Willie Gets It Right

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

The latest controversy hounding the beloved king of offensive machismo, Willie Revillame, has to do with this meltdown he had in “Wowowee!” The following words were uttered when ABS inserted a window on the TV screen showing the procession of the body of former President Aquino from La Salle Greenhills to the Manila Cathedral while his merriments were going on. This is what he said according to the article “Willie Revillame violated code of ethics – MTRCB”

Hindi siguro magandang tingnan na pinapakita niyo yan (Mrs. Aquino’s footage). Nagsasaya kami tapos pinapakita niyo yung, I don't think dapat ipakita yan.

Eh mahihirapan akong magsalita rito. Nagpapasaya ako nakikita ko ‘yung ano (cortege) ni Tita Cory. Sana pakitanggal naman muna ‘yan sa ating traffic. Kasi kung ganyan pakita nalang natin ‘yan kasi nagsasaya kami dito tapos masakit sa akin yan. Nagsasalita ako dito yan Pls, sana maintindhan niyo, nagsasaya kami dito papakita niyo sa amin yun. Diba? Hindi tama eh okay?

Hay nako. Pangit. Hindi maganda ho sa atin nagsasalita pinapakita yung kabaong ni Tita Cory. Diba? Paano kami magkakapagsaya nahihirapan kami? I'm sorry ho ah pero ako totoo ako eh. ‘Wag niyo akong papagalitan...Pagkatapos ng show pakita niyo ‘yung gusto niyong ipalabas. Kasi itong Wowowee gusto ko at alam din ni Tita Cory ‘yan kasi napasaya din siya ng show na ito na laging masaya dito. Okay? ¹

What poor Willie is trying to say in his halting, perhaps annoyed, clearly caught off-guard manner is that placing the live footage of the procession for the transfer of Tita Cory's body in the same screen as his wildly undulating show is done in bad taste. Firstly, because it does not respect the grandeur of the event. There, in a small screen, dwarfed by crying gay boys being outed in TV and an audience maddened by the onslaught of distractions, was the solemn send-off procession for the best loved president of this threatened Republic. It’s just so ABS to do something like that: maximum circus with minimum consideration for potentially offended sensibilities. Secondly, Willie was unable to proceed with his usual irreverence and sacrificial-audience-member badgering while such a mournful event was taking place. Thirdly, and most importantly, the contrast in events was just too extreme that their mutual presencing would have canceled each other out.

Willie’s extravaganza is an avalanche of sights and sounds meant to dissipate the self. There is the constant dancing, the getting-to-know-you of contestants that borders on a grotesque charade of the Dr. Phil-esque exposure of psyces, the karanabal-like display of talents of contestants which prelude the games, and the prize-givings which are the creamy centers of this elaborate, over sugared pastry of an event. Willie’s show is exactly a doughnut dipped in sugar, topped with a sprinkled bed of layered frosting, and stuffed with the thickest, sweetest cream. It’s a pastry that one has to consume completely because once in your hands it keeps drawing you in until it is consumed. When you have completely consumed it, you are filled with this dizzy feeling of having taken in something that fills you but not in a good way. It leaves you uneasy and queasy, but it felt so good in the mouth that it keeps you coming back for more. It's something like the mall.

The mall is a wonderful place that is designed to allow you to disperse yourself. It is meant to draw your attention to all kinds of sensory delights designed to titillate you appetites and push your desires to their limits. In a mall, your mind and will are dispersed such that everything is supposed to draw you hither and yon, and you are meant to be so dispersed that you act and want on sheet impulse. Because you keep moving and wanting, it seems that your life, for that brief moment is full, but at the end of it, you're tired and dispersed and empty. That's why you can't wait for the next time. It's like computer games, casual sex, ecstasy, and so many of the things that we do.

Tita Cory’s funeral rites were something completely different. And, when something does come along that manages to attract our attention and gather us, something like the solemnity of a sincere, albeit slightly showbizzed, a-Dieu to a beloved person, we are silenced to self-gathering. That is I think what happened to us in the days around August 5. When Tita Cory died, the nation seemed to fall silent as if everyone lost someone who meant something to them. We all did. We lost someone who stood for our best possibilities given our finite, broken selves. Tita Cory could be seen as a model person. A model person, according to Max Scheler, is a person who bears, in her finite way, the best possibilities of being a person given a particular value system. She was our model person for she showed us how to be humble, simple, and steadfast; to be courageous and and open to the call to service; to be selfless and love one's people; and to be a good mother to one's children while being responsible for the children you have embraced as your own, i.e. all of us.

The funeral rites for Tita Cory captivated us. People everywhere were glued to their television sets watching the huge crowds of Filipinos line up to pay their respects and listening to those who knew her talk about her simplicity, great care for people, steadfastness, and great love. Listening and watching, being attentive to the expressions of love and admiration, participating in rituals of remembrance and sending-off to God—these things quieted us. The rituals of saying goodbye to one who showed us who we are and how simplicity, constancy, and courage could win the day reminded us what we as a people could be. As we remembered her in saying goodbye, we remembered our best selves, and we were gathered interiorly.

What happened in those days was the polar opposite of what happens every day at Wowowee! There, people are given the best offering of forgetfulness through layers upon layers of noise and haste. As we are immersed in Willie’s world, we are allowed to forget ourselves, or make a spectacle of ourselves, or see ourselves as bathed in the borrowed light of the showbiz world. There we don’t find our best selves, our selves that can triumph over crushing poverty, our selves that can love our children in the most degraded conditions, or our selves that can create lives with dignity and hope in the most decrepit environments. There we find our carricature selves: the stereotype gay boy televising the drama of his angst, the genuinely sorrowful widow of a dead soldier singing out of key through her tears, and the old lady with insurmountable debts dancing to Willie’s delight. These are our sorry selves that are translated to television marionets for everyone’s delight. The projections are not meant for us to know and embrace who we are but to forget how truly, potentially tragic human existence is. And for that treat, and perhaps more money that we can ever imagine, we are willing to let Papi have his way with us.

Now that Willie himself is hinting at political ambitions, he is telling everyone that he has been serving the public now for so many years. He has been serving us not as a theif but as a giver of gifts. He said in the news “Hindi ako magnanakaw, mambibigay ako.” Or something like that. But I’m not sure how true that is. For how much entertainment and money he has given, how much of our selves has he taken away?

__________

[1] GMANews.TV. Sunday, August 9, ( http://ph.news.yahoo.com/gma/20090808/tel-willie-revillame-violated-code-of-et-284c369.html), accessed 20 August 2009.

Why the World is a Little More Empty Without Her

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

Before anything else can be said, this must be said. Yes I know that President Aquino could have and should have initiated a meaningful and comprehensive land reform initiative. If she did, if she was willing to sacrifice Hacienda Luisita and to distribute unjustly acquired land with her revolutionary powers, she could have truly and substantially improved the lives of millions of Filipinos and perhaps set us on a road to just development. It seems that she could have, while she was popular and well loved and enjoyed the support of her nation, neutralized the influence of the traditional elite and the military and gone about instituting real political reforms that would have allowed the opening up of our systems to the effective participation of the marginalized in shaping the new republic. But for some reason, Tita Cory quickly fell under the influence and the control of the traditional elite and her military backers. For all her love of her people, she took our restored democracy and seemed to have handed it back to traditional powers. This failure makes possible the widening gap between the rich and the poor and the continued subversion of the state by self-serving politicians who distort our democratic institutions for personal gains. However, despite this, despite her being a conservative progressive who failed to respond to the revolutionary call of her time, Cory Aquino is an exemplar and a good president who deserves all the love we give her. And now that she is gone, the country seems to be a little darker and sadder especially since it is struggling to free itself from the grips of a petty tyrant.

Tita Cory is Tita Cory because she was a genuine model person in the sense Max Scheler uses that phrase. A model person is one who bears the best possibility of our selves given the call of our times. A model person bears and realizes the best values of our humanity that the times call to surface in order to inspire a people to be their best possible selves. Isn't that what we loved about her? Despite her failures as a politician, she was the best person anyone could want to be. Her whole life was oriented toward serving her people in the best way that she knew how. She had a real concern for the systems that we restored. She inspired us to give ourselves to the higher call of our nation. Even when she was old and sick, she stood with us without any self serving motives in our struggle against those who threatened our democracy.

I personally will miss having someone in the public sphere who can speak with such purity of intentions. Not even our religious leaders can speak so purely without being suspected of some agenda, whether it is to preserve the power of their institutions or to gain some influence with the administration. When Tita Cory spoke, we listened because we knew that she spoke from the heart despite her not-completely-progressive politics and her seeming political naiveté. Perhaps it was precisely her naiveté that made us open our hearts to her, because this naiveté was rooted in her desire to find the path to the good in all things. Beyond our political strategizing to achieve the sought for liberation of our people, Tita Cory always kept her sight on the good and the ought, and thus she reminded us what ultimately we were fighting for.

There are lessons to learn from her life. The foremost of which is that the simplest people, even those who seem to be least likely to be called to greatness, can become truly great if they are able to discern the challenge of the times and respond to it as best as they can. Heroes are not the greatest persons in skills and abilities but they are those who can respond with courage and wisdom to the call of their fatedness. That is the great lesson of all our best fairy stories. Trust the cosmos when it invites you and it will bring you to a fullness you can never achieve yourself. But of course, to hear this challenge, you must be genuinely open and generous of heart. To find yourself, to find your place in history, you cannot be self-involved. You have to be listening to where life is calling you and respond with generosity.

The other lesson, a more painful one, that we can learn from Tita Cory is that no matter how pure your intentions are, no matter how you act with a passion for the ought, evil structures can always subvert the good that we do. Look at how President Aquino was unable to craft a better constitution or how her push for land reform was watered down. These were all effects of structures that limited her ability to do good. At every step of the way to reform with her revolutionary government, there were traditional politicians and powerful military men always pushing for their self-interested projects. And they won because the political structures that she operated with were always slanted against the interests of the majority and always allowed a selfish and short-sighted elite to determine the national agenda. So despite the fact that President Aquino was potentially poised to realize far reaching reforms, the structures of our state and our political systems were too infected with the rot of the traditional and new elite that the democracy she rebuilt was still rotten from within. Thus GMA and her brand of politics which shamelessly undermines the state to serve her obvious interests is still possible.

Certainly, this is a good lesson to learn, We don't only need good people, we need good governance structures in order to realize our common good as a people. We need to build solidly democratic structures so that our potentials for sustainable and just development are not always stolen away by the predatory elite that continue to dominate our political and economic systems.

There's one last and best thing I think that we can learn from Tita Cory. What she taught us with her life is simply this—if you love as best as you can, as best as your human frailty allows you—people will recognize that love and love you back. Of course it's not important that they love you back—that's not the point of loving or genuine service. But love does beget love and sometimes, with the best of us, our love is infectious and can set a nation aflame. And her love did, and we burned with good will for a while. It was such a wonderful thing to live through those times when we were a people of good will who thought we could infect the world with it.

We will miss you Tita Cory, especially now that we battle with such a dangerous evil in our government. We will miss your steadfast faith and hope for that was the light with which you led us.

Poems for Cory

For Cory
by Marc Oliver Pasco

Nothing happens here.

Nothing but the cries that linger amongst the few who have seen what it means to do.

Nothing happens here.

Nothing but the cheers that resound amongst the few who witnessed what it means to listen.

Nothing happens here.

Nothing but the silent resolve of one who persevered and struggled so that something may have happened.

Para kay Cory
ni Marc Oliver Pasco

Nakalimutan ko na yata
ang pangalan ko
Matagal-tagal na nang huli kong narinig
mula sa bibig ng iba
Ang ngalang dati’y
Nililingunan ko.

Sadya ko na lamang kayang
lilimutin
ang pangalang
ibininyag lang naman
sa akin?

O hihikayatin ko kaya
ang langit
na magbuhos ng ulan
nang muli nilang alalahanin
ang ngalang inihandog
nila sa akin.

Mourning Michael

by Agustin Martin Rodriguez

And so the prince has passed on. The sad little prince who after he failed to grow up to be something even remotely resembling normal, who came to characterize the brokenness that we can fall into when our formative years are deprived of love, who made so many of us scream with joy and amazement when he created a new world of music on stage and then cringe with revulsion when he created a strange wonderland for him to play with little boys, finally departed the world in which he could never find a place. Finally, he made the passage to the only wonderland that could embrace him with the love he sought.

The world mourns his passing. Every media agency is focused on talking about his death and projecting their sorrow. Fans are camping out in spontaneous communities of shared sorrow. Celebrities are tripping over themselves to release the most profoundly sorrowful sound bite.

Of course everyone feels a genuine sorrow because MJ is dead. Michael was part of the soundtrack of their youth at some point of his career. I'm sure “Ben” or “Billie Jean” or “Man in the Mirror” triggers some memory of some important event in most everyone's life. But as we mourn and remember him so fondly, I cannot help but remember how he was so mocked and reviled by the western media as if he were a circus monkey fit only for the admiration of shrieking Asian girls.

If there is a lesson to his death, it is this: death makes everyone love you and makes them guilty for their terrible thoughts about you. And if you are famous and the mass media obsesses over your death, everyone will try to remember how much exactly they loved you all along. Can you therefore blame poor outcast teenagers who fantasize about being famous and about being dead?

But the other lesson to learn as everyone mourns the great child prince's death is this: celebrity culture is incapable of celebrating genuine greatness. Without a doubt, Michael Jackson did contribute greatly to popular music. He was at the forefront of the invention of pop styles from the 60s to the 90s. But in the grand scheme of things, what did his style contribute to human civilization in its quest to realize the potential of its spirit? How has his music helped us discover our potential for creativity as we face the end of world civilization and life as we know it? How does he help us discover who we are as we come to realize that the world we have built for ourselves is neither sustainable nor enriching? Because in the end, shouldn't our greatness be measured by these standards? And yet, half of the shows of most of our serious news programs spent their time extolling the life and death of one whose best lyrics were “I'm looking at the man in the mirror and I'm asking him to change his ways” and “Heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race.”

On the other hand, just a few weeks ago, a great peasant leader was shot dead. Rene Peñas was a simple man from a simple background who against all the odds rose to greatness. Ka Rene was a truly great man. He led a handful of powerless peasants to fight a whole system designed to deprive the margins of their resources and won to teach his nation that hope and perseverance can sometimes triumph over systematic evil. He showed us all that we could still believe in happy endings in a history built on the deeds of petty evil and shameless, magnificent greed. Ka Rene's greatest hit was a simple march of 444 kilometers. It was not sold to a lot of people but to those who were his fans, their spirits were made to awaken to the greatness of the simplest of men. Their hearts were blown open to embrace the love in the universe that ever so subtly invites us to move with its heartbeat and bring outrageous good to the world.

But when he died, only a few nuns and priests, activists and NGO workers, peasants and students wept and scrambled to say something meaningful so that his death would not be so absurd. And so the peasant leader, the exemplar of who we could be if we were attuned to the call of the good, passed on to his true ancestral lands where he will never be hungry or threatened or killed, where he will truly be enlivened by the creative power that he felt in the land and heard calling in the suffering of his people. But the remembrance of his passing did not come anywhere close to the world's mourning for a boy who could walk backwards as if there were no gravity and had a sweet, sweet voice that could make us forget that there was a goodness to humanity beyond petty loves and glamor.

HR 1109 Denounced

On the night of June 2, the administration and its allies railroaded the passage of HR 1109 with their usual impunity. As is characteristic of this administration, democratic processes and respect for the common good were sacrificed when they insisted on the realization of their
self-serving agenda.

Clearly, from the point of view of the nation's interest, there is no urgency in pushing for Charter Change in this dubious mode. Nothing can justify the trampling of deliberative processes. It is clear that the administration solely wants to ensure that it stays in power.

Such arrogant disregard for the will and the interests of the people is ingrained in the governance style of this government. From the countless appointments of unqualified allies to key positions in government to the various corruption scandals, the President and her allies continuously violate the principles of good governance because they can.

Everyone who is supposed to be able to check these violations of our national interest, but does nothing, is complicit to this evil. But, this has got to stop. This government has to be shown that it can no longer insist on its agenda for power. We are calling the key institutions in this country to say no. The Senate has to move and protect its right to decide on constitutional issues as a co-equal branch. The Supreme Court has to continue to show the nation that it
can stand against the attacks of tyrannical forces on our democracy. Civil society must continue its efforts at blocking the rise of this dark tide. And we hope the citizens of this country will be moved by the swell of the passions of opposition that say never again to GMA and the politics based on greed and abuse of power.

May the spirit of the murdered Sumilao leader, Rene Peñas, inspire us to persevere in our non-violent struggle for a humane, just, and peaceful society.

Signed,

Individual Faculty Members of the Philosophy Department,
Ateneo de Manila University

Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez
Michael G. Aurelio
Remmon E. Barbaza
Oscar Bulaong, Jr.
Mark Joseph Calano
Manuel B. Dy, Jr.
Geoffrey Guevara
Jacqueline Marie D. Jacinto
Michael Ner Mariano
Pamela Joy Mariano
Marc Oliver Pasco
John Carlo Uy