Category Archive for: pulitika

komentaryo

on “pseudo-history” & the end of discourse

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:

momblogger1
momblogger1
momblogger2
momblogger2
momblogger3
momblogger3
momblogger4
momblogger4

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.

kultura

admitting to class differences, the dream of readers at home: Butch Dalisay and Phil writing

<…> if these two talks of Dalisay are any indication <…> what our texts have and what ails our texts by default given colonial history <is that> we are out of the Commonwealth loop <…> and while American colonization gave us the English that we use for our writing, we all seem to have forgotten that, and we’re like the bastard children that appear at the family Christmas dinner. There are no favors to be had from our colonial fathers here, and it can only be difficult to deal with expectations.

Such as what Dalisay sees to be the “mournful wail of oppression” as the one thing expected of work from the Philippines, the main thing a writer must be able to work against. But towards what? Again another bottomline: the problem is that even we don’t know what we’re about, so how do we even begin projecting ourselves to the world?

Maybe we begin with what is inescapable. As far as Dalisay is concerned, there’s no escaping class, not for any writer, not for any kind of writing. There’s no avoiding the divide between rich and poor, and in that sense it could be a trope, the one thing that we cannot ignore in the task of writing, especially in English, especially given that this means having very few readers where we come from. And it is a trope that encompasses even that which Dalisay considers to be the most important story for Filipinos of our time: the diaspora. 

read the rest here!

kultura

on naming Ballet Philippines as the Phil Nat’l Ballet Company

and questions on national and cultural, and the crisis that is Philippine dance, that can only resonate for the rest of culture industry in this country. excerpt from the piece by Myra Beltran:

<…this> greatly changed environment <…> also signals that the bill can be examined in terms of its assumptions about the “national” and “culture” (Philippine culture). These are the discourses which inform the bill. These discourses summoned by the bill then imply that a deeper discussion on this bill apart from the one centered on who is “more deserving” or not, can be made and that it is no easy labelling of being “for” or “against” the bill. It does not seem to be as simple as saying or implying that that those who oppose this bill would probably not oppose if they had been the beneficiary or implementor of this bill – rather, part of those who are being dismissed as simply “against” truly mean to have a sincere inquiry as to who is speaking for whom in this bill, what is being spoken in behalf of the “whom,” and whether the answer to this should be enacted into law as a republic act. [5] I suppose those are also topics which also concern the entire arts community as all precedents do have a subsequent ripple effect.

A case in point is that one of the reasons cited by Ballet Philippines in seeking the status of “national” is the precedent set by the naming of the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company as the “national folk dance company” (R.A. 8626 by the 10th Congress) with the contention that others who oppose this current bill would do well to seek the same for themselves, “to work for it”, [6] as the Bayanihan bill itself provides. On this count, and if one were to proceed to “work for it,” the proposed bill also summons the notion and the distinction between a “national folk dance company” and a “national ballet company” as both representative of “Philippine culture.” And then after, if one indeed were to “work for it,” what kind of “national” entity would one be? The same question would be posed to one working for a “national theatre company” or “national orchestra” in the future.

click here for the rest of it.

komentaryo

no apologies, no excuses: on The Manila Hostage Massacre*

On August 7, 2011, the History Channel premiered its 48-minute documentary on the bus hostage drama that happened in Manila a year ago on August 23, 2010.

For a full week after the premier, this same documentary would be replayed every day, sometimes three times a day, on cable TV. There was no noise about it, barely any media mileage other than what looked like press releases from the History Channel itself, where the documentary is sold along with the rest of the channel’s offerings for August.

For a nation that prides itself in having a powerful online and mainstream media, for a nation that can pick on a private citizen like Christopher Lao, and an artist like Mideo Cruz, we sure as hell know when to keep something under the radar. We sweep it under the proverbial rug, so to speak, just in case we might also be allowed to forget it. Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, means we cannot be seen as evil? (more…)

kultura

Kulô before/after the hysteria

Going to art exhibits and events since 2009, I find that what I enjoy most about it is the solitude and silence. I’m not known in art circles (or any circle for that matter) and can go around unobtrusively; on “gallery days” it’s rare that there are other spectators, least of all someone I know, in these art spaces. It’s a gift, a break I take even as it requires trips to places from UN Avenue in Manila to West Avenue in Quezon City. The time becomes mine, the art I own with my gaze.

It was with this same gaze, within the same task of going to see as many exhibits as I can, that I went to Kulô at the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) on July 2 2011. I was doing Virgin Labfest 7 marathons, and made sure to come early to spend a good hour at the gallery. A day or so after, I virtually happened upon participating artist Pocholo Goitia and told him how much I loved the exhibit, the best of the Rizal efforts I’d seen so far; a couple of weeks after he tells me in passing that it’s gotten into some controversy or other and I brush it off: who has cared about art in the past three years that I’ve been engaging with it in my own way(s)? Given Kulô’s premises I also thought the only ones who’d wrongly take offense would be the University of Santo Tomas (UST), alumni as the exhibiting artists are of the said university, the Goitia essay particularly placing the exhibit within, beyond and against the said institution. (more…)