A recent Pulse Asia survey shows that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is the most corrupt President in the Philippines, followed by Ferdinand Marcos in the #2 slot and Joseph Estrada in the #3 position.  This is no survey that you would like to jockey a top spot for.

   But wait: should we make a big deal about statistics in the first place?  After all, Benjamin Disraeli wrote that infamous quote: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

   Whenever I do social science, I wouldn’t rely on statistics for two reasons.  One, I’m not a good statistician (I took my Statistics course twice).  Second - and perhaps the most important - is that statistical data is all-too-often misread and misinterpreted.  Numbers show something, all right, but the numbers rarely ever tell the story.  To me, the story behind the numbers is perhaps more important than the story the numbers tell by themselves: numbers beg the question of sampling method, statistical tests, and so on and so forth.  As such, any statistical presentation of anything is itself a source of doubt.  Which is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time.

   I’m not an Arroyo supporter - for heaven’s sake I’m an Arroyo critic - and I must say that while I agree that Arroyo is corrupt beyond reasonable doubt, there’s just no way in hell an unbiased and objective survey would point to her being second only to Marcos, or even Estrada.  Had Marcos been a non-factor, she would definitely top the list of the most corrupt Presidents post-Marcos.

   Here’s why: every corrupt excess Marcos had in two decades of iron-handed rule is the absolute benchmark of corruption (I hope) in the Philippines.  You can throw every shred of evidence of corruption against Macoy and you wouldn’t be hard-pressed to back them up: from the billions plundered and coursed through Swiss bank accounts to Imelda’s shoe collection when Malacañang was raided post-EDSA I.  Surely, Arroyo wouldn’t make the same mistake in being far more corrupt than Marcos to incite the anger and revulsion of the Filipino people in being “more corrupt than Marcos.”

   As far as Erap is concerned, say what you will about the Sandiganbayan verdict, but the verdict just goes to show that if we cannot indict the former President fairly and justly for plunder, we might as well indict him for a thinly-disguised charge of incompetence.  The evidence against Erap, as the prosecution panel said, can fill up a room.  If it did, then what more for Gloria?

   Here’s the thing: I’m not downplaying the negative effects of surveys against the President, but once the survey’s findings becomes questionable, then it is possible to downplay the whole idea of the survey.  Especially when the survey is supposed to corroborate something obvious.

   Not too long ago, I was talking to an instructor-friend of mine: like me, he has no love lost for Arroyo.  But he brings up a rather interesting point: aren’t the allegations against GMA completely circumstancial, like connect-the-dots painting-by-numbers things?  If anything, my general impression of the Arroyo Presidency is that it has proven to be a scapegoat for everything wrong with this country: if you can’t blame anyone else, blame Arroyo.  This goes for everything from the ULTRA Stampede to the death of Marrianet Amper.  Giving her the title of “Most Corrupt” only serves to add to the long list of “circumstancial crimes” we can pinpoint to GMA.

   Anyway, here’s what I think: statistics only tell half the story.  The other half still remains as speculation.

   I live in - and for all intents and purposes, I love - Baguio City.  I was born here, I was raised here, and if anything, I would prefer to die here.  I wouldn’t have problems in the afterlife if I am to be interred in the crowded necropolis that is the Baguio City Cemetery.  My love for Baguio has been a 22-year love affair: ever since I was born, I knew of no other place where I should live.

   I live near Brentwood Village, a place I sometimes refer to as “Little Seoul.”  Pardon the pun, but it is one Seoul-ful place, where Koreans have settled with their questionable residency certificates and business permits to operate English language centers.  Anyone fresh off college and looks for work would be hard-pressed not to find an ESL center at Brentwood, teaching a foreign language to foreigners.  It is the irony of it all.

   I’m not a “nationalist:” if anything, I share the same conundrum the Mahatma himself, Mohandas Gandhi, faced when he returned to India: he had to speak English instead of Hindustani.  At least I don’t have to suffer the nationalistic indemnity and damnation of having to speak a few words of Korean in order to “properly” communicate myself.  But I’ve learned a few bits and pieces of Hanggul: to know that a given place is either a church, an Internet café, or a bar and restaurant.

   There’s a bulletin board at Porta Vaga that’s the exclusive domain of Koreans: signs written in Hanggul advertising heaven-knows-what: prayer meetings, boarding houses, business opportunities.  I don’t know, and I wouldn’t know until someone is patient enough to teach me the language.  Not to be ethnocentric (the anthropologist’s mortal sin), but somehow I find myself irritated at the Korean invasion.  I feel an invasion of my space.

   There is, was, and forever will be an aversion to the invasion of space: whether it is personal space, interpersonal space, or social space.  Lately, America has been debating over the issue of outer space, even.  Wearing my hat as a passing “social scientist,” I think that everything from global policies to personal identities are built on space: without spaces situating these concepts, we effectively become voided and empty.

   And so perhaps I couldn’t be blamed for having a negative impression against Korean migrants in general.  Surely, there are a lot of kind-hearted and considerate Koreans out there, but the thing is, I’d rather have my space - and my identity - back where it belongs.

   In the interest of humor, “Youth Suicide” is the name of a Wrestling Society X wrestler famed for throwing himself off 25-foot ladders and into thumbtacks and explosive ring props.  However, for this entry, I’d like to talk about a different sort of youth suicide: young people killing themselves before they reach the prime of their lives.

   Awhile ago, I talked about a recent suicide by a 12-year-old girl at Cabinet Hill, Baguio City.  The latter half of this year has been rife with youth-related suicides: Mariannet Amper of Davao City, a boy who committed suicide in Iloilo under the influence of rugby, and various hangings.  Rather than of the kind of suicides consistent with the depressing lyrics of Fall Out Boy and Hoobastank, these are suicides that are of a different nature from teen “emo” phases: there seems to be a prevalence of depression among the youth today.

   This article, haphazard as it may be, attempts to ground youth suicide into a framework: a social-anthropological one.  Here, I attempt to make sense of suicide from a different perspective outside of blogging commentary.

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Boring sociological brouhaha

   Emilé Durkheim, considered by many to be the father of sociology, was also one of the first to study suicide scientifically.  In his work Suicide, Durkheim distinguishes between four forms of suicide:

• Egoistic suicide: results from too little social integration, where suicide is committed because of having little in the way of social support mechanisms;
• Altruistic suicide: results from too much social integration, where suicide is committed because people are willing to sacrifice their own lives for others’;
• Fatalistic suicide: results from overregulated, unrewarding lives (i.e., slavery;
• Anomic suicide: results from problems in integration like the inability of societies to provide for needs (acute and chronic economic anomic suicide), or the inability of societies to provide for adaptation (acute and chronic domestic anomic suicide).  (http://durkheim.itgo.com/suicide.html)

    Suicide, at least given this framework, is not caused or done solely by the individual: the value of Durkheim’s sociology (perhaps even its limitation) is that it frames social events and phenomena from and into the social world.  For the lay person reading this entry, it is already possible to assume that youth suicide is by and large anomic: for example, Mariannet Amper’s suicide was an acute or chronic economic anomic suicide.

   But while we can chalk up a lot of youth-related suicides to the inability of social institutions to provide for needs, surely something else outside of institutions has to be a cause for suicide.  If you asked me, from the structural-functionalist framework of viewing things, the social structure is composed of social agents: think of Lego blocks creating a tower of Legos.

   My newfound knowledge and appreciation for psychoanalytic theory leads me to a probable cause for suicide: the human psyche itself.  I’m fairly new to psychoanalysis, so right now, my firmest grasp on the matter is more towards Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (BTW: they’re not “psychoanalytic” per se, they critiqued psychoanalysis) as opposed to Sigmund Freud or Jacques Lacan.

   The psyche being the Lego blocks in the tower of Legos, we need to consider the human individual: Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, write that the individual, being a desiring-machine, works only by breaking down (this holds true for every machine).  This breakdown can cause many in the way of what Deleuze and Guattari call “neuroses:” while I’m not sure if suicide is in the text, I’m sure that it is a manifestation of it.

*     *     *

   It’s clichéd, but the reality of youth-related suicide (or suicide for that matter) is that it is not caused by a single factor: instead, it is caused by a multiplicity of factors.  There is no central cause to youth-related suicide: consider the MySpace suicide, among many other Internet-related suicides for that matter.

   I’m not saying that suicide is an event without a cause: all I’m saying is that because we cannot trace suicide to a single pool of causes that are easily addressed, there’s really no way to prevent suicide.  It is possible to alleviate the effects of suicide-causing factors so as its effects would not be so prevalent, like more jobs and a common social understanding for the lesser among us.  But as far as preventing something that has been with modern society since day one, it’s not possible.

   “Vicious cycles,” says my friend Rhon.  I just hope that’s not it for a problem I don’t really know how - or where - to start solving.

   I was having my morning coffee when breaking news appeared on TV: a kid committed suicide here in Baguio City, somewhere at Cabinet Hill.  I was extremely bothered: Cabinet Hill is a short walk away from my own house, and that house looked extremely familiar.  From the camera angle, it looked like the very same boarding house some of my old college friends rented a couple of years ago.  It was enough to have the hot coffee stop halfway down my gullet: if anything, yet another lucid interval yesterday had me hallucinating on the matter of a girl hanging herself, not too far from where I live.

   To further corroborate and validate some lingering suspicions on the death of that girl, a friend of mine blogged about it.

   Damn, I thought: what is it with kids killing themselves nowadays?  I would be extremely happy to assist an Angst-ridden emo-loser’s suicide if he or she wants to kill himself or herself with the bristly end of a toothbrush, but this is just ridiculous to the point of worry.  Back in Original TMX, one of my later entries was the suicide of 12-year-old Mariannet Amper, wher I wrote:

“We can only speculate what went on in Mariannet’s mind that All Souls’ Day when she found herself in that room with her hand clutching a makeshift noose.  Maybe the poverty was too much to bear that she decided to end her misery once and for all.  Maybe she couldn’t take it anymore.  Maybe she cannot have any more than what she already has, so the grim future was to be found at the loop of that noose.”

   Much as I hate to admit it, we can only speculate what happened to that girl who killed herself at Cabinet Hill.  Depression, maybe?  Sexual abuse, perhaps?  Or maybe there’s just something in the wiring of the human brain that just leads you to do things that you would not usually or rationally do, like kill yourself.

   There are things that even speculation would not solve: why a 12-year-old girl would make a noose out of a belt and rags and hang herself from a second-floor window.  I won’t play to the hypocrisy and hype in saying that this is “martyrdom,” but it’s a sad state of affairs.  Depression is caused by too many things: it is anomic, it is the failure to adapt and to integrate.  It is something that’s not only the failure of one person, but society in general… when we fail to live and to keep living.

   I was talking with an old batchmate of mine when the topic inevitably drifted to the matter of social action.  And so it comes with the jadedness of two guys bullshitting: him taking up law, me taking up the challenge of establishing myself as a “theorist” by the time I graduate.  In our heyday as young men in undergrad, we both shared the mantra of “down with the system.”  With someone like an Antonio Trillanes IV representing that same idea… well, it doesn’t sound so cool or so right anymore.

   I’m the first to admit that my social consciousness was made and formed in the streets by virtue of a placard or a streamer.  Yup, I was an activist.  I still am, although of a different sort.  I now make qualified distinctions between “militant,” “progressive,” “Leftist,” and so on and so forth.  The reason being is that having grown up with the general movement of the Marxist idea of improving society through struggles of many different sorts, walking the walk is different from talking the talk, and walking the talk is different from talking the walk.  Walking while talking is different from talking while walking.  It’s the way things are: it took me the better part of five years to figure that out.

   “Critical thinking” is more of a catchphrase to me than an actual practice: there is a difference in thinking critically and thinking in the end of criticizing.  “We denounce” is the kind of warcry you would see in a political statement, blowing everything out of proportion that every problem that there is in the country - or the world - can be pinpointed when you find someone to blame.  I’ve gotten a lot of flak for that over the years: where I have the power to write online, I do not blame.  You really have to look deep inside yourself to see if you are in the right plane to point fingers at anybody without your arm tiring.  Are you pointing up, or are you pointing down?

   All too often, the problems of this country aren’t supposed to be laid upon the finger of blame.  Judgment is reserved for those who can judge: those who themselves contribute to the decay of society in any way are bad judges of character.

   Jadedness… maybe it’s having to look from things at the other side of the fence for once.