In that case, all the present celebrations and traditions would have to be modified to fit into this re-contextualization. For instance, the Germanic Yule log (burning the evergreen Christmas tree’s trunk to say goodbye to the jungle ugliness of the past) can be incorporated into our Christian nation’s Christmas season activities in place of the now-maligned midnight-hour firecrackers that’s becoming more profitable to a nation of hospitals and Betadine manufacturers than to the larger luck-seeking nation. The log can also represent all the bad trees that fell on our paths during typhoons Ondoy (Ketsana) and Pepeng (Parma)—thus the necessary burning. Implementing this transformation in our customs can also prove itself beneficial to the country’s underappreciated logging industry, which shall henceforth supply everyone with the necessary Yule logs for these prayer-celebrations for a bountiful year ahead.

The only problem might be the newness of it, so perhaps instead of burning the logs some of us can burn plastic Christmas trees instead. Plastic-burning is after all more in tune with Filipino landfill management customs. A bigger ozone hole this transformation will contribute to the entire globe will render us more able to see a brighter Bethlehem star in the heavens, should such a Bethlehem star come back to within our view in a sort of second coming.

As for those Christmas trees, the hung apples can be revived, especially since imported apples are now cheaper than locally-farmed but for-export mangoes, and thus would be the better symbol for the Philippines’ kowtowing to the WTO religion surrounding the heaven of economies of scale. We can light little electronic candles on these trees, all made in China, which by their being a fire hazard can already qualify them as the recurrent Filipino vehicle for clearing squatter zones to make way for prosperous industrial beauty. Incidentally, we might take note that, by the proof of our prayers, divine blessings are measured by the amount of industrial production and products that a country booms with at the expense of the Catholic Church-sponsored bloated surplus of a working population.

2. The Bacchus Route

An alternative renovation of our Christmas habits can be coursed through the bringing in of the Roman Brumalia month-long bacchanalian celebration, which shall also culminate on the 25th of December. But, this time, not in honor of a god of drinking and merriment (Bacchus) but of God Himself as that mono-deity who has been able to provide our country with the materiel for our street corner or bar or terrace drinking binges and lightheaded merriment. In this regard, the sole governmental and business sector adaptation—apart from the beer fest-like celebrations—would be in requiring people to create a song that would praise God as the Christian God of Bountiful Alcohol that keeps this nation sane amidst all the carefree, drunken legalese in governance itself.

The bacchanalian feast can commence on Andres Bonifacio Day in late November, which is just right considering our heroes are mostly martyrs like Jesus of Nazareth himself. The alcohol can then be presented as an alibi for the general cowardice that made the heroes martyrs in the first place, all in cognizance of the fact that any heroism gets sublimated into martyrdom when it leans on the support of a more popular cowardice or sleepiness among its neighbors.

In that regard, consider the heroism of CNN Hero of the Year Efren Peñaflorida. By his example, the definition of heroism has become this: one that the government tolerates in designing for itself those things that seem to work. Sure, that heroism will get a medal from Malacañang, but that doesn’t mean that such heroism will be emulated or appropriated by, say, a prideful Department of Education that might merely understandably scoff at such heroic non-profit ways. Manny Pacquiao is a sports hero symbolizing hard work, dedication, and persistence, but that doesn’t mean our leaders will point to those symbolized virtues as more important than the symbol.

It’s the same with Jesus of Nazareth, who is now nothing more than a plastic child in a manger at SM department stores instead of the revolutionary irritant in his day’s conventional Jewish wisdom. The symbol has become more important than what he/it symbolized, and that doesn’t have to be so.

For behind the loss of all that symbology, he/it—Jesus—still symbolizes something. Except that, this time, the symbolism has become more lightheaded than utterly serious, more economics-serving than ethics-directed. Supposedly we’ll be happier that way.

3. Pagan Julian’s Guidance

Finally, we may opt for the continued use of the word Yule or Jul, which probably points to the “pagan” Roman emperor Julian. Its validity for Philippine use can be propounded thus: our Christian beliefs are often pagan beliefs, anyway, for we pray to sculptures as well as shiver in imagined salvation by the droplets of holy water culled from the convent’s faucet. We recognize more divine pleasure in touching the altar leaf than from understanding the pedantic parables of the Nazarene.

I am not being ironic and saying this is bad, I am merely saying this is what we are all about. Thus, if we are to change anything it is easier to change the context instead of the people’s mentality. Thus, here, renovation would be by the simpler, though drastic, gradual easing out of the New Testament in our bibles in favor once again of the holier-than-thou ethnic ceremonies of the Old with its clearer political cum nationalist contexts.

In line with this worship of idols, and with the season’s ultimate culmination on New Year’s Day having done away with environment-unfriendly fireworks, a shift to the firing of guns in the air should be in order. This will be in celebration of our honesty and the renouncement of our old hypocrisy that had been saying, “we’re clean, we’re gunless, we’re a peaceful society.” Such firearm revelry will show the world these symbols of our courage, our idol Gun-Gods that have made us the best country in the world in the sport of executing journalists and NGO workers. We can by this idolatry regain our pre-Hispanic culture wherein datus ruled, claiming our divine wisdom back from the days when the whole archipelago was still a happy land of brave warlords.

In fact, this transformation might even bring back the old religiosity, with everyone praying under the backhoe to such Ampatuan patriarch-like figures in Philippine leadership, mumbling simple words of prayer like, “Lord, please hear our prayer.”

So, you see, re-contextualizing doesn’t mean changing our people’s ways to fit into the context of their actions, which is hard to do given our education department’s often misappropriated funds. Re-contextualizing is easier when we merely change the meaning of the existing actions and objects themselves in order to make them fit into our ready and existing culture.

So, that's it. That's my essay-sermon for this season. Merry Christ’s Mass every one, including the masses always merry in their rebellion-free contentment, and a Happy New Gregorian Year ahead. May our population increase and multiply by Pope Gregory’s wish, as should the churches’ bounty in the year of our Lord (Jesus, the revolutionary theologian now mere plastic holy relic) twenty hundred and ten. By the way, that year-number can be written with the peso sign, that being the new sign of our daily cross in trying to fill the VAT, our holy grail offering to those Glorious Arroyo loans from China, the Red-Nosed Reins, Dear. [END]

Photo borrowed from: http://www.dbtechno.com/science/2009/12/21/shortest-day-of-the-year-means-the-winter-solstice-is-here/

A battle of faiths (or, In defense of journalism)

2009-12-11T11:46:00.047+08:00

While debates in Congress continue on whether to revoke or uphold the Macapagal-Arroyo government’s declaration of martial law in Maguindanao, a martial rule presumably imposed to quell massing of arms by loyalists of the Ampatuan clan (prime suspects in the Ampatuan massacre of 57 individuals), Mindanao-based expressions keep coming in, adding themselves to the equation. This morning alone, December 11, 2009, TV news reported an attack by three men on a Philippine Army and national police convoy in Maguindanao, the abduction of a Basilan college vice president, and the kidnapping of schoolchildren and adults by an Agusan warlord’s CAFGU men. Although the last report mentioned an earlier release of the schoolchildren, as of this blog’s writing 57 adults are still being held hostage and government forces are reportedly “negotiating” with the warlord. Meanwhile, a Lanao del Sur representative and Macapagal-Arroyo ally belonging to the Dimaporo clan was at the Congressional hearing on the martial law declaration, testifying on a situation at a town in his province, requesting for the inclusion of his area in the scope of the Maguindanao state of martial law.

Expect this new round of reports to be picked up once again by the critics of the Macapagal-Arroyo government in their ongoing expression of a long-standing suspicion towards anything the Macapagal-Arroyo government decides to do, is planning to decide on, or is testing the waters for. Commission on Human Rights chair Leila de Lima conveyed her own fears that the nearing commencement of the trial at a Metro Manila court of one of the suspects in the Maguindanao massacre could be used as an alibi for declaring martial law in the metropolis, using another supposed Ampatuan-supportive massing of arms as a rationale. In fact, only days after the arrest of the prime suspect in the said massacre and his detention at the National Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Manila, a parked van near the said NBI compound was purportedly raided and found to contain muddied M16 rifles, presumably demonstrating a possible intent by some parties to rescue the said prime suspect. Was this the start of that martial-law-in-Manila stage of a martial-law-2009 recipe that de Lima feared?

Critics’ Faith

The suspiciousness of Filipinos critical of the Macapagal-Arroyo government’s declaration is not entirely due to memories of the martial law years under Ferdinand Marcos. After all, Philippine society has a very short memory; it doesn’t put a premium on its history, and even when it does it hardly puts a premium on the contexts of historical data and their continuing significance to the present (Jose Rizal is regarded as only important to the past and certainly not to the globalized present). So, were these Marcos memories the sole ground for the anti-Macapagal-Arroyo suspiciousness, the numbers would be decidedly small. But considering the masses of people who have shown up at rallies against the government through the years since the Hello Garci Scandal, the suspiciousness has to be with the Macapagal-Arroyo government itself and towards Gloria Arroyo herself.

No, it’s not because of Marcos’ use of martial law which not many remember. These Filipinos wary of Gloria Arroyo and wary of her martial law declaration in Maguindanao province are wary because of her past and continuing use of all the loopholes in the laws of the land and our Constitution to push for the legality of all her actions. And they suspect now that the Maguindanao martial rule is not entirely for the purpose of reining in the lost Armed Forces of the Philippines-employed civilian volunteer army formerly at the beck and call of Datu Unsay municipality mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr., the prime suspect in the abovementioned massacre that triggered international outcry and the government’s late martial law declaration. They suspect that martial rule in Maguindanao could be “practice” for a gradual expanded one. Some even suspect the Ampatuan-Mangudadatu families’ escalating enmity was government-taunted, with one side supplied by arms from the Department of National Defense, so martial law can take place in the aftermath of whatever resultant violence, and consequently prolong Macapagal-Arroyo’s stay in power. After all, the Ampatuan clan, through its patriarch, the warlord and governor of the province, Andal Ampatuan Sr., along with his two sons, Andal Jr. and Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao governor Zaldy Ampatuan, and eighteen more Ampatuans in government posts including an energy undersecretary post, are longtime favorite allies of Gloria Arroyo’s government. Unfortunate though the aliance may have turned out to be for her, the alliance and mutual trust was real, with support brimming with arms supplies and (seemingly now) brimming with funds for this poor province that may have paid for the Ampatuans' eighteen mansions scattered in Magujndanao, Davao City, and Makati City. But the government likes to claim that the Mangudadatus, victims of the massacre, were also Macapagal-Arroyo allies, although it turns out that the Mangudadatu clan became the less favored clan, creating a breakdown of clan detente some pundits say wasn't allowed to happen during Cory Aquino's and Fidel Ramos' time. (Is the present martial rule also a way of saving the Ampatuans from the multiple murder charges, sublimating all this deed onto a bailable and amnesty-friendly rebellion charge, as has been suggested by many a lawyer?)

In the 2004 presidential election, the Hello Garci Scandal involving the incumbent president’s tapped phone call to Commission on Elections commissioner Virgilio Garcillano (“Garci”) resulted in a congressional investigation, hampered only by the said commissioner’s hiding, purportedly in Maguindanao. The president’s chief opponent, Fernando Poe Jr., got a zero vote in the province, “miraculously” as critics put it, with voter turnout at an incredible 94%. In the 2007 senatorial elections, the administration’s twelve candidates swept the province, 12-0. After the unceasing report of vote rigging in the province, a fall guy was finally found in the person of provincial Comelec supervisor Lintang Bedol, who also figured in the Hello Garci case. He was charged with fraud but soon went missing; his person is still at large today. A teacher whistleblower, Musa Dimasidsing, was advised by family members to escape Maguindanao but was still gunned down outside an Islamic school later. Two other teachers on their way to Manila to testify on the alleged vote rigging were abducted in Cebu by armed men.

We might also remember that in the “Oakwood mutiny” of Navy and Marine officers and their men in 2003, one of the mutineers’ complaints was the shortage of supplies and materiel purportedly being diverted by a gunrunning clique in the higher echelon of the AF

P to the highest bidders in the private sector. Fast forward to the present, and in the two weeks that the AFP raided houses and lots of the Ampatuan clan, even mortar rockets were recovered, buried underground or in septic tanks or hidden inside thick concrete walls.

The recovered weapons could well keep a marauding Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) battalion off Maguindanao. Unfortunately, reports came in by December 10 this year that the Ampatuan clan may have murdered even before the massacre at least 200 more people in the province who were not MILF people, and that these reports have been known a long time ago. Some residents of Davao City, where the Ampatuans own a mansion in a hectare-wide block in a prime subdivision, now suspect some of the summary killings that happened in Davao City in 2008 may have involved the Ampatuans (one resident even swears that Aldan Jr. is a drug user who purchases his dose from a squatters’ area in the city). But, let’s be honest—the abuses of CAFGUs and civilian volunteer groups have long been a given among those living in areas where they are present, and governments since Ferdinand Marcos’ have been made aware of these abuses.

But, hey, the abuses do not seem to be exclusive to CAFGUs. The legitimate armed forces and the national police themselves have long been held accountable by critics for the murder and disappearance of more than 1,300 individuals since 2001, many of whom were journalists or NGO workers on mere suspicion of being coddlers of leftist movements or being simply critics of the national government or local government officials. We might remember that one of the squealers on the Fertilizer Fund Scam of 2004, journalist Marlene Garcia-Esperat, later disappeared. The scam involved then-agriculture undersecretary Jocelyn Bolante who allegedly diverted P728 million in fertilizer funds to the presidential campaign of Gloria Arroyo. We might also remember the abduction from the airport of witness Jun Lozada by Presidential Security Group men. Lozada was set to appear in a Senate hearing on the NBN-ZTE Scandal, and was only rescued from the PSG men by the tense media airing of his abduction; he was turned over to his wife the same night of his airport abduction, and to the nuns of La Salle Green Hills where Lozada’s family took refuge.

We might remember further on the “2007 Glorietta Bombing” that killed eleven. At the height of the processing of the 2007 impeachment complaint against Gloria Arroyo, an explosion occurred at Glorietta Mall in Makati City which the police initially confirmed as a bombing (citing terrorism due to the presence of C4 explosive components) but later denied (citing methane explosion from a sewage tank). University of the Philippines chemical engineering professors and students disputed the possibility of a methane explosion, as did private investigators hired by the mall, the latter citing presence of the AFP-issue explosive’s components that the police investigation kept dismissing from then on. Later in November of that year, a Batasang Pambansa bombing occurred, killing a congressman’s driver.

Critics of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration often point their fingers at then-National Security Adviser (now National Defense secretary) Norberto Gonzales whom they have long suspected (some say been aware) of being a terror-tactic specialist, along with then-Interior and Local Government secretary Ronaldo Puno. Many a critic have mentioned Puno as their suspect in the Rizal Day bombings in 2000 at the height of the impeachment proceedings against Joseph Estrada (under whose administration Puno was also serving the DILG secretary post). The purported architect of Marcos' declaration of martial law (critics say Juan Ponce Enrile staged an ambush on his own person) is a staunch Macapagal-Arroyo ally and current Senate president ironically co-presiding the current Congressional joint session on Macapagal-Arroyo’s martial law declaration.

Some journalists swear to the veracity of Gonzales’ and Puno's involvement in terror tactics, as does Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago; but most can only rely on faith in the two’s evil, evidence to support the suspicion being elusive. Up to now, no proof of their involvement or testimony in relation to that involvement has been presented, whether in court or any other government office or the media.

But this impression on the two can only be seen in relation to Gloria Arroyo’s (like Joseph Estrada’s before her) unbridled desire to prolong a stay in Malacañang, a desire that not a few times tried to force an attempt to change the Constitution through Macapagal-Arroyo’s sons and allies in Congress, happily thwarted though these were by the meager opposition at the time and by critics in the noisy media. Macapagal-Arroyo has made the now-undying impression on her person as a consummate liar, with no amount of lying by all the brilliant men around her (from Secretary Eduardo Eermita to Press Secretary Serge Remonde) able to bend the faith of many Filipinos regarding her persona as a symbol of a superior PhD in government lying and doublespeak atop of all the corruption allegations that have clouded her credibility, her supposed loyalty to country and the Filipino nation, and her supposed godliness presented in many a photo-op shots where she is in prayer mode. This belief in her lying habit is not entirely out of blind faith or as a result of black propaganda by the opposition. It is in fact faith that derives from her own consistent refusal to be transparent, refusing to show papers of any deals, all in the name of a god called Executive Privilege.

It is in this light that no one trusts her government now as her government (on her currently hiding person’s behalf) announces that the Maguindanao martial rule is not “practice” at all for a later Manila and national run. Arroyo’s critics can at least turn to press spokesperson Lorelei Fajardo and laud the young spokesperson’s honesty when she announced earlier that Macapagal-Arroyo will not abandon the Ampatuans even while they remain suspects.

In all this Arroyoan dishonesty and propensity to lie through half-truths, we can say that the Macapagal-Arroyo government has actually started the murder of the journalism profession itself, and I’m not even talking about the arrest of the ABS-CBN journalists present at the Manila Peninsula rebellion of 2007 (later, the bus was called to return and arrest all journalists, so as not to make it appear that the government was targeting ABS-CBN journalism merely). All in all, by its constant spitting on the name and virtue of truth-seeking and investigations, we can give it to the Macapagal-Arroyo administration that it has done quite well in the manipulation of human intellection, even abusing as it did its control of government channels, turning these into Lakas Kampi CMD official channels for the republic.

Apologists’ Faith

But take away the long-standing Macapagal-Arroyo critics who have decided to give the government the benefit of the doubt on the Maguindanao martial rule, critics like Teodoro Locsin, Jr., who may have turned things over in his head and come to believe that martial rule in Maguindanao may perhaps be right, along with others who have come to believe that this was the apt government obeisance to international calls for swift justice to the massacre victims and the journalism profession.

Take away those and there are still the blind loyalists of Gloria Arroyo’s government who are the prime demonstrators of strong faith operative among many in this country’s citizenry.

My neighbor’s aunt, who has figured in two of my blogs (see blogs with the “My neighbor’s aunt” label), comes to mind once again. Just yesterday she was once again defending her president Macapagal-Arroyo against the conjectures of friends eating at her eatery, insisting that if the recent decisions of the Commission on Elections against two opposition-party governors in highly-populated provinces are products of a Comelec design to take control of the provinces in favor of ruling party governors, then we must castigate the Comelec instead and leave her president and her Malacañang out of it. Malacañang cannot have anything to do with these Comelec decisions to nullify the said governors’ election after all these years, with only five months running before the new elections, she says. The anti-Macapagal-Arroyo eatery customers were talking about how the Comelec may be looking at manipulating results in these provinces in favor of Lakas Kampi CMD candidates in the coming 2010 elections through the supervisioon of the newly-appointed governors, but my neighbor’s aunt says Malacañang cannot have anything to do with that, sounding so much like a PhD-in-journalism graduate working for National Broadcasting Network’s Channel 4 (otherwise known as the official Lakas Kampi CMD channel).

Every time a corruption anomaly jumps out in the media, my neighbor’s aunt has a recurring line weapon that says, “Malacañang and the president cannot be held responsible for the corruption happening around her. If we are to hang anyone, it would have to be the men around her, not her.”

You might think this kind of thinking funny, which—I’m sad to say—is not strictly logic exclusive to lazy minds but is rampant among many yuppies and students as well as pro-administration journalists with high IQs. It is not funny. It is precisely this kind of apologism reliant on faith that spits on any evidence laid on the table (whether this spitting is in communion with corruption or not) that has oiled the machines of Marcos loyalism, Erap Estrada loyalism, Gloria Arroyo loyalism, Ampatuan and other warlord loyalism, as well as the new loyalisms of the coming elections.

Apologism by faith despising evidences of truth and journalism has become widespread in this country’s articulate intellection with an attached disgust for investigations. This apologism by faith is murdering journalism itself.

The Future Culture of Impunity

Only recently, a little debate ensued between two Noynoy Aquino supporters, with one supporter dressing down a fellow supporter for writing an open blog letter to his presidential candidate. It seems that the latter supporter was asking his candidate to up the ante please so as to show his command of his own intelligence and leadership ability and so as not to allow hits on his being a puppet of people around him (including new people around him that used to come from the supposedly dirty Macapagal-Arroyo administration) to take momentum. The latter supporter obviously had faith in his presidential candidate’s abilities and sense of ethics but didn’t have faith in his campaign and the people at the helm of his campaign, thus the open letter. The latter supporter was not necessarily aiding the opposition, merely illustrating as well as exposing the agenda of the opposing parties on his candidate’s persona that these parties’ propaganda machines were now eager to launch (e.g. “Noynoy abnoy,” or abnormal Noynoy). In fact, while echoing the hits on his candidate’s person, he was also lambasting the opposing candidates.

But the former supporter, taking offense at the open letter to his candidate, called the latter a “slacktivist,” which means by Wikipedia’s definition a slacker activist whose support of social causes is limited to internet postings and petitions. This word is in fact an unfair liberal pejoration on intellection or self-examination inside liberalism or activism itself. The word is a slur by those with a claim to true activism against activist writing or even Internet use itself as a part of activism. The slur is a slur against Rizal in favor of Andres Bonifacio’s actions on the ground, Bonifacio’s adulation of Rizal notwithstanding. The slur is a slur against editorialists and bloggers in favor of rallyists, even as some rallyists appreciate the criticism of certain of their rallies by certain editorialists (even the criticism that many rallies displaying more of an organization’s banners than placards are looking more like a party-list party’s campaign sortie than a rally for or against something). Or, “slacktivism” is a slur against journalism in favor of the “next level,” that is, Action.

Therefore, the slur is a slur on the intellection and criticism of one’s own candidate or one’s self. It is, finally, a denunciation of the car break in favor of the accelerator. It is a joyous word raising the flag of blind faith. It is the activist’s new Nazi uniform. In its denunciation of thoughts in favor of sole “next level” action, the slur is practically trying to murder journalism itself.

And so anti-“slacktivism” is the new apologism that ironically is the one aiming to battle it out with the apologism of the Gloria Arroyo loyalist (of which my neighbor’s aunt is only a minor entity), the Manny Villar-Danding Cojuangco loyalist, the Gibo Teodoro-Danding Cojuangco loyalist, the Erap loyalist bashing Noynoy alone (this loyalist will curse any theory that Erap is a Macapagal-Arroyo probe sent to divide the opposition vote in favor of Villar or, remotely, Gibo) and even Liberal Party loyalists for Noynoy Aquino. But loyalism is precisely what “slacktivism” wants to check! Slacktivism is one among a few vehicles that checks the psyche of actions and emotions when they begin to veer away from an original cause or intent!

As we approach the 2010 elections with no bills or reforms tackled or heatedly debated on the table, we are all only expected to rely on our faith in our singing and dancing candidates, content with their platforms and slogans devoid of detailed whys and hows.

And given this cultural proposal of faith coming from many a man’s passion, I say we have by that alone lost any moral authority to denounce the Ampatuans, who did everything they did only out of blind faith in the new popular ethos of winning and winning big as an end in itself.

Thus, assuming that the opposition’s Noynoy Aquino or Eddie Villanueva is to win over the administration’s Manny Villar or Gibo Teodoro or Dick Gordon or Erap Estrada, we can only rest assured that he (the new president) will still be surrounded by new anomalies, new powerful murders, new moves for power prolongation, and so on, care of the people who propelled him to power by their blind faith. And although it may be true that he himself may not be directly to blame for these new ills (should that blamelessness look true), given the greed of people or family and friends and corporate greed around him, I will not emulate my neighbor’s aunt’s way of thinking and will hold the new president responsible for his lack of scruples or balls in his failure to put his foot down. I will, in short, emulate the self-examining or constantly measuring slacktivist.

My fellow Filipinos, unless we get rid of this culture of apologism by faith, we will all have been Ampatuans ourselves, like my hating neighbor’s aunt, believing only in our virtues as we denounce our enemies’, denying our flaws as we hype up our enemies’ evil, cursing these most violently without check. Our love for truth is good. But the line between love and hate, as well as that between truth and lies by selective truth, is thin.

The culture of impunity in this country cannot be redeemed by the sowing of more hatred between political faiths. It can only be solved by more intellection, freer intellection, un-manipulated intellection, and unbridled investigation, able to criticize everything and everyone, including one’s self and one’s party.

If it is to be otherwise, we might as well be Macapagal-Arroyos and Ampatuans ourselves, sowing fear in our quest for the fulfillment of a utopia. [END]

Photo borrowed from: http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/news/photos/2009/12/07/philippines-cp-wd-7775167.jpg

Southern social -isms

2009-12-01T19:32:00.076+08:00

The election-related massacre of 58 people on a Maguindanao highway (the Philippine Daily Inquirer says 64 people), including 34 journalists, members of a gubernatorial candidate’s family, the candidate’s lawyers, aides, and motorists who were mistakenly identified as part of the convoy or simply witnesses (“collateral damage,” as military parlance goes) happened on a November 23, 2009 afternoon. In its aftermath, the tragedy dug out—or manifested in plain view—the variety of elite cultures and territorial beliefs within the omnibus Philippine political cultural spectrum, cultures and beliefs that have long ruled our archipelago with classic impunity. According to ridomap.com and a book titled RIDO: Clan Feuding and Conflict Management in Mindanao, there are currently 255 ongoing blood feuds in Maguindanao and 1,470 in the entire Muslim Mindanao provinces, revealing an entirely different nation of beliefs alien to Manila society with its belief in one law, the law of the land (in spite of laws being made to fit a ruling party’s desires by corrupt justices).

These various micro-political beliefs, or -isms, must be fully brought to light, not only so they can provide us crucial clues on—towards an understanding of—the motives and psychological forces that had been at play in the gruesome act of the Maguindanao massacre and similar killings in the months and years and decades past, it also arms us with ideas for the necessary steps to take in order to mitigate tensions, fix quandaries, resolve conflicts, and check the avarice that are a clear and present danger to human existence not only in Mindanao but the rest of the country as well. That is to say, should we decide one day to do just that: try to mitigate tensions, resolve conflicts, mend wrecks, purge evil.

Now, while our country’s leaders from the elite or new elite class are still trying to decide whether they as a collective want to be on top of these mending, many ask: what could have motivated the gruesome act of that which has internationally been touted as “the single deadliest event for journalists in history"?

Sure, there has been a rain of conjectures. Layman psychology offered us the possibility of a narcotic influence in the men who, in the act of inflicting harm, probably could not avoid doing something else beyond killing the bodies screaming in front of them. This is an understandable theory, considering the many cases of similar unhindered violence and mutilation due to drug-induced psychoses. But, given that, illegal drug intake alone cannot be the main rationale for the mass murder itself, considering the near-finesse of trying to get rid of the bodies after the act. Other reports even state the deed had been planned days in advance. So, what could have been the other possible socio-political, filial, or personal motivations, not only for the killing but for the post-murder mutilations that presupposes deep anger?

Another offered view is the personal angle, namely, hatred for a family who may have inflicted hurt on a man or men within a chronology of painful words and insults, coursed through word of mouth or, perhaps, the local media. Although possible, qua simple accumulated hatred, this psychology behind the deed would necessitate confirmation by some deep and objective research into the history of the Ampatuan-Mangudadatu families’ enmity and feud, and by deep we mean deep into the families and their confessions and stories. Did one of them call one of the sons sissy, or something like that, for example?

Another angle offers jealousy as the culprit, involving a woman or women (or a man, for that matter). Why did an Ampatuan suspect display such deep hatred for the wife of a Mangudadatu as to lacerate and puncture her feminine parts even after death? But this angle, too, would require an intensive research (deeper than for the insult angle) and immersion in the families for it to be able come up with a reliable documentation of stories and confessions.

Finally, there is—apart from the temporary-insanity-due-to-drugs theory—the imaginative angle that proffers a non-drug-induced insanity as a likely explanation for the killing and subsequent mutilation and abuse of the murdered bodies. While psychological testing of one or two of the suspects is possible, it is—however—hard to imagine a collective insanity operating among a hundred armed men, although it is possible the mutilator was only one of them.

Whatever was the psychology behind the act among the inflictors, my interest is really in the larger -isms that led to the act itself, by which I mean the social -isms that inspired or motivated the personal -isms or psychological defects among the involved to do the deed.

Now, in scanning these -isms I do not seek to pinpoint one as singularly responsible, but rather would like to imply interplay between the various -isms that—inadvertently or advertently—may have supported each other.

It may be true that, as some analysts say, a balance was ruined (for instance, there is the proposition that the Macapagal-Arroyo administration may have favored the Ampatuans over the Mangudadatu clan that thus resulted in the one lording it over the other, with the other rebelling in turn). But I am less interested in the analyses of détente or mutual neutralization or tolerance of one party’s abuses or the nurture of one party’s -isms. . . . I am less interested in those specifics than with the drawing of the tree illustrating the long-standing presence of this hierarchy of -isms functioning as a support system in the Philippine jungle we like to call Democracy.

So, instead of trying to debate with pundits on what may have triggered the moment, let me just examine the larger history and web involving the various -isms at play.

1. A country of datus

Off the bat and quite quick in coming to mind is the idea of datu-ism, or the belief that a Mindanao datu family (a localized ethnic Moslem form of monarchy) has the full right to the control of an area’s affairs, inclusive of its lands, its industries, its natural resources, its laws.

Now, what would be in conflict with this entrenched utopia? The obvious contest to a datu-ism would simply be one coming from another datu-istic entity, i.e. another datuist family, that might wish to challenge the ruling datu family’s reign, although still from within the same datu-ist belief or system rather than without.

However, such a challenge may not be that simple. Such a challenge to a datu family’s datu-ist rule, albeit from within the datu-ist system, may also in fact be a challenge to datu-ism itself in the long run. A datu-ist entity’s challenge, for instance, may be intent on seeking reforms within datu-ism, or—even better—the gradual eradication of datu-ism itself. The reasons for such a direction may be various (chief of which might be “everlasting peace” and the concept of that -ism we love to call “democracy,” along with the latter’s accompaniment, “free enterprise”).

But the datuist philosophy itself, whether confronted by a democratic challenge or not, is certainly enough farm for greed wrought by the belief. Thus, qua farm patch for the dreams of greed, it would not be hard to imagine this psychological setup as reason enough for a person (entrapped in this datuist utopia) to protect his domain and thus exact the deepest of hatreds towards those wishing to challenge the same domain and (possibly believed to be divine) privilege.

Confronted with this ideology in the field, then, we are now duty-bound to ask whether, for one reason or another, we wish to allow datuism to continue to exist in Mindanao or not. And corollary to this question to our leaders is the necessary query as to whether a form of datuism in the Christian parts of the country exists also—among self-appointed Christian “datus” in certain provinces—or not, and to what extent these “datuisms” are practiced in terms of how they use violence or grave threats to achieve objectives. After all, not a few Filipinos may testify to the rampant presence of these “datus” all over the country.

2. Datuism vs. Islamism

Islamism is, of course, long reputed in this country to resort to violence every so often in its mission to achieve an Islamist region, or at least momentarily to attain funds for its protracted mission to form an Islamist nation. After all, Islamism without violence is a contradiction in terms if jihad is a requisite to achieving a necessary Islamization. As a religious crusade, therefore, its recourse to violence or armed struggle is not surprising but self-explanatory, in the same way that it is not surprising to see unorganized armies of the American conservative right (consisting of fundamentalist Christians known to their liberal friends as Christo-fascists) every so often finding it righteous to inflict bodily harm on such American social enemies as abortionists, gays, feminists, and blacks.

But Islamism is a controversial term, and some personalities described as Islamists shirk from the tag due to its associations with violence and terrorism. We are using the term here to refer to the belief among certain Moslems that there can be no ideal separation of church and state in a territory, given that its ideal is the very opposing concept—that is, the marriage of Islamic and state laws within a claimed territory or geographical unit. Corollary to this idealization is Islamization through jihad or any other form of forcing the issue.

Though datuism may be mainly Moslem-held in Mindanao, in the same way that monarchies in the Mideast are Moslem, Islamism is an enemy of datuism, and vice versa. This is so because although the religion of datus is often Islam, datus are not necessarily devout Moslems but may only be using religion as an alibi to promote certain personal or filial interests, in the same manner that some Christian sects pretend to be followers of the landless nomad Jesus of Nazareth to be able to dupe their followers into donating a hefty percentage of their real estate sales to their church.

There are proposals of analysis to the effect that Nur Misuari’s renewed rebellion after his Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) leadership stint was precisely due to a Macapagal-Arroyo-sponsored return to datuism within such territories as Maguindanao. If that is true and correct, then Misuari’s neo-rebellion can be deemed justified (or at least understood), since by that Arroyoan sponsorship the ARMM rationale would have to be redefined from being for an autonomous Islamist region to being for an autonomous Moslem datuist region or compendium of datuist regions.

3. Federalist warlordism

But, of course, that picture proposing a conflict between two interests among the Moslem Mindanao elite may be too simple. For interwoven into the complex thread is a national patronage system that has its own complex of -isms. Part of the complexity of political relationships and affiliations is the patronage system involving the electoral process, among other processes, corrupt and/or not.

We have, of course, heard of the federal system. Now, while the

Philippines

is not a federalized country, the federal system of political patronage has long been in existence.

In the federalized system of electoral processing, a set of national leaders is supposed to be patrons of a set of local leaders, Mindanao datus or Visayan or Iloco or Bicol warlords though they may be. Those in the latter level, in return for the patronage promise to deliver votes, through thorough and perfectly legal campaigning and/or through extra-legal means—threats or even assassinations should that be necessary.

In this type of democratic process, votes (numbers) become more important than voters (people), and thus would perfectly regard warlordism as an ideal if not a necessity. In this social system, therefore, it is normal to hear reports of canvassers, teachers, watchers, campaigners, or even journalists disappearing, or at least being threatened with the disappearance of either their own persons or their families’.

This -ism in Philippine society is a classic and has long entrenched superior clans and dynasties in many parts of the country and practically promoted (consciously or subconsciously) violence as the rule more than the exception—although as much as possible delivered discreetly, away from an unwavering journalistic glare. Again, these local warlords are made possible not by themselves alone but through a Philippine type of warlordic federalism. It may be worth noting that the federal or central regard for a journalist, for instance a reporter covering a Department of Agriculture national fertilizer fund scam, is usually seen as the inspiration or model for the regard for a local journalist, say, for instance, a Leyte broadcaster who mentioned someone's illegal logging of native forests in Samar that could inundate towns with floods.
But despite the assassination of journalists, this federalist warlordism can also be considered as one of the systemic reasons why the Philippine archipelago has continued to remain a nation or as one country instead of as several island-nations governed by different warlords. In fact, a warlord from Isabela can even borrow space in Samar for a certain period of time while his logging concession lasts. Datus and warlords can be friends, in the same way that intra-royal marriages were resorted to in Europe from the period of Ancient Antiquity to Early Modern Europe in order to maintain the peace.

4. International Capitalism

But federalized warlordism is not possible without goods dangled coming from a national or federal center. And that federal center, though reliant on goods from its local entities, is much more reliant on goodies from abroad.

These international goodies may take the form of weapons aid from a certain country or certain countries, delivered in the name of keeping in check two external -isms that dream of entering the territories of the status quo—Islamism and communism.

These internationally-derived goodies may also take the form of loan packages for projects that make sense (farm-to-market roads) to projects that don’t (an auditorium at a far edge of a city), the rationales for which are either contractor- or supplier-determined instead of need-determined or otherwise season-determined (say, the election season). In the first rationale, the benefits to the local warlord (or simple, mild-mannered politician with secret kidnap-and-torture goons) is in terms of hefty commissions. In the latter rationale, the benefit is either for commissions or electoral image-building or—at best—both.

In return for the international loan package from abroad, both national/federal warlordism (with borrowed elements from the Armed Forces of the Philippines as their own private warriors) and local warlordism (with Civilian Volunteer Orgnaizations for warrior units) may then deliver to the national/federal level the very reason why the loans were approved in the first place: natural resources for international capitalism.

But notice that warlordism cannot be content with police for warriors, demanding CVOs with high-powered ammunition. The reason for this discontent with a simple police is simple. Contest often does not derive from mere citizens or journalists, who are usually puny targets for easily contrived “accidents,” and which police can take care of. The enemy may be real competitors who are aware of the natural resources at play, whether these be oil in Sulu or nickel in Palawan or silicon in Maguindanao (totally beyond the meager plywood industry in value and not really worth killing journalists and other datuists for).

In Mindanao, these contesting groups would include the Islamists and the Davao-provinces-based communists who consider each other Mindanao's anti-foreigner liberationists.

5. The corollary alibi

Yes, apart from the conspicuous Islamists are the obscure Mindanaoene Communists.

But, you know, the Islamists and the communists are really part of the overall equation. While their presence provides voices of resistance against international corporate expansionism, it also presents a rationale for the perpetuation of militarist arrangements that in turn feeds on datuisms and federalized warlordism.

@ @ @

So what is left to the general populace?

The general populace has its journalists who, though necessarily operating from within a corporate setup, are required by the competition of the journalism trade to be non-partisan, objective, or freedom-conscious. Unfortunately the -ism of journalism runs counter to the tenets of datuism, federalized warlordism, and international corporate expansionism. Thus it often finds itself an easy and juicy target for the Philippine sport of truth assassinations.

Now, speaking of truths or truisms, there are also the citizens themselves, led sometimes by civil society groups or NGOs. The NGOs, whose purposes in life are to solicit funding for a project they can think of, projects that range from digging safe drinking-water wells for rural barangays to supplying villages with solar-powered generators for an environment-friendly future, also may have well-meaning civil society directions that could be in conflict with the interests of datuism and federalized warlordism and international corporate expansionism: for instance, certain mercury droplets coming from an international corporate expansionist mining exploration or toxic substances killing fishes in an NGO-funded local fishpond livelihood project is ripe status for a conflict. The government can only be expected to side with the international corporate expansionist for the obvious reason that it has to maintain the status quo of the Philippine social -isms equation.

Now, given these conflicts with the interests of the eternal Philippine triangle involving the local warlordist and the federal warlordist and the international expansionist, it is also no surprise to find the local NGO and journalism trade threatened by the unforgiving hatred of the triangle, mostly involving people who don’t like to be disturbed by truth problems while they’re enjoying their 18-hole golf game fantasy, complete with fantastic piña colada in a dreamy afternoon mist.

Would they think twice about killing people in the name of their utopia?

Hell, in the Philippine social -ism we love to call Democracy, voters are important, yes. But they’re no more important than the votes. [END]

Photo borrowed from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maguindanao_massacre