Category Archive for: komentaryo

komentaryo

on racism, in the meantime

it seems that we are in a bind, and are in over our heads, about this whole discourse on racism. and yet we seem to be trivializing it really, by invoking racism when we don’t understand it, when we do not even discuss it on the level that makes it dangerous, we make it even scarier than it is. so we invoke it against Arnold Clavio’s opinions about the Azkals, we invoke it against Jimmy Sieczka who did the 20 reasons i hate the philippines video. both will be discussed at length soon. but this must be said about the former: oh honey, we just missed out on the humor that was in that one. (more…)

komentaryo

Dear Pinay,

March is International Women’s Month and March 8 is Women’s Day.

It’s the perfect time to kick-off The Be Cause. This is a tiny project that I’ve been wanting to launch as a way of dealing with contemporary women’s issues, central to which can only be the images of womanhood that we’re bombarded with everyday. It isn’t just that these images are false – if not impossible – for a majority of us; it’s also that this has normalized superficiality in discussions about being Pinay in this day and age. (more…)

komentaryo

poverty, human rights & PNoy’s devt plan

In a land where a president takes pride in conditional cash transfers and poverty alleviation disbursements, it is not surprising that there is no real long- term solution to solve poverty. Worse, poverty is seen only as by-product of corruption: such was Benigno Aquino III’s campaign slogan, such is the continued tagline for what it is that ails the nation. It is corruption not poverty, it is corruption not human rights, it is corruption not a systemic dysfunction that keeps the poor where they are. (more…)

komentaryo

the death of us all

in conversations with my Pinay friend Sunshine who left for the US five years ago, and who came to visit in the middle of January, tears were necessarily in order. what was surprising was that while these would be shed in the first two hours or so for the distance we had kept and the things we had survived separately, the rest of our time together would be spent crying about nation, if not shaking our heads in dismay.

by the end of it i found that what needed to be articulated, what needed to come from me, what Sunshine needed to hear, was this: Catholicism, as we know it in this country, is the death of us. (more…)

komentaryo

Malacanang’s miscommunications team strikes again!

in September of last year, in a conversation about the PNoy government that was riddled with questions from a British filmmaker newly met, i found myself talking about the disappointment that is Malacanang. the palace with a three-headed communications office that takes pride in being connected to the people, and yet has proven time and again to be releasing either the wrong information, too much information, or just not speaking up when it should.

that conversation led to many things, though an interesting tangent was this: the new-acquaintance-turned-friend tells me that he had sent a proposal to Malacanang in the mid-2011 to do a docu-film on a-day-in-the-life of PNoy, an inside story of the Palace and the President’s life kind of thing, much like those done for and on Obama. the proposal had landed on the lap of employee #1, who works within one of them communications offices, who had seemed interested in the project, and promised to take it up with his superior. my filmmaker friend was optimistic. (more…)