we should not forget. regardless of the success that is the distribution of Hacienda Luisita among farmer-beneficiaries.
we should not forget. regardless of the success that is the distribution of Hacienda Luisita among farmer-beneficiaries.
this comes a wee bit late in the day — as i write this the early morning shows are talking about what can happen today to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. and i’m with you when you think: karma’s a bitch ain’t it.
stuartsantiago‘s got us all covered on the whys and wherefores and gone wrongs in the unfolding of GMA’s arrest. but lest no one else points it out, there is something tragic in the undercurrent of kamachohan, of good ol’ Pinoy machismo, that’s in the soundbites that came from Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda with regards Atty. Ferdinand Topacio swearing on his balls that the Arroyos would return if they are allowed to leave.
i mean Topacio living off of soundbites is expected, that the mababaw-ang-kaligayahan media will lap it up even more so. but for the Presidential Spokesperson to fall into the same trap? for someone like Lacierda to even justify what Topacio swears on, even talking about his wife! and her needs, is not just irresponsible, it also reeks of how petty kamachohan lives in the halls of Malacanang.
and it comes to a head at that press briefing on November 18, where after a good 27 minutes or so of Sec. de Lima seriously talking about the warrant of arrest for GMA, and about where PNoy stood on the matter, Lacierda goes up to the podium only to say:
“I think the decision of the Pasay RTC will allow Atty. Topacio to keep his family jewels.”
and walks off to the tune of male laughter — male laughter! — which ends the press con. it is beyond me why Lacierda even thought it correct to throw in that punchline, at a press briefing that’s so serious, no jokes or puns or soundbites no matter how difficult to ignore, should’ve been on anyone’s mind.
good job Lacierda. you’ve just revealed that in the halls of Malacanang shallow petty macho thinking lives. i hope you know a sense of humor doesn’t mean any more balls than the next Pinoy man.
i wonder what jokes are being said about the RH Bill.
let’s begin with the fact that this video/docu was well done, shall we? it’s 15 minutes, with more information than we get out of a regular TV documentary, had no voice over, had short effective copy, great animation, a clear narrative line. and the best questions: who are the Cojuangcos, why have they gotten away with murder — literal and figuratively — in this country?
that it has gone viral, which is to say its hits are at 337,048 as we speak, is no surprise. the form allows for it, the content even more so. there is no way to measure how many of those hits actually mean people changing their minds about the Cojuangcos or how many brush it off, how many believe it and how many look for sources and say, ah, these are all lies.
the point being that in this age of texts made for online dissemination, in this age of social media, while much might be said about putting our names on everything we write, there is also the fact that sometimes it matters very little because what’s being said is more important, the discussions it forces on us are bigger than who said what and why. and isn’t it that in the end the parts that are factual, the story that is hacienda luisita, the fact of oligarchies and feudalism, the fact of government’s inability to deal with both, aren’t these parts of that video that are more relevant than the parts that have yet to be proven?
granted, this was a telling of history that was slanted. but whose history telling isn’t? we disproved objectivity a long long time ago and in the end we deal with the subjectivities that are intrinsic in texts we encounter, historical and otherwise. in the age of online media and viral videos, every text requires us to be responsible and discerning. we must deal with questions of why we share what we do, and how we respond to something that’s being watched by more people — the youth, especially — than we have readers.
now with regards the latter, and i say this with all due respect, it seems unproductive for xiao chua to riddle his response to the video with: i’ve written about this before and this is nothing new. that information exists doesn’t necessarily mean it will be read, and in the end, when we are up against a well-done fast-paced video, the notions of leaving things up to the courts, or asserting that there are two sides to a story, will just go over the heads of those who were already drawn into the narrative. we fail to engage them in a better discussion on history in general, and the Cojuangco question in particular. it also ends what should be the beginning of a discussion on history and propaganda, fact and fiction, and where those lines need to be drawn, if at all.
but more problematic might be the noise that followed this video’s going viral, at least in so far as noise has to do with the self-proclaimed guards of online media and twitter- and FB-kind.
randomsalt asked momblogger: is blogwatch now in the business of spreading pseudo-history? after the latter posted the video on the site. to which momblogger replied that she was in the business of spreading both sides which is why she got xiao chua to respond to the video and posted that response, too. (click here for the rest of the exchange.) what interests me about this exchange though is the fact that momblogger herself proves that she cannot see her own biases, the slant that she takes, when she introduces the video with:
Thou shalt not be ignorant. Infamous facts about the Aquino-Cojuangco family. I found this video from the PinoyMonkeyPride youtube channel. He writes the following disclaimer below. You might be also interested to read Philippine historian Xiao Chua’s initial Comments and Anton Dulce‘PinoyMonkeyPride’, ‘Yellow Magic’, at ang Magkabilang Panig ng Parehong Pisoafter watching the video.
this video, whether psuedo-history or not, should not be equated with making us all less ignorant. in fact, as unsigned online video, it is everything and dangerous to say that these are “infamous facts about” something. to say “you might also be interested” versus “do watch” all responses to this video, is also momblogger’s subjectivity working against her insistence that she was being responsible when she put that video up.
the only thing worse than momblogger’s denial of her own biases, is the manner in which she handled the questions from randomsalt:
it is beyond me how inaccurate information can ever be balanced, nor how an anonymous video such as this one can be seen to come from just one side which makes another side identifiable. here, what momblogger proves is that when faced with a video that goes viral, she will go the way of the very simplistic, ultimately uncritical assessment of the text, while at the same time thinking that she is objectively disseminating facts, even as her own subjectivities are there for all the world to see. and she will take offense at being questioned, even as we all know this is the price you pay for making a career out of online media.
meanwhile, these questions remain given a video with historical fact and inaccuracy, but issues that remain relevant, gone viral: what is our responsibility here? what is it that we end up doing by the act of sharing? how do we respond? what do we do when someone argues with us about what we said or did?
momblogger did the most juvenile thing: she blocked randomsalt.
TEDx Talks are independently organized TED talks across the world, which is about “riveting talks by remarkable people.” TEDx Diliman was my first. This is a review of each of the TED talks that were part of it, done in 18 minutes or less, because that’s the time limit of a TED Talk. Read more about TED here, and check out this really good video on TEDx here.
the thing with saying that the Philippines’ advantage is our freedom is that the only idea it gets across is a romance with the freedom of expression we enjoy (as exemplified apparently by having the TEDx talk to begin with, Alampay says), which of course also means limning over the fact of activists being jailed and disappeared, cultural worker Ericson Acosta still being in jail, and really begs the question: what freedom?
Alampay’s 18++ minutes (yes he was allowed) was spent talking about freedom being our competitive advantage because it can mean making the country the center not just of civil society which feeds off of freedom, but also the center of academic freedom (“Kaya namin ‘yon!” he says). both will mean generating jobs and contributing to the economy, creating an industry out of our freedom.
for Alampay, freedom is the card we can play, because, and i quote:
freedom is the one thing we do better than anybody else.
do we? really do freedom well I mean? Alampay uses the example of CCP’s closure of the Kulo exhibit (without mentioning it of course), without realizing that in fact in fact more than proving that the gov’t can just take away our freedom, that incident also proved that when we are questioned about our freedom, we have no idea how to defend ourselves. we mess it up completely: our artists, curators, cultural workers. we do not know how to defend ourselves, we do not know how to talk to media, to the people who don’t care for our art but will care about religion, and we mess it up. that is us messing up even as we are free. that is proof that we don’t do freedom well.
even more false? the idea that there’s academic freedom where we are. i’ve lived off of two universities in this country, and when you’re immersed in that manner you also know that in fact your freedoms are false in these institutions, they are limited to what is the intellectual parochialism that’s there, they are limited by the people who have been in the academe all these years.
most importantly, academic freedom, artistic freedom, freedom of expression are all highly questionable when you come from here and know | feel | see that freedom is also overrated when it cannot will not put food on people’s tables and more and more people are falling below the poverty line.
and if you live in the Philippines, you must also know — and must admit — that most of the time we are delusional about our freedom because we are middle class educated English-speaking TEDx speakers. or, as Alampay says, he’s an economy of one, dreaming.
dreams are good. but as ungrounded and unfulfilled, as romanticized and sophomoric as this? not at all worthy of a TEDx talk. but it sure sounds like something the PNoy government would love to hear.
The Church and reproductive health
by Juan Miguel LuzWhen RH is portrayed as a great evil and when women and men who choose to pursue RH measures, notably contraception, are deemed to be sinners by Church leaders, this is neither fair nor informed.
The greater sin would be to bring any number of children into a world of poverty.When parents do so with no means to provide adequately for them nor provide them a chance at a decent quality of life, they do themselves and their children a great wrong by placing the family at great risk. (I consider poverty a great risk and not a blessing despite what the Church might think.)
A government that does not provide the means by which families of any income group (but especially the poor) can help plan family size and expectations would thus be an irresponsible one.