Category Archive for: komentaryo

komentaryo

silence

because i’d be lying if i said that Maria Ressa throwing the words libel and malicious my way didn’t render me speechless, literally and figuratively.

but maybe what was worse than throwing that my way was the fact that it was also retracted with a brush-off: filing a case would be too much for too little. i haven’t been patronized like this publicly, have never felt let down by someone i respect since, oh i don’t know, i applied for a job at UP Diliman and got a version of this from an ex-teacher. but this is different from the latter in that i was not applying for a job with Ressa, and there is no — there is no — notion of seniority that should have mattered here. of course randomsalt has so succinctly pointed out that it isn’t what it seems from where Ressa stands. (more…)

komentaryo

on ignorance and vampires: self-/auto-plagiarism

what is being brought to light too, i find, is that while Lito Zulueta’s biases are questioned precisely because of the place he occupies in the Philippine Daily Inquirer vis a vis UST, his engagement with this issue has not happened in the broadsheet he works for. whereas Luis Teodoro’s attacks on him have happened in a regular Business World column.

the discussion, thankfully, continues. (more…)

komentaryo

going to the dogs

two weeks since the discussion that had most everyone ganging up on UST and Lito Zulueta and siding with Marites Danguilan Vitug ang rappler.com, where is the discourse on media (online and otherwise) at this point? rappler has quietly revealed itself to be about helping out government instead of being a critical voice that at the very least asks: how much was paid BBDO for this campaign and is it worth it? i guess no questions like that for “uncompromised journalism” now tagging itself as “citizen journalism.”

and i guess it’s not surprising. if there’s anything the lynch mob that was the middle class / educated online world revealed then, it was that a love affair exists among those who are holding the fort of “new media” | “online media” — self-proclaimed and otherwise. if anything i am reminded that in media, as with the literary world, and maybe every aspect of this Pinoy culture, what keeps the status quo are friendships: ones that run deep, ones that are unquestioned from within. the question for Ressa and Teodoro really is whether or not they could have at any point disagreed with Vitug on this and any story? the question for all of us who blindly want to be invited into the bubble of middle class media and sort-of-NGO work is how many questions will we then fail to ask?

(more…)

komentaryo

the dangers of fun

congratulations are in order: the DOT after all has triggered a meme of itsmorefuninthephilippines and its campaign has functioned exactly the way they imagined (with the help of a media enterprise now admitting its bias, yehey!) it is not without its critics, myself included, but i don’t mind letting it have a life all its own, commentary included about as much as unthinking celebration: if we can trip on the DPWHere, how can we not trip on this one?

which is not to agree that we should be blinded by all this fun. which is to hope that we all know — we all agree — that tourism in itself, as an industry is a sharp and double-edged sword. one only needs to look at Boracay and Tagaytay and find that foreign investment has meant congestion and pollution and the slow but sure killing off of local industry.

Poor entrepreneurs have generated their own capital over time, by starting small and reinvesting profits over several years. However, they may be squeezed out if outside investors drive rapid growth in the industry – as occurred at Boracay Island in the Philippines (Shah, 2000).

one only needs to walk through Makati Avenue on any evening, or Greenbelt 3 on a weekend to find that here are forms of tourism like we don’t want to talk about. go off to Angeles and find the industry of girlie bars that have been brought back to life by the middle-aged Caucasian man who has decided to disappear quietly in the Philippines upon retiring from wherever in the world he comes.

“The Department of Tourism is treading on dangerous waters. Marketing the Philippines as a destination for divorcees is practically synonymous to marketing the Philippines as a destination for sex tourists” (gabriela website, 2011)

The Philippines is one of the favored destinations of paedophile sex tourists from Europe and the United States. (“Global law to punish sex tourists sought by Britain and EU,” The Indian Express, 21 November 1997)

The tourism program of the government which aims to project the Philippines as a major tourist destination has increased the number of prostituted women. As more and more areas of the country are targeted for tourism, more and more women are driven to prostitution in desperation to ensure their family’s survival. (“Women Evaluate the State of the Nation,” GABRIELA, 24 July 1997)

these statements might be decades old, yes. that these resonate in the present? it is everything and telling of what any tourism program has to care about. it’s also to point to this fact: the reality has got to get better for the majority in this nation, so that they might know of those fun images, too. the goal has to be about making those witty taglines real for all of us.

because let us not even talk about tourism and this campaign, as if it is something that will save us from anything at all. know that this campaign in particular is replete with the limitations brought on by social class: more than who would even say “it’s more fun…” here, who exactly can afford to think about fun in this way? who has the wherewithal to be putting together memes, to have photographs of nation that are deemed worthy for being tagged “fun”?

know too that in the narratives of tourism across the world, it is the poor that suffers for it. they are the ones who lose access to their own resources, because they are not equipped to negotiate with the programs of tourism that exist.

there are many other examples where a few private entrepreneurs exclude local people in order to gain key assets, often through unauthorised land-grabbing. For example, Sabang is the gateway town for St Paul’s National Park in the Philippines, and 20–30 years ago contained much public land, almost all of which has now been privately exploited. The local authority lacks effective power to prevent breaches of planning regulations (Ashley, Boyd, Goodwin 2000).

know that “Tourism development has not <…> incorporated poverty elimination objectives. It remains driven by economic, environmental and/or cultural perspectives at national and international levels” (Ashely etal., 2000).

and in the philippines it is driven now by the notion of fun: which is always and only fleeting. which is only true for a few of us.

sources:
PRO-POOR TOURISM: PUTTING POVERTY AT THE HEART OF THE TOURISM AGENDA by Caroline Ashley, Charlotte Boyd and Harold Goodwin, Natural Resource Perspectives (journal), March 2000.
factbook on sexual global exploitation: philippines. http://www.uri.edu/artsci/wms/hughes/philippi.htm.
“Tourism Dept draws flak for divorcee tourism.” gabriela website. http://gabrielawomensparty.net/news/press-releases/tourism-department-draws-flak-divorcee-marketing.
“Tourism, the poor and other stakeholders: Asian experience” by Shah, K. (2000). ODI Fair-Trade in Tourism Paper. London: ODI.

komentaryo

yearenders and firestarters

because 2011 ended with some sadness, and the new year had me on a roll, which is to say it forced me to hit the ground running. one must be thankful.

the yearender for arts and theater and the one on popular culture were up before the end of 2011. though with the Metro Manila Filmfest happening at the end of the year, too, these could only be overshadowed by the notion of ending-with-a-bang and a foreboding of the year to come. the sadder thing might be that this has fueled discussions on Pinoy film from people who admit they haven’t watched it in a while. well what else is new with regards elitism in this country.

which is to segue too into the fact that i did see some of the MMFF films: the Asiong Salonga review and the My Househusband review are up, and i have two more to go. suffice it to say that as far as Asiong is concerned, what we might demand for at this point is a viewing of the director’s cut, if only so we can judge its creative team who were ignored / disrespected / dissed by the movie’s producers as they added removed scenes, changed music and/or sound, and messed with the editing of the film. that’s the work of director Tikoy Aguiluz, editor Miranda Medina, and musical score by Nonong Buencamino that we have yet to judge Asiong Salonga by. show us the director’s cut na!

in the meantime, the wish for 2012, has to be clarity and truthfulness and just our cards on the table. because it seems that between those faked-up magazine covers and press releases about objective journalism, between power-to-the-people rhetoric and the govt strategy of running a government campaign by not doing it themselves, 2012’s begun on very very rough ground.

<…> “good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great,” Slavoj Zizek says, and yes he was talking about the violence of communism and stalinism, but in third world philippines, he could just be talking to you and me and our lack of a sense of the realities that define us. it could just be you and me refusing to get to the heart of any and all of this nation’s problems: a failure in the system that allows for the poor to get poorer and grow larger, and a minority to get richer. and i daresay, the middle class thinking they can save the world by working — admittedly or not — within the system the State has set up.

“The basic insight I see <with regards the Occupy Movement> is that clearly for the first time, the underlying perception is that there is a flaw in the system as such. It’s not just the question of making the system better.” — yes Zizek, not anymore.

we should all be reminded of this the rest of 2012.

quotes from Zizek via this Harper’s Magazine interview by J. Nicole Jones, November 2011.