Duterte-phobic Notes of the Week

1. ONE basic thing you need to know about history deniers (historical negationists), fact deniers, fake news writers, and their ilk. They will name anything and anyone as a case to study and confront it/them so to avoid focus on themselves. Don't fall into this trap. They are the cases that you need to examine and confront! The focus ought not to be on anything or anyone other than them! They are the basic issue! Expose everything there is to know about them!!

2. Degrees of Corruption
    True, if you're a media or religious institution or persona fixing every now and then the function of your privilege in order to serve the interests of holding companies or specific corporations or of political factions, you deserve to be called corrupt by the President of the State.
    Then again, if you're a President of the State who has devoted himself to the facilitation of another state's natural resource and market interests in his state, you are not just displaying corruption of the third or second degree, but absolute treason, one being committed by no less than You as the leader of the government of this State. That is corruption of the supreme or highest universal degree.

3. Planning a Novel
    What if I explore this premise for a novel's plot?---
    The 21st century. China would only have to look at its history where, once upon a time, there was this British-instigated Opium War against it designed by Britain to get its silk, porcelain, and tea. In that looking back would be born enough inspiration for a now-rich China to plan a 21st-century fear-farming War on Drugs false flag on a neighboring state. They will have to do this through---or care of---a potential puppet in that state that they can sponsor and install as that state's new leader. Once installed, that leader can farm all the fear he wants through that new "Opium War", through which fear-farming war the leader can facilitate China's slow and smooth entry into the leader's state, not just to get this neighboring state's silk, porcelain and tea but resources more precious and ready for a hefty harvest. Does that sound like a good plot for a fiction novel to you? Or would I be plagiarizing life for a historical one?

4. In the Era of Simplified Psychometrics
    Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell have provided a concise, workable definition of the term "propaganda," viz., "Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist."
    Following that definition, it should be easy for us to see why government would be busying itself presently with the labeling of everyone in the divided opposition as "bobos" (stupid people), most especially the Vice-President, Leni Robredo, in recent days.
    Is the intent of this propaganda move to shape the manipulable public's perception that it is the critics of this government's policies who are bobo, in order to hide its own series of boo-boos?
    Is it to manipulate cognitions that everything that it is doing is the smart thing, if not the only smart thing, which process of manipulation may involve the hyping up of the truly smart it's done and hiding beneath the quilts all the stupid moves it had committed?
    Is it to direct behavior towards a derogation of critics and the celebration of this government's supposed revolutions?
    I think we're all intelligent enough to know when propaganda is twisting us or sucking us in. Or are we?
    And if we are, or suspect we are, being sucked into it, how do we fight it? Do we fight by throwing the same techniques it is using? Or do we fight it by exposing its lies? By exposing all the truths behind its lying?
    Do we expose the whole anatomy of processes in its propaganda that aims to "achieve a response that (will further) the desired intent of the propagandist"?
    What are those desires?
    Are we as a nation intelligent enough to in turn desire answers to these questions? Or are we truly bobos enough to desire nothing, simply wallowing in never-ending trust?

5. THE argument that says Duterte's spitting on due process ought to be thanked because the drug pusher and his addicts that used to be the kings in one's neighborhood are now all gone . . .
    is no different from the argument that says Hitler's regime should be thanked because it furthered the popularity of Wagner.
    Or don't you see the similarity? If you don't, well, . . . perhaps you never will.
    Perhaps you never will see that that legitimization of Hitler by one's deep love of Wagner is the same sort of legitimization that you are placing on Duterte's aggressive wariness towards all his critics, in this republic and outside, a legitimization motored by your understandable love of peace in one particular anecdotal neighborhood.

6. UNTIL that day comes when good people in a land start invoking violent resistance in order to protect rights, violent evil will continue to prosper in that land and in other lands. That is not inciting rebellion. That is a mere articulation of a historical truism operative among frightened peoples in repressive, suspect regimes.

7. ARE we afraid? My friends: government is excited about, and not wary of, creating a fearful people, for the fear-farming reasons we articulated above.
    But it, government, seems to be ignorant of the fact that courage is actually 100% fear. Let us rejoice, then. For as government makes progress in creating more frightened people, its hold on the people is not strengthened, it is lessened. Fear pa more! [S / -I]

A Caveat to the Global Era of Post-Truth Politics

an international magazine acknowledges the phenom
as worthy of a cover treatment

NOONG mailibing ang supposedly mga buto ni Ferdinand Marcos sa Libingan ng mga Bayani mid-November, nagkaroon ng ineskedyul na malalaking rali laban dito, mainly ng mga ngayo'y oposisyon nang paksyon ng mga dilawan ng Liberal Party at ng mga pulahan ng Left na kaalyado ng Big Tent ng ruling party. Ngunit sa sidelines ay may mga nagkumento---kasama na rito ang isang Trotskyist at anarchist communist kong kaibigan. Aniya noong Nobyembre 25:
    "Mapapangiti at mapapakamot ka talaga sa salimuot ng realpolitik kung makikita mo ang mga nangyayari sa likod ng entablado. Halimbawa, ngayong araw ay may mga belated rallies sa Luneta o sa Plaza Miranda o sa Mendiola Street o sa kung saan man laban sa pagbabalik ng mga Marcos, at ang rali ngayong hapon ay pinangungunahan ng Makabayan group. Alam na natin ang conflict between the Left at ng Marcos family, obvious naman iyon, di ba? Pero mapapangiti ka sa sitwasyon na silang dalawa---ang Left at ang Marcos party---ay kapwa kaalyado ng business interests ng mga lider ng Nacionalista Party at ngayon ng Big Tent government ni Duterte, at diumano ay pareho sila mga benepisyaryo ng Generous Patronage at global neoliberal business interests ng Communist State of Imperialist China. Hehehehehehe. Sino kaya ang mangingibabaw? Ano kaya ang magiging desisyon ng kanilang mga Tatay?  :)"
    Now, of course it may be that the voice of the anti-Marcos rallyists, both from the Left-hating yellows and the yellow-hating Left, together might not reflect the majority's voice, which had yet to be polled during that period of the month and year (in lieu of an absent or inaccessible direct democracy instrument for a referendum call) on the issue of Marcos' burial post-burial. You may aver that rallies are not so much proper democracy as instruments of mob rule. But, you see, democracy also provides individuals the choice to participate or not to participate, to vote or not to vote, and only those who cry are heard. And rallies may prompt people to put up more rallies everywhere else.
    But as regards the Marcos issue or even simply the Marcos burial issue, I do not think democracy (through a majority or a minority) can help this anymore since it has not really been a conflict of beliefs on facts open to the possibility of one side being able to convince the other side of the latter's beliefs' or gathered facts' wrongness; from the git-go, this has always been nothing other than a conflict of faiths (beliefs, period) by the contending parties, faiths akin to religious faiths wherein there is no possibility of one side being able to convince the other side to change its perspective. This is a closed issue to all parties concerned that democracy can judge as a hopeless conflict that only needs a little push to be escalated to the level of war as the only resolution. According to Karl Popper, democracy requires an open society, and the Marcos issue has not for a moment been open to openness from either side.
    And, seemingly, the same might apply for many other issues under the Duterte government (care of its propaganda machine) in this same era that Donald Trump won the US elections (care of its own alt-right and neoconservative propaganda machines) and China's historical claims on the West Philippine Sea that has had an upper hand as another truth contrivance in today's world.

    Welcome to the global era of post-truth politics, the resolution for which set of problematics may not be found in a democratic battle of persuasive reasoning but in the power of propaganda to manipulate the psychology of crowds' or nations' propensity for confirmation bias as well perhaps as in the power of facilely resorting to brutal force. [S / -I]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TODAY, IN the face of eulogies concerning dead heroes, some of us may ask or may already be asking: What drives an institution, say the Church, to call someone a saint? What drives a hero's, say Corazon Aquino's, emotions to do the heroic? Why do we need saints and heroes? Why do they have to be from the upper class, at least in our literatures?
     I have no quarrel with the idea of Cory Aquino or Ninoy Aquino being acknowledged as leaders of a people's struggle. I have questions about their followers' obsession with the concept of sainthood and heroism, almost synonymously taken. It's similar to the obsession with slogans and symbols overwhelming all concern for the details. I could write a book enumerating the many ramifications of this shallowness. A eulogy to a hero may be commendable for being not without content, since many eulogies are, but for the present days---or for all days---we should trouble ourselves with more takes on the ingredients of every gram of content, and less with the packaging of heroes. Were some essays not eulogies or eulogy-looking, for all their good intentions they'd actually function as essays around a hero-person's packaging.
     Now, critics of heroes, on the other hand, may be critical of certain of these heroes' inaction on certain causes or issues or dates. But critical from what angle of a mission? Are their issues the mother issues? Is the Hacienda Luisita issue, for instance, really just about the Aquinos concerning Hacienda Luisita or about Hacienda Luisita itself as a national symbol? And aside from the Hacienda Luisita acquisition history and its accordant politics, the mother subjects are still blanket land reform, agrarian reform, progressivist takes on these issues, social liberal takes on these issues different from the progressivist approach, liberal economics' takes, post-reform scenarios, and so on, and these involve characters and polities more numerous than the Aquinos or Tarlac and other element-targets of a certain party out to merely destroy a set of heroes. The Aquinos as heroes and the anti-Aquino counter-hero's role in these issues ought to be judged according to our treatment of the several hypotheses concerning the issues. Sure, we can report on the details of a struggle, any struggle, as it progresses; that'd be exciting to read about. But what about the objectives of the struggle itself? What about the merits and demerits to the post-win scenarios themselves, post-win scenarios that would define the victorious heroes' staying power within significance and memory?
     Sure, a hero's critic may have demonstrated the hero's virtue or non-virtue from his critique's end, citing missionary projects of value or no value to the hero's civilization. And that'd be good (or bad) for the hero and us. But, again, what would be the objective of the critique? Is one's objective merely to take down notes, say, for Noynoy Aquino's "our hero" or "our champion" standing in the eyes of a public answering polls as per the demand of, say, a contending Nacionalista Party? Or is it to truly promote the cause of, say, human rights, out to fight any government's shortchanging the progress of the cause, whether that government is a social and political liberal or political conservative or progressivist or socialist or libertarian one? Journalism is good, but there's also such a thing as selective journalism, black propaganda journalism, latent advocacy journalism, not to mention bad journalism, that in the process of their practice could actually only be validating a process of hero-packaging by virtue of their opposition to pouring more attention to details, details of the issues and causes surrounding these heroes and anti-heroes who---in the first place---are only players in the quest for the triumph or defeat of causes and societies larger than themselves. Understand that heroes can either be a party's, a niche's, or a cause's.
     Consider the Nacionalista Party of Manny Villar that gathered progressivists as well as hauled in Bongbong Marcos to a coalition lineup of senatorial candidates. Definitely worth talking about, that one, for instance. And you'd wonder why no one among the critics of the Aquinos' heroism who were likewise sympathetic to the Nacionalistas did. And, sure, Pres. Cory Aquino may indeed have "self-limited her greatness. She ended her service to the Filipino people where the interest of her clan, friends and supporters began," as a Facebook view states it. That may actually be true. But should that be true, it should be nothing more than a manifestation of what could happen when emotional critics become leaders. Such leaders may have to look for an economic ideology on the job, sometimes finally finding one on their last week in office. That's one reason why we ought to rather read criticism that tackles details instead of those that paint abstracts we already know, or abstracts by way of selected specifics, likewise excluding oneself from the count. For the hero or non-hero (villain) ought not to be the issue, it's the issue that ought to qualify someone's heroism or non-heroism (villainy) within it. Otherwise, what will be offered society will be a battle of superheroes deriving from various parties' metanarratives that all avoid a higher view upon all the forces and prejudices and ambitions at play.
     For the hero on whichever side is never alone. The writer-critic is part of his heroism, if not the definer of that heroism. And, therefore, the critic must derive all his judgments from a confession of his causes as well as a confession of the sort of heroes he prefers to fight with him for his causes.

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


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

Why Are We Writers Shallow?: A Voltairean Exploration

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

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

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

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

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

Another Lousy Day for Heroes (Counter-Reifications)

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

     Let's zoom back in on Ninoy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Moving forward, ano ba dapat ang artist?

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

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

     Sinasabi ko ito dahil, sa isang perspektibo, may mga facet ng isyu akong nakikita kung saan puwede kang mag-apply ng resolusyon. Hindi rin ako sang-ayon na nagkakamali ang media tuwing tinutuligsa o tsinitsismis nito ang "maliliit" na bagay na hindi pinapansin ng masa, dahil ang mga journalists, tulad ng mga tsismoso, ay may kani-kanyang political agenda o socio-educational mission na ayon sa kanilang mga kultura o kaalaman o di kaya bias, at ang mga agenda o misyon at kaalaman o di kaya bias na ito ay makikita nating worth talking about, actually, kahit nilalabas nila ito sa maliliit na bagay lamang.

     Off the bat, isipin natin ang isang facet nitong malaki o maliit na isyu na 'to. Ang tanong: ang exhibition bang ito ay magiging malaking isyu ng journalismo at intelligentsia tungkol sa estado kung ito ay hindi state-sponsored art or at least state-facilitated art dahil dinisplay sa isang state-sponsored na venue, ang CCP? Kung ito'y dinisplay sa Ayala Museum, mag-rarally lamang ang mga konserbatibong deboto ng Simbahang Katoliko laban sa artist, sa curator, at sa mga Ayalas, di ba, at ang mga Ayalas lamang ang magiging malaking isyu. Wala nang pagreresign-in na mga otoridad ng CCP. (Sabagay, malaking isyu na rin iyon kung may nagtangkang sunugin ang Ayala Museum kung sa Ayala Museum nga nai-display ang Poleteismo ni Mideo Cruz).

     Sang-ayon ako, actually, na maraming malalaking problema ang naungkat ng exhibition. Isa na ro'n ang problema ng attitude ng estado towards institutionalized religion. Isa rin do'n ang problema ng pagdedesisyun nito sa kung saan dapat tinatapon ang pera ng bayan at sa kung saan hindi dapat. Panahon na na ang isang liberal na gobyerno ay magsabi na ang pera ng estado ay hindi dapat nakikialam sa pagtutulak ng art, sa dahilang ito'y nag-aaksaya lamang ng pera ng bayan sa pinaborang artists, maging mga kaibigan ko man sila o hindi. Panahon na rin na ang artist ay hindi maging artist na boses ng estado o isang rehimen/administrasyon kundi artist ng sarili niyang pagkatao bilang indibidwal o miyembro ng isang niche ng lipunan na gumagalaw independente sa suporta ng estado.

     As a corollary argument, kung censorship din lang ang pag-uusapan, may karapatang i-censor ng estado ang anumang art na ginastusan o ginagastusan ng pera nito. Kahit sa lighting man lang, or after the fact of the artmaking. Karapatan, I mean, na sa papel ay hindi ideal, lalo sa isang maka-demokrasya at maka-Konstitusyon na lipunan na dapat ay bukas sa lahat ng uri ng boses o pananaw, subalit totoo namang nangyayari pagdating sa mga aksyon ng mga screening committees. At depende na rin lang sa uri ng estado na gumagawa ng censorship: ito ba ay isang mapanupil na rehimen o liberal na gobyerno na gusto lamang i-censor ang mga materyal ng anti-democracy voices.

OO NGA. Bumisita si dating First Lady Imelda Marcos, ang asawa ng dating diktador na si Ferdinand Marcos, sa CCP exhibition, at ang ngayo'y isa nang Representative ng House of Representatives ay naglabas ng kanyang pagkamuhi sa nasabing installation project.

     Pero, in relation to Imelda's oft-quoted slogan "the true, the good and the beautiful," coming as it seems from the perspective of a royalist ideology, tingnan naman natin ang sarili nating mga konsepto ng truth, goodness at beauty from our own respective contending ideologies. I-iimpose din ba natin ang atin sa bayan? Sasabihin din ba natin sa tao na magbayad sila ng buwis para masustentuhan nila ang mga art at artists na may bersyon ng ating truth, ng ating goodness, ng ating beauty ayon sa ating ideology? Kung oo ang sagot natin, ano ngayon ang pinagkaiba natin kay Imelda?

     Bilang isang social liberal at isa ring kritiko ng ilang Roman Catholic policies at doctrines, dapat akong magdiwang sa tapang ng artist na si Mideo Cruz at ng mga art sponsors niya (curator, etc.). Subalit ayokong gawin ang ginagawa sa akin ng mga kalaban ko sa argumento (mula sa fundamentalismo ng institutionalized religion)---ang magdiwang tuwing nasasagot ako habang nakasandal sa poder ng ideloyohiya o teyolohiya na kumakalinga sa kanila, dahil alam kong dapat wala ang poder na iyon sa likod nila habang tumatakbo ang demokratikong argumentasyon. In short, wala silang threats na "patawarin ka sana ng Diyos" o "gabaan ka sana" na maririnig sa akin mula sa aking secular na punto de vista. At bakit ko nasabi ito? Dahil sa side naman ni Cruz, poder ng state art ang sinasandalan niya, at---sa pag-aming may karapatang masaktan ang relihiyon---ayokong sumandal sa poder ng sekyularismong iyon na kasalukuyang pinamamahalaan ng isang diumano'y social liberal na gobyerno. Dahil forever bang pag-aagawan ng mga ideologies o theologies ang CCP at National Commission for Culture and the Arts? O, in the US' case, forever bang pag-aagawan ang National Endowment for the Arts ng mga liberals, religious conservatives at Tea Party-ites? Ano kaya kung itumba na lang natin ang mga pinag-aagawan na 'to? Kung tayo, bilang mga social liberals (o Christian o atheist progressivists man) ay nakikiagaw kay Imelda, ang stalwart ng Philippijne royalist ideology, wala tayong pinagkaiba sa kanya. Pare-pareho tayong gustong magdikta ng ating malamang estetiko sa buong bansa.

     Dahil bagamat ako ay isang social liberal, alam ko rin na ang liberals ay hindi ang buong bayan. Kung ang ating asta ngayon ay, "kaming mga liberal ang hari ngayon, hawak namin ang CCP ngayon, kami ang masusunod, art namin ang masusunod," aba, huwag tayong magrereklamo kung sa mga darating na taon na si Bongbong Marcos naman ang presidente, ay sabihin niyang "o, mga royalist na naman ang may hawak ng CCP ha, art naman namin ang masusunod. Back off kayo." (This is assuming, of course, that Bongbong Marcos won't surprise us with a future sudden reconfiguration of his person from being a defender of his father's record to being a real champion of the masses and the country's coffers' integrity and strength, should that be possible.)

      We should not weary in the eternal struggle of raising self-critical banners. Just as we won't with a possible hundred years of war with un-self-critical fanatics, given that a state of civil war might be acceptable to many if that's what would wake us up to the virtue of democratic tolerance. So, today while debate is still possible, and debating with oneself won't necessarily be by virtue of a gaslighter's effort but by one's own scruples, so I'd say, that even if I were the lucky type who often gets my way, I'd still be against state sponsorship of my art and art profession. For state sponsorship is at the very heart of the Mideo Cruz piece, even if all the state did was provide Cruz a space with gallery lighting! On this issue, at least, I'm one with Newt Gingrich. LOL.

     But yet, also be aware that many US Republicans don't exactly want the NEA abolished. They just want it governed by conservatives who would put up evangelical art. If they can have it their way, they won't want to get rid of state sponsorship of the arts and the arts profession. They won't be one with Newt Gingrich.
     At, finally, sa debate tungkol sa piece ni Cruz, sa bandang akin lang naman: kung may poder man ang secularism na gusto kong sandalan sa anumang argumento tungkol dito, ito ay hindi sa pagdikta nito ng sekyularismo bilang haven ng panginginsulto sa relihiyon kundi sa pagdikta nito ng prinsipyo ng demokrasya na nagbibigay ng kalayaan kanino man na manginsulto kanino man. 

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

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

     Ahem. Okey. Mga kaibigan, naalala ko tuloy.

     Isang araw kasi noon, nagpatugtog ang kaibigan kong FM radio deejay ng Pearl Jam grunge sa radyo nila, kaya tanong ng station manager niya, "ba't yan ang pinapatugtog mo? Mawawalan tayo ng listeners nyan." What did my friend do? Did what was expected of him, played the '70s folk-rock band America's "A Horse with No Name" followed by James Taylor's "Your Smiling Face." "Yan ang rock," sabi ng station manager. Pagdating ng dapithapon, nag-inuman kami ng kaibigan ko at buong gabi naming tinalakay ang definition ng rock music. Napunta kami sa new wave music, kung saan chinallenge ang idea ng pagka-rock nang walang electric guitar, at sa kung saan-saang dako pa ng genre-fication. Kinaumagahan, nung ako'y magising sa aking hangover, isa lang ang na-realize ko. May isang milyong definition ng rock music. Pero nakatulog lang uli ako, at doon naman sa dako ng aking paglalakbay habang tulog, napaniginipan ko si Prof. John Lennon na minumura ang estudyanteng si Kurt Cobain. Sabi niya, "ano ba yang pinaggagagawa mo, Cobain? Pakinggan mo ang 'Woman' ko. Ganyan gumawa ng kanta, okey?" . . . Uhm, pa'no ba alisin ang hangover? Uminom na uli ng isa pang bote pagkatapos sumuka? Parang ganon nga yata. Uh, you were saying?

     Where was I? Ano bang argument pa ang sasabihin ko sana? Oh, yes. Sabi ng isang Facebook friend of a friend, "Unfortunately, the intolerant side won't even let you finish a sentence by instantly pushing the usual 'shut up', 'bobo', 'bastos', or, worse, the 'gaba-an' threat as well as death threats." Tuloy ng kaibigan ng kaibigan ko, "It baffles me how anyone can just throw the word 'bobo' around when you need several intelligence tests to accurately come up with a conclusion. Even then you need to establish if these tests are culture-fair pa, and then there's EQ vs IQ . . . "

     Where was I? Oh, yes. Sa bus nung isang gabi, sumakay ang isang barkada ng mga estudyanteng high school. Ang lalakas ng boses! Sabi ng isa, "si ma'am yun." "Gago, hindi si ma'am yun," sabi naman nung isa. "Si ma'am yun, bobo." "Ulol, kitang-kita ko ng mga mata ko, gago ka ba?" "Tarantado ka," sabi ng isa, sabay batok sa kaibigan habang sila'y nagtatawanan, "hindi ako gago, 'no. Alam ko ang hitsura ni ma'am, tanga ka pala e." . . . Mahabang kuwento 'to, pero sa madaling salita, dumating din sila sa kanilang paroroonan, silang maiingay na mga gago, at wala namang nagalisan o nasabunutan ng buhok. Buti pa ang mga high school, sabi ko sa sarili ko, pag gumagamit ng mga salita galing sa social science, walang intolerance. Lahat ng "bobo," "gago" at "tanga" ay kaibigan.

     But, to be fair, Jose never used the word "stupid." Instead, he only used the words "immature," "juvenile," "ridiculous," and phrases like "lack imagination," "don't think hard enough," among other implied hellfire of judgmental language.

     Hanggang dito na lang ba ang usaping ito? Sa side ni Jose o ng kanyang kinikilingan ay ang truth o artistic truth, at ang kabilang side ay ang kabobohan? The name of the Truth, the Good, the Beautiful . . . Amin?

     Ang sinasabi pa ni Jose, ang artwork installation art daw dito sa exhibition in question ay copied art, lacking in imagination or originality. A gimmick, then! And should go back to the drawing board.

     Where was I? Oh, yes. Isang gabi, nag-daydream ako na isa akong critic na kelangan me sulatin. Di ko alam saan ako magsisimula. Ah, biglang sabi ng epiphany area ng aking utak, may titirahin akong mga derivative art. Ewan ko kung ano ang nangyari, pero napunta ang panaginip ko sa pinagsasasakmal ko ang isang derivative art sa di ko alam na dahilan. Oo, hindi ko alam ang dahilan. Hindi ko alam. Ang alam ko lang, wala akong sinabi sa sangkaterbang iba pang derivative art, o sa sarili kong derivative art. Para akong tambay sa kanto na may nakursunadahang iisa lamang, at di ko alam ang dahilan.

     Now, it may be that no one's awaiting my opinion on this, but let me just clarify to those who have stumbled into this that, in contrast to Mr. Jose's unclarified position, I'm neither on the side of the Church of Caiaphas (which is what I've come to call the Catholic Church authorities' recent temple of corrupt behavior under Gloria Arroyo's previous government) nor on the side of the sons of Christian aniconism. I'm just a man on a bus petting a historical hangover.

PARDON MY attempts at wit. Wit is a 1995 play and 2001 movie about cancer.

     I mean, God forbid the Gabâ (instant or imminent bad karma). Or death threats. And so I say to you, to Christians like myself (cafeteria Christian though I am) there ought to be no death, no darkness, no end to the Christian perspective. And yet we put out with holy water the fire we stoke for Joans of Arc? Nakaka-puzzle ang death threats (o ang mga tipong death sentences ng Opus Dei sa mga nobela ni Dan Brown hahaha), dahil dapat hindi parusa ang sickness o death sa Christian philosophy. Ito kaya ay patunay lamang na maraming Christian gurus kuno ang walang pakialam sa mga turo ng kanilang libro at hero?

     "Sana gaba-an kayo," sigaw ng mga deboto, gayung sabi ng kanilang hero, "love your enemies." Tama nga naman si Hero. Di ba't ang iprinopose niya noong thesis ay ang anti-thesis sa Ancient Roman philosophy of Might? Sabi ni Hero, hindi Might for Might, kundi Love ang magpapatumba sa kaharian ng Tiyuhin ni Caligula.

     Pero tila mali ang metaphor natin dahil lalabas dito na ang iilang iconoclasm ngayon ay gawa ng mga pagano at "Romano" ng ating panahon. Di ba't si Hero mismo ay ang iconoclast ng Judaismo ng kanyang panahon? "Wala akong pakialam sa sinasamba nyong Templo ng kabuktutan," tila sabi niya noon, "itutumba ko yan at papalitan ko sa loob ng tatlong araw."

     Dapat na nga yatang tumbahin ang CCP ng "Caiaphas-approved art lamang ang puwede at ipapako sa krus ng media ang susuway." Itayo muli ang "templo ng tao at ng puso" na hindi gawa ni Imelda kundi ng bawat simpleng bato sa kanto! At dapat hindi ang The Rock ang punong-kritiko!

PARDON MY attempts at wit. Dahil sasabihin lang ng mga deboto, aha! ang witty sa sineng Wit ni Mike Nichols ay namatay sa cancer, buti nga. Gabâ. Ang isa pang friend of a friend na nag-witty mimic sa exhibition art na pinag-uusapan natin dito ay biglang na-ospital dahil sa isang pamamaga sa mukha. Isang supporter ng exhibiting artist in question ang isinugod sa ospital ang anak. Well, let me say this. Lahat ng tao---may sabihin man laban sa Simbahan o wala---ay nagkakasakit o namamatay. Kaya nagtataka ako kung bakit itunuturing na Gabâ ang sickness at death, lalong-lalo na ng mga deboto na dapat ay unang nakaaalala sa mga turo ng kanilang martir na nagpakamatay sa mga pahina ng Bagong Testamento.

     Should this attitude towards Gabâ or retribution among the Church's faithful to be viewed as a koan cum puzzling paradox, Christianity's history being replete---as I said---with a constant involving the burning of its own people whom it would later pronounce as its saints? Jesus of Nazareth himself, let me repeat, was an iconoclast at Caiaphas' Church.

PARDON THE depth of my subtext. My bad. History makes bad ad copy. Unless, of course, its strategy is to provoke questions. And my friend, the veteran journalist-activist Sylvia Mayuga, says there's good news about the CCP. That "things are changing as we speak; issues are being clarified, starting with ourselves." Well, remains to be seen in what direction of defining goodness it has chosen to move towards. For, putting aside my usual contention against the state's role in supporting art-making activities beyond museums and libraries maintenance, I could cite an example of an ill-advised direction.

     A friend of Mayuga's echoed and reiterated lines of argument coming from those whose moral standpoint have been offended by the art in question.

     "Freedom is not absolute . . . carries with it a sense of responsibility," says one recurring line. This is true, and that is the reason why we have laws, statesmen, legislators and lawyers on the one hand and warlords and assassins on the other. The "one hand" as well as "the other" provide society with the parameters, the "one hand" with the letter and/or wisdom of the law and the state, the "other hand" with violent/death threats and/or their quick implementation.

     And, true, the artist must have a sense of responsibility. But firstly a responsibility to himself and his cause, be it the cause of evangelical art, Marian art, punk art, bad art, or whatever. Restraint must be, but in fact is, part and parcel of the process of art-making itself wherein decisions of what to include and what not to include are a constant. But the question now is: who should nudge an artist's propensity to allow excess or shyness, himself or the state? Who shall have the post of The Measurer of excess or non-excess? Him? Me? You? Your mother? F. Sionil Jose? The Pope? The majority? The minority? The individual? Those are the questions.

     "Junk art is no art," true. Unless your art is "junk art" (subgenre of "found art"), which---after the conscious self-labeling or admission of the label---might qualify an art genre category assignation unto itself, and thus to be read according to this genre's elements and terms. It escapes Jose that in the same way the sonnet is its own art enjoyed differently from the way one enjoys the art of the epic poem, so installation art is its own niche art and language different from the artistic language of craft-driven photorealist painting. So, abstract expressionism and minimalist art are their own painting genres with concerns and ironies different from the concerns and ironies of a, say, religious hyper-realist work. This, in the same way that noise rock is an artistic musical genre with elements and a thesis separate from and independent of the standards and thesis of easy-listening Bing Crosby. So, therefore, the question now is: Who shall be appointed to the post of being the measurer of "artful"-ness and "artless"-ness among the different arts and their approaches to the enjoyable, their artistic languages, their theme treatment concerns, their ironies, their elements that comprise their language, their standards? Critics? Artists themselves, as their own best critics? Me? You? Your mother? F. Sionil Jose of PEN International? The Pope? Catholics? The Opus Dei? Protestants? Gnostics? Agnostics? Aniconists? Engineers? Psychiatrists? Haute cuisine chefs? Manicurists? Those are the questions.

     "Ethos" and "merit" were words waved by Mayuga's friend. But these concepts shall forever be debated on the surface of the earth as well as in the bunkers, and liberals and conservatives (in society and in art) shall forever be at each other's throat over these. Bearing this in mind, one can now go out into the day and clearly decide on his responsibilities---responsibilities to his faith, to his politics, or to his art.

     Well, okay, some others would say responsibility to the state, to the majority, or to his death-threatened family, but I would leave that to the bearer of his own mind who, in the end, will have to make up his own mind, . . . whether he decides on his responsibilities at the point of a gun or the point of resolving an artistic or thematic point.

I HAVE always been of the belief that free society has encumbered the individual with responsibilities that go with his freedom. The individual has to exercise his sense of measure in his quest for survival within the laissez-faire traffic of thoughts and decisions and actions in the social environment consisting too of others' freedoms. And so, in this society, responsibility readily resides in the individual. However, the state, for as long as it subscribes to the tenets of democracy that seek to protect the freedom of the individual, would have enacted laws that affirm as well as protect the equal freedoms of each one. Thus, freedom of expression, thus freedom of religion, and so on and so forth. Ideally in a free society, a society such as what the United States' laws and many European countries' laws seek to maintain, the state only interferes when an exercise of one's freedom hinders another's. For instance, one may deem it his right to cross any part of the highway at any time of the day, which may in turn hinder vehicle owners' right to a free-flowing highway devoid of potential human roadkill. The state would, and often does, interfere in such simple problematiques. However, when one spits on the name of a religion or a religious practice without hindering that religion from exercising its freedom to exist, it should be a no-brainer that the state cannot and must not interfere. Thus, the UK did not find it difficult to say that Salman Rushdie, who many Moslems deemed insulting, had the right to insult, even as the state did not share his "insult" (many mosques are allowed to exist in England).

     And so, now, we go to a suggestion to put up authority bodies akin to the Union of Soviet Writers passing judgment on the oppressive works of the Alexander Solzhenitsyns of our place and time. Regulation of artistic practice is being peddled as an attractive notion. Does this notion negate the ideal of a free society? I believe it does.

     True, when I agreed above that individual freedom does have its responsibilities, I did not only mean to allude to such Karl Popperian dictums on an open society as the individual's duty to be aggressive with his opinions while always on the ready to accept his obsolescence, I also meant to allude to the individual's sense of measure, restraint, and other social considerations. This sense may include such choices as civility, giving the other space to save face, avoiding provoking emotional limits, and so on. But in no way was I implying that I'd be in on the idea of forming authority bodies to police individual freedom. Thus my question, "who will decide for the individual, your mother?"

     The Union of Soviet Writers was one such "collegial body" as those being suggested for the Philippine democratic environment. It was appointed by the Soviet state to police individual writers. But it was perfectly understandable for the Soviet Union to come up with that, because the then-Union's concept of democracy was not intended for the individual but only for the collective. I, as a poet and fiction writer and blogging critic as well as a citizen of this republic, spit on the idea of any Philippine collective or committee deciding for the individual. Certainly we have fellow artists and fellow citizens as well as critics and self-appointed critics on blogs who have been given by the state their own freedom to denounce and malign an artist, but the denounced artist's own rights cannot be trampled on by their own respective freedoms.

OH YES, certainly there is that other option in a free society that is also mentioned as an ultimate course of action for those who've been offended by the CCP exhibition. Yes, indeed, there is always that option for legislators to turn the state into freer atmospheres or less free atmospheres.

     In the United States, for instance, some Republicans have been demanding that the state sponsor evangelical prayers in public schools as well as the putting up of statues of stalwart evangelical leaders of the pioneering era in public school campuses. That is certainly going in the direction of more freedom for evangelical devotees at the expense of Moslems, Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, and so on, who are themselves paying their taxes to the state. Do states do this kind of stuff at all? Yes, they do this all the time. And that is why there is always a see-saw of leaderships in the history of democracies, also because of citizens' demand for either more freedom or less freedom for others as time progresses or regresses. In our own state and time, for instance, we do not allow the freedom of the pornographer to exercise pornography, at least on paper. We do not recognize homosexuals' right of access to civil marriage. But at the same time, we have other freedoms that other democratic states don't have. Hundreds of barangay governments allow dog owners to turn our streets into canine toilets. Local peanut butter manufacturers are not policed by aflatoxin level guidelines. Philippine companies are allowed to discriminate against jobseekers by reason of their sex, religion or age.

     And so it is up to us as a nation of citizens, either by plurality voting perhaps or by the power of reason and mutual respect as per the decision of our representative democracy, to decide whether we want more freedom or less freedom in certain areas of our social existence and co-existences. Many do demand more "order," as some of those anti-CCP exhibition guys would put it, while many others also demand more freedom, recognizing perhaps that there is (or can be) order in the plurality of voices in our land. While some of the latter would allow that they might consider the requirements of civility in criticality, others are firm in their conviction that even such exercises as radical aniconism, iconoclasm and even downright artistic insults in the practice of an art have a place in an ideal democracy.

     Again, it is up to us as free individuals cum collectives of a free nation and open society to decide now whether we wish to diminish or expand our neighbor's roster of freedoms. And ponder, likewise, the consequences of any reduction or regulation both on them and ourselves.

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

"WHAT'S THE bottomline?" the friend of my friend asked. "If we're to establish limitations on art and its expression, why? Is it at all possible to simplify matters into pros and cons/cost-and-benefit analyses? Are our fears and concerns about not putting limits on expression valid or not?"

     "May cons siyempre, pare," sabi ko. "If you're pro-X, you're bound to hear extreme pronouncements against your stand from anti-X and pro-Y folks. But the pros of an open society outnumber the cons. No one will stop you from putting out your own pronouncements against the stand of the anti-X and pro-Y. Most important of all, while it is hard to listen to the outbursts of a position in conflict with yours, it is far harder to live in a place where we keep each other from talking."

     Let me put up this proposal, I continued. What if we follow our other friend's suggestion and start applying that on Facebook, wherein a committee will have to review all opinions bordering on insults before one can press the Enter key. You want to try that experiment? Okey ako ro'n. But we should all be ready with the consequences. There will be a struggle to occupy seats in that committee, and God knows where it might all lead. Northern Ireland? Constantinople once again?

     "What I don't get here is why these lawmakers are putting more stock in prosecuting someone who supposedly 'hurt' sensibilities, totally overlooking the fact that somebody else actually threatened his life, destroyed property, and attempted to commit arson---what if the CCP burned to a crisp because of what he did? So it's perfectly understandable for people to threaten someone's life, maybe even take his life and burn his property if 'sensibilities' are offended?"

     Yan ang problema sa batas na yan na nagsasabing di mo puwedeng insultuhin ang anumang relihiyon, habang binibigyan natin ang relihiyon ng karapatan na insultuhin ang sinumang indibidwal, sabi ko. Ang isa pang problema dyan, wala akong alam na legislator na hindi beholden sa relihiyon at sa hatak ng boto ng institutionalized religion. Kung meron man, iilan ang sasama sa kanya sa pagpanukala na ibasura ang may kiling na batas na ito?

3. Art from now on, ano ba?

WE ARE all Barthes.

     But first, my friend the painter Marcel Antonio is right, the artist has the responsibility to manage the contextualities and impending contexts of his art, even---or specially---when the artist intends a free contextualization of his imagery vis a vis a plural or potentially antagonistic society. We might recall the machinations of absurdist plays, which---while they pronounced the absurdity of existence---yet were structured in such a way as to communicate those absurdities, in essence negating absurdness by packaging absurdities in consumer-friendly tetra paks within the library of orderly categorizations. Some absurdists were aware of that contradiction.

     Yet Mideo Cruz is also right in saying he can't control the audience, taking---I'd like to think---after Roland Barthes' extremist (?) assumption that each man reads a thing differently or that a man can read a thing in various different ways at various different times. Still, Marcel might still ask Mideo, "did you intend to control the audience in the first place?"

     I know where Marcel is coming from. We might take as an example the marketing of CDs or movies. A US version of a rock star's album would be tweaked to include another song in exchange for a removed song for its UK release. A band would refuse to play a popular song of theirs in certain areas of the world for reasons sometimes only privy to their managers and promoters. A Filipino movie that premiered in LA might be retitled and resubtitled for Cannes. In short, artists or their managers do manage contexts or impending contexts. Even Mitsubishi decided to do away with the name Pajero on one of their vehicles for Spain's market, understanding that in Spain "pajero" is the slang term for a wanker.

     Still, Mideo by Barthes would be right, for managers are sometimes surprised when their tweakings result in more controversy rather than the pacific atmosphere their engineering minds expected to find.

     So, what does this Mideo Cruz affair finally give us as a final context?

     Let us consider the absence of the old New Criticism approach to the artwork as integral to itself removed from the authority of the artist. Think, for example, what might have happened had Cruz died of dengue after putting up his art project without anybody except CCP authorities knowing about this "departure." Certainly we would still be screaming for the artist's explanation, placing that absence in the context of the art, say, as manifestation of fear and guilt. Later, we may become aware of the artist's demise. We would then find ourselves recontextualizing the art with that outside "old/new" reality attached: with, say, the artist's "death as gabâ" context, for one.

     Yet others might crop up, shouting celebratory slogans, declaring Cruz a hero of aniconism or even an inspiration to the ire of Islamic terrorists (who may not read the Qur'an but) who dismiss all Christian icons as imageries of the infidel. Cruz would not be there to announce his distance from any such causes.

     Could Cruz's constant refusal to answer intent part and parcel of his art? Is he feigning ignorance in order to test the extent of the Filipino audience's ability to weigh things? Is he being a pollster-artist? We don't know.

     Whatever the artistic intent, what does this affair finally give us as its final context as it evolves in the culture and zeitgeist of our land, amidst our people's minds today?

     To me and my humble semiotics, it is finally a test on our democracy. It goes beyond mere questions of taste that say, "punk rock is just noise and Bing Crosby's is real music" or "this is bad art and Marian art is the pinot noir of Philippine artistic achievements." It asks, furthermore, questions on the role of icons in Philippine Christian worship, the role this worship plays in Philippine state laws, and the state of Philippine politics today in relation to religious hegemonies. That is to me the final achievement of Cruz's work. It could be that he didn't intend that, but like you and me, who in this debate had been interested in what the artist wanted to say?

     We are all Barthes.

NOW, WAY before Barthes was born (1915) there was Marcel's namesake, Marcel Duchamp. A urinal is supposedly a non-art, mundane boring item. Put that in a gallery, however, and it becomes poetry ("Fountain", 1917).

     Barthes proposed that the mind has its own galleries. Like Duchamp, we can pick any bad art or ugly art or tramp art and turn that into brilliant art according to the reading of our mental galleries' considerations.

     I wouldn't, for example, be surprised if Barthes announced this imagery above as illustrative of the Catholic Church's crucifixion of the penis on top of the Christ (albeit the penis is now hard as wood) in the Church's present campaign for abstention and against masturbation. The Christ, meanwhile, while used as cross is simultaneously miscast as behind all this penile crucifixion.

     Nor be surprised if Barthes is to invoke a feminist take on the image as representing institutionalized Christianity as that phallic, male-centric movement for gender mainstreaming. Which, incidentally, was what Cruz---in an online magaizne interview---actually said was what that artpiece was all about.

     But Barthes is his own Barthes, separate from the Barthes in the artist. Many of my fellow Catholic friends are a different collective-Barthes altogether, with their own take on things. Thus their declarations of wanting to take over the state and barricade the bill of rights for their rewriting, towards the reification of their metanarrative.

WHILE WE'RE on Barthes, I'd like to call attention to his The Pleasure of the Text, wherein he made an effort to demonstrate a way by which reading can escape both the clutches of the vicious Left and the bourgeois Right. His vehicle of choice? Hedonism. Further, in A Lover's Discourse, he sought to come up with rhetoric that would veer away from socially-dictated meanings. He would essentially fail in both of these efforts, however, in the same way that Mideo Cruz (assuming he's also on this same path) failed to extricate himself from social contexts in a punk-like hedonistic immersion in supposedly "socially freed" image-making.

     Still, the point is not so much in the success or failure of the effort. It is in the effort, which by itself presupposes the existence of social dictators of meaning from which one seeks to escape. The furor over the effort only braced the point of that hegemony's existence.

A FRIEND of several friends commented, "I'm getting tired of this whole Brouhaha! Couldn't people just get a life?"

     To which I said, "I wish the continuing furor over the art project (yet for exhibition elsewhere) by some Catholics and media personnel would listen to you and leave art alone to exercise its freedom to blaspheme anything and anyone. But, no, they had to help art get a boost and a new life in the popular stream by being its talent manager and designing this 'scandal'. They could've just ignored the artpieces and enjoyed Mompo wine with pesto bread and Parmiggiano-Reggiano cheese, after which they might have had all the time to have siesta before the next Day of Obligation mass to be attended by the mayor's daughters." They could have flaunted forgiveness instead of anger and hatred.

     Another friend of a friend of a friend, meanwhile, said, "The artist is mad at Christianity. There's a sure sign that it's in his system."

     To which I offered, "I cannot speak for the artist but I can speak for my own reading of the artworks, as only I could and perhaps should for those interested. For there is such a thing as 'aniconism in Christianity', in contrast to aniconisms elsewhere, which therefore makes it not an extra-Christian attitude but one which had been at work within Christianity. Its manifestations is most remembered in Early Christianity before 325 AD, in the Byzantine iconoclasms of the 8th and 9th centuries (730-787 AD and 814-842 AD), in 16th cenutry Calvinism, and in 16th and 17th century Puritanism, but is definitely present in our century most notably in Christian Fundamentalism. It might be more apt to say the artwork is 'mad at Christian imagery, especially Catholic imagery'."

     Now, assuming this reading of mine (one of a few other readings I could muster) jives with the artist's own intent, what now?

     It's about time artists wake up to the reality bite of The Death of the Author, if they haven't already. That death can be for real, without being literal. Because art from now on, in a more compartmentalized world, shall be that struggle between the artist's silence outside of his art and the collective audience's noise within their own metanarratives upon art.

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