Category Archive for: pulitika

kultura

the rich and their notion of nation

i did say i was aching to write about Rogue Magazine‘s independence day issue, but was overtaken by the NHI’s accusations, Joey Mead’s naked body, and Argee Guevarra’s defense.

suffice it to say that it was as i expected of a high-end P180-peso english “literary lifestyle” magazine, and their notion of the “State of the Nation” — the title of the month’s issue. save for Lourd de Veyra’s literary piece on an imagined exchange between two friends, one in Dubai and another in the Philippines, there is no mention AT ALL of the crises that beset this country. (more…)

komentaryo

when judy ann and meralco fail to mix

What has Judy Ann done wrong by speaking for Meralco? She has, after all, sold practically everything.

Simply said, it is the fact that the truth she sells in the hotly contested ad is unlike any of the truths she declares in her other endorsements. In selling vinegar or ginisa mix, feminine wash and shampoo, laundry detergents and plastic ware, beer and diet pills, one can suspend belief and say, yes, those products may have worked for her, if not necessarily for others. (more…)

komentaryo

hello partyline?

(or laughter as the worst medicine)

it was an unlikely but perfect match: a bad stomach, a long rainy, dark and dreary day, and three lessons learned from 4:30 to 5:30 with only coke and very little food in my body.

one, you can pretend that you ARE an activist by saying that you WERE one during the first quarter storm and throughout Martial Law. it apparently gains you enough credibility to be invited to talks and have books published in this country, even if they are about communism – and even when the issues you raise are old and the problems you assert have since been solved. apparently, any person who’s proven by word of mouth as activist of three decades ago, can get away with pretending that he remains one, by virtue of the fact that he continues to talk about it. with an air of credibility, and  – dare i say it? – wisdom. which is directly connected to something i proved to be true: if you admit to being old, you also apparently deem yourself wiser. and you can say, i’m tired and want to study rats. can you – addressing the young impressed audience, of course – please continue what i started? (which of course presumes that what you’ve done so far is worthy.) (more…)

komentaryo

Where Has All the Laughter Gone?

published in PCIJ i-Report, the investigative reporting quarterly, of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Issue no. 4, November 2005

FIVE YEARS ago, we had a president who made as much fun of himself as everyone else did. He even had his very own joke book and his very own think tank to make up stories and jokes that revolved around his supposedly being uneducated, as well as his being uncouth and unpresidential. Then came his impeachment trial, which provided us with all kinds of material for comedy.

At that time, everyone was fair game for parodies and jokes that came fast and furious in the form of text messages and email, standup routines, and comic strips. There was no escape. But since the Internet was and is the most liberal and liberating of media to work with—uncensorable, untouchable, maybe even incomprehensible to many—so much was published from the computers of hi-tech Pinoys who could deal with the Estrada presidency only by consistently putting down the man, his cohorts, and all those who voted for him. So much so that when PCIJ’s Alecks Pabico sat down to write “Pinoy Parody Online” (http://www.pcij.org/imag/Online/pinoyparody.html) then, a veritable mine of websites that poked fun at President Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada was there waiting for him.

A failed Edsa 3 and a junked impeachment complaint against Estrada’s successor later, most of those sites that Pabico featured—even writer Bob Ong’s website (http://www.bobongpinoy.com)—are dead links (pun intended). And one can’t help but wonder why.

It cannot be that there’s nothing to laugh about at this point, can it? If all things humorous are really based on grains of reality, then laughter should not, and need not, end. The funnies can only survive. For sure, we continue to receive and forward funny text messages and emails of jokes, editorial cartoons, and comic strips from the print media that delve into the state of this GMA-Garci nation. And yet, as we reel from one political punch after another, there are hardly any good punchlines echoing from cyberspace.

This is not to say that nothing political is being written online. There are tons of complaints, many bordering on anger. But instead of sites dedicated to parodying or satirizing the daily events that should concern us, what’s proliferating are weblogs or blogs—online diaries that can be on anything and everything, with no pretensions to objectivity or truth, but with illusions of an audience that will want to read through text upon text of opinion, rants, and raves.

THERE ARE, of course, bloggers who have used the form well, basically because they know what they want it to be about—politics, for example, as with Luis Teodoro (www.luisteodoro.com) and http:///www.piercingpens.tk/; or Pinoy pop culture, as with Paolo Manalo (in the old www.psychicpants.net and the spanking new http://www.livejournal.com/~paolomanalo). These sites also seem to have a clear sense of an audience, limited though it may be. Manalo’s blog(s) in particular, is funny, not just because of its chosen concern, but because it is lightly and cleverly written. But it rarely talks about politics.

In contrast, there are blogs that are overtly political, such as www.angasngkurimaw.blogspot.com and www.ourthoughtsarefree.blogspot.com. But perhaps because of the seriousness with which politics do need to be dealt with, there’s rarely anything to laugh about in these political blogs. Often the funny blogs are nonpolitical, if not altogether apolitical. There’s the http://akosipaeng.blogspot.com/ blog by a Pinoy who seems to always write about his world as if he’s seeing it for the first time; and there are those blogs like www.tabulas.com/~apester that has always been fun easy reading, but talks about nothing else other than food in its recent reincarnation.

It is these types of Pinoy blogs that are more personal diaries than political commentary, more this-is-my-life than this-is-the-state-of-the-nation, which have made up much of our Internet production in recent years. In this sense, while the blog has been celebrated as something that can function as an alternative source of information (the PCIJ has its own blog, for example), it has for the most part been used by Pinoy techies as a form through which they may write without limits, even when they really have nothing much to say. It has even become the rule rather than the exception to be apolitical and apathetic in the blogs we create.

A personal blog like www.professionalheckler.blogcity.com is a rare exception in that it ridicules the political state of the nation by poking fun at its personalities—akin to Erap’s time. More known for his spoofs of political speeches, blogger Loi Reyes Landicho calls the site a humor blog born of his agitation over recent political events, which to him make for “desperate times that require desperate measures.” Yet because of the form that it takes, what Landicho really offers the blog reader is mostly a hodgepodge of thoughts on various issues and events that may be political (why is there no outrage over the junked impeachment complaint?) but are not always so (why didn’t UP win in a recent pep squad competition?).

Still, Landicho can be funny, especially with her Top 10 lists a la David Letterman. Just on September 23, he posted the “Top 10 (Silliest) Reasons Why GMA Won’t Resign”:

  1. Unlike the Ejercitos, her family does not own a posh villa in Tanay, Rizal. In the event that she goes to jail, she would languish at Camp Capinpin, deprived of the same luxury being enjoyed by her predecessor.
  2. She would never allow some guy named Manuel ‘Noli’ de Castro, a graduate of some school known as UE to take over the presidency. She did not spend years at Assumption, Ateneo, UP, and Georgetown only to give way to a UE graduate! [Taas-kilay to the 9th degree…hmmpf!]
  3. Resigning would enrage her god whom she claims to be on her side and who makes everything possible for her. Remember her father’s dictum that has become her
    favorite cliché? “Do what issh right. Do your bessht and God will take care of the ressht.” Whatever.
  4. Luck is still on her side. [As I discussed here before, she is fated to become president.] Filipinos have more important things to do than join rallies. Despite unfavorable SWS, Pulse Asia, and Ibon Foundation surveys showing unprecedented public dissatisfaction and distrust, fact is, these are just figures. People would rather feed their families than burn effigies.
  5. GMA won’t step down unless Cong. Mike Arroyo wins an acting plum. His latest movie, “Sablay Na, Pasaway Pa” [which had its premiere in Biliran province
    sometime in June] has yet to be shown in Metro Manila theatres. Reports say bookers decline to release the cheap flick for obvious reasons.
  6. She will only relinquish her post as soon as the Philippines has overtaken Indonesia in the Asian corruption index ranking. We’re still at number 2. Becoming number 1 would be a feat indeed!
  7. The concept of delicadeza is alien to her.
  8. GMA simply cannot imagine herself behind bars while the First Gentleman goes shopping in Hong Kong with Vicky Toh.
  9. GMA dreams of a royal wedding for her only daughter Luli in Malacañang. Not in Lubao Church, not at the Manila Cathedral. The plan is to invite heads of state, as well as former US President and GMA classmate Bill Clinton. The event will eclipse the
    profligacy of the Imee Marcos-Tommy Manotoc wedding.
  10. And finally, GMA won’t resign because she’s not the president. She’s just an overstaying palace visitor.

STRANGELY ENOUGH, while this list is funny in its “silliness,” all a reader can muster is a smile and maybe a snort. It hardly provokes laughter, most probably because it hits too close to home, but also because there’s nothing funny in the way Landicho has reworked his material. In fact, most of these could be true (although it has to be pointed out Landicho may have meant the lavish Sarrat wedding of Irene Marcos and Greggy Araneta, and not that of Imee and Tommy Manotoc, who had eloped). It is obvious enough that GMA has no delicadeza, and it is possible that she has believed her own propaganda about God being on her side. Even more painful is the possibility that she is just lucky—people aren’t in the mood for rallies, or for information that will lead them there. Number 10 in particular isn’t funny because it reminds us that we may have handled Erap and Edsa 2 all wrong. The funniest thing about this list really is the way it makes fun of GMA’s speech defect (see item 3), which is similar to the way we made fun of Erap’s grammar.

So why doesn’t this work? If Landicho’s blog entry for September 6 entitled “The Award Goes To” is any indication, the answer may have more to do with ideology than creativity. This entry pokes fun at the personalities involved in the impeachment case against GMA, with the “Cry Me a River” award, for example, being given to Dinky Soliman for crying three times after she resigned as the social welfare secretary, while still looking “fashionable with the highlights in her hair …Jolinaesque indeed!” There were also the “Mag-diet Ka Muna” award given to Taguig-Pateros Rep. Alan Peter Cayetano (for obvious reasons), and the “Not Enough Vitamins, Not Enough Life” award that went to Sorsogon Rep. Francis Escudero, who was unable to participate in the pro-impeachment walkout in Congress because, he said, he had fallen ill.

Here one begins to see why Landicho’s humor blog isn’t always funny. On the one hand, it has the temerity to make fun of the current state of the nation (when it wants to). On the other, it isn’t very clear where the blog stands in all these issues. It finds it fit to lampoon both GMA and her opposition, i.e. Soliman, Cayetano, Escudero et al., but it’s fuzzy about who—or what—it’s for. Strong statements are also made against what Landicho calls the “obsolete Left,” without taking into consideration all the steps this Left has taken toward compromise over and above the rallies that it leads.

Over at another humor blog, the sides are even less clearly drawn. Created by graphic artist/blogger Retzwerx, www.retzwerx.com has become known for its “poop-to-graphs,” in which thought and speech balloons are added to photographs of the president and her gang. But what or who is being made fun of? GMA? For having done what, exactly? What is the humor grounded on? That Retzwerx recently shifted topic from politics to reality TV’s “Pinoy Big Brother” is indicative not of the freedom allowed the blogger, but the lack of a clear political agenda that must drive any site set on inspiring change through laughter. It’s also something www.retzwerx.com shares with other similarly positioned Pinoy blogs: Although they have the guts to make fun of our politics, they are in the end only reactionary. They don’t have a clear stand on things, much less a sense of what to aspire for.

That’s one of the reasons why they’re not funny. One cannot make fun of the state of the nation without being serious or truthful about where one stands. In the same vein, one can’t just simply hate everyone—the government, the opposition, the Church, the Communists—without having a sense of the different colors they carry, and what those colors mean. One also can’t simply be angry. That doesn’t achieve much, as proven by Edsas 2 and 3.

AT LEAST in Erap’s time, our enemies were clear, our allies and alliances even clearer. We didn’t criticize both sides, and we reveled in having more and more people on our side—the Left, the Right, the religious in all its denominations. Now there are no enemies or any allies, and so we are not laughing. We seem stuck in a humorless political limbo.

Beyond the blogs, though, there seems to be hope, albeit a very small one. The site www.pldt.com is still going strong, and is in fact one of very few that fill the gap between the anti-Erap parody sites and the anti-GMA angry/reactionary blogs. While serious in its thrust of being anti-Arroyo at this point, particularly after the impeachment complaint was junked in Congress (see http://www.pldt.com/tipping%20point.htm), the site itself remains a force to reckon with. Not only is it still among the Top 50 Google sites in the news/satire directory, it also continues to rightly claim that it cares for the state of the nation, beyond Erap Estrada and Edsa 2. Just the same, however, there is a lot less irreverence now that there was in the Erap era—and a lot more anger directed at GMA.

Probably the only site that more than makes up for the dismal lack in political humor in light of current events is journalist Alan C. Robles’s online tabloid Hot Manila (www.hotmanila.com). Created by someone who has been exposing the absurdity of our politics for nearly two decades, Hot Manila is clear in its stand and has a good grasp of issues. It is also well-researched and well-thought out, using graphics and photographs alongside anti-GMA articles that make fun of her and the way she runs the country. It creates lists as well, but only to point out the parallelism between, say, having GMA as your lavandera (laundrywoman) and having her as President of the
Republic. (Among the top 10 reasons you wouldn’t want her as lavandera, it says, is that something other than your clothes.”)

Hot Manila skewers other political personalities, such as missing elections commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, who stars in the article “Cooking with Garci” that contains, among others, Recipe 1: Malacanang Delight—take one ballot box, and that’s it! “The Arroyo Administration: Good and Bad,” meanwhile, is not only funny, it is also a reminder of how this government has wasted money, ignored public clamor for better governance, and helped big business in its continuing plunder of the economy.

Hot Manila has readers laughing while offering the enough information that can force them to make a stand. Unfortunately, it is only one in a sea of sites and blogs that offer little else beyond clever writing about nothing. It’s a situation that can only be detrimental to the country, and delightful only to the Arroyo administration.

Actually, this lack of online laughter is not only a measure of our stand on things, if any, but is also revealing of how the Net functions in this country. It is really a middle-class tool, one that we had used successfully against Erap because he wasn’t like us. A friend observes that it had been much easier to gather people, i.e. the middle class, against Erap because of the matapobre factor. We felt Erap wasn’t good enough for us, so we fought him at all levels, and particularly on the Internet, which is the educated’s turf. Now that we are faced with a president who is Erap’s opposite—a GMA who is well-educated and not (outwardly) crass—we have become uncertain on how to cast the Net.

We can’t quite see GMA as the enemy, since the enemy in this case is broadcaster-cum-vice president Noli de Castro. Although a college graduate, he is still perceived to be of the same educational and showbiz class as Erap. There is a matapobre factor at work once more, but this time it’s working for the incumbent because the pobre who does not quite measure up is de Castro.

With successful parodies and satires, laughter becomes the only defense against the truth presented. But what happens when those truths aren’t clear to us? Orunacceptable to us? Maybe that’s why blogs like professionalheckler’s fail at being funny. There are just no truths to pick on and laugh about so hard that it hurts.

Now we just hurt.

komentaryo

Finding Spaces

published in PCIJ i-Report, the investigative reporting quarterly, of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Issue no. 3, September 2005 http://www.pcij.org/i-report/3/filipino-youth.html

Too often the Filipino youth is viewed with the conventional eyes of our elders: we are the future of the nation, we are the agents of change. Government counts on us to help save the country, civil society exhorts us to be vigilant, the media remind us often enough that we are the hope of the nation. For the most part, however, they are disappointed. Especially when it’s convenient, we remain incomprehensible to our elders, and it’s easy to see why.

We are the high-tech generation, adept at computers and cell phones, but unable to communicate well without a keypad or a clicking mouse. Our relationships are characterized by, even built on, text messages and electronic mail, impersonal as these may be. We conspire with piracy and free internet downloads with gleefully open eyes, morality and ethics aside. We sit before our computers to find ourselves, if not in writing, then in creating websites, or in looking for jobs, friends, a community we might belong to. For many of us, our computers are our best friends, personal extensions where our work, our studies, our lives are conducted – if not created and re-created – as often as we find the need for it, which is quite often.

Our dependence on computers and cellphones is not only an indication of our aptitude for high-tech tasks and processes, it’s also an indication of our need for something we can hold on to, something that somehow defines us, and only us. We love being incomprehensible to our elders because of this technology, and we revel in it. Unfortunately, a lot of the time we also reveal our incapability at discernment, as we unthinkingly forward ill-informed text messages or emails, upload pictures on the internet without realizing the probability of its distribution, take videos with our phones and think nothing of it. We have a hard time deciding whether something is right or wrong, dangerous or not; worse, we are unable to discern just what role technology is playing in our lives, or why it has become so important to us.

This lack of clarity about the things that define us may be the only thing that we of this generation have in common. Born in the late 70s to early 80s to possibly activist or hippie parents, or to the straight conservative ones who stayed aloof of either extreme, ours is a generation that can’t seem to find a reason for its existence. At least our activist parents had the Left to believe in and the Marcos regime to struggle against; our hippie parents had the liberation of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to live up; our conservative parents had the Church and the institution of family to hold onto. We, on the other hand, are faced with nothing but the dregs of these institutions, now all unstable, often unintelligible, usually in the process of compromise. It’s practically a non-space of resistance and liberation, with uncertain enemies and even less certain ideologies to back us up.

Not that all of us are having a difficult time finding the right spaces within which we may exist, if only to survive. Cheap labor and globalization have brought us the call centers where half our youth are employed, changing their biological clocks, messing up relationships, and creating demand for 24-hour McDonalds and Jollibees in the strangest street corners. A small percentage of the other half are self-employed, given rich parents who are only too happy to put up seed money and get their kids started on the capitalist course. Others with moneyed parents have the luxury of doing volunteer and NGO work, moved as they seem by a need to “give something back to the country” without necessarily seeing the big picture in which rich (probably their) families are the oppressors. Many are still part of the Philippine Left, confusing as that label has become, in all its denominations. At least those of us who are part of the different leftist movements have a better sense of what ails this country, even when we have to go from simple terms like poverty and corruption to the abstract levels and jargon of imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and fascism. But so many more of the youth have left, or are set to leave. Our prospective teachers, doctors, nurses are on a constant exodus to different parts of the world, with a small middle to upper class percentage leaving in disgust what they think is as a sinking boat. The bigger chunk of those who say goodbye though are of the lower classes, and they’re the ones who say that they shall return, when they’ve ensured their futures with the dollars they will earn.

But most, if not all of us, are at a loss. It’s not clear why we’re living our lives the way we do, doing the things that occupy us. There’s always a sense of uncertainty, not about the future, but about the present: what exactly are we doing? why is this what we do? Whereas the generation before us always had a sense of a future – with family, with career, with house and lot and what-have-you – we are always looking at a future that’s closer to the present, where we may finish our studies, find a job, write a book, or just simply see the month’s end and decide then what next.

This is not to say that we aren’t enjoying ourselves, uncertainties and all. Thanks to the fruits of our hippie and activist parents’ labors, we live in a time when there’s freedom in the music we hear, the books we read, the television shows and movies we watch. We are liberated from the strict rules of the Church and the institutions of family, school and employment. Freed from the stereotypes which our parents rebelled against, we think nothing of reconfiguring our roles to suit our needs. We are redefining relationships as often as we redefine ourselves – literally with vanity, or figuratively with spiritual or religious beliefs, and the next hip ideology. Homosexuality in all its dimensions has become our norm. Easily accessible organic herbs, designer drugs, and expensive alcohol are inanimate friends we can count on. And then there’s the sexual freedom we are heir to, which most of the time we abuse, misuse, and unthinkingly tie our lives around. Our liberation, handed down as it was, has become the freedom we can’t quite live up to. We wear what we want, we can be what we want, and do as we please, but this is not to say that we’re actually doing something.

For the most part, we are easily satisfied with ourselves, and that’s where the problem lies. We can do volunteer work for an NGO by day and party with abandon by night without feeling conflicted – we deserve it because we’re doing something for the country. We can sit at a café all day and talk about what ails our lives, our relationships, our country, and think that this is productive. We go to a token rally “for the truth to come out” and imagine ourselves socially relevant. We look at EDSA 2 and think: hah! that was my doing, without a sense of what it has truly brought this country, which isn’t much.

Four years ago, tasked to teach critical thinking and the essay to college sophomores eight to ten years my junior, I decided that the only way they could learn to think critically would be to show them where exactly they were coming from, and where they should speak from, given the state of the nation. I wanted to help them realize that in everything they said, did, or thought, they were speaking, doing, and thinking as Filipinos, whether they liked it or not. With that realization would come the responsibility not just to speak as Pinoys and Pinays, but to be Pinoys and Pinay in their analysis of everything from soap operas to foreign critical theories, from current events to the clothes they wear.

Of course given that we all, young and old alike, continue to be messed up about our identity as a people, I could only ground them in certain realities about our country that we manage, consistently, not to confront. Realities that we keep in check because we can, since we are not directly burdened. The most basic of these that needs to be acknowledged, I found, is the fact that we are an impoverished country, never mind that we’re driving the newest cars, or that we have the latest cellphones, or that we are not the poor. It does not mean that everybody else is as well-off – because not a whole lot are. Only upon realizing this can we raise the question: why are we poor? A question that can only be answered by history, hopefully a Constantino history, which tells of how we have been oppressed for centuries and by what, and how we have always fought back.
A sense of history is a good beginning, I believe, for those of us in this generation, students and teachers alike, seeking a reason for our existence at this point in time. Because we may be hi-tech and all, free to make life choices, and liberated in the way we dress, think, and do things, but in truth, we are misplaced and displaced by a lack of consciousness about where we truly come from in the context of the country we irrevocably belong to. When the poverty is acknowledged, our enemies become obvious. Ours is a long history of governance that has not had the interests of the majority of this country in mind, allowing globalization to eat us alive, allowing the elite to continue owning more and more of this country’s money and natural resources for themselves, allowing booty capitalism to prosper at the expense of the poor and hungry majority.And then there’s us, the educated middle class, some of whom choose to remain complacently uncertain about what we may do, and some of whom choose to take off, in search of happier spaces.

But the space we search for can only be here, in the one country we are born to and can truly call ours. Whatever we do, whether we’re leaving or staying, taking to the streets for the masses or going to the countryside and joining the armed struggle, whether we’re writing in English or living up the Filipino language, teaching in a university or answering complaints at a call center, we make our decisions in the context of the state of this nation, as we know it. This is all the space we need, and the space where we are most needed. We only need to know enough to see it.

Meanwhile, we wander among the spaces we create and wonder what it will take to knock some sense into our heads about the changes we have the power to effect. Quite possibly, we are a generation doomed to an endless process of searching – in denial about this country’s truths, not ready to give up our lives for the bigger battles, uncertain of what exactly it is we can do. Probably, we are a transition generation, finding and making spaces in the strangest of places – be it in the technology we so love or in the bars of Malate, be it in waging war or in observing the peace, in writing or in taking to the streets – living out our contradictory lifestyles and values, creating an open space for the time when we may all agree on what we stand for, and find it in ourselves to fight the real struggle for country vs. poverty, enemies and all.

Hopefully we see that this time can be now.