Archive for November, 2009

Nothing Short of Chaka

Nothing Short of Chaka

Picking off from my commentary piece for Philippine Online Chronicles.

The logic of the Commission on Elections Second Division is one that comes straight off Planet Eksprokenengneng: that Ang Ladlad’s motion to be registered as a party-list group for the 2010 polls should be denied based on moral grounds.  Had the grounds for denying and failing the petition been (more) legal, (more) Constitutional, and deemed acceptable based on the universal right of suffrage and freedom of assembly, then there would not have been outrage.

The Comelec positioned itself, in this case, not as an arbiter of the right to suffrage and representation, but an arbiter of morals.  The precinct became a pulpit, the Second Division became a confessional box, and Nicodemo Ferrer, Lucienito Tagle, and Elias Yousoph overstepped their bounds to dictate morality: what they say is right, and what they say is wrong.

Party-list representation – that mechanism by which the marginalized should be represented based on the will of the people and the strength of the cause manifested in the vote – became, in this case, a moral litmus test.

November 15, 2009 3 comments Read More
Mediation, Interaction, Cyberdemon

Mediation, Interaction, Cyberdemon

Ernesto Kelly Magtoto wrote a letter to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, where he alleges that the “Gestapo-like” Internet(s) has made our relationships with other people unnatural.  Apparently, we young people are becoming “aggressively mechanical and error-prone in their humanity.”  Mr. Magtoto seems to be railing against the Internet and computers in general; the kind of healthy paranoia that comes with them heathen computers and how much of a threat they are to traditional values.

Yep, them computing machines are ready to destroy not only our way of life, but life itself.  Didn’t we all get along before these ridiculous things like “Facebook” and “Twitter?”  Them blogs are destroying the world, and we’re starting to “add” friends instead of “making” them.  “Gestapo-like” Internet?  I don’t think so; if there’s anything to fear, it would be the big horned demons carrying big guns and wiping the heck out of human existence as we know it.  Following Mr. Magtoto’s logic, we are, well, doomed; we all live under a veneer of hypocrisy, we are never “real” as “real” can be, our friendships are distorted, and these “maeler daemons” have now judged “what is proper and improper.”

Hmmm… LOL?

November 11, 2009 0 comments Read More
Francis Escudero

Francis Escudero

Senator Francis Escudero is a complex individual.  Some understand this complexity as an attempt to be deep, and some interpret that same complexity as a cover for inner confusion.  In the two hours some of us spent talking to the Senator from Sorsogon, I think he’s more of the tentative sort.  To some, perplexing; still to others, discerning.  To some, his long-winded answers to simple questions may be exasperating; still to others, exploratory.

It’s my second time to meet Chiz; a Senator who perhaps has given up on the diplomatic, kagalang-galang handshake and just gives me the fist-bump.  He’s always presented himself as a spokesperson of the youth – “ang bata natin” - to the point that judgment passed upon him reflect the same ironies, idiosyncrasies, and paradoxes he himself reflects.  Depth as confusion, tentativeness, perplexing discernment, exasperating exploration.

In all probability, Senator Francis Joseph Escudero stands a shot at the Presidency.

November 9, 2009 3 comments Read More
Love in a Time of Catachresis

Love in a Time of Catachresis

I heard someone say that the love letter is every person’s contribution to literature.  As honest and as earnest as you want to be in a love letter, people want to land that all-important impression that turns the “bes” to the “babes” (or “behs” to “bhabes,” depending on how you spell it).  It doesn’t seem important or even relevant, but the love letter writer uses poetic and rhetorical devices; to deliberately express and impress, the opinions of others relegated to kebs.

At first, there’s that urge to okray and chaka-fy the attempt of someone in love to be literary, poetic, or profound.  You don’t know what to make of words and phrases in love letters.  Stopping short of “You’re the bandage that can heal the wound of my bleeding heart,” or perhaps “Sorrow never felt more real in sight when I missed saying goodnight,” or canned lyrics like “I’ll hang from your lips instead of the gallows of heartache that hang from above” (yi-hee), that’s the whole point.

Malapropism?  Solecism?  No, let’s use something so bonggacious: catachresis.

November 8, 2009 7 comments Read More
Reiteration

Reiteration

In 1997, Romeo Jalosjos was convicted of raping an 11-year-old girl.  He was sentenced to two life terms for child rape.  Prison was an air-conditioned suite with cable television, air conditioning, burger stands, and tennis courts; all to serve his functions and responsibilities as a member of the House of Representatives.  After 12 years of paying his debt to society – his sentence commuted for good conduct – he walks free, and this child rapist seeks full pardon from no less than the President of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.  Romeo Jalosjos, a convicted child rapist, is seeking his seat back in the hallowed halls of Congress.

There must be some feeling of outrage, no matter how silent or repressed, in the gall of one Romeo Jalosjos – convicted child rapist – to seek pardon from something that, beyond all reasonable doubt, he was found guilty of.  Jalosjos, for the longest time, has been portrayed as the most privileged prisoner in the Philippine penal system; surrounded by every deduction to human society, Jalosjos still enjoyed a life unimaginable for many even outside prison walls.  Jalosjos was the epitome of it all: when crime pays, it pays good.  With the brazen pride expected of unrepentant criminals who are imprisoned precisely to be restituted and rehabilitated, Jalosjos flaunted about.  For all intents and purposes, he got away with it.

November 7, 2009 0 comments Read More
Give a Man a Fish

Give a Man a Fish

On my way home, I was thinking about fish.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, considered by many as the a pillar of modern anthropology (or at the very least, the father of structuralism), died this week at the ripe old age of 100.  Lévi-Strauss was difficult reading back then; I distinctly remember photocopied readings from book excerpts that were highlighted and marked for pop quizzes and long exams.  Yet as difficult as Lévi-Strauss was to understand and to comprehend, he’s a very useful repository of how to understand society.  The ties that bind us all together are not only the relationships we have with individual and groups, but the cultural practices that transformed us all.

Lévi-Strauss is very well remembered for The Raw and the Cooked. If I remember it right (and please correct me if I’m wrong), human behavior revolved around what is “natural” (that which exists in its own state in the physical world) and what is “cultural” (that which is affected by the practices and rituals of man).  The whole thesis of The Raw and the Cooked was a structural analysis of myth (and everything else in Mythologies) and the search of cultural universals, but I can’t remember that now.  Perhaps that celebration and commemoration of Lévi-Strauss is left to authentic, practicing anthropologists, ethnologists, and the students of that interesting – if not absurd and fun and wacky – discipline that stands on his shoulders.

Most notable – and perhaps the most remembered – is cooking.  What is there is transformed; in other words, practiced, “done.”  Culture is all about transformation.  Culture transforms not only people, but what people do.

Culture transforms fish.

November 5, 2009 2 comments Read More