Sunday, April 27, 2025

9:00 AM | A Spectacle of Unraveling

It’s kind of frightening to see how fast America—supposedly the most powerful nation in the world—is unraveling these days. It’s also kind of frightening that Americans themselves allowed this to happen, that they voted for all these to happen. [My friend, the poet Bino Realuyo who is based in New York quickly tells me in a rejoinder: “Well, 31% voted for [Trump]. But 36% didn’t vote at all . Question is—how far will the 2/3 tolerate this stupidity?”]

I remember once watching a Fourth of July parade on cable television, the kind with high school marching bands and brass instruments blaring Sousa, confetti cannons flaring red, white, and blue. The commentator was breathless with patriotic pride. “This is America,” he said, as though the idea was enough to inspire the gods into applause. I was perhaps thirteen, and I believed him. In my young head, like many Filipinos, America was always the center of everything—of hope, of culture, of democracy, of dreams. I remember Jessica Zafra once quipping: “The greatest Filipino dream is to be an American.”

Fast forward a few decades, and that glittering image has rusted at the seams. Something is decaying in the state of America, and the rot is loud, unruly, and voted in.

I say this with the reluctant love of a former believer. Like many in the Global South, I grew up with a default reverence for all things American. The accents in the movies, the sitcoms, the endless brands, the smiling Disney promise of happily ever afters—they crept into our consciousness as omnipotent truths. America was the future, and the rest of us were catching up.

But the future got here, and it’s a mess.

The images we now get are of insurrections and incoherent speeches, of politicians with no grasp of science or decency, of book bans and culture wars, of schools riddled with bullets, of billionaires playing space cowboy while millions can’t afford insulin. All of it unfolding in real-time, the way a house burns while the owners argue whether fire is even real.

It’s a strange kind of horror, one that feels cinematic and absurd. Like The Purge franchise, but real. And yet, what’s truly terrifying isn’t just the collapse—it’s the consent. They voted for this. Again and again. With red hats and furious Facebook posts and voter suppression laws polished to look like patriotism. America, for all its claims to moral supremacy, seems to have walked willingly into its own undoing.

And I wonder: what do you do when the empire forgets its own mythology? When it willingly dismantles the very tenets it once exported with missionary zeal?

We have always been told democracy was sacred. That the press was free. That justice was blind. That the arc of the moral universe bent toward something good. And yet here we are, with courts stacked like rigged decks, with news dismissed as fake if it dares speak truth, with minorities demonized, with women fighting for rights their grandmothers had already won. There’s a recklessness to it all. An arrogance, too.

Because America is used to being the hero in its own story. It doesn’t know how to be the villain. So when the cracks appeared, it doubled down on denial. The climate? A hoax. Racism? A relic. Income inequality? Bootstraps. Mass shootings? Thoughts and prayers. Rinse and repeat.

It’s a madness dressed up in freedom.

And what does that mean for the rest of us, those watching from across oceans? We used to model our democracies after America’s. Our leaders have studied in their universities, we spoke their language, we echoed their dreams. And now? Now we scroll through headlines and see echoes of our own fragilities mirrored back at us.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: America’s unraveling is a mirror of what happens when a nation stops listening to itself. When grievance overtakes governance. When nostalgia becomes a weapon. When truth becomes negotiable. It’s not just an American story. It’s a cautionary tale.

And I find myself thinking of empire—not as something distant in time, but as something always on the edge of implosion. Rome had its bread and circuses. America has Fox News and TikTok. Both distract while the government burns.

Still, I don’t say this with schadenfreude. There’s no joy in watching a giant stumble. Especially one whose footprint stretches so far across the world that its missteps send aftershocks everywhere. The fall of America—if that’s indeed what this is—won’t be clean. It won’t be cinematic. It’ll be slow, spiteful, noisy, and lived. And it will affect us all.

And yet, part of me still hopes.

Because some myths die hard. And because somewhere in the noise, there are still people marching, resisting, organizing, dreaming. There are still artists making sense of the chaos, writers speaking truth, teachers holding the line, kids growing up not buying the lie. Maybe that’s what resilience looks like: not a return to old glories, but a stubborn insistence on not going quietly.

Still, it’s frightening.

Not just the speed of the fall, but the willful blindness that preceded it. The fact that this didn’t happen overnight. That it was courted, invited, elected.

That’s the part that haunts me.

Because if the mighty can vote for their own collapse, what’s stopping the rest of us?

Labels: america, issues, politics

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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Sunday, August 11, 2024

9:00 AM | Why I Hated Basketball: On Carlos Yulo’s Olympic Wins and Gendered Sports

[Originally published on Rappler, and based on this short post.]


“Sports is beautiful but it’s also brutal.”
~ E.J. OBIENA, pole vaulter, Paris Olympics 2024


In the light of Carlos Yulo’s Olympic wins in gymnastics in Paris [and in remembrance of Hidilyn Diaz’s watershed win in weightlifting in Tokyo in 2021], there was a burst of online chatter about the state of competitive sports in the Philippines. About the hardships our athletes have to go through to train and to participate in competitions, often with the most measly and most grudging of government support. About how ironic it is that our Olympic wins have come from sports not usually seen as “appropriate” for the gender of the athlete that won them. And about how support for these sports always seem to pale in comparison to certain other sports that enjoy not just widespread appeal but also consistent corporate largess.

And then people began side-eyeing basketball.

To quote improv comedian and comics artist Jay Ignacio: “Eh, kung i-modify natin ang gymnastics na kailangan ma-syut sila sa loob ng basketbol ring tuwing di-dismount, makakaakit kaya iyon ng mas maraming sponsorship?” And then from screenwriter and poet Jerry Gracio: “Pagkatapos nating manalo sa Olympics sa mga sports na hindi basketball, tiyak, magtatayo tayo ng maraming maraming basketball courts.” Mostly played for laughs, of course—but the undertone of many of these posts was serious. Other social media posts were more upfront: “Hindi lang [sana] puro basketball,” wrote historian Kristoffer Pasion, echoing many others who wrote the same sentiment in a variety of ways. Like the actress Agot Isidro, who posted: So pwede na ba natin bawasan ang sponsorship at funding ng basketball at idagdag na lang sa gymnastics, boxing, and weightlifting?”

Why single out basketball? I think there’s an unspoken reason why, and I proceeded to share my thoughts, and my story, on X [formerly Twitter] in a long thread. Within mere hours, the post blew up.


This is a slightly extended version of what I posted on August 5 on X:

For the longest time, basketball has really been symbolic of the Filipino macho, celebrated not just for the great sport that it is, but also for showcasing a performative masculinity that many Filipino men ascribe to. As a child, I remember the grownup men around me drinking beer and thumping their chests [or their potbellies] as they cheered for their favorite basketball teams on TV, and arguing with each other over who was the best player—Robert Jaworski or Alvin Patrimonio? When I went to school, most of my male classmates were all the same. And I remember feeling left out, because basketball did not interest me at all, and I had no real interest to play it. So automatically that made me “queer.” Not wanting to play basketball was a silent mark people judged me by.

I actually remember, around the age of 11 or 12, making an effort to like basketball. I began watching the PBA on TV. I decided to have a “favorite” team: Ginebra San Miguel—because the men I knew were rabid fans. I studied the moves of the game, I studied the players. All in the effort to be accepted into this boisterous camaraderie of men I felt ostracized from... But I felt like an impostor. It just was not me. I pretended to be such a basketball “fan” for months and months, until I could not pretend anymore. I remember finally saying to myself, “Who cares if I’m not as manly as these men I know?” and gave up on liking basketball altogether.

There was also the fact that in high school, being forced to play basketball for P.E. classes was always a humiliating torture. I just could not dribble, I just could not shoot baskets. I felt so self-conscious whenever I had to play this darned game just for the grade. And then to hear your classmates tittering around the court about you because how was I a “man” in a basketball-crazy country and not know how to play basketball? Baling bayota uy, klaro kaayo, they’d laugh.

And this is why I hated basketball when I was a kid. I don’t hate it as much anymore as a grownup, but I do know that basketball as a social phenomenon in the Philippines has long been weaponized in a quiet gender warfare that marked so many boys and men as “unfit” or “unmanly,” just because basketball was not something we loved.

Which is why when I first saw the Brgy. Lo-oc gays the other year do “gay basketball,” playing a good game while donning tutus and other queer-affirming costumes, I felt so much joy. It felt like a corrective. It took away the thorn of machismo associated with the game, and for the first time in my life I actually enjoyed the sport.

End post.


I was soon bombarded with an avalanche of responses. As of August 6, that X thread has had 602K views, 8.7K likes, 1.9K reposts, and God knows how many responses. I hit a nerve. I knew my experience was not exactly unique, but I had no idea it would resonate so hard among many people. The responses were variations of these: “I feel seen!” or “This is my childhood!” or “Somebody finally said it!”

The number of responses of course are directly proportional to the acknowledged popularity of the sport—the feeling that in our culture, we are surrounded by this great and unquestioned worship of basketball (“It’s part of our Filipino culture!” some of the indignant responses went), that for me to write this post, I have articulated what so many people have felt but could not say—perhaps for fear of backlash, and perhaps for fear of confirming for others what they wanted hidden.

I will not deny the massive popularity of basketball, and why so many people love it. My TV screen—with its endless seasons of NBA or PBA games—confirms it. Going around any neighborhood and seeing basketball courts everywhere, built well or improvised, confirms it. The fact that I can utter a mononym—“Jaworski”—and be understood by many confirms it. The fact that Coke abandoned Coke-Go-for-Goal in its singular advocacy for nurturing football in the country in favor of forming the Coca-Cola/Powerade Tigers PBA team starting in 2002 confirms it.

Basketball is like an inevitability for life in this country—somehow, one way or another, you will be touched by it. There’s also this that can be taken as a reason for its popularity: it’s sheer accessibility. One response went: “Basketball is the sport that will always resonate to Filipinos. It is like a moth to a lamp. Basketball is so accessible: may 15x15 [feet] na open space ka, good to go ka na, isang bola, sampung katao agad ang mag-eenjoy. At the same time, [it’s] fast paced. It is one of the most social contact sports out there.” So true.

I am not a sports historian or a cultural anthropologist or a psychologist, but I can also understand why basketball became very popular for many Filipinos. The sport was introduced to us by the Americans, and made popular by them by spreading it via the public school system they set in place. That American imprimatur probably helped, and in a sense they thoroughly ingrained the sport in us. The things is, basketball as a game is truly a marvel to behold and beautiful to see when one begins to analyze its strategies and possibilities of execution—and many basketball fans would attest to this as the very reason for their abiding love for it. And then with the PBA becoming the only sports televised for widespread consumption in the Philippines for many decades, one can see why basketball has only grown in popularity over the years. That popularity could only beget more popularity, a bandwagon effect that is about conformity aside from also being about being sports-minded and being entertained.

Here is the turn: it has also been mostly basketball with male athletes we have seen popularized. And because these male athletes are on TV, they have become the equivalent of gods. We worship at the altar of the sport, and consequently we have also begun worshipping—and reflecting—the gods that play it. And then it happened: the sport somehow became closely connected, semiotically speaking, with an idea of Filipino manhood. To ascribe fandom to the game or to play the game itself—no matter our personal limitations—somehow became prerequisite for defining manhood for many Filipino boys. Not all, but many.

My father was a basketball coach for a school in Northern Mindanao where he taught as a young man, and the brood that he eventually raised with my mother was six boys total, and no girls. Sometimes family friends would jokingly point out that he perhaps purposely bred an entire basketball team for him to coach. I must admit that my relationship with my father—which was partly estranged for a time—had probably colored my view of the game. (He loved watching PBA endlessly.) But truth to tell, my father never forced me or my brothers to play (and a significant number of us are quite tall for the average Filipino male!). But because of what I’ve posted on X, I have been getting so many responses detailing intense parental or familial pressure—usually from elder male relatives—to play the game to prove their manhood, and eventually courting disappointment when they failed.

In my case, it was the men in all the neighborhoods I grew up in that somehow signaled to me that to participate in this fandom or to play the game was the only way I could get into their brotherhood. And like what I’d written, my schoolmates also did the same in varying degrees. It was not always overt. It can be very subtle. I somehow learned to read from social cues what was expected of me, and proving my “straight malehood” through basketball was certainly up there. (Given that I was a closeted boy who did not want to be found out added to the tension.)

And it’s not just the boys, it’s the girls, too. One response I got was from a woman who truly loved to play basketball, but when she was a student in a Catholic girls school, she and her schoolmates were forbidden by the nuns to play the game lest they turn into lesbians! Our culture has definitely coded sports in gendered ways for so long, and we don’t even question why. Basketball as a code for “straight malehood” can be insidious in the way it expresses itself. You will get snickers and you will hear the whispers of people “confirming your sexuality” just by how you take to the game. One such response I got on X was from a man who told me this story: that as a boy he was aware he was being tested by friends regarding his sexuality when they asked him to name two of his favorite NBA teams. He replied: “Boston and Celtics!” Alas, he didn’t know that those two were one and the same team—and so he invariably outed himself because of that response.

Another person told me that a new male employee at the company he worked in casually asked him to describe himself in terms of positions in a basketball game—whether he was a point guard, or a shooting guard, or whatnot—and he knew that the question was loaded to test him whether he was “man enough” to know what basketball was. When he couldn’t answer, he heard the co-worker later whisper to others: “Bakla nga!”

The same trajectory happened to another man who responded: “I was a senior in high school, there was a party, and my friends wanted to play basketball after dinner, but kulang ng isang player yung isang team. Kinukulit ako ng buong tropa so I had to pretend like I was f*cking asleep just to get them off my back. I heard one whisper: ‘Bakla nga.’”

Another one told of a time he and other gay boys in his high school class were grouped together as one basketball team by their P.E. teacher—and the fact that they actually played a good game did not matter, because they were really teamed together to be the butt of jokes running through the game. The hoots and jeers and laughs they had to contend with at their display of flamboyance and effeminacy while running around a basketball court were humiliating—but they endured. That P.E. teacher was being cruel—but I doubt anyone had the temerity to call him out. He was just being a man of the culture.

Others still remember being told that “sayang yung height mo,” just because they did not want to play. Another respondent recalled that a P.E. teacher coerced him into joining the basketball team because of his height, and then proudly announcing to his mother that he had consequently “saved the boy” from being seen as “gay” by other people.

Others have had opportunities denied them simply because of the basketball they were required to play in school. The journalist Ryan Edward Chua [who is now out] recalled: “I hated basketball so much and the shame and humiliation that came with not being able to play it. Once in grade school P.E., we had to play basketball for our final exam. I refused to join and chose to get a failing mark.”

Why this common disdain by many gay men for the sport? It is not the fear of “balls hitting them,” although many people have suggested that to be the case. In high school, I may have hated basketball but I loved soccer and volleyball. I wasn’t scared of balls coming my way and hitting me. So many other gay men attest to this, so it really is something else about basketball that bothers them—and the only answer I can muster is how coded it is with toxic and performative masculinity. It is that machismo that we reject, not really the game itself. The same machismo that has largely been violent to men like me who could not pass the ephemeral standards of manhood, like the mere liking of basketball.

So yes, basketball is coded as a “masculine” and “heterosexual” sport in our culture. And so is boxing. Volleyball and gymnastics, on the other, are somehow considered feminine sports. So if you were male, and you played these last two sports, you were definitely rendered sexually suspicious. (Remember all that old gossip about Carlos Yulo being gay?) The ridiculousness of these assumptions are titanic.


Like so many others, when Carlos Yulo won his first gold medal in gymnastics, I felt so much of me moved by an intensity of feelings. I cried when he cried on the sidelines when the final scores were tallied and announced. I could feel the weight of the mountain of expectations set on his shoulders—and the mountain of his personal frustrations as well—somehow melt in his utter disbelief at his win, but also in his eyes somehow a glimmer of vindication of what he could do and set out to do despite all the setbacks. In a sense, at that moment, I projected my own life and frustrations and hopes to his spectacular win, and it felt good to know that somehow we are always capable of overcoming the most monstrous of our challenges when we face it.

Later, when I had time to think more about the impact of Caloy’s win, I found it sufficiently validating that the gold medals we have won so far at the Olympics were won by athletes who defied the stupid gendered preoccupations of sports. Hidilyn Diaz, a woman, won a gold medal in weightlifting—which is taken as a male sport by most of us. And Carlos Yulo, a man, won two gold medals in artistic gymnastics—which is considered a female sport by most of us as well. I love the irony, and it’s a very telling rebuke to our outdated sexual politics. But will Filipinos learn from this realization? I can only hope so.

But the power of seeing Caloy clutching his gold medals is tremendous, and I hope it will have good repercussions in the way we view sports. The power of a winning image cannot be discounted. Many Filipinos saw on television and on the Internet Carlos Yulo powering through those gymnastics moves, and win, and I hope that that is enough for many to change their mindset about what kind of sports is good for them or for their kids, regardless of the gendered way we think about it. (It helps that Caloy is being celebrated now, especially financially. Sometimes that helps. I remember a time when careers were heavily gendered—for example, being a nurse for many decades before in the Philippines was considered only as a career for women. That changed eventually in the 1980s and 1990s when widespread economic difficulties forced many Filipinos to seek greener pastures abroad, and one sure way to do that was to be a nurse. Suddenly we had a flood of men suddenly taking up nursing. And now we don’t even blink twice anymore when we encounter a male nurse. It has become commonplace.)

So Caloy’s win can be a watershed moment in how Filipinos view gender in sports. Children, especially at a certain innocent age, are not usually mindful of the politics of sexuality and gender in everything; they just do what they want to do—although eventually, when they grow older, they do get socially conditioned to think of things in a certain way, with all the biases from adults and from the culture eventually absorbed and ingrained. So if these children will want to pursue certain sports that’s not part of their gender expectations, I hope their parents have become enlightened enough—because of Caloy and Hidilyn—to let them pursue these. And I hope their localities will have the sufficient facilities to meet their athletic needs. The children with dreams will always be there. Let’s hope their parents and their communities can be there for them as well. And let’s hope we will have moved on from gendering sports unnecessarily, and from having more ligas shoved down our throats.

Labels: gender, issues, life, memories, olympics, queer, sports

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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Saturday, July 27, 2024

4:17 PM | July's Most Hated

If you’re keeping count and are chronically online, socialite Cat Arambulo-Antonio’s merry excursion through the floods that has recently engulfed Manila is probably the third incident that has caused much Internet pile-up this July. This is not including the usual disdain we regularly dish out for our elected officials—including the Vice President’s ill-advised and quick-as-lightning departure for Germany in the throes of Typhoon Carina, which begged the question: was the trip for a “medical emergency,” or a Taylor Swift concert? All the while, the capital drowns in another devastating flood that has not seen any reprieve in the hundred years or so we’ve been a modern republic.

And in the immediate aftermath of that flood, we get a now-deleted TikTok video where Ms. Arambulo-Antonio films herself and her family, safe in the warmth and safety of their car as the vehicle wades through the murk. They look around and witness the flood, and she makes light of it by indulging her children’s imagination of the whole thing as a kind of thrill park ride, discusses making a “floaty,” and wondering aloud: “Safe kaya mag-floaty dyan, yaya?”—in a register so tone-deaf, it enraged almost everyone who saw that TikTok.



On the one hand, you cannot fault the socialite for what is perhaps her genuine thrill and wonderment at comprehending such a flood with her children, and indulging their imaginative takes. On the other hand, what transpired is a perfect example of how the privileged can be so tone-deaf to the devastations facing a country, marking once more the inevitable truth of our vast social divides. The truism is that the elites of this country simply live in a different world compared to the rest of us—which is why they cannot be bothered to see for real the depths of the problems that face us. Many online commenters were quick to draw a parallel to the Oscar-winning Korean film Parasite, specifically noting the scene where the rich wife rides at the back of her chauffeured car and talking to a friend on the phone about how wonderfully blue the sky was because of the heavy rain that happened the night before. Unbeknownst to her, her chauffeur, who is listening in with a tired face, had just gone through hell with his family, the rain having flooded out their basement home. In that immediate parallel, Parasite was savage in its messaging about how the rich and the poor truly live worlds apart—even if they share the same patch of earth. Ms. Arambulo-Antonio’s excursion through the flood was the real life version of that Parasite scene—and the Internet bit back. But this wasn’t Ms. Arambulo-Antonio’s first time at this rodeo: right at the very start of the pandemic, in March 2020, she was roundly castigated online for calling quarantine violators “motherfuckers,” and wondering aloud why they couldn’t just stay at home. She filmed herself saying this while enjoying her lavish garden at home—and the online world hit back by saying those “quarantine violators” did not have her privilege and luxury of surviving the lockdown, and they had to go out simply because they had to find ways to live. She subsequently apologized, and vanished from our consciousness—only to be vilified once more for this new flood video.

I cannot help but wonder: maybe she should just stop filming herself?

What is this TikTok mentality that has become a disease for many of us? I know academically the answers of course—but the actual demonstration of this need to document ourselves in our panopticon of a world girded with social media is really something else. We are so inured to this predisposition to film or post everything we do online that we have lost the ability to distinguish what is right or wrong. We have become blind. Everything has been flattened to “content,” to engender likes and views, that we often post things without realizing they will show us in the most unflattering light. Do you remember that person who posted on Facebook about wanting to buy bread at a certain store, and then upon finding that it was unmanned [the staff had to take a CR break], proceeded to take what she wanted, and posted on Facebook a promise to pay the vendor? Her intention for her post was to call out the vendor for leaving the store unmanned, and probably felt the public would recognize that and sympathize with her. But the Internet clapped back by telling her that what she did was actually theft.

Do you remember that theatregoer who wanted to demonize Lea Salonga for not being gracious in her reception of their visit to her dressing room, and posted about it online—only to be widely castigated for invading her much-needed privacy, and for dropping names to gain unwarranted access to backstage?

This is what I mean by blindness to what is right or wrong—as long as we are able to post about it online. Right around the beginning of July, in the aftermath of San Juan City’s Wattah Wattah Festival of June 24, a video of a certain Boy Dila—real name Lexter Castro—surfaced. He had filmed himself pranking passersby by dousing them heavily with water, all in the name of local tradition. The prankster in the video was clearly delighted in his misdeeds—the mischief in his eyes sparkled, the devil-may-care sneer taunted. He was showing off for content—and even when all of the Internet came after him, he was defiant, absolutely glowing in his newfound notoriety. Days later, taken into police custody, he would sport a different face, of course: broken, reprimanded, lost.



But there is also another side to this: the relentless online lynch mob that happens to people like Castro, or Arambulo-Antonio. In Castro’s case, the boy and his family received a flood of death threats. The online mob also castigated him with choice punishments—including inundating his address with food orders and packages amounting to thousands of pesos his family clearly could not pay.

This has become so much a part of our contemporary reality that we know have a term for this: “online public shaming” or OPS, which political philosophers Guy Aitchison and Saladin Meckled-Garcia have described as “a form of norm enforcement that involves collectively imposing reputational costs on a person for having a certain kind of moral character.”

Which brings me to a moral quandary: in online public shaming, whose sins are bigger? The original offender, or the lynch mob that calls for their total reputational annihilation? I have no answers.

This brings me to the latest object of online public shaming: the writer and host Jude Bacalso of Cebu City. Everyone by now knows the details of the scandalous story. On July 21 around 6 PM, according to original Facebook poster John Calderon, Bacalso—who identifies as a transgendered woman—had retaliated against a waiter in a restaurant in Ayala Center Cebu, simply because the staff had called Bacalso “sir.” According to Calderon, Bacalso made the waiter stand in front of him for two hours, caused distressed among the rest of the staff, and snidely deflected all efforts by Calderon and his mother to find out what exactly happened. By the time Calderon intervened, the waiter was in tears and Bacalso had left the premises.



The optics were not good. A person of privilege terrorizing a member of the working class. What’s worse: there were photos and videos taken of the standoff, with Bacalso seated firmly while the waiter stood in front of him, the very picture of class dynamics at play. Words are one thing; incriminating images are totally another thing—and the Internet went wild with memes, some funny, some approaching gutter sensibility.

Bacalso soon after released a statement signifying that communication has been established with the restaurant owners and that the matter has been settled. She also pointed out misconceptions in Calderon’s original post, but also voiced out an apology: “I … realized that in the impassioned pursuit of my advocacy, I could have done with a little measure of kindness, sadly quite absent in the ruckus this has all unnecessarily created when it was made public without our knowledge.” She has remained silent since then. But in the hours and days that followed, the whole of the country, and not just Cebu, became an online lynch mob, even celebrities imparted their own two cents, from Ogie Diaz to MJ Lastimosa to Rosanna Roces, who called Bacalso “ugly.” Some, like KaladKaren, were more measured: “Oftentimes, people don’t mean to offend you,” KaladKaren wrote on Facebook. “Nalilito lang talaga sila. Tinawag kang ma’am or sir because they want to show respect. If you don’t agree with how you are addressed, it is up to you to correct it. If you show them respect, respeto din ang ibabalik sa iyo. Pero syempre, may iba rin naman talagang gustong mambastos at ibang usapan na iyon… Sadly, not everybody is 100% aware of how to use the right pronouns. As members of the community, I believe it is our responsibility to educate others about this. We have to let them understand the importance of using the right pronouns for every SOGIE. But educate properly. People commit mistakes; I do too.”

A dummy account was soon set up, impersonating a ravaged Bacalso calling out everyone spitefully for their attempts at her persecution. An FB events page was also set up to “schedule,” at the very restaurant the incident happened, the canonization of Bacalso as a “saint.” Videos of people singing variations of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” sprang everywhere, the lyrics detailing their condemnation. In Paris, someone visited Disneyland and filmed themselves calling a mascot dressed as the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, “Sir Jude.” In fact, “sir” became the byword for the lynch mob. The word repeated ad infinitum became the most popular comment made on Bacalso’s Facebook page and elsewhere.

Bacalso’s reputation, of course, is the foremost target. Suddenly, all that she has worked is at stake. She is a multi-hyphenate: a molecular biologist, a teacher, a radio and TV broadcaster, a stage actress, a writer, and a very popular host. She also runs a restaurant named Executive Restobar in Lahug. Most of these occupations rest on good reputation—thus the question now becomes: will Bacalso survive this? I’ve been the object of online lynch mobs twice in recent years: once in the early years of the Duterte regime, and once in the aftermath of the 2022 elections. All that I did in my life did not matter at all for the lynch mob. So I know what it feels like to be diminished. In the eyes of the mob, everything you have achieved in life does not matter at all.

But as a gay man myself, I was also horrified by the unleashing of such virulent homophobia and transphobia online—some even coming from my own friends, and some even coming from other gay men I know. What Bacalso did felt very much like a variation of the Streisand Effect, which Wikipedia defines as “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information.” (The effect is named for Barbra Streisand who attempted in 2003 to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, which was taken to document coastal erosion in California, citing privacy issues. But her desire to hide photos of her house instead made these even more popular and widely disseminated.) Here, in Bacalso’s case, we find her trying to educate people she encounters about trans issues (specifically in addressing her with what she considers as the proper gendered terms), but she has instead singlehandedly created a massive anti-trans movement among Filipinos instead. Truth, the bigotry was probably always there for sure, but hidden. But she awakened it.

On a personal level, I’ve had my own encounter with Bacalso. We share a lot of common friends. We were introduced once, and I remember her just looking me at me, down and up, and then pretending I wasn’t there. I took that like water off a duck’s back, because I thought: “You can’t expect everyone to like you”—and her not liking me did not at all affect my life in any significant way. Later on, in the aftermath of July 21, there would be more stories unleashed about how Bacalso have treated a variety of people in the most “hampas lupa” way—and that’s when I decided that what was going on, especially at the very core of it, was beyond gender issue or class issue: it was about being a good human being.

Be kind.

Try to be good.

Be self-aware.

But above all, also remember that being a good human being also entails not being a transphobe or a homophobe. Just because somebody is an asshole doesn’t give you an excuse to be an asshole yourself.

Labels: internet, issues, people, psychology

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Tuesday, June 06, 2023

7:00 PM | Amen.

Labels: AI, art, artists, issues

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Sunday, August 29, 2021

3:00 AM | A Letter to the Writers of the World from Afghan Writer Homeira Qaderi

I'm sharing this open letter from Afghan writer and fellow International Writing Program [IWP] alumnus Homeira Qaderi, who writes about what's happening in Afghanistan right now...


Greetings, friends,

My name is Homeira Qaderi, and I am the author, most recently, of Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son. I met some of you in the International Writing Program, and I know others through your writings. I live in Kabul these bloody days, where as a writer, woman, and mother I see my people being pushed around by the Taliban. We are trapped in a war that was imposed on us: a proxy war in the Global War on Terror, but also a proxy war promoted by our neighboring countries. When the Taliban came to power in 1995, Afghanistan was ravaged by civil war, and then the spirit of our people was destroyed by the Taliban imposing draconian and obsolete laws. The world remained indifferent to our fate, believing it was still a civil war. But the Taliban’s embrace of terror posed a danger to the world, as the events of 9/11 made clear.

I want to say the war on terror does not belong to Afghans alone. This is a war that must be waged by the world. If Afghanistan loses, then the security of the world will be endangered.

Everyone has a weapon in this war. Mine is my pen. This is the pen with which I am writing to ask you, the writers of the world, to be my pen. Our displaced children are sleeping these days on dirt roads, our women give birth in the streets, our old men and women have no way to escape and thus either die in their homes or are killed in the streets where they huddle with thousands of other internal refugees. The catastrophe has reached its peak. We are nearing a painful end.

Please talk about this tragedy in your media. Do not leave Afghan women and children alone.

Please do not forget this human tragedy.


Homeira Qaderi

Kabul, Afghanistan



Iowa Now

Homeira Qaderi is the author of six books, including the novel Silver Kabul River Girl, published in Iran in 2009 to widespread critical acclaim. An activist for women’s rights and currently a Senior Advisor to the Minister of Labor, Social Affairs, Martyrs and Disabled, she teaches at the University of Kabul. She was a fall resident of the IWP in 2015.

Labels: afghanistan, iowa international writers program, issues, writers

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Thursday, August 05, 2021

9:11 PM | Today's Random Thoughts

[1] An American missionary in Calvary Chapel [my former church] seems to be a COVID conspiracy theorist, and MAGA to boot. [Sigh.] How is this guy a “missionary”? [Worse: some people I know like his posts regularly.]

[2] Meanwhile.

[3] Dear God, my poor country. The chaotic scene at SM San Lazaro in Manila early this morning, as people ran to secure vaccine slots. The system is so broken, so heartbreaking.



[Video by Anthony Llegue Norcio]

[4] I hate feeling like a spy, but when I see establishments breaking COVID protocol, I report. Even my favorite establishments, I report. I am concerned about COVID above all. The staff usually gets reprimanded when these things get reported. Which is why I feel guilty — but it also feels like a barbed necessity. Because I know a lot of these staff people, and they’re nice. But they’re also steeped in a cultural fix that makes them timid in front of intimidating and demanding customers they see as “important,” especially foreigners. There are class issues at play here.

[5] The Olympic athletes this year have been so amazing and inspiring. [Except you, Novak Djokovic.]

[6] Listening to opera singer Zofia Kilanowicz sing “Symfonia piesni zalosnych” from Henryk Górecki’s ̄Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 while on Ritalin rush is absolute mental orgasm.



[7] The s.o. and I:

Labels: cats, church, classical music, coronavirus, issues, life, love, music, olympics, sports

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Tuesday, July 27, 2021

4:47 PM | Random Thoughts on Hidilyn Diaz's Win

[1] From “Oust Duterte matrix suspect” to “Congratulations, Hidilyn, the entire Filipino nation is proud of you” in two years. What a flex.

[2] Gratifying to hear the “Lupang Hinirang” while the Chinese flag flew second place.

[3] Filipino women always do the heavy lifting around here. So, go Golda Benjamin! And vote for Leni Robredo!

[4] In a sporting event like an Olympics where participation and support is heavily political, you cannot suddenly erase the political from Hidilyn Diaz’s win just for ... vibe’s sake. Hides brought it up herself in her very first post-medal ceremony interview with Gretchen Ho -- which was poetic justice since both of them were ensnared in that “matrix” kagaguhan in 2019.

Labels: dumaguete, issues, life, olympics, philippine history, politics, sports, women

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Friday, July 23, 2021

10:46 AM | Sad

Had to block a beloved former teacher on FB today. They once taught me the value of asking questions, delving deep, and trying to be comprehensive in our reportage — but perhaps in their anger at current issues, they’ve asked me to abandon the journalistic principles they’d once espoused in my effort to do narrative reportage. I don’t blame them, but incivility in comments [accusing me of being “bayaran” for interviewing the principal figure in the issue] is something I can only take so much. For their sake and mine, unfriending is perhaps the only recourse.

Labels: dumaguete, issues, journalism, life, social media, teaching, writing

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Thursday, July 22, 2021

12:25 PM | Statement on the Reclamation Project from Concerned Writers and Artists of Dumaguete

We, the concerned artists and writers in Dumaguete City, stand against the railroading of the 174-hectare reclamation project. An undertaking of this magnitude—one that can cause irreversible and catastrophic damage to interconnected ecosystems—should not only undergo public scrutiny, but careful and thorough deliberations from experts across different sectors as well.

We stand with fisherfolks whose livelihoods rely on what the seas have to offer and whose work provides the daily sustenance of several communities in the city.

We stand with those in coastal communities whose homes are now threatened by private encroachment.

We stand with environmentalists, marine biologists and scientists—those who tirelessly study and conserve marine biodiversity; those who have worked so hard to rehabilitate and protect Dumaguete’s coastal features; those who do the thankless job of educating us now about the complex entanglements of such delicate ecosystems.

We stand with residents of Dumaguete who now face yet another wave of gentrification and displacement—for who else would be able to afford the skyrocketing property value and increased cost of living once these condos and malls are built?

We stand with policy-makers who say yes to development but not at the expense of the environment.

We stand with lawyers and law practitioners who use their expertise to unpack and explain in detail the potentially exploitative nature of the JVA—something that the elected officers should have done for their constituents, even before agreeing to it.

We stand with the students, youth groups and young professionals in Dumaguete who went all the way to organize a massive show of opposition; to let their voices be heard since they are the ones who will inherit the problems created by this generation.

We stand with Bughaw, the lone pygmy blue whale who sometimes lingers off the coast of Dumaguete, and all marine lives who also call the waters of Negros their home.

There is more to development than just sci-fi utopian aesthetics. The future that we should be aiming for is one that is sustainable and climate-resilient; a future that is inclusive and equitable. Lest we forget, environmental protection is vital to a successful economic development.

Art does not exist in a vacuum—it is grounded and informed by the socio-political struggles of our time. As such, we strive to commit in illuminating, critiquing and challenging injustices that impact our society and immediate community. We call on fellow artists, writers and cultural workers to register your dissent and speak up against the 174 Reclamation Project.

SIGNATORIES:

Xteve Abanto, visual artist [new]
Edlyn Abrio, visual artist
Bea Bianca Acas, theatre artist
Annabelle Adriano, writer
Michael Angelo Alano, cultural worker
Stanley Alcala, filmmaker
Merlie Alunan, writer
Andrew Alvarez, filmmaker and musician
Cesar Ruiz Aquino, writer [new]
Kristoffer Ardeña, visual artist
Simon Anton Diego Baena, writer
Andy Bais, theatre artist
Bea Banzuela, photographer
Lendz Barinque, writer and filmmaker
Theodore Boborol, filmmaker
Luigi Borromeo, photographer
Raffy Cabristante, songwriter [new]
Urich Calumpang, photographer
Zhel Calumpang, visual artist
Hersley-Ven Casero, photographer and visual artist
Ian Rosales Casocot, writer
Ramon Adonis Catacutan, visual artist
Kenneth Catipay, theatre artist
Dyck Cediño, visual artist
Nikki Cimafranca, theatre artist
Elsa Victoria Coscolluela, writer [new]

Labels: artists, dumaguete, issues, writers

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Sunday, July 18, 2021

7:53 PM | Notes on a Growing City, Part 3: Development and What We Know

It’s important to listen. Development [and everything else] in a community falls flat on its face when “listening” does not occur and when the culture of the place is not taken in due consideration.

I will try to illustrate this crucial element of culture with two examples.

It’s important to note that management for most of the divisions of Robinsons Dumaguete [the grocery, the movie theaters, etc.] remains elsewhere—Bacolod, in particular. They hired locals to man the most immediate areas of supervision, but major decisions were executed somewhere else. [This includes what movies got shown on the three screens they had!] Still, when Rob opened, we welcomed its presence in our midst—like an oddball suddenly marking its arrival in a community that regarded it with a mixture of bemusement and a desire to see a “mall” [how cute!] become successful in the context of Dumaguete.

I remember walking in on opening day—and was gutted with an immense and immediate sense of disappointment, which I later learned was shared by so many other people. This is it? we all shook our heads. Mao ra ni sya? The cavernous two-story space was just a simple L-shaped thing—usa ka tuyok, humana na. That alone did not bode well for Dumagueteños from the start; we felt insulted and patronized by a langyaw’s underwhelming offering. Coming from three centuries of Spanish neglect in favor of Cebu, Iloilo, and Bacolod, we were [and still are] nursing a grudge. In a previous installment of this series, I discussed the notorious pickiness of Dumaguete people—and the mall was a disappointment in that regard right from the get-go. But still, local businesses were game enough to welcome it, opening satellite stalls and branches inside the mall, essentially replicating the business landscape of the city in the microcosm of the new shopping place. (Within a year, most would close down those branches.)

And contrary to popular belief, the mall did not displace local businesses—the city itself in its smallness was already a kind of a strip mall, and certainly more accessible, and “not far.” This proved consequential for some stores: National Bookstore had a thriving branch in Portal West along Silliman Avenue—but abandoned it in favor of a spot in Robinsons. Foot traffic dropped.

What does this say about the Dumagueteño? That we love our “downtown”—and our thriving concept of it lies within the space of the Spanish colonial tradition of “encircle and protect,” which was naming the streets surrounding and threading through the poblacion after saints [e.g. Calle Santa Cecilia (old name of Silliman Avenue), Calle San Jose, Calle San Juan, Calle Sta. Catalina, and Calle Sta. Rosa] and after Spanish rulers and personalities [e.g. Calle Alfonso XIII (old name of Perdices Street), Calle Maria Christina, Calle Colon (old name of Cong. Lorenzo G. Teves Street), Calle Cervantes (old name of Mayor Joe Pro Teves Street), and Calle Real (old name of the national highway now known as Veterans Avenue and Mayor Ramon Pastor Teves Street)—although some streets retained their original descriptive names [e.g. Calle Marina (old name of Rizal Avenue)]. Beyond this space of “encircle and protect” are the “nether regions” of Dumaguete—which is why, even until the 2000s, many places like Bantayan, Daro, Piapi, Motong, Calindagan, Banilad, Pulangtubig, and many others remained in the minds of many locals as being “too far.” Certainly, Robinsons Place in Calindagan was “too far.”

But the parking story is even more representative about “development without listening or taking note of local culture.” A few days after Robinsonsplace opened, management banned motorcycles from their parking lots, insisting that these were reserved only for four-wheeled vehicles, with the thinking that “motorcycle parking was messy.”

The mall management asked people with motorcycles to park along the street or in nearby empty lots—which was a complete misreading of Dumaguete culture. Dumaguete, at least at that time, meant motorcycles. For many years, we were even given the moniker of “Motorcycle Capital of the Philippines.” The ill-advised mall policy was an inconvenience for a population that went around in motorcycles, and not cars. So while the mall parking lot remained mostly empty, the byways of nearby streets were choked with motorcycle parking. And then, several weeks later, the foot traffic in the new mall dropped precipitously—and management scrambled to address this, one of which was to reverse their earlier policy of banning motorcycles from their parking lots.

“By then,” biologist Richard Pavia remembered, “people were already fed up—and realized Rob was not the ‘mall of malls’ that it was promised. It was also too far from the city center, and was in reality an ‘epithelial mall’—meaning it occupies a large area, but the stores are only along the inner periphery. In my honest opinion, going to the mall was not worth the trip. Their parking policy already showed they did not do their research on Dumaguete culture.”


There was also the case of Frontrow Entertainment bringing the controversial play M Butterfly to Dumaguete in 2019. By and large, it was a successful staging in terms of enthusiastic public response—but it was the first time a theatre company dared put on a production that lasted for several days in succession on a Dumaguete stage, including matinees. Considering the capacity of the Luce Auditorium, the ambitious staging required patronage [e.g., ticket sales] that had to go beyond Silliman University, which co-sponsored it, and even beyond Dumaguete—possibly enticing audiences from the nearby towns and even the nearby provinces.

This required marketing of such precision.

And the production’s marketing staff, flown in from Manila, did their work—but mostly patterned their techniques on how things were done in bigger cities, like Manila or Cebu, one of which was holding a press conference.

Dumaguete locals who do events know this by heart: press conferences do not really work in Dumaguete. They only work in two specific contexts: beauty pageants and politicians making revelations about a policy or a controversy; and sometimes a restaurant opening—but even this is not a guarantee that something will be written about it for print or broadcast. When a press conference was scheduled for the M Butterfly cast and creative staff in Robinsons a day or two before the premiere of the play, nobody came. “But we contacted the media ourselves!” the marketing staff told us. And I remember thinking: If only you asked us if this was feasible.

Another case of langyaw who do not do their research on Dumaguete culture.


In the proper categorization of heritage items, this type of culture is what we call “secret knowledge” which is under the category of “intangible culture.” Intangible culture is defined by the UNESCO as the practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill consisting of nonphysical intellectual wealth. This includes local languages, folk beliefs and superstitions, festivals, rituals, songs and musical compositions, dances, local technologies, local sports and games, literary arts, culinary arts, local jokes, local healing arts, and of course, secret knowledge.

What is “secret knowledge”? It is difficult to define, but perfectly easy to demonstrate. It’s essentially the knowledge of the practical variety that is shared by many in a cultural community that everyone subscribes to and believes in, without it being properly defined or delineated in studies or books. These are things “we just know,” and pass on to the next generation through sheer osmosis.

In Dumaguete, for example, we “just know” that we demand our goods to be cheap but without sacrificing high quality. A dish in a restaurant that costs more than P150 is already “very expensive.” [KRI famously built a thriving restaurant culture by starting off with all the dishes in its menu not costing more than P99. When chef Ritchie Armogenia was asked by visitors from Manila why he priced his dishes so low, he answered: “You don’t know Dumaguete.”]

Other things:

We “just know” that Bantayan is “far,” and the barangays traversed by Larena Drive are “bukid na man na.”

We “just know” that if you’re downtown and you want to catch a tricycle going to Piapi, you will have to flag one down at the corner of Union Drug, if you come from Lee Super Plaza, or at the corner near Jo’s Chicken Inato, if you come from Portal West.

We “just know” that when we tell tricycle drivers we want to go to Orchids or Bricks or Golden Rule, they know exactly where we want to go, even if these are currently non-existent landmarks.

We “just know” that pedicabs and tricycles are one and the same—although they’re really not. [A pedicab is technically something you “pedal,” like a put-put—but we don’t really care.]

We “just know” that the remedy for fevers is Mirinda Tru-Orange with raw egg thrown in for good measure.

We “just know” that “L” differentiates us from the Binisaya of more powerful centers of culture in the region, especially Cebu—and we relish that “L” in our pronunciation of things.

We “just know” that restaurants along the Rizal Boulevard are for tourists and expats, and if you want the real Dumaguete deal, you had to go restaurants somewhere else visitors would not know about—like Qyosko, or Hayahay [although this one is increasingly becoming known], or Manang Siony’s.

We “just know” there is a huge community of expats in our midst, which we tend to ignore—and are surprised when our visitors are themselves “surprised” to see “so many foreigners” in Dumaguete.

We “just know” that when it comes to doing things, it can be a fine balance of pleasing the four major universities in town. [“Pang-Silliman ra man na,” “Pang-Foundation ra man na,” etc.—and the loyalties can run deep, and can even spill over to strange contentiousness.]

We “just know” that even though Siquijor is a completely separate province, it’s still part of our landscape of what “home” means—even among Siquijodnons themselves.

There are so many other kinds of secret knowledge only people who have stayed in Dumaguete for years and years would come to know in all their strange nuances.

But above all, we “just know” that central to our identity as Dumagueteños is the easy access to both sea and mountain. Straddled between Bohol Sea to the east and Cuernos de Negros to the west, Dumaguete worships the icons of both: the Rizal Boulevard is our temple to the sea [and the frame to our idea of sunrise], and our regular hikes to Mount Talinis is our pilgrimage to the mountain gods. To attempt to destroy both, even in small ways, is a stake through the very heart of what “we know” about being Dumagueteño.

When the Philippine National Oil Company [PNOC, now the Energy Development Corporation or EDC] attempted to encroach in 2003 on the natural bounty of the Lake Balinsasayao Natural Park—which is essentially the colorful front door of Cuernos de Negros—for the reason of “geothermal exploration,” which required cutting more than half of the area’s forest cover, we rose in arms and protested, and we won.

We already protested an earlier attempt at reclamation by the Philippine Port Authority of the sea off the Rizal Boulevard in 2007—and we also won. Now that another, and more pervasive, reclamation project is underway, there’s no denying the vehemence of the opposition. It’s essentially sacrilege, and this partly explains the anger towards the plan.

In our hearts, this “Smart City” reclamation is perfectly anti-Dumaguete, given what we know about ourselves and our community. This is an unsolicited proposal from another langyaw which somehow gained traction among the powers that be, and this feels very much like an invasion into the heart of ourselves.

I shall continue this essay in another installment.

Labels: culture, dumaguete, environment, issues, small town living

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5:39 PM | Hinay-Hinay

Maghinay-hinay ra ko, please. I’ve already written 5,500 words on the subject pero grabe ka kulang gihapon, mao nang nahimo syang series. I’m slowly putting in pieces for a wide-ranging analysis nga kaya nako. In Part 1, I began by using cultural context and history. In Part 2, I’m trying to put in various examples of public works projects throughout history, with different purposes and different outcomes — with a bit of personal confessions. Wala pa gyud ko kaabot sa reclamation itself. I’m taking my time because I am realizing the issue is sooo complex — not just environmental and economic, but also cultural and political, including new inputs like an unbelievable Chinese incursion behind the scenes, the powerful opposition from so many groups even including the BTS Army, a specific entry of a particular urban planner I cannot mention, etc. I’ve always believed in journalism that takes a stand, but arriving at it by not seeing things in black and white, by being able to see the nuances, and by being able to connect all the widespread dots. Ganahan ko maka-answer sa “why,” a question that’s often left out in journalism. Ngano mang isog kaayo ta sa plano? [Pero naa pud uban nga sige’g “Change is essential to progress.” Tinuod ba?] Ngano mang na-entertain man ni ni Ipe nga plano? Unsa sa Dumaguete og sa pagka-Dumagueteño naka-resulta aning isyuha? Kapoy baya, pero feeling nako kinahanglan.

Labels: dumaguete, issues, journalism, life, writing

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Sunday, June 07, 2020

11:33 PM | F*cking Up Local Journalism

The latest episode of Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj on Netflix—about the gradual death of local newspapers [reasons: Facebook and Google are sucking up all ad revenues, and private equity firms are bleeding them dry] and the quick spread of lies and fake news through social media [e.g., that horrid Plandemic documentary]—is so enlightening and depressing at the same time.

Labels: issues, journalism, television

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Saturday, March 21, 2020

1:40 AM | On Taking Down Mocha Uson Blog

I thought of it as social media “people power,” and granted it's not a black and white issue, and granted it can be viewed as a kind of undemocratic cyber bullying. [This is a nuance about democracy that a lot of strongmen actually manipulate. Also ironic: cyber bullying the person who has the patent on cyber bullying?] But I also thought back to some of my own questions about instances in history when fascism took root, and we asked, “Why didn't the people do something?” Well, as of Friday night, we did one thing at least. To quote Karl Popper: “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”

Labels: democracy, issues, politics, social media

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Wednesday, October 11, 2017

1:28 AM | Dove and Race

The clips we got in our social media feeds were actually cropped, incomplete -- edited to be race-baity. The white woman actually eventually turned into an Asian woman, and so on and so forth, suggesting a theme of fluidity more than anything else. Context changes perception. It's still a campaign that should have been rethought before execution, but the complete story should give us pause. The quick outrage that followed may have harmed more than helped our fight for POC concerns. In this age of click-baits and fake news, it is always wise to verify and research everything, even things that preach to our kind of choir.



Read Lola Ogunyemi's op-ed piece for The Guardian: "I am the woman in the 'racist Dove ad'. I am not a victim."

Labels: advertising, issues, media, race

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Tuesday, October 03, 2017

9:00 PM | A History of Gun Violence

“Who cares if Kim Jong-un gets a nuke? Nukes don’t kill people, people kill people.... See how fucking stupid that sounds?”

~ Bob Cunningham

Labels: issues

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Friday, September 22, 2017

11:38 AM | Art to Disturb, Art to Move

There are three things that have slowly become apparent as we live out the current days with their quotidian tremors that often signal—at least to those people who are sensitive to them—an unending arrival of apocalypse:

First, that Jean-Paul Sartre and Darren Aronofsky are right: hell is other people.

Second, that Hannah Arendt is right: the great cover of evil is banality.

And third, that Umberto Eco is right: a very good way to fight evil in the world is to persist in writing about it.

Evil is a curious thing. We tend to think of it as a dreadful embodiment of metaphysical darkness—a demonic possession, for example, or the bloody body count of serial killers, or the social havoc that is unleashed in the wake of psychopaths. In these instances, often graphically illustrated by the purveyors of our popular culture through movies and books, evil as a thing is banished to the realm of fantasy. It has become a malevolence that lurks mostly in the fringes of our imagination. We can be screening The Exorcist on our laptop screens, for example, cowering from its perfectly modulated jump scares—but we can just as easily turn the whole thing off, and then proceed to draw the curtains of our closed-off rooms, and suddenly the daylight of the “real” comes crashing in, saving us from a further sense of dread. Real evil, alas, is not so easily pigeonholed, and doesn’t usually come with bells and whistles.

What is often missing in the simplistic consideration of evil is the real thing that lurks in the human heart which, once in a while, jumps into abominable turns of history that allowed Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Marcos, and many of others of their ilk to happen.

Hitler impassioned many Germans—who were understandably feeling defeated by the ruinous end of the First World War—and he did so with his dreams of National Socialism. He triggered with it another great war, as well as the systematic elimination of “undesirable people” through a program we now call the Holocaust. (For Hitler, it was just called the “Final Solution.”)

Stalin built on the communist ideals of Lenin before him—but soon realized that a “revolution” ceased to be a revolution when it had no enemies to fight, and so he unleashed a never-ending search for “counter-revolutionaries” that ended up as several cycles of murderous purges in Russia, sparing no one.

Pol Pot dreamed of a return to a pure peasant society for Cambodia, and unleashed a program he called “Year Zero,” which soon systematically brutalized his people through years of making them toil in the so-called “killing fields.”

Mao dreamed of an empowered China and ushered in a plan he called “The Great Leap Forward,” a catastrophic program that led to 18 to 46 million dead Chinese—perhaps the greatest genocide in history.

Marcos dreamed of a “New Society,” and armed it to the teeth with martial rule.

What is often amazing to consider in these experiments in terror is that they were often carried out at the behest and in the name of those that these dictators ruled. “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country,” Pol Pot once said. All the others felt the same way, too. In many cases, these despots often unleashed their worst tendencies with the approval of many. Hitler was beloved in Germany, and his policies—obviously wrong and evil in retrospect—resonated with the German masses. In their eyes, Nazism was a chance for Germany to become great again, and Hitler could do no wrong. Today, we ask a question that cannot be truly answered: how could so many be deceived? How could so many give tacit permission for atrocities to happen? And the answer may be this: human nature. Jean Renoir perfectly sums it up with this line in his film The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” Which makes Sartre right. Hell is other people—especially those people who have learned not to see anymore the moral imperatives of decent living.

I made this observation not too long ago: “When the bodies started piling up a few days ago in what appeared to be a growing rage for vigilantism, emboldened by a strongman’s battle cry for a war on drugs, the manner of the deaths and the manner of the disposal horrified me—as they should any right-minded human being. The anonymity of the hits. The crude fact of packaging tape sometimes covering the corpses, mummifying them in despairing positions. The cardboard signs that declare the dead a criminal—‘Pusher, ‘wag tularan,’ ‘Snatcher, ‘wag tularan,’ etc.—justifying the murder. Inside, I scream: ‘What happened to due process?’ These days those two words—bedrocks of a functioning democracy—are being laughed at. And I could not understand how people could shrug off the sinister implications.

“There has been a quiet acceptance by almost everyone of these things happening. And also waves of violent mocking by a mob if you issue dissent.

“It is not an entirely new thing. A sense of history would attest that these things have happened before, in exactly the same manner, give or take a culturally specific difference. I am going to use right now the most frightful of historical correlations. Because now I totally get what life was like for ordinary Germans in Nazi Germany, especially in the contentious pre-war decade. You see, seeing and reading about the horrors of World War II—in particular, the unbelievable death machine of the Holocaust—I used to ask myself: How come nobody did anything? Why were ordinary Germans so quiet, so passively (or aggressively) supportive of the programs of Hitler’s regime? Couldn’t a civilized people recognize a evil in their midst?”

That acceptance, that silence make evil the most ordinary thing in the world. All these murders have become so ordinary, we are not even moved by every new reportage anymore. We have learned to shrug away all these things, and we have even learned to make excuses for them. “Para sa bayan ‘to,” some of us have learned to say, without the slightest hint of irony—and thus Arendt is right: evil can become so banal.

Our ultimate hope lies in a suggestion Eco once proposed, especially for those facing a moral crisis in a society that is slowly embracing evil as a necessity: “To survive, we must tell stories.”

That was the imperative I went when I decided to put The Kill List Chronicles in June 2016, ostensibly to collect and archive the many literary works that started appearing, all of them protesting the new culture of impunity in the Philippines. In my introductory essay to that archive, I wrote: “Many Filipino writers…have slowly come out of the shadows of overwhelming public approval of the ongoing purge, to register dissent, to call for a process of justice that also respects human life and dignity, to strive for a country that recognizes that indeed crime must pay but this must be done in the only way that makes our democracy a functioning one. Anything else is a form of fascism.

“The rise of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency, and his unorthodox methods of dealing with some of the country’s problems has currently inspired — if that is the right word at all — a few of our writers to take to the literary to express their grief and their horror, all in all registering a dissent that is still forming, that has yet to be studied. Some of the works take their cue from the bloody reports from television news and broadsheets. Some from the unexpected deaths — the new ‘collateral damage’ — of friends and people they know….

“This…is an attempt to archive the new literature of protest that is now beginning to be written. Only the future can tell how this literature, as a prospective tool for change, can impact what is going on at present. Protest literature are almost always considered only in the aftermath; perhaps this project can change that, and can demonstrate, once and for all, the power of literature as a social tool.”

One of the many writers who responded to that call was Carljoe Javier, who started to churn out little stories to document, in fiction, various scenarios, which would have been paranoid fantasies only a few months ago, but now have become painfully realistic.



Those stories together have become the first short story collection about the EJKs, a folio titled Cardboard Justice.

He started out with a poem titled “Cardboard Villanelle,” which rendered to playful lyricism the realization of growing horror at the status quo. Not satisfied with that, he turned to the essay—and produced “#PosiblengAdik,” a short rumination about the vicious randomness of the killings, where he makes this plea: that drug addicts and drug users—which are not the same things—must be seen as human who are capable of rehabilitation. He uses his own life as evidence of that, and writes: “We want to protect ourselves, protect our families. But every single time I see one of these people who are dead, I think, that could’ve been me. If I made different decisions in my life, I could have turned out that way. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to go to school, I can imagine being driven to do whatever it takes.”

That sentiment becomes the very theme that animates the short stories that quickly followed, each one suddenly pieces of a whole that gave us a sad geography of injustice.

“At the Door” shows us a young musician answering the frenetic knocks of raiding policemen, bent on arresting—or even killing—him, even though he has cleaned up his act for some time now. That doesn’t matter to the raiders. His name is on “the list,” and that was enough for police to harass him. That same dynamics—the fear of “the list”—puts the two characters of “On the List” in an existential crisis. Should they answer the summons or not? All the alternatives prove ultimately deadly.

“Past Buendia” follows a man on an innocent leisurely stroll in an old neighborhood—and gets mistaken for a pusher, and nearly dies because of that mistake.

“In the Street” underlines the innocence that has become compromised in the new culture of impunity: a group of young girls—a barkada—decide to have a food trip in Maginhawa Street in Quezon City, and they become witness to an actual extrajudicial killing. Their confrontation with the killer in the end marks the very end of their innocence—and signal a world that has gone absolutely upside-down. That blooms to paranoia, eventually—which becomes the focus of “At the Hood,” where a group of friends—formerly a rock band—consider attending the funeral of one of their members. But attendance at what cost? One of them demures—“It’s like those movies where people go to a funeral of a mob boss, and so there are cops all over taking picture of everyone go goes to the funeral. Then they use those photos to track down the people who went”—painting once and for all the compromises of a new age of paranoia.

“In an Uber” takes that paranoia and makes it the center point of conflict in what should be a normal social interaction between strangers: an Uber driver and his passenger. One approves of the killings, the other does not. Tension mounts.

And in “Nagda-drama Lang,” Javier chooses to occupy the consciousness of the bereaved—a woman cradling the dead body of her lover gunned down on the streets. It is inspired by a real life incident that became an iconic piece of photojournalism—a measure of grief that President Duterte later dismissed as “nagda-drama lang.” Which finally underlines the unemotional inhumanity behind all of these.

Why does Javier continue to write stories like this? They couldn’t possibly be a hoot to write; these sad stories only immerse us—the writer and the reader—in a flood of despair that seems, for the moment, unstoppable.

I think the answer is this: our anger has to be sustained, although that itself is an undertaking fraught with difficulty. How does one sustain anger? It is often easier to give up, and then to spout out such lines of “wisdom” like: “People deserve the politicians they vote for.” It is so much easier to surrender to the prevailing darkness—much like the Germans did at the height of Nazism, or Filipinos in the first five years of Martial Law. Protest and the literature that advocates it are not something that is embraced or favored by many people especially in the immediate aftermath of disastrous things. We are often told to “shut up”—and just embrace the status quo.

Nonetheless, we write.

In his recent visit to the Philippines, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa made it perfectly clear that reading and writing are subversive acts: “Dictators [and] dictatorships are right in being suspicious of this kind of activity, because I think this activity develops in societies a critical spirit about the world as it is,” he said.

And its effects are not in the immediately apparent; it is in the cumulative.

So Carljoe Javier and others like him write on, because we must survive. Because we must document and dramatize the unspeakable. Because the future demands it. Because when good finally triumphs over evil—as it always does—it needs to see where its seeds began, and it might as well begin in the stories we chose to tell today.


What dark place Carljoe Javier had wrought Cardboard Justice from is something I am familiar with. I was invited to write for Rogue Magazine late last year: it was for a personal evaluation of the year that was—2016—and what had been, by and large, a tumultuous and ugly time. The spate of EJKs had exploded and divided the country, among other issues, exposing the unbelievable horror that people were actually capable for cheering for more blood.

I remembered F. Sionil Jose’s old reminder: “Art does not develop in a vacuum. The artist’s first responsibility is not just to his art, but to his society as well.” So in that Rogue article, I had posed the following sentiment, taking note of my responsibilities as a creative writer: “But when was being silent being part of the solution, ever, in history? And am in the wrong for calling for justice and for asking for equality? Should we stay quiet because the world has gone mad? Must the mob win? I ask myself: what is the role of the writer in times of crisis? Should I be spineless? When you live in horror, shouldn’t you fight the bogeyman?”

I haven’t been silent—and I have used what art I know to chronicle the nuances of these disturbing times. As I have previously mentioned, I put up a literary blog last year—I called it the Kill List Chronicles—which has become an attempt to archive the new literature of protest that is now beginning to be written. I wrote about it: “Only the future can tell how this literature, as a prospective tool for change, can impact what is going on at present. Protest literature is almost always considered only in the aftermath; perhaps this project can change that, and can demonstrate, once and for all, the power of literature as a social tool.”

Since then I have received, and archived, hundreds of poems, essays, short stories, and one-act plays that have tried to provide insight, or have struggled to define these bloody times—mostly from amateur writers, but also a significant number from some of the brightest names in Philippine literature, including Krip Yuson, Marne Kilates, Carljoe Javier, Luisa Igloria, Dean Francis Alfar, Daryll Delgado, Miguel Syjuco, Floy Quintos, and so many others.

I’ve written two horror stories for the effort, both articulating the horror of EJKs in a fantastical realm that finally didn’t seem so farfetch. And as we have seen, it has also led Carljoe to come out with what is perhaps the first short story collection about the EJKs, Cardboard Justice, and Miyako Izabel to come out with its poetry equivalent. When I judged the Palanca for the short story in English, two entries immediately stood out as gripping responses to the times—John Bengan’s “Disguise,” which won first prize, and Katrina Guiang Gomez’s “Misericordia,” which won second.

Let’s do a quick sampling of artistic responses to the national malaise. Nerisa del Carmen Guevara has done a performance piece titled “Elegy 5: Wake.” Jam Pascual has done spoken word poetry titled “Bloody Sunday.” Gary Granada has come up with a song titled “Pordbida!” Adolfo Alix Jr. has done a feature-length film titled Madilim Ang Gabi, and Bor Ocampo a short film titled, of course, “EJK.” Liza Magtoto has written a musical titled A Game of Trolls for PETA.

I am fascinated, however, with what visual artists have come up with to make sense of the madness—and we don’t have a lack of such artists coming up with works both subtle and visceral all over the country.

In Dumaguete, there’s Einstein Schwartz Gaspar Maulad whose miniature and morbid piece titled “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” does not mince intentions with its slap of the painfully ironic. It caused a bit of a stir when it was unveiled, together with the works of other Silliman Fine Arts students, last August. Here, what you basically get is a contraption that’s laid out as a kind of elongated balikbayan box, or perhaps a gift, accompanied by a label that recalls immediately the official tagline of Philippine tourism. Upon opening the box, you get a surprise: the shape of a dead body wrapped up in masking tape, bloody drips everywhere, bearing a sign that reads, “Drug pusher ako, wa’g tularan,” recalling instantly the EJKs we have come to breathe as the new reality of this carnage republic.



It’s not a subtle piece, nor is it meant to be. This is what accounts for its greatness: the forcefulness of its message that straddles the border of irony and sincerity—which is perhaps the best response to the murderous chaos this postmodern world has come to be.

And then there’s Nicky de la Peña whose Predicaments exhibit only last February continues to haunt me. I cannot stop thinking of the works in that exhibit, how appropriate they are material-wise, how uncannily conceived to be both a reflection of the headlines and as a shock to our complacencies. How simple they are in the final analysis, but also how fraught with undeniable power.











Each work—a painting? a sketch?—is set on cardboard pieces of several varieties. There’s a pizza box, for example. (“The choice of materials is vital [because …] carton boxes [have been] used for the well-known ‘adik ako, huwag tularan’ signs [we have seen],” Mr. de la Peña explains.) And on each haphazard piece, upon the uneven brown surface of the unlikely canvas, we see bodies drawn in various states of black-and-white deadness—the faces all unseen, all becoming inconvenient ghosts most people today are removed from and do not think as an affront to the freedom they are enjoying.

The works ask you: do these anonymous bodies deserve their fate? Why?

Mr. de la Peña writes in his artistic statement of his inspiration and his process: “The issue of textrajudicial killings in the Philippines has attracted international concerns. Some countries strongly criticize the current administration while some have [given] solid support, especially from the East and South-east Asian region. Opinions [are] divided into right or wrong, between justifiable actions and pure immorality. This division of perspectives is the issue [that] my works depict.”













But to add to the hauntedness of his pieces, he used his own body as the subject of the reenactments of the various crime scene. According to him, it raises questions about what is right or wrong, or framed up or guilty, or what exactly accounts for just another collateral casualty. He continues: “Those people who don’t know me are more likely to justify the death, for they have no background of [who I am]. [My family and friends who do know me, however, will seek query.] These questions are important to me because people nowadays are quick to place judgment with inadequate comprehension of the situation, [often] turning a blind eye to justify their own opinion. With the current crisis involving the Philippine National Police…, these questions need to sink into the [minds] of every Filipino now more than ever.”

His art, like most protest art now being produced in the Age of Duterte, provokes us with this question: to what extent can you dehumanize someone to accept their murders as something completely deserved?

Can the news headlines remain impersonal to us? Can we remain unmoved?

It reminds of this passage from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, where a society so much like ours slowly finds itself descending into misogynist dystopia:

“We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

The art we do now in the name of protest is to negate those “blank white spaces at the edges of print,” and “the gaps between the stories.”

They are meant to disturb, to make people think. They are finally meant to move.

Labels: art and culture, artists, EJKs, issues, literature, painting, philippine cinema, philippine culture, philippine history, philippine literature, protest art, writers, writing

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Sunday, January 01, 2017

10:00 PM | The Ladies of Kayod and Rampa

When Babyruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen (2016) [trailer here] was announced Best Picture of the lot of eight at the tail-end of the 2016 Metro Manila Film Festival, I thought without hesitation: “Good for the MMFF. The film deserves the honor.”

There is something immensely satisfying in the acknowledgment of that accolade — like it was something long-time in coming — given how its inclusion in the 2016 slate created so much furor among industry people, most of whom found it being a documentary an irritating aberration that should have been grounds for exclusion.

It does mark a first in that regard: in the history of the festival, which was founded as the Metropolitan Film Festival in 1975, no documentary has ever been considered as a contender. That Sunday Beauty Queen won felt like history coming full circle all at once. That it also won considering that it was the one film in the whole festival that struggled the most in getting itself seen — only a few theaters outside of Manila dared screen it — felt like divine justice for those who had been championing it, who believed in its merits and the importance of its story.

For me, it felt like a decade-long corrective: its win comes exactly ten years after Enteng Kabisote 3: Okay Ka Fairy Ko ... The Legend Goes On and On and On was proclaimed Best Picture in 2006, the festival’s most embarrassing low point. Its win is a mark for great change still to come; it is also a clarion call for battles still to be waged ahead. (But of course. Bad taste does take time to overhaul, and it does have its own high priests. Consider, for example, the Manny Castañeda debacle.)

But here I speak too much of the film in the context of the MMFF’s long troubled history. Does it work as a film, and is it any good? It took me a long time to write this review. I saw the film four days ago, and I felt I had to allow it to settle in my head. Not that it was too complex to understand, or even too cerebral to feel: in these two considerations, Sunday Beauty Queen wins by being a film that is easily digestible and also easily felt. There are scenes aplenty in the film that provoke instant welling up of tears — the scene of someone talking about counting airplanes through the kitchen window, the telephone conversation about someone’s unexpected death, the scene at the halfway house.

And the structure of the story is easy enough to comprehend — Ms. Villarama’s camera simply follows several Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong as they struggle for six days of every week to manage the households of their “amos,” some under the scrutiny of cruel employers, and then on Sunday, on their day-off, they prepare to join an annual beauty pageant.

I think the film successfully sells itself as a very human story by allowing its cameras to linger and explore with so much intimacy the lives of the people whose stories we are following. After the film’s immediate opening at one edition of the annual beauty pageant — after the beautiful gowns have been paraded and after the crown and sash have been awarded — we are immediately plunged into the women’s every day reality. In the chaos of Hong Kong traffic, they transform to become the reverse of the Cinderella story: they trek back to the condominiums and apartment buildings of their employers, trying so hard to beat curfew, and in the next six days we see them toil with mop, broomstick, vacuum cleaner, and apron.

Often the film takes us deeper into the dirt-cleaning and babysitting by allowing its subjects to address us through talking head interviews, where they are allowed to explain, to reminisce, to ponder their place in the story of the country they have left behind. Why am I here and why am I not home? Why am I taking care of other people’s children while I have to make myself contented by watching my own child’s graduation through Skype? Why have I allowed myself this debasement by sleeping on the kitchen floor?

Their stories become a reflection of our nation’s frailties and broken promises. We know these stories exist; and yet to be confronted with stark images of these stories in the sweep of cinematic largeness is to feel cowed, and to feel crushed by our country’s seeming indifference. The film thrusts us into an identification with these people in a way we probably have never felt before, simply because cinema is powerful that way: thus their pain becomes our pain, their joys our joys.







And yet while the film does consider the darkness that often blots many domestic helpers’ lives in foreign places (getting abused by cruel employers, getting fired in the middle of the night, feeling the rush about having to get employment within 14 days at the risk of deportation, and so on and so forth), it also becomes a celebration of the hardy lives of these OFWs, and the film rightly marvels at their capacity to stage a “carnival” even in stark circumstances. That’s the Filipino spirit, I think, illustrated so well.

Ms. Villarama chooses to frame their stories in the simple framework of its witty tagline, “Kayod mula Lunes hanggang Sabado, at rampa ‘pag Linggo” (“Work hard from Monday to Saturday, do the catwalk on Sunday”) which I think is ingenious, considering the complexities of these real-life stories, a lot of which are left out in the name of narrative consistency.

Then again, one documentary is really not enough to contain everything, and so this is an editorial decision I can accept even if I feel it could have more in following, just enough, the hidden depths of the tangential issues it does present. For example, why is the Philippine Consulate generally unhelpful in addressing the plight of many domestic helpers in need of assistance? Why is the lesbian angle that is so tantalisingly proffered by the film not really explored? We are never given more than a promising mention of consular indifference, or a teasing shot of two women walking away.

One can explain these away by understanding that the filmmakers may not have wanted it to be too serious in weighing political and gender issues, which might distract from the simpler story of “struggle plus beauty pageants” — but I’m not so sure. One pointed way the film reminds us of a very political problem is by introducing its principals by full names, the number of years of their stay as DHs in Hong Kong, and the most damning of all, the college degrees they have earned back in the Philippines. It is saying our country has done great disservice to its people, reducing college degrees to nothing more than an aberration in a resume destined for servitude. This is never really explored as a problem, only limned at.

Some friends have also likened the film’s structure as being too much like a typical episode of Kapuso Mo, Jessica Soho. “I’ve seen BBC documentaries that have tackled these issues better,” says one.

I don’t really agree with that — but I do think it could have borrowed a cue or two from Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, that great 1991 documentary about Harlem balls staged by gay black men in the very fringes of society’s margins. In that film, their “pageants,” their “voguing” competitions, their practice of “shading” are explained as expressions of a subcultural outrage, as aspirational efforts to counter the fact of their dreams being denied in the reality outside of these balls. Sunday Beauty Queen hints at that promise — it did ask the character of Daddy Leo why he organizes these pageants, and he merely replies with a playful, "Wala lang, feel ko lang" — but proceeds more or less to go the route of regular “poverty porn” storylines without the slums.







But I do think I am expecting a bit too much of Sunday Beauty Queen — and I think I am because the film is so very well-made it could have stood a bit more complexity. Nonetheless, I laughed, I cried, and in the end, I wanted to hug all domestic helpers from Hong Kong coming home for Christmas.

This is a great film every Filipino needs to see.



[The film is not being screened in Dumaguete]


#MMFF2016Revolution

Labels: documentaries, film, issues, MMFF, philippine cinema, review

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