Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
At one of my lowest depths in the days of the pandemic, when I was struggling mentally to just live through each day, I was tasked to teach a writing workshop for [bleep]. This was before I was diagnosed, by the way, and was properly medicated. [Or was this after I was diagnosed, but quit medication for more than a year because I thought I didn’t “really” need it? Who knows.]
But I accepted the challenge of a workshop, because the organizer is a very good friend, and I believed in the project. And the project paid. The thing was, the date of the event did not even sink into my consciousness, nor the brief. I forgot all about it. Eve of the first day, I was reminded by my friend that the whole thing was starting the next morning. Fine, I said. I can wing it. That next day, I realized it was to be a writing class with regional languages in mind. Fine, I can wing it, I thought. I've taught a workshop on writing in Binisaya before, anyway. Then when I was finally facing the participants, I realized that they came from all over the Philippines, and Bisaya would not be the primary language of most of them.
Dear God, I don’t know how I got through those three days just winging it — but I actually did supremely well, and their final activity, which involved a performance of some sort, was actually a highlight of the closing program. We even made a zine of their outputs! But I will never recommend doing the same thing to anyone. I was just lucky I had stock knowledge, and a well-spring of bravado and guts.
Please seek help if you feel like you’re flailing. I finally did a few years ago, and my life has been better because of it. [Although I still mostly wing it with life.]
At the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, I was one of several people commissioned by the Cultural Center of the Philippines to write the obituaries of artists who had passed on between the pandemic years of 2020 and 2023. It was a grim task, but the rationale was noble: to commemorate the lives of these Filipino artists for their contribution to Philippine culture—big or small—in a time when we were surrounded by so much death, and so much uncertainties. I readily said yes to the task, since I had always been a fan of how The New York Times did their obituaries [in fact, one of my favorite documentaries is Obit, directed by Vanessa Gould and released in 2016, which chronicled the work of these writers and the choice of their peculiar genre of writing]. And for some reason, then and now, I have always felt the need to write the obituaries of Filipino writers when they pass on, because I am often frustrated by how meager the writeups about them often are in mainstream media.
Writing those obituaries for the CCP felt like a necessity. By then, I had developed a system of research that enabled me to write a considerable tribute—scraping all corners of the Internet to find information, and approaching willing members of grieving families for a little bit more I cannot find online. [When is their birthday? Where is their birthplace? Where did they study, and what degree did they earn? Questions like that.] Part of the exercise was, of course, verifying the information I’d get—and this was where I usually found myself chuckling. Because, with all due respect to the dead, a number of them do inflate their accomplishments.
I still remember writing one such obituary for a musician. In his bio, he mentioned having studied in the U.S., and tutored by such and such teacher. This is par for the course of musicians. When they release their biodata for writeups in concert programs, they do mention the music schools they studied in, and the music masters they studied under. This gives credibility to their training, especially if those teachers are world-renowned musicians themselves, or their schools are sacred training grounds for music. I took this dead musician’s biodata, and inputted his claims in my prospective writeup—and then came the verification: it turned out the school he mentioned was not a music school but a high school he attended for one year in an exchange program, and the teachers he mentioned were not musicians but his high school music teachers. Far from my immediate assumption of him studying under masters in an incredible music school! I did not include these details in the final obit I made of him. The rest of what he did in the Philippines was enough.
So, yes, there is such a thing as inflating one’s accomplishments.
Over the past year, I caught two news stories—splashed with congratulatory headlines and with such drama on the media outlets they were published in—that are examples of this kind of inflation.
I remember reading about an author being celebrated for the fact that he was being published by Barnes and Noble! It sounded incredible, and to the uninitiated, truly worthy of praise. But I immediately thought: Barnes and Noble is not a publisher, it’s a bookstore, so how could this be? It turned out, the author being extolled had merely released an e-book, and it was being offered for sale on NOOK, Barnes and Noble’s own version of the Kindle. This is not the same as being published by a major publisher.
I remember reading about a visual artist being celebrated for the fact that she was being exhibited at the Louvre Museum in Paris! It sounded incredible, and to the uninitiated, truly enviable. But I immediately thought: the Louvre is not a commercial gallery, it is a repository of fine arts as collected by France, so how could this be? It turned out, the artist was being exhibited at the Carrousel du Louvre, an underground shopping mall that had direct access to the famed museum. This is not the same as being exhibited by the finest fine arts institution in Paris.
This essay was actually occasioned by a tweet from film critic Jason Tan Liwag, who posted on X [formerly Twitter] last February 9: “There's a difference between the Cannes Film Festival and other film festivals simply held in Cannes.” I was intrigued.
It turned out there is a filmmaker that media is currently crowing about, regarding his being “invited” to the Cannes Film Festival—which is truly an honor for any film artist. One headline reads: “How a late-blooming director conquered the international film scene.” The article describes his film as “becoming a finalist at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.”
Nice.
It turned out he was not at all invited by Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux to be part of the main competition, or even in any of Cannes’ official parallel competitions every May, such as the Un Certain Regard or the Directors' Fortnight or the Tous les Cinémas du Mond. But his film actually participated at the Cannes World Film Festival—which is a totally different festival, also held at Cannes every June, with no ties to the official Festival de Cannes. [I also remember another filmmaker crowing about participating in Cannes. It turned out his film was merely hawked at one of those exhibitor markets that are corollary to festivals such as Cannes, and which anyone with a film to sell can join.]
There is a certain species of person who cannot resist the impulse to inflate their accomplishments. You know them. You have seen them. Perhaps you have even, in a moment of weakness, succumbed to this temptation yourself. In faculty lounges, in alumni reunions, in the halcyon corners of cocktail parties, they hold court with grand pronouncements of triumphs often unverifiable. And yet, their audience nods along, some in admiration, others in veiled amusement. The Bisaya word for this is “hambog,” a label so easily affixed to anyone whose self-confidence tips, ever so slightly, into boastfulness. But what compels people to do this? What primal need is satisfied by exaggeration?
Psychologists might tell us that this tendency stems from a deep-seated insecurity. Alfred Adler, that old rival of Freud, would perhaps explain this as a classic case of overcompensation—a defense mechanism meant to mask one’s private feelings of inadequacy. A struggling writer, unpublished but desperate for literary recognition, might inflate the significance of a rejected manuscript by calling it “highly praised” by editors who merely sent a polite rejection letter. A businessman, teetering on the edge of financial ruin, might exaggerate his recent successes to maintain an air of affluence. It is a survival tactic, a way of keeping up appearances, because in a society that equates achievement with worth, to be seen as ordinary is to be invisible.
And yet, there is also something deeper, something almost cultural at play. The Filipino psyche, shaped by centuries of colonial rule and the relentless pursuit of social mobility, is uniquely susceptible to the need for validation. Our histories are punctuated by stories of social climbing—by ilustrados who flaunted their European education, by politicians whose surnames become brands, by socialites who name-drop the hacenderos of old, or by so-called historians who has no published historiography but whose claim to fame is alleged kinship to every single important family in the province. To declare one’s success, even in embellished form, is to assert one’s place in the hierarchy, to ward off the creeping dread of being relegated to irrelevance.
There is, too, the simple seduction of storytelling. The line between truth and embellishment is often blurred, especially in a culture that values wit and oratory. To tell a good story—one that elicits gasps of admiration or knowing chuckles—is often more important than strict adherence to fact. This is why a provincial mayor’s minor government project might be presented as “nationwide reform,” or why an academic’s modest conference paper might be rebranded as “groundbreaking research.” The mythologizing of the self is an art form, honed over years of careful curation. And in the age of social media, where the highlight reel of one’s life is curated for public consumption, the temptation to embellish becomes all the more irresistible.
But what does this do to the people who practice it? If a lie is told often enough, does it not become a kind of truth? There is an inherent danger in believing one’s own exaggerations. To convince oneself that an exaggerated accomplishment is real is to become complacent, to cease striving for genuine achievement. This is why a society that rewards the illusion of success often stagnates. When merit is measured not by substance but by perception, we create a culture of empty accolades, of self-proclaimed experts who have mastered the art of self-promotion but lack the depth of true expertise.
The antidote to this, I think, is a return to quiet competence, to an ethic of humility that values work over recognition. Some of the greatest minds in history have been those who labored in obscurity, more concerned with the quality of their work than with the applause it might garner. The true measure of one’s worth is not found in how loudly one declares one’s success, but in the silent impact one leaves in the wake of genuine accomplishment.
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.
I was getting a haircut today at the barber’s, and I began to appreciate the fact that even at my age my hair was still quite thick. I had no idea I had hair issues until around late December 2020. I just went through COVID-19 [and these were the days before vaccines were a reality]. After recuperation, I felt fine, but deep inside I knew life was changing in a fundamental way I could not even articulate. I began to go through so much psychological distress that I began to lose my hair. I found hair everywhere, in clumps, on my bed, on the floor, in the bathroom. I seriously thought I was going bald by all the hair I was shedding. This went on for months until Renz finally convinced me to seek therapy in May 2021. It was such a huge help, and the hair loss soon stopped.
We were having drinks at Tempat Raya Malaysian Kitchen a few nights ago, and a visiting writer/friend from Laguna dropped by. He had been prowling the streets of Dumaguete all day, looking for places to write and drink—which, according to him, fueled his creativity, and which he needed now because he was in the middle of writing his next novel. “I’m the Charles Bukowski of Philippine literature,” he told us, and we laughed.
“Oh, by the way,” he told me. “I was with this guy earlier tonight, and when I mentioned that I was joining you for a drink and wondered if he could join us, he demurred. ‘Ian hates me,’ he said.”
That sent my mind reeling.
“Can I have his name?” I asked—because the first instinct is to know “why.”
My friend gave me a name but he didn’t know the surname. The person was just somebody he had randomly met that day. I racked my brain for the name, and came up short. I knew no one by that name, or at least not as far as I could remember in that moment.
To say that it unsettled me would be an exaggeration. But it was a grain of irritation that persisted all throughout that night, and when I woke up the next morning, I turned to Facebook and searched for that name. Only one person came up in my search—a name from a very distant past. I sent his profile to my friend over Messenger, and asked, “Is this him?”
“Yes.”
I laughed so hard.
Because I didn’t hate this guy at all. That realization was a relief. But if it wasn’t hate, it was something else: a memory of an awkward one-night stand when I was so much younger—this was in the mid-2000s!—which became a bit too clingy for comfort. So I ghosted him, way before the word “ghosting” was even invented, and thought no more about the person. But hate? No.
Hate is such a visceral word, one I don’t readily use to describe my feelings about other people—and if I have to make an honest accounting of the people I truly hate, I can only come up with three names. One is an artist who once defamed me. Another one is a former communications administrator who had such an uncanny talent for people manipulation. And the last one is an insecure wannabe who has no talent but has all the airs and the pretensions of a fourth-rate social climber. [To be honest, I don’t even really hate the last one. I’m more annoyed than hateful.]
But I will use the word “hate” to describe them because I cannot deny the physiological manifestations in me when I see their faces. I feel a creeping coldness that spreads from my hands to the core of my body, and then there is the sudden breathlessness that occurs. What it feels like is that of time stopping, and my body racing in self-preservation mode even if I am just standing still, pretending that all is right in the world.
I will use the word “hate” because in my darkest fantasies, I see a scenario of them lying by the roadside and in pain, and in my dark imaginings, I go up to them—and kick them instead. I would probably help them up in real life, but in my imagination I am the paragon of cold-heartedness. I know for sure I am not the only one who has this vengeance fantasy, if we must be honest.
Why do we hate?
Using the three people I mentioned above as parameters, I succumb to “hate” because:
[1] I was hurt, and the blow was unexpected. I thought we were friends, and then she defamed me online so thoroughly that the action left me bewildered I actually stopped doing art reviews for more than two years.
[2] I was witness to a horrible instance of inhumanity—because the last time I saw this person do her terrible magic in people manipulation, it was in a boardroom meeting and what she did filled me with such terrible awe that I couldn’t help but tell myself: “I have just seen a demonstration of evil, and I am paralyzed in its presence.” I wasn’t just paralyzed; I was stupefied. I could not believe that I was hearing this woman pronounce lies with so much nonchalance, and that the people around me were nodding their heads.
[3] I was victim of this person’s eternal pettiness, which I know springs from deep insecurity in his part. I probably would not mind him too much, but I would often catch him stealing my work and my research without acknowledging me and passing them off as his own—and then badmouthing me to other people on top of that. But, to be honest, this is more annoyance than hate.
I am annoyed with many people, but I rarely hate.
Hate, as an emotion, is so loaded, you confer it only to people who—in a weird way—truly deserve all that investment of emotion. We cannot bring ourselves to admit hate, because it is difficult. To admit hate is to acknowledge the actions of people we would rather ignore. To admit hate is to acknowledge that we have been moved—at least in a negative way—by them, which is a tacit recognition of their power. To admit hate is to bear a dark badge on our souls, negating the idea of ourselves as good people who manage to stay above the fray.
Which is why when I asked some of my friends about people they have truly hated in their lives—to the point that their blood would boil when they saw the faces of these people—most of them demurred from using the word. A musician friend would rather use the word “immensely dislike.” A psychologist friend would rather use the word “resentment.” A friend who’s a travel advocate would rather use the word “distrust.” My teacher friend, on the other hand, had no compunction over using the word.
My travel advocate friend told me: “There are three people I can think of—but I don’t use the word hate, because I do not want to hate. I extremely dislike them for their attempts to hurt me or my family, so this emotion really stems from distrust. Their intentions to be near me or us will always be hinged on malice. So I do not want to be near them. In fact, I just steer clear of them. I ignore them.”
I asked her to describe that feeling of distrust, and she told me: “When I do see them or when someone mentions their names, my palms get cold, my chest feels tight, and my heart beats faster. Naay mura’g sensation—I would describe it like an electrical current—mag-dagan-dagan sa akong arms, from my hands up to my shoulder and then back down again. But mentally, I feel calm and I know I am capable of doing just about anything if provoked.”
My psychologist friend told me: “There are three people I can think of—but I don’t really hate anyone. I can be angry at someone, I think. Or disappointed. But not hate. Let’s just say, extreme anger or disappointment na lang. But every time I see their posts on social media, saputon ko. Mo-sakit akong tiyan then lami i-syagit. Then I imagine myself telling the person how angry I am at them. It’s deeper than dislike. There are days I really feel resentment—and I think resentment is stronger than hate.”
There was somebody in our shared past who had done so much wrong to my psychologist friend, and also to me. Somebody we used to love immensely, but had become a distant object we never talked about anymore. I asked my psychologist friend about him, and she said: “I was never angry at him. I don’t hate him. I pity him. We knew him that much that we totally understood why he was the way he was. He wasn’t happy at all! There was severe pain and misery behind that famous laughter and charm.” I agreed. I don’t hate him either—although he gave me one of the most intense episodes in my life where I finally had to seek legal counsel. I can admit that what I feel now about him is mostly pity. He was, is, a broken man. I don’t hate him—but I also cannot imagine sharing the same breathing space with him anymore.
My teacher friend told me: “There are three people I can think of, to be honest. In recent years, more and more—and perhaps this is due to age—I’ve come to realize that the intensity of my hatred towards other people has to do more with what they represent and do, rather than for who they are as people. So even if I hate the person for who they are [because they generally are unlikable], the intensity of my hatred toward them is increased because of what they do or represent. Like unfair labor practice, or being a gun rights advocate, or being a Christian homophobe or heterosexist fascist. I really hate people who are actively making themselves insensitive to the plight of ordinary people. For whatever reasons they have, they make me seethe in anger. While I can control this anger in a way that still make me appear respectable, its residual deposits build over time that I can feel its weight, even so lightly, whenever I see or encounter the person again, in the same situation.”
He continued: “But such situation is not only a trigger but is also a magnifier. I especially notice that certain situations intensify my hatred against a person. In my line of work and commitment, for example, a situation might be a CBA negotiation, or a labor arbitration. In such a situation, my hatred against a person is more pronounced and I become more demonstrative of it. My hands become active and animated, and my voice becomes agitated. I am sure my eyes speak loud, too!”
He qualified all of that as a summation of his experience: “At this stage in my life, hatred for me has become more of an indicator of theological, social, and political pathologies. It is an emotion that tells me that I am in a situation of injustice or exploitation or exclusion or oppression. And spiritually, this allows me to feel the situation more deeply and closely. I am attuned to the complaints and cries of those around me. In this sense, this hatred of other people makes me more human and humane. So I embrace it fully.”
My singer friend told me: “There are three people that I can think of—but I don’t hate people man uy, I just extremely dislike,” and then he laughed. He continued: “I dislike people when they are a source of injustice. This is why I extremely dislike many politicians. And I don’t know where this is coming from—and maybe this is coming from my Christian background—but I also somehow believe in redemption. People are human, and they have reasons for doing things. But I do judge people.”
When pressed, he admitted: “Honestly, I used to be really hateful. I was a hateful kid growing up. But there was a turning point for me, especially when I studied psychology. I was in a class on trauma healing, and I asked myself—if ever I will meet the person who killed my father face-to-face, will I be able to forgive? When I was able to really tackle that issue within myself, I started to also hate less generally, and I began to be more understanding of people, I guess. But dili pud ko mag-plinastik. I still do judge people, and I do still feel anger when I see their faces, especially when I associate their faces with injustice. If ever I meet them, I think I would still be civil, and I can still talk to them—but I do judge them.”
I also asked my friends what their reaction had been when they found out that certain people do not, in fact, like them. My travel advocate friend told me: “My first thought is: ‘Why?’ But it does not trouble me. I care very much for all my friends, even my acquaintances. I have trained my mind, and my heart, to set aside na lang those who dislike me.”
My psychologist friend told me: “My first thought is: ‘What did I do?’ When I was younger, I used to ask: ‘What is wrong with me, or what do I lack?’ At this age, I just say: ‘Okay.’ But primary I still assess myself if I did anything wrong to the person—and kung wala, I just acknowledge that’s just how things are. And then I think: ‘Maybe they’re threatened by me.’ Based on my experiences, they lash out because they are unhappy and they need a target for their frustrations.”
This insight on insecurity as source of resentment was also echoed by my singer friend: “This is normal! As artists and as leaders, people will always see our flaws because we are always at the forefront of things. When I started one major music project in Dumaguete, I heard people grumble about me. They raised their eyebrows. They didn’t like me. They didn’t like the way I organized things. They didn’t like the way I performed. But what I did was, I just tried to be nice to them. That whatever they said about me, I was fine with that. And then it turned out, some years later, they also participated in the project I was doing!”
He continued: “There was another instance when, in an artistic group I was part of, I was totally hated by certain people. People cancelled me because of something I did. I started to also dislike, even hate, people. But you know what I did? I genuinely learned to forgive. I was in church in Davao and I was singing ‘The Lord’s Prayer’—and in that part where we sing ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,’ I was crying so hard. And then I learned to forgive those people who had judged me, and it turned out many of them later on became my closest friends now. I hated them—but I gave them a chance to understand my situation, where I was coming from. I think it was because I began to believe in becoming more empathetic, more compassionate, more understanding—and this is really the surest way to end hate.”
“There is one thing I learned from a mentor,” he continued. “That when things go wrong, or when people do not like you or when they question you, there is always dignity in silence. Not only to protect yourself, but also to give yourself time to reflect. You can give yourself time to evaluate your thoughts and your feelings. Why do you not like this person? What can you do to reconcile with this person? What can I learn about them that will change my mind regarding who they are to me?”
I asked him if reconciliation was necessary, and he immediately answered: “No!” and he laughed. “But when possible, make it possible. For inner peace.”
I asked my friends if they could ever forgive the people they … umm, immensely dislike / resent / distrust. My travel advocate friend answered: “Yes, if they apologize.” My psychologist friend answered: “Maybe more like ‘move on’ from them. But forgive? Only when apology is given.” My teacher friend answered: “F***k them. This gives intensity, and clarifies for me the reason why I hate them.”
I, on the other hand, forgive too easily—often to my own detriment.
As with regards being disliked, I can think of two very recent encounters that qualified for me what I have come to understand being an object of “hate” myself. In May, I was the object of a social media firestorm related to the elections. I know that this made me lose acquaintances, even people I thought were close friends. One of the latter in fact publicly posted on her Facebook page: “Go cancel yourself!”—and I thought of all our years of close camaraderie [even family history], and it made me very sad. But I was strangely calm throughout that ordeal, telling friends who were concerned for my welfare [some of them were even offering legal help], that it was all perfectly fine. That we would weather all of that. The calmness felt so grownup. As a meme once put it succinctly: “It’s okay not to be liked by everyone. You don’t even like everyone.”
Not too long ago, I had come to a meeting over lunch at Mister Saigon with a fellow LGBTQ activist who I found myself sparring with online. Over chat, she had accused me of “flexing my patriarchal muscles” when it came to planning Pride Month events last June, and I said equally hurtful things to her as well. But, minutes later, we both calmed down—and we agreed to meet face-to-face the very next day. We poured out our feelings and our frustrations over that lunch, knowing that the contention sprang from miscommunication, and we came away from that meeting feeling reassured about our common goals. But one other person in that meeting also told me this: “There are people in Dumaguete who don’t like working with you, Sir Ian. They don’t like you.”
I remembered my response—which I think echoes what my singer friend also realized: “Being liked is overrated. You don’t get to where you are without people hating or undermining you.” I truly meant it—and I found some form of inner peace when I articulated that. I was finally fine with being disliked! It was such a good realization, especially after spending most of my life doing unbearable people-pleasing—apparently an ADHD trait.
I also remembered what a visual artist friend told me when he visited Dumaguete early in June to attend the opening of MUGNA Gallery in Valencia. He was wary about encountering some artists who were instrumental in him leaving Dumaguete for good and settling to do his studio work somewhere else instead. He hated these people—who counted, among them, the very artist who defamed me. [Apparently, this is not an uncommon situation.] But he stayed on anyway for the opening party. And when we were going home, he told me: “We actually need these people in our lives.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well, if they didn’t make me leave Dumaguete, I wouldn’t have gone on to make a more significant mark in the art world. My anger fuels me.”
I thought about that, and I replied: “You may be on to something there. If that person didn’t defame me, I wouldn’t be writing this much about the Dumaguete art world.”
“We need them. They keep us on our toes. They make me want to succeed even more,” my friend said. “But, nonetheless, f***k them.”
I miss people, my friends, and sometimes I just want to cry. But at the same time I’m anxious over the idea of meeting with them. It’s a strange twist in our lingering pandemic mindset.
5:02 AM |
Nicole Kidman Singing Much-Needed Anxiety Balm for the Soul
I'm anxious as hell for America as it votes for its life. Nicole Kidman singing "Dream A Little Dream" for the title sequence of HBO's The Undoing is the anxiety balm I never thought I'd be happy to have.
I too thought I could weather well the lockdown’s early months. But it got under my skin so thoroughly. Dean Francis Alfar’s story last night for Shorts, and this article by Juju Baluyot for Rappler now tell me I wasn’t alone feeling desperate, at the edge of a breakdown. It has taken an immense effort to rise from all that, which only really waxed for real on my birthday weekend, thanks to the ministrations of the s.o. I found a breakthrough through him—“Just open up and don’t push people away, you can ask for help, you know, you don’t have to do everything alone,” he said during one of my darkest moments—and I’ve made some efforts following his prescription, which also had a weird side effect: it has made me very emotional, and with every catharsis I’d have I’d cry at the drop of a hat.
Why do some people still remain DDS after all these years, especially those who are "Christians" who should know what is right or wrong? I looked for answers. Found some in this 2017 article by psychologist Paul Bloom for The New Yorker, who posits that the "root of cruelty" is actually borne out of a high sense of morality, if misplaced, and one that ultimately seeks to "teach a lesson." He writes:
In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn’t entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force: 'People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ETHICALLY GRATIFYING.' [These actions] often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson.
In other words, these people are not indifferent towards moral distinctions. They're not sociopaths. They just believe they're in the right side of the divide ["if you can only see things our way" is a common DDS refrain]. If you do enough study of genocide, suicide bombings, school shootings, punitive rape, domestic abuse, gang violence, or honor killings, you will almost always come across the perpetrator justifying his or her act in terms of punishment or revenge against the victim. Think of mass shooters or incels gone amok who publish their manifestos online before doing the deed. Think about the Nazis who set-up a string of anti-Semitic laws to justify the Holocaust machine. Think about racists and homophobes who justify hate crime because the victims are "inferior" to them. Think of the DDS who label any dissent as "nanlaban," "adik," "dilawan," "komunista," "anong ambag mo?," "sana ma-rape," "presstitute," "dura lex sed lex," etc., fighting what should be common sense just to hold on to the moral justification of their choice in 2016. And it's not easy to admit you're wrong, even if blood is on your hands.
Their desire will always be "righteous." And with every win -- Delima in jail, Sereno impeached, Rappler hobbled, Maria Ressa found guilty, ABS-CBN locked down -- they smell blood, like sharks, and want more, their sense of being morally right going through the roof. As for the "Christians" I began with? Jesus is the last thing in their minds.
1. “Sometimes, you just have to let people love you, Marilla.” This was the line in the last episode of the first season of Anne with an E, Netflix's adaptation of the beloved children’s classic Anne of Green Gables, that finally did me in: behold, waterworks. The Cuthberts in this episode are in dire financial straits, but Marilla refuses to let people help, which she sees as pity disguised as charity—until Anne spouts this line and changes Marilla’s outlook on things. It touched me. I’ve always had this great suspicion of people daring to love me, you see, perhaps coming from some great unexplored hurt, and ultimately rises within me as a kind of self-defense: “If no one loves me, I won't be hurt.” Which is pretty much why I am so independent in my ways, always skirting the herd, never asking for help. Renz knows this: me asking for help in anything is the last resort I take, arrived at after going through countless detours where I try to just make-do with what I can, on my own. It’s just me being headstrong and proud; it never makes things easier. And so when I finally do ask for help, from friends or family, and help is indeed extended, I am always astonished, like seeing the world in the light of generosity I never knew can exist.
2. The new normal—the world in quarantine because of the coronavirus, with no end in sight—has had most of us reeling with melted hours and indistinguishable days. We sleep, we struggle with sleep, we fret with the news and from the unseen dangers of going outside our doors. We read, we watch movies, we have chilled with Netflix for so long it no longer means “sex.” In the second week of the quarantine, which now feels like ages ago, what got me through the doldrums was all three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Now, in the fourth week of the quarantine, I’ve found Annie with an E. And I think its tenderheartedness and unabashed humanity is just what I need to get through the thickening uncertainty of these dark days. Perhaps I'll watch The Secret Garden next, and then A Little Princess. Who knew that the classics I read in childhood would come back to me to offer comfort? Maybe this is even regression, a fanciful escape to more innocent times—but I don’t mind much: whatever gets me through the day, and still believing in the best of humanity, I’ll take it.
I will always feel the pain and dark anger of the likes of Alex Forrest, Angelique Bouchard … and Rebecca Bunch. But dear God, this episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend [S03E04] goes dark so deeply, so deliciously. The insanity makes sense.
And I wish that in life there’d be a Josh Groban accosting me in the dark to sing something like:
Life is a gradual series of revelations That occur over a period of time It’s not some carefully crafted story It’s a mess and we’re all gonna die. If you saw a movie that was like real life You’d be like, ‘What the hell was that movie about? It was really all over the place.’ Life doesn’t make narrative sense.
Winona Ryder, in an interview with Diane Sawyer for 20/20 in 1999, revealed how it was to be complicit in hiding our deepest pain under a facade of fabulousness: “I used to drive around [Los Angeles] at night listening to music because I couldn’t sleep. [Once] I was driving around, and I was wishing so badly that I had someone to talk to, a friend, someone — and I didn’t. And I saw this magazine stand, and I saw the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine, and it said something like, ‘Winona Ryder, The Luckiest Girl in the World.’ And it broke my heart, because there I was being in so much pain and feeling so confused, and feeling so lost in my life. And I wasn’t allowed to complain because I was ‘so lucky,’ you know, and I was ‘so blessed,’ and I made a lot of money, and my problems weren’t real problems… But the stuff I was going through was difficult… I love the first line of [Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, a book about a girl going through clinical depression, and being institutionalised for it]: ‘People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.’ Which I think is very true.” She produced the film adaptation of the book, she said, to give a voice to people exactly like her.
And yes, to be "interrupted" is "easy."
By 2001, Winona succumbed to the pressure and famously self-sabotaged -- a shoplifting incident that made headline news and ruined her career, but which she, in retrospect today, calls her saving grace.
I remember about six years ago I was looking at my own Facebook timeline, and an odd thought came to me: "I wish I had that life for real." It came unbidden, and I had to laugh -- but it revealed something about social media I think everyone knows at a fundamental level but cannot seem to grasp fully. All our posts are curated: we cherrypick our lives to create a narrative we want the world to believe about ourselves. IT IS NOT BAD, but it's also not good if we come to compare our days with the curated posts of our online friends. They aren't always at the beach. They aren't always chasing beautiful sunsets. They aren't always having dinners with fabulous friends. They aren't always gazing romantically at their beloved's eyes. You don't see the long and frustrating commute alone, or the rainy days, or the betrayals of an old friend, or the vicious fight with the significant other. [The ones who air their dirty laundry online is another story.] Realizing this does bring a measure of relief, no? But it's a realization that's hard to sustain. We have been culturally programmed to think of photos as being truthful, and immediate. And so even though we know they are curated, seeing the visual representations of friends' social media selves make the old pangs of rabid comparison rise up again. That adventurous trip through Argentina, those beautiful flexed biceps from gym workouts, that fun Broadway show -- why am I here browsing Facebook in my pajamas in a bedroom that needs cleaning now? Why am I writing this, at midnight? I'm really not sure, hahaha.
Every year since 2010, I've devoted the month of October to watching horror movies of all kinds, from slasher films to psychological thrillers to haunted house movies, from the classic to the contemporary. (Except torture porn. I draw the line there.) This year, I've decided to do "Women in Peril" as a theme. It is an intirguing subgenre of horror, and I intend to catch a full range of its varieties. I'll try to stay away from the "final girl" trope, however. So, no Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween for me. If you have any suggestions, drop me a line in the comments.
[5] Here is a documentary that runs like an unconventional horror movie of the true crime variety -- with a coda in the end that horrifies and curdles the senses for its depiction of the desperate reach we sometimes have to do to grasp the “closure” we think we deserve. It springs from a murder that has now become almost mythological -- partly sociological parable and partly urban legend.
In 1964, a young woman by the name of Kitty Genovese came home from her work as manager in a neighbourhood bar in Queens, New York when she was accosted by a man named Winston Moseley. She is our woman in peril for this series. Moseley knifed her in the open air, along the quiet sidewalk only a corner way from her apartment. Her terrified screams for help alerted several people in the neighbourhood, and she frightened her assailant just enough that he immediately walked away. Bloodied, she carried on slowly towards the front door of her apartment building -- only to find that the assailant had come back to rape her and finally finish her off. According to the newspaper accounts at that time, with the venerable New York Times leading the charge in reporting, about 38 people heard her scream and watched her die, and did nothing, most of them reporting later on the same mantra: “I didn’t want to get involved.”
The news story proved a sensation, spurred people into action, and seized the wider cultural imagination: it has since given birth to the term “bystander syndrome,” which describes the apathy of people in stopping a crime they’re witnessing, and also allowed the installation of the 911 system of calling the police.
But James D. Solomon’s The Witness (2015) is more than just mere true crime sensational retelling. For me, at its basic level, the film is a thorough and powerful examination of the subconscious biases we bring and even nurture in order to tell the stories we need to tell. Its title then is a perfect capsule of its [unintended?] theme: we are only witnesses to the truth we are comfortable with, and from that springs our versions of the tale.
Ostensibly, the documentary follows the investigations of Kitty Genovese’s younger brother Bill, who was closest to his sister and was a very young boy when she was murdered. Now much older, legless, and ambling around in a wheelchair, he feels a consuming need to find out what exactly happened that fateful night on March 13, 1964. Did 38 people really turn away as his sister was being assaulted? What explains this psychologically? All his life, this murder and this knowledge of what was now being called “bystander syndrome” have singularly defined every choice he has made -- including signing up for the Marines at the height of the Vietnam War. In a culture where young men like him were finding ways to shirk from the war, he had volunteered -- because he didn’t want to become one of those “38.”
And yet the questions remained, and his family was not much help either: Kitty’s death also murdered her memory within the family itself, with most of its members having since refused to talk about her, preferring instead the comfortable silence. Perfectly understandable, given that the murder totally devastated everyone, leading soon to the deaths by stroke of Kitty’s mother and then father. As a much-younger niece recounts in the film: “I first read about the story in my high school class. I was deep into reading it when I finally realised it was actually about my aunt.”
Thus begins Bill’s decades-long investigation: first, he pursued leads and compiled the names of the 38 witnesses, and interviewed those willing to meet with him. Many of them had since died, complicating the filling out of the narrative, but for some of those who are still alive, a significant detail soon comes out from their telling of what they remember: some of the witnesses actually did try to help, and some actually called the police.
The first version of the story then is the newspaper version, as well as the prosecutor’s version: that 38 saw and did not help.
But now a second version comes out: only a very few of the 38 saw the assault, most only heard screams, and almost all did not know a murder was being committed.
Bill tracks down the legendary journalist Abe Rosenthal, who was City Editor of the Times who had given the green light to publish what was now clearly erroneous reporting. The third version of the story now emerges. In hindsight, for Rosenthal, the details of the report were flawed and not entirely factual, but he insists on the “power” of the story: it is now a story discussed in classes, in books, in films. Its implications have become important sociological theory which has in turn done much good, including the implementation of 911 and the better policing of tough neighbourhoods.
But for other critics, there is a fourth version of the story, a shadow narrative of Rosenthal’s insistent one: Kitty’s murder and the 38 have became a metaphor for “big city indifference,” for the soullessness of metropolitan living. It transformed New York into a dangerous place of the imagination.
The inconsistencies in the original reporting leads Bill to find out that his sister was not a “bar maid” as reported, but actually the bar manager -- and then he stumbles on Kitty’s secret life as a lesbian. He tracks down an old lover, and from her he gets his fifth version of the story: about young women in the closet in 1960s America, and the perils of having to identify the body of a murdered secret lover.
Further in his investigation, Bill finds his interest slowly leading to the murderer himself. Upon arrest on an unrelated case of robbery, Winston Moseley had confessed to police about an earlier murder of another woman, and later on also the murder of Kitty Genovese, which was brought about apparently by another psychopathic hankering to randomly kill another woman. That’s the sixth version of the story: the original confession of the killer.
The seventh version came some years later: in an earlier bid for parole [since denied], Moseley wrote an editorial for the Times where he proclaimed himself reformed, and now ready to become “an asset to society.” This is no longer the story of Kitty Genovese but the story of a poor man who had lost his way, and now was ready to make amends to the world.
Bill approaches prison authorities to arrange a meeting with the convicted murderer. Later on he learns that Moseley has denied the request, feeling that the media has already “exploited” him much too much for a good number of years; being filmed in conversation for a documentary with the brother of the woman he had killed was not something he wanted to do.
Undaunted, Bill seeks out Moseley’s grown-up son, now apparently a minister. The conversation that happens is fraught with tension, and here an eighth version of the story comes out: the son obliquely accuses Bill Genovese of belonging to an Italian crime family [not true], and tells him that his father Winston had suggested that Kitty had been killed because she had verbally attacked him, calling him racist epithets, and he had snapped.
Later, learning that Bill had talked to his son, Winston finally writes him from prison, and in the letter, a ninth version of the story comes out: Winston now claims he never killed Kitty, that he was just the getaway driver for the true murderer who had warned him never to tell the real story.
Bill Genovese responds with what for me is the truest line in the documentary: “It’s kind of like the human condition,” he wearily tells his wife who read the letter with him. “One believes their own bullshit in evolving stories.”
Now fully cognisant of the fact that he can never really truly get to the truth, he turns to one device that makes the film a perfect real-life turn for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: he stages a “reenactment” of the crime in the very neighbourhood his sister was killed. He requests a friend, a young woman, to go to the Kew Gardens neighbourhood with him, and in the exact locations of the unfolding of that 1964 murder, he instructs her to do the exact same screams.
From the opposite side of the road, Bill becomes the titular witness -- the young woman follows Kitty’s haunted footsteps, how she had walked from the nearby parking lot where Kitty had parked her car, on to the sidewalk where she first encountered the shadowy form of Winston Moseley, on to the first screams she made upon being knifed, on to the pained walk she struggled through as she sought her apartment building door after the assailant had run away, on to the second screams she made when she found out he had come back to finish her off. The screams curdle as the night wears on.
Are we witnessing catharsis for Bill? Did the reenactment give him the closure he needed? The tenth and final version of the story, after all, is the personal legacy of that night, and it involved him: in not wanting to become one of the “38,” he had gone to Vietnam, and in the middle of the hell of that senseless war, he became seriously injured and he lost his legs.
In the end, he confesses to the futility of his obsession to find out the truth of that night. There is no truth, only versions of the “truth,” and every witness has a bias to skew it for a story that best fits them.
And so, in the light of the tumult in our ongoing political tribulation that seems to have no end, we must remember that we have accused everyone of bias -- particularly the media. Is media biased? Of course it is; to tell a good story it can sell. But then so is everyone, including you. We all trumpet the story we want to hear because we love the smell of our own bullshit.
And everything in the world, in fact, is bullshit.
I think it's very much like shopping and a denial of buyer's remorse.
"I swear this shirt is cool. I didn't actually really notice these prints were animal prints -- but you know, be an environmentalist and stuff, right?"
"It's not that tight. [Catches breath.]"
"Let's just say na lang this pair of pants will motivate me to go to gym. It's, ummm, cool."
"The children who made this sweater in that Cambodian sweatshop are at least earning for their family. You know."
I've come to realise this: let people wear what they want to wear. But do Instagram it, and make that your Throwback Thursday years from now.
I wish some Pinoy filmmaker would take a cue from that bloody wish fulfilment in that final movie theatre scene in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, and do to the Marcoses what Tarantino did to Hitler. It would feel sooooo good. I'd be watching that, and I'd be grinning like shit. (Pero hanggang movies lang, ha.)
When you study popular culture, you learn that movies, books, etc. can be, as Soledad Reyes once said of komiks, "a release of deeply suppressed emotions—such as anger, hostility, and hatred—without inflicting damage to society." She goes on to say that the komiks [and I think most of popular culture] can be "a site where the battle between good and evil are played out systematically with the forces of light eventually gaining victory over the forces of darkness." I'm pondering on these because I'm trying to understand the spike in real-life bloodlust by many Filipinos. And it dawns on me that in Filipino cinema, the action movie is virtually extinct, and we are in fact inundated by mostly bad romantic comedies not just in film, but also in television and Wattpad. Is this why we're acting out, because the violent fantasies of our id have not been sated by the Pinoy popular culture we currently devour?
It is easy, even tempting, to dismiss the dread—a thick, growing mucus of it—as symptomatic of paranoia. Human nature is wonderful, but also perfectly naïve, that way. In Greek mythology, Cassandra refused Apollo’s gift of prophecy, which he was giving her in a bid for seduction. Scorned, the god spat into Cassandra’s mouth, inflicting her with a curse that nobody would ever believe any of what she prophesied. She did foresee the destruction of Troy, and warned its citizens about the Greeks hiding inside the Trojan Horse. And she saw the tragedies befalling everyone else around her.
But no one believed her.
History is ripe with Cassandras. The same fervent disbelief has churned in various permutations over the decades: “Hitler will not dare invade Poland.” “Senator McCarthy is just looking out for us because there are communists everywhere.” “Oh, come on, the science is not decisive about the link between cancer and smoking.” “Marcos could not possibly suspend the writ of habeas corpus.” “Climate change is not real.” And so on and so forth. Confronted with prophecies of darkness, the human tendency is to dismiss the warning, and to embrace the comforts of denial. The warnings, they’d say, are just a little too much on the paranoid side. But then again, to quote Joseph Heller in Catch-22: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
In one of the panels at the International Conference of Philippine Studies held in Dumaguete last week, the scholar Oscar Campomanes made this remark that struck me as stark in its truthfulness: “History is the only discipline that matters.” He was right. An educated consciousness of what came before—and the learning that must stem from that—is the only way we could better inform the actions we take. George Santayana, of course, has given a version of this line, which has since passed into cliché: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Alas it is a cliché that has never quite gotten into our skull thickened by denial.
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?
Actually, psychology has an answer: human beings are hard-wired to accept (and even participate in) evil, and be obedient—as long as there is an authority figure giving us a blanket permission to go ahead. The Milgram Experiment in 1963 proved that. The Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 proved that.
We are the new Milgram experiment. We are the new Stanford Prison experiment. And for those who resist, you soon become aware that while you kind of know “what’s happening,” you feel a helpless about it. What is often worse in your discovery of the new normal is that the friend you thought you knew is actually a member of the Black Shirts, those ordinary people in 1930s Germany who supported Hitler’ s ascent by bullying everyone else around them. (They wore black shirts in their operations of intimidation, hence the name.) Today, any dissent you offer is met with very vocal violence, especially online. I have dissenting friends threatened with rape. I have received malicious emails, too. Most often I’m just told to shut up. “O.A. ka,” they’d say.
Hitler started with the “undesirables,” too—people he thought had no place in polite society he just systematically eliminated. And everyone cheered him on.
I’m beginning to feel there is only a slight difference with Germany’s 1933 and our 2016. At least I could still write this article in the name of freedom of expression, and have some assurance there will be no knock on my door come midnight. But I wonder for how long? The media is now just beginning to be discredited, with pronouncements like “there are many media people who are connected with the drug trade.” It’s a subtle charge with deeper repercussions. There are calls for the “impeachment” of Senator De Lima, a dissenter—even though any person who knows the operations of government know a senator cannot be impeached. My fear is that soon, any dissenter—even those without drug connection—could just be anonymously picked up, killed, wrapped in tape, with a cardboard to proclaim the corpse: “Pusher ‘to.” And nobody can do anything about it. Is this paranoia? Or just the Cassandra warnings coming in with a sense of history?
The ironic thing is that I do know the President means well. This is my dilemma, and the extension of my human need to feel “everything is all right.” (The poet and activist Mila D. Aguilar told m: “I agree with everything you said except that ironic thing, Ian.” To which I replied: “I’m still hopeful kasi.” Mila replied in return: “Oh well. We can always hope against hope. Maybe I always see the worst so I won’t be disappointed.”) I’m not exactly sure though if our President knows how this framework he has created—given the history and the psychology that we know—could easily escalate into something monstrous and uncontrollable. History is rife with the bloody reminders of mob rule. Why are we not learning from it?
A friend, the filmmaker Jason Paul Laxamana—he directed Magkakabaung (2014), Babagwa (2013) and Astro Mayabang (2010)—told me: “I’d make a prophecy: there will be no fascism in the next six years.” (God, I hope so.) To this, another friend, Prof. Philip Van Peel, added: “I think you’re right. Fascism requires two things: first, a clear cut ideology based on national identity, and second, iron discipline from the obedient followers. I don’t see any of these two emerging here.” But I do see an emergence. Marcos, for example, used to call his dictatorial regime as “martial rule with a smile.” The thing is, Filipinos tend to make “softer”—but nevertheless still harsh—versions of iron rule, so I’d wager this: there is a possibility of the next six years being “fascism with fiestas.” And that it will be predicated by two things: first, a resurgent nationalism about “a common good”—already present with these extrajudicial killings (“Para sa kabutihan ng bayan!”); and second, a mob rule that believes the leader can do no wrong and any dissenter is either “bobo” or soon to be another corpse wrapped in tape with a cardboard attached to him. But there will be fiestas, sans fireworks.
Prof. Van Peel replied: “The future will tell, but I think it won’t be like you say…. I don’t see Duterte as a nationalist. Quite the opposite, he is very inclusive. A nationalist would always blame the ‘Other’—foreigners, ethnic or religious minorities, etc.”
Another friend, the lawyer Trixie Cruz-Angeles, told me: “This is an inappropriate comparison. The killings in Nazi Germany were unquestionably state-sponsored. There is no evidence yet that the alleged spate of killings is pursuant to a policy directive of the government. Right now, all we can assume is that these are murders. Who executed them? We don’t know yet. Sige, compare pa more.”
I told Trixie that that is not entirely true. He has been captured by television giving statements that basically encourage people to do extrajudicial killings. There was that infamous quote, for example, about the expected bump in funeral services. True, there is no “policy.” He’s wiser than that. He’s all public bluster, but no written rule—which makes it more dangerous. But he symbolizes the state (hence he is the authority), and words do come out of his mouth. For many people, that’s enough. That’s the Milgram experiment for you.
Trixie replid: “Yes but we know that it is not. You want liability, then prove it. Where is the government policy? Why do we presume there is no investigation when this is SOP for all homicides involving law enforcement? If we demand the presumption of innocence then it applies to all, including government agents.” In reply, I sent her a news item from GMA News about the new Solicitor General Jose Calida telling the Philippine National Police about not being afraid of possible congressional hearings on the recent spate of deaths in the currently raging “war against drugs.” I do know Trixie to be a fantastic lawyer—she’s a legal celebrity in the Philippines—and I know her replies spring from a knowledge of the rigorous demands of the law especially regarding allegations and evidence: the law requires evidence, the law needs a paper trail to convict. But I’m thinking: what if the perpetrator is a lawyer, is very smart and cunning, and knows how exactly not leave a paper trail, like written policies?
Of course, sooner or later, these things, no matter how hidden, do get found out with dogged investigation, but that takes years. We’re still finding out things about Marcos, for example. And Richard Nixon’s “smoking gun” White House tapes after the Watergate scandal erupted have several minutes suspiciously deleted from them. And to go back to Nazi Germany, the papers of the Wannsee Conference—the notorious high-level conference that determined the Final Solution for the Jews of Europe—were destroyed, except for some stray copies that were later accidentally discovered. The paper trail—great and damning evidence that it is—is also easy to hide, to tamper with, to destroy. And right now, my best “paper trail” is the President’s mouth and the things that come out of it, and then to consider the resulting body count that is happening. Aren’t words enough for us anymore?
Trixie replied: “Awwww Ian, you know me. I don’t like to lump cases together and make conclusions. Each one is driven by different motives or causes. This is not to say I don’t share your worries. I do. But I also don’t want the discourse to be based on emotion. Particularly when they involve very solid rights.” I tell her that as of the moment, given the quickness of what has been happening, I’ve been trying to balance emotion and evidence, as well as history and psychology. I tell her this combination is the best dissent available for me as of the moment. Because so many people these days are just too quiet, and too quick to say, “Okay lang ‘yan.” It’s almost like I’m seeing unthinking zombies. I have been asking questions like: what happened to my friends? why are they not alarmed?
“Because we link causes to personalities,” Trixie said.” “That is yellow. That is red. That is Marcos. Just my opinion, but divorce these from the possibility that they will damage the polar personalities and we may get better discourse. That’s just my guess. But it could be anything.”
And this is true. I do hope, however, that the mob believes that though. I’ve found it difficult to do “discourse” with most of them. Somebody just called me O.A. in a Facebook comment—just one dismissive word bereft of knowledge of history.
“Consider it a badge of honor,” Trixie said. “You out yourself out there, you’ll get some stones thrown. But you, at least, are out there. But here’s what I’m can promise you. I’ll be more stringent with the cops. They do bear the burden of public trust.”
But it dawned me hours after my dialogue with Trixie that I was perhaps wasting my time fighting people’s politics, and their earnest hopes that all these are “for the betterment of the country.” It made me feel utterly helpless—but also strangely liberated.
I have a favorite quote from Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu [The Rules of the Game] (1939) that for me explains everything about people, and which has once more made me philosophical about things: “The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons.”
With that, I’m signing off from the debate.
Let history be our arbiter.
Let the blood that has been spilled so far mean something.
I have a really good friend, a good and very talented man, and somebody I've worked with before so many times -- but his homophobia unsettles me. I've tried my bit of "setting a good example," subscribing to the notion that most homophobes are the way they are because they don't really have good friends who happen to be gay. I've tried enlightening discourse, going through intricacies of queer theory and narrating what I could the normalcy of gay lives. But there's really no stopping his entrenched view that my being gay is a rot of a life that begs scandal. That's his favourite word: "scandal." As in: "I pray that you won't be dragged into a scandal, Ian." Like my life is a pressure-cooker just waiting for a scandal to happen, just because I'm gay. I don't know what to do. Again, he's so good in so many other respect, but his homophobia is galling.
In my attempt to understand him, I see perhaps his religiosity as the final reason for his homophobia. He is intensely a fundamentalist Christian and although he doesn't quote verses from Leviticus to me, I feel those unspoken verses stab at me every time he opens his mouth and invariably calls me scandalous.
Homomphobia is the strangest thing. Long before I understood the full breadth of its psychology, I have always taken it as a kind of mask. I realised one day that most homophobes are really closeted gay men and women who see openly gay men and women as mirrors of their possible selves -- and because of the culture of compulsory heterosexuality (often violent) that they are embraced in, they lash out at these mirrors. The denial gets articulated as abuse -- sometimes verbal ("Faggot!" "Bayot!"), sometimes physical. It becomes their short cut to assurances that they are not, in fact, gay. It is internalised hatred.
In a 1993 study, levels of homophobia were assessed among 64 men along with their sexual arousal (measured by increases in penile circumference) in response to erotic videos of heterosexual, same-sex female, and same-sex male encounters. Those who scored high on homophobia were more likely to also manifest sexual arousal in response to the videos of male homosexual encounters. In a more recent study it was found that men raised in authoritative households were more likely to repress same-sex attractions and to exhibit more hostility to gay people.
Emile Griffith, a recently deceased welterweight and middleweight champion, pummeled an opponent to death after he had called him an anti-gay slur, Griffith continuing to punch him in the head well after he had clearly won the fight. Though he denied he was gay or bisexual at that time, later in his life Griffith admitted to having had affairs with several men including a male partner who cared for him up until his death.
Add this anecdote to several others including that of right wing politician Larry Craig, who pled guilty to lewd behavior toward other men in an airport bathroom but who also championed anti-gay legislation during his political career, and Ted Haggard, leader of the famously anti-gay National Association of the Evangelicals, who resigned after it was discovered he was engaging male prostitutes.
Same-sex attractions have proven intractable throughout history and are notoriously difficult to extinguish, either by people who harbor them or societies that seek to repress them. As stated previously, there are over a half a dozen countries, including Iran and Saudi Arabia where homosexual contact is punishable by death and many whose governments penalize such behavior with harsh prison sentences. However, Iran has a flourishing underground gay society and Pakistanis have been found to be the most frequent Googlers of gay porn. An acquaintance of mine who is a flight attendant and a gay male will attest that when he visits these homophobic countries, he is frequently approached by men for sex in hotels, gym saunas, parks and certain streets. So despite the obstacles of profoundly punitive laws and homophobic cultures, same-sex sexual behavior cannot be completely constrained—and this has been known for a long time.
Is my friend then gay? Could be. Who knows. My gaydar tells me his son definitely is, hahaha.
What galls me about homophobia, however, is when it gets manifested as bullying. Drown, a film by Dean Francis, is the perfect film that articulates homophobic bullying: it contends that it comes from an explosive cocktail of jealousy and dangerous desire. The film, according to its website, follows Len, "a Surf Lifesaving champion in the cloistered surf club, just like his father. But when the younger, fitter Phil arrives at the club, Len’s legendary status starts to crumble. Then Len sees Phil in the company of another man. Phil is gay. Over the summer, Len forms unexpected, confusing feelings for Phil. When Phil de-thrones Len at the annual surf competition, Len and his buddy Meat take Phil out on an intoxicated bender through the seedy city. Jealousy, homophobic fear and unrequited lust culminate in a tragic late night trip back to beach where Len seeks total oblivion."
What we see of Eva Green's Vanessa Ives and her character arc in the first episode of the new and very promising season of Penny Dreadful is a perfect portrait of depression -- and of a depressive aching for a reprieve. "All has not gone well with me here. I've been low and sedentary, unwilling to go outside, sunk into a kind of an unhealthy lethargy, sunk into something like my own sadness," she writes Sir Malcolm. "... Perhaps that is the root of what has been troubling me. I have left my faith. Or it has left me. Thus, my prospects seemed only a long, dark corridor without an end. I have done things in my life for reasons that seemed right and even moral in their violent immorality. And now I stand without that God upon whom I have always depended. But please do not fear for me. I have no fear myself. The old monsters are gone. The old curses have echoed to silence. And if my immortal soul is lost to me, something yet remains. I remain. So I sign off now with hope, and, as ever, with love... Vanessa."
Do I like Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's Anomalisa (2015), the latest opus in Mr. Kaufman's long-running meditation on White Older Male Miserabilism? I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps not. Or maybe just a little. It has an engaging second half, and a truly charming and unexpected interlude where Jennifer Jason Leigh's Lisa sings an awkward version of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." For the most part, the film drowns us in a monotone world -- embodied as claymation -- where everyone sounds exactly the same (all voiced by Tom Noonan). One hapless fellow, a customer service guru named Michael (David Thewliss), finds himself at wit's to find true connection -- and then he finds Lisa. I couldn't connect, and if I did just a little, I had to be brought in by an out-of-this-world storytelling device that was calculated to keep me watching. In Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008), it was the strangeness of having to behold a theatre director trying to build a life-size set to tell his own story. In Anomalisa, it is the audacity of using animation to showcase adult concern -- and part of that includes having to witness sexual intimacy being demonstrated amply by animated characters beyond an acknowledgement that hentai exists. But I couldn't connect with the misery and with the lack of a strong narrative drive. Because what does Michael learn in the end? Nothing. Nothing changes in and for him. The film is just a masturbatory exercise to embody his formless ennui. But what did I expect from Mr. Kaufman? I've always thought his strange stories was best served being told by somebody else like Spike Jonze. Together they have indeed given us very strange films about miserable and haunted people -- Being John Malkovich (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Adaptation (2002 -- but these film pulsate with heart, and I think that comes mostly from Mr. Jonze. In Anomalisa, only the strangeness and misery remain, and that's not enough. ★★★☆☆
11:58 PM |
Winging It
