Category Archive for: media

komentaryo

#DearPopeFrancis*

Today you arrive in Manila.

Unlike Sri Lanka, there will be no elephants dressed in fancy garb to welcome you on our streets.

But I hear the President himself is set to welcome you at the airport, refusing as you have to do a State Dinner at Malacañang Palace. While he might invoke his Catholic upbringing, there have been many instances when he seemed to lack compassion and kindness, when often that is what this struggling and exhausted nation needs.

You might also meet his more famous sister. She will invoke her Catholic upbringing as well. But she has also single-handedly created a celebrity culture in this country that is about all things superficial, and she has made a career out of a shameless display of her wealth.

You will meet, too, the every-politician. In this country, religion can be a matter of convenience – if it can win them elections they will wear their Catholicism on their sleeve. It is not a measure of how well they serve the people.

Today you arrive in Manila and all the streets you pass will have been cleared of dirt and debris. You will see a Manila and later a Leyte Province that have no semblance of the cities we live in dangerously every day. That can only be a measure of how well our leaders have been able to hide what ails this nation. It’s a measure of how well they have silenced the people. (more…)

kultura

Marian’s freedoms*

If there’s anything that’s true about Marian Rivera, it’s that she doesn’t care what we all think: she presents to us what she is, which is probably the closest to a private self we’ve been treated to within the public space that is local popular TV and movie culture. 

And when I speak of Marian’s private self, I mean the one that we don’t usually see of our celebrities, I mean that which is usually deemed unworthy of being made public. But Marian doesn’t seem to care that she doesn’t sound as classy or doesn’t move with as much finesse as the usual female star. 
(more…)

komentaryo

Justice for Jennifer

But first we decide not to be confused about the fact of this death.

Because media is truly messing it up, even with just getting Jennifer’s name right, as they refuse to call her by the name that she identifies herself with, insisting on calling her by her birth name Jeffrey. Worse, many put Jennifer in quotes, or say Jeffrey Laude alias Jennifer, which already layers her name with the idea of deception.

Because Jennifer is transgender, a trans woman. Woman being the operative term, and common sense tells us that she is a “she” and nothing else. There is no reason to be confused. Of course, media will be its hardheaded heartless unthinking self, and refuse to identify Jennifer as she identified herself. (more…)

komentaryo

the Marcoses’ embarrassment of riches

It is always with a heavy heart — yes medyo OA — that I read / listen to discourse about the Marcos’s wealth of art and clothes and shoes, the ones that history tells us we have paid for, but which is handled with nary care or creativity by the powers-that-be as we get these back from the Marcoses.  (more…)

komentaryo

#YesAllWomen

i had watched the hashtag #YesAllWomen take a life of its own on Twitter, and was fascinated that while it didn’t trend in the Philippines, the tweets from elsewhere in the world (mostly the US it seems) resonated with this Pinay so removed from that context.

i’m the last to imagine universality to be a valid enterprise, imagining as i do that we are always more complex than just being / standing for / standing against one thing. yet it is feminism still — no matter how it is not named such, no matter that it denies this label — that i realize i fall back on, if not go back to. (more…)