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

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 that would presumably quell any massing of arms by loyalists of the Ampatuan clan (prime suspects in the Ampatuan massacre of 57 individuals), other 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 in 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 display 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, offering as rationale another supposed Ampatuan-supportive massing of arms. In fact, only days after the arrest of the prime suspect in the said massacre and his detention in 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 an intent by some parties to rescue the said prime suspect. Was this already the starting ingredient for that martial-law-in-Manila stage of a martial-law-2009 recipe that de Lima fears would be fed into our media?

Critics’ Faith

The suspiciousness of Filipinos critical of the Macapagal-Arroyo government’s declaration is not entirely caused by 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). Were these Marcos memories the sole ground for the present anti-Macapagal-Arroyo suspiciousness, the numbers of those expressing that suspiciousness would be decidedly small. Considering the masses of people who have shown up at rallies against the government through the years since the Hello Garci Scandal, I would say the suspiciousness has to be with the Macapagal-Arroyo government itself and towards Gloria Arroyo herself, not via a fear of a past almost forgot.

     Yes, it’s not because of Marcos’ use of martial law, which not many remember, that we fear some same declaration. Filipinos today wary of Gloria Arroyo and her martial law declaration in Maguindanao province are wary of it because of her recent past and continuing use of all the loopholes in the laws of our land and Constitution for pushing the legality of all her actions. They suspect now that the Maguindanao martial rule will not entirely be for the purpose of reining in the lost Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP)-employed civilian volunteer army formerly at the beck and call of Datu Unsay municipality mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr., the prime suspect in the above-mentioned 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, 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) funds for this poor province, funds that may have paid for the Ampatuans’ eighteen mansions scattered in Maguindanao, Davao City, and Makati City. But the government likes to claim that the Mangudadatus, victim-clan of the massacre, were also Macapagal-Arroyo allies, although it turns out that the Mangudadatu clan became the less favored clan; the massacre is now 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 provoked by 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 so” 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 soon gunned down outside an Islamic school. 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 AFP 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 actually been known by Mindanaoenes for a long time now. 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, soon 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 at Manila’s international airport; 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 explosion the police initially confirmed to be the result of a bombing (citing terrorism, due to the presence of C4 explosive components). Police authorities later recanted the report (citing methane explosion from a sewage tank as the cause). 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 Ermita to Press Secretary Serge Remonde) able to bend the faith of many Filipinos regarding her person as a symbol of a superior PhD in Government Lying and Doublespeak attained atop 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 has been 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 divine statute called Executive Privilege.

     It is in this light that no one trusts her government now as her people announces (on her currently hiding person’s behalf) 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 the human intellect, 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 demonstration of 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 those 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 supervision 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 supported by taxpayers’ money).

     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, albeit classic, which—I’m sad to say—is not 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, Noynoy Aquino, 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 mere 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,” which read: 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 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 demand placards are looking more like a party-list parties’ 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 intellect 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! Slacktivism is what parallels action with its reflection! Slacktivism is intellection!

     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 definitely hold the new president responsible for his lack of scruples or balls in his failures 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

The economics of vanity

butt vanity photo borrowed http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-style/us-mum-spends-15k-on-injections-to-get-bootylicious-backside/story-fn9076o9-1226395624468

It is not as exclusive as many think it is. And I'm referring to what many assail as the vanity of tummy tucks, butt implants, liposuction, and what-not. For steep as the price of any of these operations may be, vanity is universal, and its many aesthetic variants would betray just as many pricing levels in the market. In fact, vanity is the market.

     I write this as my way of recording my recent debate with my neighbor's aunt at her diner in front of our barangay market when I went there this morning to buy a rare cup of barako coffee and enviable thick Visayan latik on suman for breakfast. My mother-in-law wakes up so early in the morning and I wake up so late and my wife leaves for the office for the usual rush hour along with the kids, so I'm left with the delightful experience of having special suman with latik syrup for breakfast. But this morning, a debate with my neighbor's aunt ensued when she started to scream all over the place over the issue of a lady on her TV screen, a lady who was saying Vicki Belo's clinic botched her buttock augmentation which endangered her life at a later stage when the silicone started to decay and harbor all sorts of microbial pirates inside her ass of a colony, or something to that effect. But, oh no, my neighbor's aunt was not concerned with the legalese favoring the butt-reshape customer and "victim," nor was she fuming at those who "do not follow the doctor's post-operation instructions," as some of my other neighbors in the diner cockily put it. My neighbor's aunt was merely feeling victorious, or---all right---simply glad, that an apostle of vanity had been punished by the anti-aesthetics god(s) of modesty that she says she devoutly worships.

     Reader, note that it is not my wont to argue with my neighbor's aunt, modest and behaved boy that I am. However, I have to confess I could not contain myself in my coffee cup meditation this morning and went outside my private circle in an outburst of fecund wordplay in defense of vanity itself. Not because I felt I was one of those whose vain pain she might later mock, I was still in my cheap flip-flops and am pretty past my high school days of wearing a look-at-me KISS-band makeup, but because I felt my economic philosophy was being trampled on, my belief and aesthetic religion insulted to the edge of the moon.

     How vanity is't in her, mesaid, when livest it yet in all---I said, in mock archaic English. "Ha? Ano yun?" she asked. "Unsa'y imong ingon, dodong? (What are you saying, kid?)" went she further, my neighbor's aunt from the modest island of Bohol.

     And, to my surprise, she listened. She listened, shocked perhaps that this good son-in-law of her neighbor mahjong mate who had up till now only listened and listened well to all her rantings against everything pro-labor, this boy who seemed to agree (if she only knew) with everything she said in defense of Gloria (Arroyo) not the U2 song, this son-in-law of her friend who would just say nothing but flash a series of smiles towards her articulateness, . . . shocking that he would now turn the tables and do the podium work in defense of his, his . . . "philosophy"---but she listened. "Philosophy gradweyt diay ka, dong? Unsa man, nganong wa kag mag-law? (You're a philosophy graduate, then, kid? Then why didn't you take up law?)"

     And though I forgot if I told her "no, I was never officially a philosophy student, I don't even finish the books I read," I remember that this was what I told her, to the amusement of my other neighbors in the diner (the butcher, the baker, and the candy stick vendor):

"'Nang (Mother)," I said, "all of us, all of us, without exception, plot our lives in the name of vanity. Perhaps not all in the nurture of their facial beauty, perhaps not all in the maintenance of youthful hubris, but all in the service of vanity, nonetheless.

     "You, for one," I said. "As much as I. We all, sinners that we all are as our parish pastor's wont to say, we all are children of vanity as we are of god [I believe she read god with a capital G]. Me, embarrassingly fortyish, I yet sport my long greying hair as if to spite the regal Romanness of Rome in favor of the long-haired Druids, old as I am who should be saluting the conventions of the short-haired and conventional now. And you, you in your modest 'duster' (sundress), you also take pride in such modesty and allow the arrogance of conventionality to dictate on those who sway from the barangay's ways, don't you, Aling Britney? And your name, your name itself is an identity which you subconsciously wear like a logo, don't you?"

     "Aba, aba, aba, ang galing mo palang magsalita a, dapat pala tumakbo ka sa susunod na barangay eleksyon, no. Sus, ninduta uy; hayaan mo, kakausapin ko si Kapitan, baka puwede kang . . ."

     I said I'd be back to my telework now, presently, and will just bring back her coffee mug later, and she said all right but I should consider really running for the barangay council.

     So, what was it I really wanted to say?---

     Well, I wanted to enumerate as many aesthetic variations of vanity. Sure, there are the usual vanities of art, of architecture, of cookery, of musical taste, of car and garage design, of lawns, of cycling jerseys, of religion, of politics, of engineering, of science, of a language and its poetry. . . . But there are also the more latent aesthetic vanities, aside from the vanity of modesty (simplicity's arrogant utopia against rococo tastes) and the vain righteousness of village mob wisdom. For one, there's the vanity of the view that our lives are what we make them. There's even the classic vanity of those who have long loved the status of wearing the stamp of poverty on their shoulders, with nary an absence of pride, wearing poverty like a unionist's tag on one's branded social-realist shirt. And being one of those who have concluded that, in this country, where there's smoke there's fire's one of the stupidest things you'd ever hear, I sat content with the Thoreau-bred thought that where there's a society there shall always be vanity.

And so, what now? How do we escape it, then? If we cannot escape it, must we then just embrace it, make a religion out of it, in Moses' absence?

     I thought about this question and, vainly, came up with this conclusion:

     Our problem with vanity now should not be so much with the difficulty (nay, the impossibility) of escaping it. Our problem with vanity has always been that we have constantly been told to escape it. The problem is we have been told it is bad to be vain. And yet those very same people who say so have the vanity to dictate on us what is vain and what is not. To get a liposuction is vain. But him getting a gas-guzzler of a gigantic truck for to pick his daughter from school is not, because anyway he just drives in his Jockey-branded undershirt.

     It's about time we chuck all this bullshit about what's vain and what's not. In the end, it all boils down to the same old Marxist issue of powers who label and non-powers who get labeled (and by powers I do not mean just the rich, for the stupid mob is just as much a force to reckon with as any landlord's army of goons). But lest I be mistaken again for a Communist (predisposed as everyone is in this country to do so) by my adherence to Marxist critical views, allow me once again the vanity of aggression in saying this: the examination of who said something and to whom it was said benefits not just a party, not any one party, including a Communist party, but an entire market of sellers and buyers!

     Telling our people that it is okay to be vain will do nothing less than get us moving forward. Telling our people that they should not apologize for their way of life will move nothing less than money that should be moved to stimulate an economy. It'll move our rotting butts off to the marketplace to make us buy lunch break lipo, a gourmet doughnut over a vainly simple glazed one, a sports car perhaps or a medium-sized Anton del Castillo more expensive than a Pajero, or a new fancy church in a new fancy spot. What is wrong with that, as long as it's your money? Here's my big what-is-wrong-with-that? If to do one of those is to do wrong, then everything in life is wrong. If doing one of those is bad, then everything in life is bad.

     (Sure, there's the argument that too much consumption is bad for the environment, but even that presupposes the vanity of humankind [anthropocentrism] thinking itself superior to dinosaurs and must therefore not go.)

     I finished my coffee. Having sat in front of my computer monitor for so long and said to myself all that I needed to say to deflate my chest, I vainly walked over to my neighbor's aunt and asked her, in quirky Cebuano, "Manang, you take pride in your coffee, right" She nodded, puzzled. I said, with syllabic emphases, "you're so vain kaayo, uy, but I'm so proud of you." I handed her the empty cup.

The marketplace in front of the diner went on its busy and merry way, exchanging money and judgments and all sorts of harassment in that mini-divine comedy of a day. But divine---however you put it---in celebration of selves' lives, all in the name of pure vanity.

How A P1Million Dinner Triggered A New Religious War In Our Barangay

It doesn’t make any difference that our country’s president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and her entourage recently dined at the expensive Le Cirque in New York City on the night of the Manila Cathedral vigil for Corazon Aquino, “pushing the dinner tab”—as the New York Post put it—to $20,000 (close to P1 million). It wouldn’t make any difference because we are a religious people.

     It makes a lot of difference for now, because the media have been knocked for six and will—for a time—find it profitable news. But that’s just it: the media are for-profit organizations, not public universities, and one day the news will cease to be news because the people won’t care about it anymore. There’s your vicious cycle, as the cliché goes, with the opposition’s hopes pinned on the possibility of a similar but newer future exposé. And the Palace? Oh, the Palace was quick to defend its president, as a matter of course, saying it was all a lie, though for now the media-watchers would not have any of that explanation, temporarily agog the latter are over the gustatory menu (and the $$$ that ordered for it). For now, many in the media and the media-consuming public are angry.

     But, in the end, it wouldn’t make any difference, because this is really what we’re all about: we are a religious people.

Gloria Arroyo is a religious icon. Those opposing her presence in the world oppose the religion of those who believe she’s a good leader, a good person, a model for all those who love Jose Rizal’s archipelago.

     Just this morning I was at my neighbor’s aunt’s diner and she (the aunt) was all over the TV screen, delivering her sermon in defense of her saint. “She was only a guest of the Leyte representative who picked up the $20,000 tab, what’s the matter with you people!”—she asked. Cerge Remonde, the Palace’s press secretary, who may or may not know that people picked to become press secretaries are often those perceived to have mastered the art of lying, had successfully spread that very line. Later, there were addenda-cum-emendations to the line—one being that it was just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill dinner with a Diet Coke and Le Cirque’s cheap wine. My neighbor’s aunt said the same thing. It was just an ordinary supper, what’s the matter with you people!—she said, some omelet dropping from her lips onto the TV remote control. One congressman was saying on the TV screen, It was not much of a restaurant, really, no more glamorous than a hotel resto, and my neighbor’s aunt was about to tell me a tale about how her husband proposed to her at Ma Mon Luk in 1957.

     Don’t get my neighbor’s aunt wrong. She was a Benigno Aquino supporter and loves Corazon Aquino very much. She will love to have Cory beatified. She hated the Marcoses and Fabian Ver. Then, in the early 2000s, she wanted to parade with the young to have the arguably immodest Joseph Estrada ousted from the Office of the President, if only her arthritis allowed it. She had an enemy lady fish vendor at the marketplace of our barangay that she hadn’t seen eye to eye with for years, and when that fish vendor embraced Estrada’s police buddy Panfilo Lacson during a senatorial campaign round at our place, embraced him so to wax him with fish stink, . . . then my neighbor’s aunt decided to end the decades-long silence between her and the fish vendor, and for the first time since The Beatles visited Manila bought two kilos of galunggong (mackerel scad) from the lady.

     My neighbor’s aunt still had an overflow of Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) issues and an abundance of ABS-CBN News Channel (ANC)-watching time during the period of the Estrada administration, so that she had embedded in her soul enough of her hatred for Estrada, and—perhaps thanks to her guilt over the decades-long feud with the lady fish vendor—a later deeper hatred for Panfilo Lacson in her guts. She talked lengthily about the Bubby Dacer/Emmanuel Corbito double-murder case as being one definitely more worthy of a book than the Marcos-era Escalante massacre.

     That hatred for Estrada-Lacson got so embedded in her early, as we said, that when the time for Gloria Arroyo to replace Estrada came around, she decided she would from then on label every Arroyo-critical report that came out on the PDI or ANC, especially the Senate inquiries, as mere Lacsonian propaganda (Lacson did win a senator’s seat, surviving the efforts of the lady fish vendor). Every one of those reports were to my neighbor’s aunt to be known as “Lacson’s propaganda,” as if Lacson would have the PR guru’s imaginative wherewithal to manipulate all the media’s news editors.

     To my neighbor’s aunt, Gloria Arroyo—the enemy of Estrada and Lacson—has been simply amazing. She delivers her State of the Nation Address without reading from a sheet of paper, ooh who could ever do that among the former presidents? Don’t tell my neighbor’s aunt anything about a teleprompter, because she’d quickly grip her TV remote control as if on the verge of a heart attack and stare at you as though you were Panfilo Lacson himself. Oh, she still buys a lot of PDIs but is more of a National Broadcasting Network (NBN) channel fan now, with a ready answer for anything the PDI editorials have to say, thanks to lines she can cull from Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita and that NBN editorialist from San Miguel, Bulacan, parading in front of her new faith like they were her new Pope’s encyclicals.

You’d say I’m making fun of an old lady. You’d ask me to go look for fairer game. And, well, yeah. In fact she’s not alone.
     Just last May I was watching a handful of anti-Gloria rallyists on their way to a Labor Day event, and a group of young lasses behind me, mobilized as a bargain-soap door-to-door sales team jumping off a loudly-“bargain soap!”-crying jeepney (and were earlier nudging me to buy bargain soap), were now saying some lines out of Remonde and Palace Secretary Ermita: “why do they put the blame for everything on Gloria? Why don’t they get real work instead?”

     So you see, Reader, although the polls say Gloria’s rating is low among survey respondents all over the country, I still believe that her party’s candidate would win in the elections if elections were held now. Why?

     Because a lot of Filipinos are like my neighbor’s aunt and a lot of elements of the working class are into bargain soap selling.

     How come? What makes them so blind?—you ask, almost irritated at my reality picture.

     I say: religion. Religion makes them blind. And we are a religious people.

     By a religious people I do not mean that we are a bunch of ignoramuses who have no access to sources of truth and can only lean on nothing but faith. Even affordable tabloids can be sources of truth. Even the New York Post tabloid is respected as a source of truth, the reason why there is seldom one who would dare sue it for libel.

     But truth is nothing compared to religion. Apart from that, a people who have been trained to lean on religion and their faith will always damn any evidence contrary to their faith’s own version of truth. My neighbors hate me for insisting—through a BBC Four docu—that Moses crossed a mangrove swamp called the “sea of reeds” (now part of the Suez Canal) mistranslated from the Greek into a “red sea.” They hate me for telling them that going to the Red Sea from Pi-Ramesses to reach Israel would be like flying from Manila to Legazpi City in order to get to Lucena City. Nobody can topple faith, and we are a people trained to abide by faith.

     Faith can be great. But since faith usually recruits followers using the language of the heart, inclusive of its adorations and hate-crusades, so faith also becomes the tool of liars and manipulators. And, often, once the lying has been passed, we become our own liars to ourselves. Every bit of evidence that drops on our lair we topple with the logic of our unforgiving faith. Social psychologists, should we care about their scientistic opinion, call this attitude or sickness confirmation bias.

     So, Gloria Arroyo has become a religion. As Erap is a religion. As Marcos once was a strong religion. And no amount of reporting on Arroyo in the US from American tabloids can topple the faith of our majority—our neighbors and their aunts and the bargain soap salesgirls who frequent our streets—, no one can topple their faith, or simply the benefits of their doubt, to favor the ignominy brought by paltry evidences.

We are a religious people. And we are presently divided into two religions: those who have faith in Gloria Arroyo’s goodness and do not want your evidences, and those who believe that she ought to be burned at the stake.

     Corazon Aquino was a sort of Queen Elizabeth of the Elizabethan era to us, even a Joan of Arc to our hundred-years-war with ourselves. Though already out of office, she was still uniting those who could not be united to rally against the Spanish mestizo-type malas leches habitually screaming “puñetas!” in the presidential Palace. But now—like Queen Elizabeth—she’s dead. And some of those who mourned with us Aquino's passing (including my neighbor's aunt) are back to their faith that Gloria Arroyo is more of a saint than Corazon Aquino in the pragmatic front.

     But what about that P1 million dinner? My neighbor’s aunt has a new rejoinder, one the swiftness of which you could only hear from a person devoted to her faith: “she was only invited! Don’t you people see that it’s only the people around her who are devils? But she . . . she is a good woman. She is an angel who only has the recurring misfortune of being surrounded by devils!”

     Those on the opposite faith will remember my neighbor’s aunt for this, and in their turn may embed upon their own souls an eternal flame of anger at her person. And when the time comes for them to celebrate a victory, should it come, whenever that may be, their angers might carry the same flame of faith towards their new saint, blinding themselves in their turn from all the new evidences against their own whenever that hero commits errors in judgment, the same way my neighbor’s aunt lights her blind torch for her heroine. And as for them that would then be the surely new opposition, including my neighbor’s aunt, they shall carry on the consistently contrarian role that’s expected of them, snubbing everything positive in the new regime. Not because national politics is just a game no different from a student council seat contest, but precisely because it’s a totally higher contest—where the prize is neither student fame nor academic glory but millions of pesos worth of perpetual dinners within the royalist vision of ce circle dans le cirque. Who wouldn’t end up unbiased faced with that elevated temptation, and seek any sort of confirmation concerning their position’s correctness? And those among the masses who can relate to this royalism and ambition will expand the confirmation bias, waking thus their defeated blind faith to be born again and be resurrected. [END]