Archive for July, 2009

The shirts and jeans they wear in America.  The chocolate they eat every day in America.  The jewelry that all American women wear.  The scent of every American man.  The food found in every American table.

It’s America in a box.

Nobody looks forward to the tin cans that line the bottom of the Balikbayan Box, although they are found there by default.  Salmon, corned beef, potted meat, and other goodies do not get the same respect as shoes, but they do occupy a most honored and esteemed place on the cupboard.  After all, why would you eat imported Libby’s Vienna Sausage when Phillips costs around P29 a can?

The Vienna sausage is a quintessentially American product, one of the end-products of mechanically-separated meats.  It’s on the same level as SPAM, Chicken McNuggets, kikiam, and those alphabet-shaped fried things that my nephews are wont to eat.  In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the joys and pleasures of mechanical separation isn’t lost on the reader: boys falling into lard vats, for one.  Or women losing their fingers to gangrene from stuffing sausage in cold rooms.  Or old men dying from sores poisoned by pickling.

Of course, we’ve gone far beyond the stockyards of 1906 Chicago.  Meat is as safe as it’s going to get.  Yet there’s something about the texture and flavor of Libby’s that’s left in question.  It’s like an existential crisis on your taste buds.  Too smooth, a little plastic-like.  It does dispel the myth that you should throw the “poisonous” broth away.

Lasang Amerika, to put things lightly.

Maybe we, as a people, are lost in translation to the American experience.  I think that fifty years of American colonization, and over a century of cultural domination, has made us closer to the American mindset than any other nation on Earth.  The lot of us who have not stepped on American soil would know the tree from its fruit.  The struggles of the OFW may escape the empathy of people who do not understand – or refuse to understand – things like earning in dollars and spending in dollars.  Where clothes are often rummaged, not bought new.  That white picket fences and barbecues and everything about the American Dream are mere possibilities.  Distant ones, so it seems.

Yet those Libby’s cans will occupy a place of honor on our cupboards, perhaps many of us making stockpiles of them for years to come.  For some of us, these are things not meant to be eaten.  For those who bring them in, they are trophies of hard work.  Yet for those who take them in, they are tokens of a dream.  Not of an American dream, but of a dream of America.

Like an American box, or a box from America.  Or American Vienna sausage, or Vienna sausage from America.  There’s a big difference, and it’s more than just semantics.

Tricycle, boss?  Saan tayo, bossing? I got a feeling, and the feeling is good.  When the Corporation treats you as a perennial subordinate, you look for respect in all the wrong places.  The Big Boss may be an e-mail away, but getting around protocols and SOP is like climbing stairs with a pogo stick.  Once you find a bit of loathing for the tambling of everyday life, you value random terms of address like “Boss.”  After all, I’m not the boss of anyone.

The guard greets me, Morning sir! Suddenly I’m feeling ever more powerful.  Granted that Manong Guard will greet every guy at the office and call him “Sir,” whether he’s an employee, a visitor, or a part of the administration.  When you’re in your workstation, you’re just another rat in the cage.  Yet no, not to the guard.  You’re “Sir Marck” to him.  You make sense beyond, and are more important than, your ID number.

I’m liking the grand scheme of things.  I am important.  My elementary school guidance counselors called it “IALAC:” I Am Lovable And Capable.  I am Boss.  I am Sir.  The world is perfect.

Hi Mamser, welcome to 7-Eleven!

Good morning Mamser, welcome to MiniStop!

Hello Mamser, welcome to SM!

Good evening po Mamser, ano po order nila?

Thank you po Mamser, come again!

The grand scheme of things is a conspiracy.  ”Mamser” makes me generic, fleeting even.  A customer, an instance of sales quotas, a possible shoplifter.  Nameless, sex-less, gender-less, a number in a receipt.  Just another guy who passes by the metal detectors and the doors, and only becomes somebody – for 15 minutes, at most – when the alarm goes off.  The world sucks.  I am “Mamser:” a purchase, a meal, a plastic bag.

In one fell swoop, my jovial mood and positive view of the world collapsed all around me.  I turn into the brooding, angst-driven, antisocial version of myself.  The sunshine turns into an eclipse, the bluebirds turn into crows, and the happy song in my head turns into a funeral dirge in heavy metal.  I find my permanent frown somewhere in my mixed bag of emotions, wear it, and literally storm out of the shop.

Or as I like to call it, normalcy.

I think it was Douglas Coupland who wrote, “All events became omens.  I lost the ability to take anything literally.”  ”Mamser?”  I don’t take it in jest, nor do I take it seriously.  It’s just another epiphany in the grand scheme of things: no grandeur, no schemes, and things – like “Mamser” – just move along.