The need for participatory democracy at ground zero

THE president of the Philippine Alliance of X-Seminarians (PAX), Ricardo “Ricky” Ribo, is a Quezon City-based lawyer (recently seen on TV in his capacity as counselor for actor Zoren Legaspi’s case with the Bureau of Internal Revenue) who hails from Jaro, Leyte. He tells me a story about Oliver Cam, the president of the Leyte chapter of PAX called Paisanos whose members once attended the Sacred Heart Seminary of Palo, Leyte. Cam now sits in the rehabilitation committee of the Tacloban City government, and the story about him and his mates was officially relayed to Ribo in an April 2014 letter by PAX’s Tacloban facilitator, Tony Cruzada, who wrote, “Our PAX unit in Tacloban is now fully engaged in livelihood recovery in the San Jose area” (this was in reference to the Tacloban area most devastated by Typhoon Yolanda on the fateful morning of November 8, 2013). The letter goes on to write that the focus of the program is “restoring household livelihood to the pre-Yolanda level.”

Atty. Ricardo "Ricky" Ribo (center in white t-shirt) at the Sto. Niño de Leyte Shrine collection of relief goods for Leyte.

San Jose, Tacloban City, after the Typhoon Yolanda devastation. Photo borrowed from http://www.inquirer.net/philippine-election-2013/articles/528931

     The rehabilitation strategy of the Tacloban group of Cam and Cruzada has been to work on capital build-up via people’s livelihood themselves. Livelihood, that is, in whatever form, although it had earlier been identified that the most common sources of income in the area included sari-sari stores, the retailing of fish and/or vegetables, meat or cooked-food vending, public transport pedicabs, sewing shops, barber shops/beauty salons, and small scrapyards.

     “The intervention that we wish to make is for seed money to be made available to a livelihood operator to ease and speed up his/her capital build-up,” Cruzada—whose brother, also an ex-seminarian, died from injuries caused by the devastation—explained. “The cooperator commits to a definite capital build-up target and to return the seed money on a weekly basis. The seed fund, therefore, will continuously flow to new batches of cooperators. The capital requirements of the greater number (of the villagers) ranges from P2,000 to P6,000. A smaller number would (have to) be limited to (outlays between) P7,000 and P15,000.”

     Cam and Cruzada’s group did not need to source the initial seed money from outside of PAX. Instead, they grew their fund internally through savings from the group’s purchase of unmilled rice (palay) already available in neighbouring towns and provinces. The palay were purchased in bulk, milled, delivered back to the community, and then sold through accredited sari-sari stores that also profited from commissions. The net savings and profit from this progression were then channeled to the seed fund.

     According to Ribo, this was just one among the many or few ways the people of devastated Leyte devised to rehabilitate their economy on their own, in the face of the shortness or failure of government economic rehabilitation efforts. . . .

ALTHOUGH Ribo and his national group had been one of the first relief responders to the post-Yolanda scene, operating with modest resources and collections from their headquarters in Sto. Niño de Leyte Shrine (a self-effacing chapel-cum-hideout along Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City humbled by the maddeningly tall and blue Iglesia ni Cristo church beside it), Ribo himself was able to visit Leyte only in February and then in early June of this year. In contrast, Efren Delima, another PAX member who is an accounting consultant and intermittent project evaluator for the party-list-system party Aksyon Magsasaka-Partido ng Tinig ng Masa (AKMA-PTM), had traveled to Leyte several times since November 2013 as one of the men in charge of the PAX relief distribution at ground zero.

Accounting consultant and NGO worker Efren Delima

     Both Delima and Ribo posit their views of post-Yolanda reality as having gone beyond criticizing either the national government’s or the local governments’ handling of rehabilitation efforts, and having moved on towards a desire to offer their testimonies (for whatever they’re worth to whichever party) on what’s really happening at present on the ground and to come up with plans to confront these realities.

     Delima articulates his assessment this way: in many rehabilitation efforts, there is no coordination. There is no coordination, precisely because of the breakdown of a necessary bottom-up system that has been replaced by our culture’s long-traditional and long-proved-wrong sorry top-down approach. But it’s really not that simple, he says. Delima and Ribo both saw a vicious cycle continuously at play that they say has become both annoying and frustrating:

     Where the top acknowledges the necessity of hearing the knowledge of the bottom, it expects the usual bottom to function instead of recognizing the fact that the bottom has evolved or has in fact always been dynamic. In post-Yolanda Leyte, many small government units ceased to exist, sometimes refusing or seeing no reason to exist any longer other than for the purpose of accepting donations and selectively distributing them. Most efforts from the top have failed to recognize the fact that most in this bottom need reorganization, devoid of political affiliation, preferably people- or wholly community-based as against representative-based. On the other hand, where the bottom sees nobody from the top initiating the reorganization, it submits to its now ever-present “to each his own” or “everyone for himself” state (because government has ceased to exist) instead of owning up the opportunity to establish a new organization of the people and by the people.

     The much-touted Malacañang-appointed “Yolanda rehab czar” of the national government task force for Leyte-Samar, Panfilo Lacson, once admitted to the media that the money for the area has not wholly been released yet in the absence of a finished master plan. He also mentioned two departments that didn’t want to have anything to do with the program or the political area. He failed to mention that this sort of disinterest was also driven by the psychology wherein the top kept on waiting for the bottom to provide inputs for a comprehensive plan, while some from the top came up with top-down plans that the bottom refused to heed (the declared no-build zone and the transfer of residents to a safe zone, for one, a plan now recognized as nothing more than a great sound bite for television appearances for the simple reason that it is unenforceable).

     The Ecumenical Voice for Peace and Human Rights (EcuVoice) has already urged the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate the Philippine government’s “slow, inefficient, and inadequate” response to the devastation. “Up until now,” the group's Irma Balaba told the Philippine Daily Inquirer, “the government does not have an alternative plan for the displaced communities that would ensure their long-term alternative livelihood, safe relocation areas, free housing and access to social services.”

     Ribo attests to this apparent non-release of rehab funds, having been witness to said absence of a comprehensive effort for the entire area, save those visible efforts for select spots. Delima, meanwhile, explains that where there is no master plan, there can definitely be no NEDA release, since NEDA only relies on the Procurement Law for the processing of funds. Both men insist that as of February there was no release of rehab funds, except to no more than 10% of each municipality. By June, they both insist, the efforts have remained select.

     Delima says what were released were the calamity funds for the provincial LGUs (local government units). Presently, there is yet a half year or more to wait for the next batch of calamity funds from the 2015 budget to come pouring in, should there be such an allocation. Many in Leyte’s LGUs, he says, complain that the calamity funds from the 2014 budget were already depleted by June. The immediate calamity funds from the 2013 budget, many local governments complained, appeared to have already been depleted as early as late January of 2014, Delima says. And this year’s November typhoon season is already looming on the horizon.

     But Delima agrees that government calamity funds are not enough and won’t ever be enough. The reason, both men say, why the focus should be in rehabilitating the economy first instead of in restoring government infrastructures, ideally simultaneously with equal emphasis on both. Schools, however, they say, are an understandable priority since they also stimulate the economy of urban areas and town centers. In short, what stimulates the people to move around within, with the promise of economic gain via their own little ways, has to constitute the rehab plan itself, not the top-down visions of a grandiose and monumental sound bite that can only go nowhere.

     Both men cite this instance: The immediate economic need is food; but, instead of coming up with ways of importing (from other provinces) and then retailing food, the government comes up with long-term plans for agriculture that end up with vegetables meant to be harvested in cycles harvested in toto, or with seeds meant for planting consumed as immediate food. In contrast, the more immediate economics of gambling has proliferated like crazy, with cockfighting cockpits offering an almost-daily circulation of money. Ground zero has become the cowboy movie version of Las Vegas, spurred forward by Las Vegas-esque economics.

     If there is something even Keynesians could learn from Milton Friedman’s shock therapy, it is that a people-deriving economy can sprout from an absence of physical “infrastructures”. What Keynesians can offer, in turn, is just a little bit of seed money for capital that can hasten trade in the communities and get money to move around, not seed money for big corporations to put up their projects, whatever they are, all over town. A pat on the back of the ordinary banana-cue vendor standing in front of his wok, instead of just the back of the friendly mining company executive eager to resume his community-contested venture in an island in southern Samar. Otherwise, we might as well divide the ruling Liberal Party into a Social Liberal Party intent on helping the grassroots and a Neoliberal Party intent on helping the opposite of the grassroots.

A PRIEST, Fr. Joeboy Buñales, of St. Francis of Assisi parish in barangay Jugaban, Carigara, Leyte, has thrown his savings on 1,000 pedicabs on loan to spread capital build-up around his town.

Fr. Joeboy Buñales of St. Francis of Assisi parish in Carigara, Leyte

     Such acts are much needed these days in Leyte, given that the smallest LGUs have literally been rendered revenue-less. The public marketplaces, now free-for-all areas for the enterprising, can do nothing but waive selling-spot fees. Meanwhile, residents who want to take care of their property tax are met with an absence of receipts.

     If only government had put its focus on stimulating and/or facilitating the influx of trade here, things might have recovered quicker. Again, we can take a lesson from some of our enterprising Mindanaoene brothers, who have found it worth their time to haul in fake Marlboros from Indonesia which they can affordably sell here at P30 a pack. If only government had put its focus on community organization instead of political party organizations, the atmosphere might have recovered quicker. Again, we can take a lesson from the criminal minds who have found organizing to be lucrative for group robberies, the impact of which can be seen in the transport operators’ re-scheduling of their last trips from 12 midnight to 4 pm.

     The much-ballyhooed restoration of electricity service is appreciated, of course, except for the ballyhoo. Though blackouts remain rampant and those who don’t have access to electricians’ fees continue to make do with makeshift secret connections, Friedmanian shock therapy, as well as history as a whole, would attest to the fact that humans will adapt to the reality of a situation and create an economy from inside that reality. In short, while electricity supply and service do have an immediate impact on a community’s re-emerging economy, a sheer focus on that service devoid of a seed money stimulus for the same economy puts more emphasis on the aider to the economy (electric power) than on the yet-to-exist-again economy itself needing capital help first in order to start the ball rolling. It doesn’t matter that the DPWH rehabilitation of its roads and bridges is slow-moving, as long as there is an already-strong trade there will be roads and bridges other than what the DPWH would expensively build for you and me and the contractor and the contractor’s politician friend.

     Also, a Fr. Buñales privy to what the people need would not supply chainsaws to a town that doesn’t know how to operate chainsaws, much less chainsaws from China that lose their blades after work on a couple of felled trees, says Ribo. Besides, in communities used to seeing every now and then drunk men disemboweling each other in a bolo-knife fight, a proliferation of useless chainsaws is the last thing you’d want to see in an oncoming future, Delima argues, not to mention the danger of seeing rampant small-scale illegal logging when the trees get tall enough again.

     Delima and Ribo say there was also no single effort from politicians, local and national, to rehabilitate the San Jose fisherman’s access to the sea, not even to meet with military officials on what to do with the bullets and grenades from the San Jose armory that were washed out to sea, bullets and grenades now there resting on the seafloor along with the pedicabs and wrought-iron beds aiming to be structures for a future underwater village of barnacles welcoming human scavengers as its tourists.

     No meeting over what to do with either the thousands of coconut lumber wallowing in the uplands, Ribo tells us, or those on someone’s coconut farm, which latter stagnation has driven away the tenants of that someone’s land in search of other sources of income (drove them away along with the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program certification that was dangled over the land and promised to the tenants).

THE failure to stimulate/support with seed capital the influx of trade supplies as well as outflow of potential products like coconut lumber has raised the price of meat, many of which have always come from the Davao region. Today, trucks come into the city and the towns with these meat supplies and go back to Davao without a “back load.” Naturally, the supplier would have to double the price of his meat due to the cost of this route for his economy of scale. Before Yolanda, the trucks would carry back-loads of copra, mussels, etc. Now they go back to the Compostela Valley with entirely empty vans and crates.

     With the failure to get a hold of the bottom-up requisite for a high satisfaction rate, government can only content itself with slow rehab projects and health projects slowed down by the people not “owning,” to use Delima’s preferred word, those projects. Even Guiuan, Eastern Samar, which displayed a readiness for typhoons when it built five evacuation centers for this town in the southeastern peninsular tip of Samar, evacuation centers that undoubtedly saved a lot of lives, the people—according to ex-seminarian Rolly Siguan—now capital-less, un-facilitated, and un-stimulated, also slowed down both physically and mentally. The same thing happened in Delima’s hometown, Capoocan, Leyte. Apart from the high-profile presence of Dinky Soliman's DSWD in the towns, a sporadic presence that nevertheless aided in nurturing a temporary culture of dependence, the Department of Agriculture-certified corn seedlings did not stimulate agriculture but only hunger for immediate consumption of corn millet made from the seeds. The politics behind the uneven distribution of these government dole outs further contributed to the communal depression.

     Another ex-seminarian, Osmundo Orlanes, who hails from Calbiga, Samar, says that municipal governments and governance have been tainted by political propaganda thrusts. He considers the Yolanda disaster as the ultimate demonstration of how elite politics operates in this country, where you see wealthy political families treating the situations in the landscape as playground for their little student-council contests where they can display their political party colors and logos and do their usual photo-op distributions and baby-raising as well as tirades, ignorant of the fact that the people are already disgusted by the shameless circus they are seeing.

     He looks at the way the elite political families treat each other even as they imprison each other in elite "custodial centers" or with fancy hospital or house arrests, while victims of a disaster who have no place in the roster of Tatler magazine-featured circles can make do with living in windowless plywood-walled square bunkhouses that could keep a morning pan de sal warm through to the afternoon.

A Facebook meme uploaded/posted by Facebook user "Steel Rain" at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1467111083528224&set=gm.792990204068431&type=1. The bunkhouse featured in this Internet meme photo is actually of a design redone from a previous windowless design that was criticized in the media when photos of built houses with that previous design started coming out.

     Delima says this insensitivity to or ignorance of what the people want and need, a trademark of our representative democracy through the decades, explains the government’s lack of knowledge of the perennial immediate need-based situation that has yet to transition into a future need-based one. Thus the government’s surprise when it witnesses DA-certified rice meant for planting making its way to the mortar and pestles. As we mentioned above, DA-certified seeds are stolen for immediate food consumption, and the government can only police future supplies or otherwise halt or delay all deliveries.

     Delima says the office of the Leyte governor would deny it, but politics played a part in even the prioritization of areas for the government’s restoration of electricity and water supply. In fact, jokes have proliferated about why the planned relocation (from the Palo, Leyte beach area) of government regional and provincial offices to various municipalities is facing resistance—there is supposedly ruling-party fear of development in areas not within the party’s control.

DELIMA tells me the story about a livelihood support project in Capoocan for the cottage industry of anahaw and buri (corypha) handicrafts and wares that the people have long “owned.” The government later came up with a parallel project when it introduced a similar industry using nito vines (lygodium circinatum), possibly with the good intention of expanding. But, this time, it incorporated the industry into a cooperative system. Unfortunately, the cooperative system didn’t sit well with the people’s math, and the industry was soon considered by the townsfolk as the infamous sister to the much-preferred original anahaw/buri industry where the people remained as the respective owners of their own work and profit accounting. A similar industry was introduced in the province's municipality of Tanauan which did not impose a cooperative system, which democratic decision gained a positive reception that further resulted in progress for the venture.

     Delima, in his previous work with an NGO subcontracted by the government to implement an EU-funded project, says the feeling of “ownership” carried by a people towards any venture, no matter where the idea derives from, is crucial to those ventures and their success. A top-down approach that does not collect the people’s embrace of the aid will have to be labelled as nothing more than an elitist (condescending, if you will) imposition.

EVIDENTLY, Yolanda has become a case study for all sorts of plans and systems, both the corrupt and the idealistic, both the merely-obliged and the enthusiastic. It is up to us now to choose whether we shall heed the learning we have gained from it as a hellish experience or live through another Yolanda and post-Yolanda stint that would then repeat for us what seems to remain as a very elusive point. [JSV]

Another Lousy Day for Heroes, Part II (Oppressions Birth Heroes, Corporations Breed Gods)

Read Part One here: Another Lousy Day for Heroes (Counter-Reifications)

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, media outlets commemmorated the martial law declaration and Ninoy Aquino tribute events with a clear warning (to both government and ourselves) that seemed to be embedded in the message of the remembrances. A "never again" warning context. This time around, media is playing along, entertaining the Aquino overkill that seems to jive with its previous "never again" cause.
     (Though 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, perhaps might even be an insult to a real hero that saved us all from communism. And perhaps he's right on a point. 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. No claims on his pop being a hero there.
     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 communal stories attached to the tensive atmosphere such a declaration brought into the indefinite timeline of its revolution. 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 soon? 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 governments' 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, political conservatives likewise celebrate their own. All of these heroes, dead and living, complete with awards and prizes and honorary degrees 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. 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 contravert democratic media's power 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 a cult following from it.

"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, after a series of achievements of value to society, 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). Rizal's son died in Dapitan. Rizal's mother looked for Rizal's 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. Aquino's 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 individual 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 (or art) 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 actually function as 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 about the Aquinos concerning Hacienda Luisita or about Hacienda Luisita itself as a national symbol? And aside from the Hacienda Luisita acquisition history and its accordant politics, the mother subjects are still blanket land reform, agrarian reform, progressivist takes on these issues, social liberal takes on these issues different from the progressivist approach, liberal economics' takes, post-reform scenarios, and so on, and these involve characters and polities more numerous than the Aquinos or Tarlac and other element-targets of a certain party out to merely destroy a set of heroes. The Aquinos as heroes and the anti-Aquino counter-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 post-win scenarios themselves, post-win scenarios that would define the victorious heroes' staying power within significance and memory?
     Sure, a hero's critic may have demonstrated the hero's virtue or non-virtue from his critique's end, citing missionary projects of value or no value to the hero's civilization. And that'd be good (or bad) for the hero and us. But, again, what would be the objective of the critique? Is one's objective merely to take down notes, say, for 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 social and political liberal or political conservative 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 pouring 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 the triumph or defeat of causes and societies larger than themselves. Understand that heroes can either be a party's, a niche's, or a cause's.
     Consider the Nacionalista Party of Manny Villar that gathered progressivists as well as hauled in Bongbong Marcos to a coalition lineup of senatorial candidates. Definitely worth talking about, that one, for instance. And you'd wonder why no one among the critics of the Aquinos' heroism who were likewise sympathetic to the Nacionalistas did. 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 could happen when emotional critics become leaders. Such leaders may have to 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, likewise excluding oneself from the count. For the hero or non-hero (villain) ought not to be the issue, it's the issue that ought to qualify someone's heroism or non-heroism (villainy) within it. Otherwise, what will be offered society will be a battle of superheroes deriving from various parties' metanarratives that all avoid a higher view upon all the forces and prejudices and ambitions at play.
     For the hero on whichever side is never alone. The writer-critic is part of his heroism, if not the definer of that heroism. And, therefore, the critic must derive all his judgments from a confession of his causes as well as a confession of the sort of heroes he prefers to fight with him for his causes.

NOW, I for my part 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 masses' struggles, unless a niche wants to perpetuate a tradition of martyrdom for its niche-image and myth-making. 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 via collective heroism.
     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 and own heroism 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 just 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 in our mainstream economics.
     So, to explain further my point on followers' awareness (or lack of it) of the issues and themes around a subject-hero or heroes 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

Golf, a synecdoche of the land reform problematic

THAT tiny picture up there is a shot of the Hacienda Luisita 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 scandal (which Gloria Arroyo's Department of Justice and appointed 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 (or Ateneo de Manila, which is most likely its correct appellation) 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 ones with wang-wanged SUVs. To dismiss this Lozadian facet is to dismiss Saint Paul's past and merely look at the saint as that 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 the game's 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 progressivist 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 1) of our republic itself and 2) around its regard for land ownership and that ownership's responsibilities, whether involving 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 purportedly social 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 "progressivist" 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, with 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 Apple 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 or progressivist, 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 records, "extreme golf" investors can profit from membership volume instead of from a conservative neoliberal marketing of exclusivity. It's about time we cease to behave 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 inspired by 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 outbreak of 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 policies, 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 recruitment? 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 or pseudo-progressivism. 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 "local 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:

• "He used golf to carry messages undermining the Marcos regime"
• "The Golf War: A Story of Land, Golf and Revolution in the Philippines"

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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 or New?

Here come the fiery tests. Noynoy Aquino’s government is being tested, nay, now under its own supporters’ microscope. Among social liberals and progressivists 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 demonstrated its clearly social-liberal resolve to make the laws on the road and in the taxation front equally applied to everyone, at least as far as the media could judge, and this was applauded with aplomb by a refreshed public almost with the same popular enthusiasm the new elite of France hurrah’d and hooray’d toward Napoleon I’s arrival on the scene to battle it out with the rule of the then-increasingly unpopular French Directory. Aquino’s social liberals are well on their way, too, we believe, to making heads roll over certain missing funds, certain overspent funds, and “funds funneled to feed” (FFF, one might acro-name it) the greed of GOCC (government-owned or -controlled corporations) 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’ and the looming flight-attendants’ strikes at Philippine Airlines exhumed old questions concerning Lucio Tan. Facebook discussions on this extended to similar issues concerning Henry Sy and the typecast on the entire cast of wealthy Chinese-Filipinos and their alleged collective attitude towards labor, the manipulability of the Labor Code and its loopholes, 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 the strict enforcement of this code? Will it even try? If it doesn’t, will the liberals stamp Xs in boxes printed on their list of characteristic liberal approaches, signifying the approaches Aquino has ignored, with this checklist functioning as the party’s red book 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 emulate a neoliberal or Filipino sort of neoconservative stance?
     And what about the media’s seemingly-progressivist stance: how does that play into Aquino’s administration of this problem? Or, have the media really been behaving like progressivists in their coverage foci and their questions? First of all, what’s the difference between a 20th-century social liberal (whose tenets are to a large degree progressivist) and a progressivist (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 (including agricultural industries), the progressivist social liberal’s position meanwhile is for total liberation? With the latter, then, is it for total, unquestioned land distribution—CARP (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program) fund availability notwithstanding—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 progressivist 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 or neoliberal or, by author James Weinstein, a “corporate liberal”)? On which issues/questions is he more than a mere liberal, thus a progressivist? Liberal Party stalwarts, insiders, wannabes, pretenders, and volunteers, ready your paper with the boxes. This is one for your 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 realignment or reorganization—as it’s done in professional basketball for the allocation of free-agency uniforms and colors within a season—, for these questions are seriously ideological. To demonstrate their seriousness, let’s examine the ideologies.
     It may be assumed, rightly or wrongly, that a liberal—in contrast to a progressivist—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 in the company of agricultural conservatives. Land reform may not exactly be the panacea for national wealth that many hope it will be—they might proudly shout—, 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 progressivist 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 most in economic science may view as more sentimental (or emotional) 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 supposedly ultra-radical progressivism, called communism, the individual farmer’s well-being is often questioned by democratic governments, because, although communist farmers are loaned tracts of land to till, their harvests do not entirely belong to them but mostly paid to the state.) Progressivists, in putting a premium on the extension of property rights to the smallest individual 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-based 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 simplistic macroeconomic angle. That progressivist proposal may be workable—with adaptations and emendations, so to avoid Mao Zeddong’s micro-economic faults as he tried to veer away from Deng Xiaoping’s macro-economic globalization revolution for the sake of securing the communist ideal.
     (Here, the conservative-cum-neoliberal will butt in, to say that a nation run by progressivists will only provide our country a weak military because of a consequent weak center, as if the tax-evading big business sector in our country has churned out a sophisticated military for our country as had been allowed by their conservative patrons.)
     But assuming that Aquino’s liberalism has that above question on land reform under serious consideration; still, 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-cum-royalist 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 their party to be the real champions of progressivist ideals, never mind that their billionaire leader has hardly displayed any progressivist 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 vague ideologies. This is mainly a question-blog about Noynoy Aquino’s liberalism and how far it will go in supposedly advocating the social liberal tenets that have so far distinguished him, in the present media at least, 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