Scratching our heads

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

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

     However, despite my sympathy for these situations that call for quick checking on the burgeoning number of people in our archipelago, I also know of other public management policies in conflict with the ideological point of view around that checking. Current economics governing global economies of scale, for instance, would have a different utopia that’s almost in communion with the Christian churches’ embrace of the mushrooming Earth population. These economic beliefs, which are a way away from economics of climate change mitigation, jump for joy at the sight of any new or booming market populace, clearly implying that the more market there is the merrier it is for industries and world trade. Religion’s own approval of population booms has a similar-sounding reason: the more faithful (and mobilized converts) there are, the bigger the collection for servicing God’s words. But such favor for a continuing population increase is not necessarily limited to market economics or religion; statesmanship, such as those in countries like New Zealand and Canada and Germany, lament their states’ declining or aging populations and explicitly invite not just a labor force from without but immigration as well, in order to add laborers to their industries, yes, but also new taxpayers to the states’ national welfare fund; this can definitely be deemed pro-“increasing and multiplying” by itself. New Zealand, interestingly, borrows workers from China for its tree farms every harvest year, but Filipinos’ trendy desire to move to another country has been welcomed there.

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

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

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

     Certainly, the above questions will remain unanswered by the people who have handles on those problems. That is, problems other than those to do with the population; I mean, problems directly having to do with these handlers’ disregard for the general population-cum-nation. For it is because of this disregard that the ship we call the state continues to resemble the sinking ferry whose captain is blaming the passengers overloading the low-priced rear of the boat for the sinking (after these passengers’ insistence at the pier to have the right to board was welcomed by the ticket seller at the pier booth). And now the captain would want a cap on more ticket selling. This captain will ignore the fact that selfish profit was really the culprit that allowed such overloading of the low-priced stern per trip that could have been managed via a distributed right to board across the expensive ferry’s many expensive cabins. Rep. Edcel Lagman (Lakas Kampi CMD) could have authored a bill against such profiteering at the helm whereby inflation at the boat’s stern of exploited workers would be absent. And, in this instance, it is erect profit who could find good use for a condom, so as to lessen the presence of its kind.

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

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

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

     In this sense of failure we could regard the Catholic Church and business corporate boardrooms and their jet-setting habits as both social liberal and right-wing institutions—social liberal in their preaching, right-wing in their behavior. Both being knowledge institutions seeing nothing wrong with the virtue of the exploitable market’s “increasing and multiplying,” they would cater to the seminary philosophy regarding the semen and the egg as apple fruits of that tree where no fruit should be allowed to be thrown away and where no apple should be allowed to remain uneaten. The semen must only be allowed to come out for procreation, thus banning even simple masturbation of the genitalia, and the woman’s—alongside a fruit tree’s—monthly production, and the woman’s disposal by menstruation of a reproductive egg in the womb, must both be considered as original sins of womanhood. This philosophy rumbles on with wrath, even as priests themselves may not just be scratching their penis heads in their bedrooms but be conspicuously masturbating their palates with excessive gustatory delights (the fruits of seminarian parents’ contributions to the seminary pantry) in the dining room, be feasting with their eyes on paintings and antiques and gold-plated altars and ivory statuettes of excess now in the seminary or cathedral storage room, be caressing their ears in the meditation room overly ridden with imported Italian music none of their parishioners could afford to either download or appreciate, not to mention be pumping their Sunday asses with cushion seats in their bishops’ air-conditioned four-wheel-drives on their way to vacation spots of note.

Still and all, however, after all this fact-baiting about the sins of the Church—and the business corporate boardroom—that we here set on the table, we can still say that it—the Church—is still right in admonishing us this: that it is not so much the fault of the teeming population that this population is unable to feed itself either equitably among themselves or amply. It is still right in saying that this is really someone else’s fault, with some Church authorities playing a merely supportive role as recipients of the blessings of corruption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philippine Christmas Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Jesus Christ Way

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

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

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

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

     As for those Christmas trees, the hung apples can be revived, especially since imported apples are now cheaper than locally-farmed but for-export mangoes, and thus would be the better symbol for the Philippines’ kowtowing to the WTO religion surrounding the heaven of economies of scale. We can light little electronic candles on these trees, all made in China, which by their being a fire hazard can already qualify them as the recurrent Filipino vehicle for clearing squatter zones to make way for prosperous industrial beauty. After all, we might take note that, by the proof of our prayers, divine blessings today are measured by the amount of industrial production and products that a country booms with at the expense of the Catholic Church-sponsored bloated surplus of workers in the population. Blessed are the not so meek.

2. The Bacchus Route

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

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

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

     It’s the same with Jesus of Nazareth, who is now nothing more than a plastic child in a manger at SM department stores instead of the revolutionary irritant in his day’s conventional Jewish wisdom. Hooray! The symbol has become more important than what he/it symbolized. But that doesn’t have to be so, for behind the losses in all that symbology, he/it—Jesus—still symbolizes something. Except that, this time, the symbolism has become more lightheaded than utterly serious, more economics-serving than ethics-directed. Supposedly we’ll be happier that way, and maybe we are, drunken by the daze of a blind celebration.

3. Pagan Julian’s Guidance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to give God a hard time

1. Ketsana

IN the immediate aftermath of the flash flood wrought by typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana), Metropolitan Manila Development Authority chairman Bayani Fernando had the media-perceived strategic gumption to pin the blame on everyone, including himself. His take was wisely leveled against himself primarily—for failing to convince developers and "informal settlers" (squatters) to get out of the waterways and relocate in what he deemed a necessary move for his department's flood control mission to work. Unwittingly, or so he made it appear, he had actually backhandedly leveled the primary blame on these very developers (who had acquired permits to build real estate subdivisions on wetlands from the government). Fernando also implied these projects' having in turn bred squatter zones at the subdivision's sides as parallel developments in their own right, with these squatter developments often starting as a few construction workers' shacks cropping up during the construction of the subdivisions. It was as if Fernando was saying, I know how to work this, but the government that I work for doesn't have the intelligence to address the problems and solutions that I see.

     The subdivisions and squatters Fernando was referring to were those placed right smack in the middle of erstwhile esteros or waterways (natural and man-made), incursions he says he had always known to prevent the unobstructed flow of such flashflood water as what poured from the mountains of Luzon's Sierra Madre on the night of September 26. To his credit, Fernando did mention in passing the logging in those mountains (which have also acquired permits, legal and not; the legal from the government and the illegal from the protection of corrupt government people that Fernando is either working for or with). In short, while Fernando is the kind of disciplinarian that believes there is no society that disciplines itself, this time he points his finger at our lack of self-discipline, as party to the blame, otherwise—by subtle implication—to the lack of intellectual discipline in the government that he works for or discipline among the corrupted government officials he works with.
     The populace, meanwhile, looked somewhere else. Many pointed to the dams of La Mesa, Angat and Ipo as the culprits in the flashfloods that visited Quezon City, Marikina City, Pateros, the Pasig River-side parts of Makati City and many towns of Bulacan province. And although Angat Dam was quick to deny having released water of such catastrophic volume, it released two meters of water a day after the flood to prevent "a similar occurrence" in case the anticipated new typhoon Pepeng (Parma)—expected landfall, October 3 or 4—brought in a similar mass of rain cloud cover.
     Then there were the government-controlled channels. National Broadcasting Network Channel 4, RPN 9 and IBC 13 kept on harping on typhoon Ondoy's rain cloud cover as a manifestation of nothing but climate change, the sole gist of their lip service being that everyone should be informed of these effects and—by implication—should henceforth participate in the fight to turn back the climate change momentum. Putting aside the absence of other factors that could have minimized the scale of the catastrophe, the message was noble. Except that this was being pushed even as the very same government the channels were paying lip service for have also been sparing no effort to advertise the nation's need to add more coal power plants to the national energy grid as well as to further the fossil fuel industry in Palawan, all this side by side nothing in the direction of a renewable energy program apart perhaps from a desire to resuscitate a nuclear power plant near a rising sea level.
     Now, all of the above dams do merit mention as real culprits. However, it eludes the imagination of Fernando—a presidential or vice-presidential aspirant for the 2010 elections—as it does the government channels' climate-change lip-service spinners to examine the root of the evils they so readily point their fingers at. Failing to do so brings us back to the habit of stoning criminals whose crimes may have been nurtured by the very systems we have for so long accepted as natural and defensible.

LET us start with climate change.
     It is now common wisdom that climate change was processed by two things: industry and consumption. But, putting aside the fact that the conservatives of the world are denying it ever exists or that industry and consumption have nothing to do with it, it's still a common belief that's been taken for granted. Here's looking at it again:
     The majority of economic planners agree that a good economy is propelled by consumption which in turn oils the machines of production. The vicious cycle is not declared vicious at all but is in fact regarded as the very stuff that makes the world go round, the absence of which could stop the planet or threaten the momentum of its orbit around the sun. Likened to nationalist-cum-protectionist economics that defies globalization, holistic economics of austerity teaching "buying only what's necessary," along with other like-minded Thoreau-esque libertarian economic utopias, are seen as either too Middle Ages-y or New Age-y, thus anti-industry, anti-trade, anti-production, and in the long run anti-consumer, too. As if anti-consumerism is equal to anti-consumer. Yet the economics of the vicious cycle is the very economics that churns out more private cars for space-poor roadways, more fossil fuel barrels, more styrofoam on the fastfood table, more plastic bags in kitchens and the garbage bins, and so on. It is this very economics that, while encouraging some governments to look for alternative energy, also cannot argue against overproduction's (surplus production's) imposing its philosophy on the advertising industry to promote further consumption, being itself a product of such a philosophy. And the machine wheels of consumption-driven economics have been turning faster and faster since the Industrial Revolution, a philosophy no different from the Catholic Church's mission to increase and multiply the population in its orphanages.
     But the economics that manufactured—is continuing to manufacture—climate change is not the sole social science at odds with its prayers for a better natural environment. There is also the long-standing (since the beginning of time) human proclivity to create population centers.

SINCE the beginning of time, the human propensity to centralize further and further all aspects of societal living has spiraled ever faster as well. Sucking everything center-wards like a whirlpool, as a matter of course, cities created the metropolis that created the cosmopolitan megalopolis, and around these the suburbs and "urban fringes" or "surrounding provinces" as their unofficial extensions that make up what is now known as the urban agglomeration. We know megalopolises as those composites having overly-populated towns and cities within its embrace and "on its outskirts."
     Apart from being the facilitator of cultural exchanges, our center-moving proclivity has proven itself to be healthy fodder for industries, the very reason why it has survived urban citizens' impatience with their daily urban struggles. As long as a citizen has for himself an industry, it makes no sense to remove himself from the more populated areas of the world where the bigger market is. And the industries that have blossomed out since the time of Eridu, Uruk and Ur have become so various and sophisticated.
     In our time, suburbs have proposed semi-private short-distance railway systems for the transportation industry. And, undoubtedly, the megalopolis has saved a lot of money for the manufacturing industry, an industry wont to gather around a port-of-call center, thereafter mapping a spider web of delivery routes for its trucks, ships, or air cargo expenses; the nearer a population is to the point of manufacture, the lower the shipping cost. And where's the biggest market? Almost always it's in the megalopolis, the point of manufacture.
     Industries also benefit from the population center's populace of strugglers in competition. Seeing these strugglers as denied of the comforts of provincial contentment, city industries can haggle with the cost of their labor.
     Other industries, such as government profit-making ones, have also invented projects that grew from metropolitan necessities. One of these products is … the dam. When there are millions and humongous industries to be fed water and provided electricity, there is the industry to be made in the supply of that water and the harnessing of electricity from the pressure in the dam structures. It is even possible for the control of dam sites to lead to another industry altogether—the control of the forests near a watershed or mountain lake can be managed to harness forest farming activities better known as "logging concessions."
     In short, the economics of agribusiness and manufacturing or creating domino effects of consumption has a lot in common with the sociology of spiraling inwards towards a population center. The two long-standing concepts have been feeding each other since the time of Alulim. The economist Paul Krugman has amply demonstrated this further in his theory on economies of scale which, combined with lower transport costs, create processes whereby "regions become divided into a high-technology urbanized core and a less developed 'periphery'." It was for these "discoveries" that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008.
     Now, of course this partnership between the sociology of upward and inward mobility was seen as an ideal for Thackeray's London, and continue to be for a progressive European Union or an ever-expanding Metro Manila. But not anymore if we're to stop blabbering about geographic inequities (e.g. Manilacentrism), or—now—about turning back climate change to previous ideal levels and conditions. This dual mobility should be okay if we're not constantly gabbing about minimizing casualties from either "acts of God," man-made catastrophes (such as dam breakage and explosions or oil-depot-within-a-city accidents), or urban epidemics.

IS it possible to create a new millennium that would reverse the above human proclivity, towards real decentralization? In the age of the Internet and a "global community," in the age of Skype conferences and Facebook bulletins, is it possible?
     Let us consider examples from the present.
     A California ad agency operates an office center rarely visited by its employees, most of whom meet each other and clients everyday via the Internet. Another ad agency, based in Portland, Oregon proves that it is possible to be one of the country's leading creative shops without locating its offices in Manhattan. More recently, not a few companies all over the world have realized that it is possible to base its customer service call center in Manila or Bombay, its main factory in Shenzhen, and its main office somewhere in London's outskirts. So, why not a Makati office with departments scattered all over the Philippines? Why this supposedly-obsolete habit of creating more business centers, terrorist-friendly shopping centers, factory rows beside a river ditch, or flood-prone university belts? Why transport thousands of employees each day to the Makati financial district and Ortigas Center, with a lot of these workers waking up as early as 4:00 a.m. to be able to reach office (through traffic and the Metro Rail Transit's skin-to-sweating-skin horde) by nine, when work and efficiency can be achieved otherwise, without the obsolete bundy clock's standard of measure? If the aborted NBN-ZTE broadband project of Gloria Arroyo had to have a believable philosophy behind it that might have convinced all senators, it could have been this: that a company (private or government) need not operate its departments from around the esteros/arroyos/waterways of Pandacan alone.
     But what would be gained from such a scheme? What would be lost? Decongesting megalopolises to create a scattering of mini-cities—at best a scattering of mere towns—may have to do away with the necessity of building new metropolis-bound elevated roads, for instance, or the necessity of humongous dams. Or if giant dams have to remain, it would be easier to manage the towns below the dam's spillways considering that these would be mere small towns and not an unmanageable, irreversible mini-metropolis growth like eastern Bulacan. At present, should a 7.5 earthquake hit Angat Dam and crack it, the casualty toll within the province from the flashflood will be in the hundreds of thousands.
     What would be gained? For every loss is a corresponding gain, goes some common belief, and so with the loss of manufacturing centers and a corresponding dispersal of operations there shall be created a redistribution of employment opportunities. There shall result a de-saturation of land, nay, properties' liberation from the former distinction cutting between industrial hectares and agricultural ones; a farm can now be seen beside an LCD TV factory, and—besides—factories getting dispersed thus would be easier for the populace to monitor for abuses including lack of water treatment facilities and other pollution law offenses. It would also be hard for factories to recruit and import cheap non-unionized labor from the provinces since the concept of a "province" would already have been passé. The concept of urban and rural would have gone away, since everywhere would be urban as well as rural.
     As for the benefits of de-saturating the country's city areas, it must be noted here that not a few flood victims inhabiting unlivable areas of Metro Manila or its outskirts who got interviewed on TV in the aftermath of the typhoon Ondoy calamity had provincial twangs or accents. It was not hard to imagine or directly hear Tagalog viewers commenting like Nazis that very day: "go back to your provinces, don't squat in the city's idle lands and you’ll be spared from another typhoon Ondoy." This city-bred view, of course, would be coming from a lack of an understanding of the whole complex system that encourages such migrations (or, in some cases, such subtle importations) of cheap labor and, oh yes, electorate votes [my churchworker friend M- was quick to remind me—see his comment below]. The assumption of those voicings is that life in the provinces is so okay, that there's much idle or development or converted land by, say, a senator or pretty famous billionaire where the provincials could still plant sweet potato on for their daily meals. These Nazi-like critics should try, along with their professional practice, living in the provinces today.

     Sure, it is high time we create revolutions and reverse man's city-prone movement hand in hand with his reversing his habit of creating environmental decline. But it would not be as easy and simple as the government's present Balik-Probinsiya placebo program thinks it is. Such a program must guarantee relative non-returns to points of congestion. Therefore, the dispersal must happen naturally; that is to say, not through a Maoist conscription of individuals transported to new points for acculturation but by the sowing of investments that will lead the way out of Egypt, coupled with a comprehensive environmental management plan as well as a sound population control policy. I am not talking about federalism, but simply about giving everyone an elbow room and about discouraging everyone from congregating in special points of concentration. I'm talking about scattering the prey to scatter the predation.

     Nor am I talking about the annihilation of city culture, as the cities will simply be pushed outwards while the rural areas are being pushed inwards to meet the cities halfway. Nor should I be talking, as per my friend economist P-'s advise, about urbanizing all the squares in the archipelagic map to create another Los Angeles-like sprawl. I am talking about spreading the population in the archipelago while controlling the population so it wouldn't turn the new territories into metropolises themselves. I may even be talking about everyone being required to plant subsistence food if they can help it.

     Are these impossible dreams? Is it true that Marcos, too, dreamed of this? Or are these simple products of a present need to find long-lasting solutions? Simple-minded? Perhaps, but wary of status quo. If Fidel Castro was successful in instituting urban farming in Havana, is it possible that we could be, too?

WHAT would be gained? What would be lost?
     I leave these questions for social scientists and government planners to better mull over. All I can leave my reader with is an imagined utopia wherein during moments of catastrophe, be that catastrophe due to climate change (with its unpredictable thick raincloud cover resulting in dams' brimming to scatter their water load), estero/creek/waterway asphyxiation and lack of metropolitan drainage efficiency, some officials' or (who knows?) a senator's unguarded logging concessions uptown, viral epidemics, or whatever else or a combination of some or all of the above, casualties would be relatively minimal and/or manageable. And with such a distribution of the population's numbers, God's "wrath" (through typhoon Ondoys) would have to cover the entire country to effectively depopulate it.



Photo from http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//090929/ids_photos_ts/r490447765.jpg/

2. Parma (added October 20)

TYPHOON Pepeng's (Parma's) rainclouds wreak havoc: in Benguet with landslides, in Pangasinan with broad strokes of flashfloods reaching a depth of 14 feet in certain towns, and in various other provinces with more of the same. It is a state of calamity and disaster all over, and I don't mean in bureaucratic state terms, which take hours or days to declare.

     Some would say it was a different issue here. Sure, it was by the thick rainclouds of new typhoons by climate change, but—wait, who else is to blame? It wasn't a matter concerning squatters and subdivisions impeding the flow of water from the cities' over-exploited mountains overlooking the metropolitan sprawl. Sure, it may be by the relentless enthusiasm of unchecked logging, but—wait, who else to blame? It wasn't a matter to be solved by either looking for invisible loggers. Or sending squatters back to their provinces—after all, these were the provinces. Sure, the rains were a result of climate change, but climate change is just too academic for even mayors (who have been refusing any form of change for far too long) to comprehend.

     In Baguio, many say it was more a matter of the age-old physics concerning water mixing with soil and rocks, nothing more. In Pangasinan, many say it was more a matter of a dam. Nothing more.

     In fact, everything was a matter of more. And because of this more matter, more is to come. The more I think about it, the more I feel its certainty.

MORE. In her essay "In Paradigm Shift 1: A Long Look Back," the columnist Sylvia Mayuga wrote about the history of local government corruption and the national government's leaning towards the time-proven (read: old) solutions to 20th-century problems. In "Diary of Revolution V: Another Strange Column," she wrote about government's dismissal of NGO pleas to keep Mt. Banahaw out of South Luzon Expressway's tentacles. Also, in "Paradigm Shift 2: New Vision in Government," about government's ignoring then-DENR secretary Fulgencio Factoran's Ancestral Domain Law bill in favor of the Congress-favored IES bill mandating popular consent to such projects as the coal-powered Hopewell power plant in Pagbilao, Quezon. And today in the Philippine Star, columnist Jarius Bondoc's essay "Corruption: Direct Cause of Storm Ruin" chalked up more corruption data that led to the catastrophe ("The purchase of seven brand-new radars took so long because an admin congressman had tried to block it when he was eased out as secret supplier").

     More. Alexander Martin Remollino of Bulatlat.com—an online magazine—in "Dam Nation: A Bloody History of Struggle Against Dams" waxed nostalgic and defiant towards the struggles of such martyrs as Macliing Dulag and the Dumagats in the futile fight against the construction of the World Bank-funded Chico River Dam, implying the enormity of such revolts, since one is running against such respected institutions including the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and the Asian Development Bank.

     And all this history comes back to us now, in the present hunger of the citizenry not just for somebody to hang (the dam engineer who made supposed misjudgments, for one) but for solutions to prevent a similar occurrence, or otherwise to prevent similar results in case the return of the same occurrence cannot be mitigated.

     And so we rejoice as when, on October 9, 2009, an American cinema actor and philanthropist named Brad Pitt is reported about on the Net to have unveiled in New Orleans his flood-surviving float house for the Make It Right Foundation. We happily rejoice at the criticisms and proposals of the Filipino architect and urban planner Felino Palafox, who is no sooner on our TV screens, interviewed left and right for free TV's explanation-hungry angry citizenry.

     I, too, posted Pitt's house's picture on Facebook.

     To which posting my friend copywriter A- made a not-so-satisfied comment, providing ample ideas in his wake, to wit: "The idea of working on designs for the real world I like, but those two designs for floating houses are downright ugly. Ugh. Our squatters have more design aesthetics than those architects who couldn't even show some modicum of respect for the people they envision living in those ugly houses. In my opinion, a houseboat on a barge has more charm and design aesthetics. And that's a floating property, not just a house. The barge the house is on is one's land area. And the house of course is the floor area. And if everyone in ... say, a small community had the same idea, they could moor their 'land areas', their barges, together; and when the floods come, they all rise (of course they have to be anchored to land with a slack of 15 feet), and when the flood waters recede, they're landlocked again. Nasa lupa lang at kalsada ang kalat, wala sa mga bahay-bahay.

     "Hey Jo," he added, "why don't we look for a student architect to partner with and build one? For energy we'll use solar. For food, they can go hydro for veggies and raise doves and bantam chix for meat. There's rain water, but that will have to go through some filtration because of what might be in the atmosphere."

     To which great ideas I replied, thusly: "This is adaptation. This is Darwinian adaptation. Hereon in, typhoons will be bringing in tremendous cloud cover the likes of which we have never seen before. It happened in Bombay in 2005 that got featured on Discovery Channel and still the oil industry-backed Right is saying climate change is a myth, even as Bombay reacted with dikes and better drainage. The same thing with the conservative Republican-American TV network Fox News: in early 2008, where one female anchor even expressed something like, if Arizona is to have ice and snow the whole year she'd welcome it, and if North Dakota is to have melting ice, fine, great. Then her co-anchors went on about the virtues of an extensive US offshore oil drilling, echoing John McCain's going against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's championing the need to tap sustainable and renewable energy.

     "In our country, with the typhoon's evolution, dams filled to the brim should begin to see their obsolescence, except in the possible drought of summers. Each barangay has to shift to mini-dams and barangay waterworks systems of this kind both for drinking and irrigation. But I was also talking to my Bulacan neighbors in the flood of August 2007 about Badjao houses and how we should adapt with houses on concrete or iron stilts, and everyone just smiled at me, a crazy Waray, saying, 'hindi iyan uso rito.' And yes, even floating houses, with moorings to fight the current; I was talking about these like a crazy drunk at a streetcorner birthday party. Or, people looked at me like I was a crazy drunk.

     "And Pitt's prototype for New Orleans—not exactly a houseboat like the ones we see on HGTV's show on strange houses and great vacation homes and hideaways—may be a tad better than the houseboats of Hong Kong, but henceforth the floating house must be a new genre in 21st-century architecture. We must launch design contests for floating houses.

     "If we fail to adapt and we die," I aimed for a closing, "good riddance! Let's make room for a better species."

     Great exchange, it was. But, like this essay's Part One's pleas with an unknown readership, is this to be read as just another literary banter with the ghosts of reform? After all, who—among businessmen with resources, or leaders with clout—would even initiate such adaptations that dare go against the old contractor's specifications?

THE main headline in today's (October 20's) Philippine Daily Inquirer front page reads: Mayors damn the dam. The headline news item references a PHIVOLCS report saying the dam in question rests near a fault line, which fact alone would truly bring back visions of Noah's flood into the Pangasinense landscape. The mayors are crying for a decommissioning of the dam. But.

     Knowing government, that will never happen.

     Oh, me, a cynic? No. More. A student of history. To appropriate Mayuga's essay, I dare attach the reading that almost all governments around the world today have leaderships sponsored—directly or indirectly—by corporate interests, by big business, by local and international banking systems. Governments will always side with big business, and if we are to follow the philosophy of the 2009 Nobel Economics laureate Oliver Williamson, big business can in fact resolve a conflict by dealing with another big business, and if I may add, even topple the other big business' interests. So, to bastardize or bawdlerize Williamson by a converse reading of his thesis, only big business can successfully sponsor opposition to the interests of the other big business, and thus instigate change. That seems to be the only possible fight in times present, then—windmill and solar energy corporations sponsoring a new government to topple the centuries-old oil and coal and hydroelectric power plant parties.

     Sure, there have been triumphs of civil society against big corporations, but those have always proven to be short-lived or temporary. The monster manages to come back everytime. Thus the Williamson thesis' significance.

     For even if such entities as mayors or even mayors' leagues are to clamor for change, such clamor will—corruptibility aside—often be devoid of alternatives. For instance, who among the mayors of Pangasinan would now promise to do away with the benefits of big hydroelectric power plants in favor of small barangay-level hydroelectric plants, micro-windmills, solar power cooperatives?

     Who would want to arm themselves with the argument that solar power is only expensive today because it has a lot in common with twenty political posters from a printing press that could decidedly be costed way, way lower if produced in bulk by the twenty-thousands? None, I suppose.

     My friend the UN consultant Lila Shahani talks about solar energy in Cuba. My friend the church worker M- talks about village impoundments. "I’m still an advocate of small-scale water impoundment projects," he writes on a Facebook thread. "If every community in the nation had its own small lake or pond (size depending on population), a certain amount of land would be lost, but the benefits, in the reduction of soil erosion, improved groundwater levels for deep wells and even small scale power generation, would more than make up for the loss. It’s no substitute for forests as a mitigator of runoff, but in cases where the forest is already gone, it can be a helpful alternative. But no one even talks about it." In his Oct. 6 comment to Part One of this essay (see below), M- mentions the hydro plant of Villa Escudero Plantations resort farm, and the little power plants of the Sierras in California.

     But who among the mayors of Pangasinan is ready to counter the giant San Roque Dam hydroelectric power plant's argument that closing the dam now might mean selling un-irrigated farms to land developers? None, I suppose.

     In short, we are all like my Bulacan neighbors. We will continue to lean on the tried-and-tested convenient slogan, "hindi iyan uso rito e."

AND so, I promise you: a year from now we will not see a President Noynoy Aquino or Gibo Teodoro or born-again Erap Estrada or Manny Villar (estate development stalwart) or a Vice President Loren Legarda (claiming to be a proponent of environmentalism) making any difference in the area of doing away with the dams in favor of micro-electrification and micro-water systems and micro-irrigation systems that have been proposed by many a genius from Africa to England to Texas to Luzon on the moving pages of CNN and ABS-CBN and GMA Network, geniuses we've refused to listen to because of big business' charm.

     More.

     Is it hard for us to imagine such refusal among our leaders, us being faithful followers of certain candidates' supposed competence? Well, such refusal is present in our very selves. How many of us would want to give up our cars in favor of public transport, for instance? None. Who among us would be willing to boycott McDonald's pancakes served in styrofoam? None. Who among us would be willing to give up beef and rice for chicken and sweet potato so as not to contribute to the atmosphere's warming with the methane coming from cows' farts and shit and from the rice paddies' evaporting water? None.

     Tilt the camera up. Now, imagine yourselves as those leaders up there. Who among those politicians would work hard and work fast at improving public transport systems so even CEOs would want to ride on trains? Who among them might work hard at pushing for (or at least encouraging) alternative sustainable energy sources that may render fossil fuel use obsolete in, say, ten years? Work hard and fast to spread the population, control population growth, even render giant dams for urban areas and farm zones obsolete? Equally none.

     Meanwhile, the planet's atmosphere is working twenty-four hours a day at melting the polar ice to produce warmer oceans that produce more efficient typhoons for a disposable humanity that refuses to evolve (many still even refusing to believe in the "theory" of evolving) after Darwin and the dams' increasing damnations.

SO, what am I proposing? Equally none. Because I know that nothing will be done, nothing much will be created or demolished to service the fight against climate change, dam threats, uncontrolled logging.

     More. We will continue to build foreign bank-funded corporate dams, which are actually fourth floors of all our houses serving as water storage tanks. If you think that's bad architecture, don't say a word. Even if you say "no, I don't think that's good at all," still we all latently approve of it. Nobody would want to give up the benefits that the dam brings, because no one would want to be bothered with the adjustments that micro-electrification and micro-water systems and micro-irrigation demand. We are all reliant on big business to do our water-fetching for us, along with our farming, our gardening, our cooking, and so on and so forth. Everybody latently thinks a fourth floor serving as water storage tank is good architecture, in the final analysis.

     What am I proposing? None. If I am to propose anything at all, it would be to say, let's teach our kids how to ride it out. Make them learn how to swim. Let's not bother making it hard for God to depopulate the planet of human dinosaurs. None of Williamson's firms are going to do anything about it for us.

     And besides, at the back of our minds we knew this was coming. More now—we know it's what we'll continue to get. [END]

Photo from http://www.lugaluda.com/2009/10/09/sm-rosales-pangasinan-have-come-under-water-no-thanks-to-typhoon-“pepeng”-continuous-rains/

Acknowledgment: Sylvia Mayuga featured this blog essay as a "guest column" in her Philippine Star Online column Only One World of October 25, 2009. It was a tremendous honor, Sylv.