Intrigues, secrets, codes and arcane traditions all form the regalia of a secret society: these exist in varying modes, from universities to neighbourhood pubs across continents and cultures.

For two months I have become an initiate of one such group. The ensuing days since my arrival and the brief but daily brushes with OFWs has impressed upon me not just the quantitative truth of our diaspora, but also its qualitative spread.

Identification

My initial encounter was brief but definite. On my first morning in Paris, I had a chance encounter while waiting to cross the street to board the Metro. The member was across the street, eyes bright in the sun, dark hair with streaks of white. She noticed me staring and she smiled. Silently, I returned the smile and nodded in her direction, as we crossed the street and onward to our respective destinations.

There are things we cannot deny, even without the code, our appearances give us away: the silky black hair, the middling height, the brown skin. We wear the clothes of our adopted city in respect of the weather and the elements; but our bare faces identify us, if not to others, but definitely to ourselves. There is a manner of carrying oneself that is distinctly Pinoy. The opposites of heft and lightness are combined in a mix that only kayumanggi can exude.

Code

The code is familiar; it’s a cacophony that announces itself from across the street. Often the speaker is with another member, or is on the phone. An ever greater likelihood is that the code is bookended with raucous laughter. To be quite honest, I am at a loss to objectively say whether or not they speak louder than most people on the street. Perhaps so, but perhaps, it’s only that I hear it more clearly than I do the other words. Perhaps the code registers not only in my brain but my heart, my blood. It draws my attention and I search for its source, eager to confirm the code with the visual. A smile, a nod, maybe a few words in exchange.

Case in point: I was in line at a superette one afternoon. Lost rather intensely in one my usual random reveries, when the lady beside me suddenly addresses me and says, “May plastic pa kaya na regular, mag papadala kasi ako sa Pinas?”. Ahh to be spoken to in code, amidst my idle grocery shopping, this must mean I am progressing in my membership, I thought. In my surprise and delight, I could muster only a shrug and a sheepish grin. She rambled on while I scrambled to place my items in my shopping bag. As she greeted the lady at the cashier with a bonjour, I was able to squeeze in a, “Sige ho, mauna na ho ako, mag-iingat ho kayo pauwe.” She nodded and I exit, stage right.

The code is instant access to a global society of countrymen in similar situations.

Rituals

The card carrying members of the same diaspora are performers of the same rituals: ardent patrons of Skype, Phone cards, balikbayan boxes and Western Union. Throughout the year, they carry these out at differing times, but there are non-negotiable weeks, such as the beginning of June and mid-December where these are done like clockwork.

Performing these rituals allows one to combat loneliness and to lend tangible form to the intensity of one’s filial dedication – the preferred forms here being objects and cold hard cash. Constant contact aided by technology permits one to know the minutiae of peoples’ days. I guess to feel transported to where they are, up-to-date on events, almost as if they are present. Boxes are packed with items not found back home, while the senders yearn for the things not found abroad or if they were available, are too expensive, too impractical to purchase, too indulgent to buy.

Those left behind

Much has been said of the social costs of having an OFW for a parent or family member: a de facto broken family, the lifelong dependence, resentment, adultery, single-parenthood. It is no wonder that so many movies have been made of these stories and their ever-shifting complexities.

I wonder how many homes in the Philippines owe some or all, of its prosperity to remittances. Having grown up with boxes of clothes from my Lola, I know only of the added luxuries. I grew up to have not relied on remittances in order to live. I know I am a lucky one. But families supported by members of this secret society are still luckier than those without – those that struggle to send their best and brightest to the far flung places that will take them. Put that way: being intelligent, resourceful and brave enough to work elsewhere is more burden that boon – to be the smart kid means you will be sent away.

In many ways it can be seen as punishment for your potential, the caveat of your capacity to succeed is your subsequent banishment.

Secret to whom?

Not one day has gone by since I first arrived, that I have not met another member of this secret society. They pass me and I pass them. Sometimes I am too tired to acknowledge what we both know, we are both members.

If we are so many and we are seemingly ubiquitous, then how are we secret?

One can be many, and yet be nowhere. We blend and blur into the background most inconspicuously. Too good at blending in, we fail to stand out. No one, in general, is privy to our particular existence: we know what or who we are only when we see each other. We don’t know the details yet we know the facts are the same. Everyone moves in spheres that intersect on Sundays after mass, or in American fast food places.

The key to how we remain secret is that despite our numbers we are not prominent. Only those who know our code, our actions and our faces, know that we exist. Only those who know our truths know our power. This secret club of Overseas Filipino Workers feeds our relatives, pays the bills, sends our kids to school and secures the present if not the future. Our remittances power the peso to greater strengths and to such levels that ironically reduce the value of future remittances.

The less able, the less brave, the less, left behind.

Are we grateful enough to our OFWs? When they return home, we celebrate and we greet them at the airport en masse. In country or out, they get their way. They make the decisions miles from the islands. They rule on high while the rest are led by gratitude and a sense of being beholden to the point of unquestioning obedience. They tell us what courses to take in college and what color to the paint the walls. We need them and they need us. This symbiosis is fueled by the diaspora.

The terms sound medical. Diaspora, to the uninitiated sounds like a disease. In my view, it resembles a virus for which we have no vaccine, no cure and no escape.

Thoughts

As previously stated, I am barely a novice member of the secret club. I am in Paris for training. I have no plans to settle here. I am not an émigré. I have a return ticket home and a job to do.

At times that I see kababayans, I often wonder where they work, if they are happy. I wonder how long they have been here. I wonder what led them to this place and not elsewhere. I wonder if they have plans to return home.

My novice membership, as I ready to return to normalcy, is sure to expire. Despite this passing inclusion, I will forever be honored to have even been considered. To have received the nod, the unabashed lingering glance from these ordinary Filipinos whose daily toil is noticed and is felt.

Temporary membership, I think, means that without knowing their names, without recognizing their faces, I feel I know their stories. On sharing an extended glance follows the mutual instant recognition that we are comrades-at-arms. My tendency for theatrics then triggers emotions that swell when I recall what I imagine is resplendent on their weathered faces, a look of longing buoyed by a hardened reserve. Because at the heart of it, the secret club’s greatest identifier is its members’ easy and selfless penchant for sacrifice.

Revived for the 2012 Olympics, then Kodak goes and files for bankruptcy.

It’s a snap-happy world we live in. In the snap of a button, we post the latest tidbit tickling our mind on Twitter and Facebook. In a snap of a dSLR camera shutter, our inner photographer zones in on a panoramic view of something (we want others to consider) hipster, vintage, or just worthy of being called memorable. In a snap of a wallet, we can call ourselves fashion forward as our latest purchase from obscure and not-so-obscure online stores traverse their way to us, care of Air21, FedEx and UPS.

As a proud 90’s baby, I take comfort in the fact that my peers and I are the last remaining human archivists of what life was like prior to the Internet boom, the rise (and imminent downfall) of the Kardashian empire, and those sky-high shoes without any heels. In other words, we grew up with life as it sped forward—when it was in the transition between the simple and the simply complex.

The question, then, is this: In which time were we happier?

Happiness has always been a relative term, and perhaps, that’s the problem as to why it’s hard to describe whether what we’re feeling is genuine happiness. Having no set standard, each sensation of perceived joy can be considered different. Given this premise, is it possible to compare such a feeling?

When I was the 11 or so, my tech-savvy self was given a brand new Nokia 3310 by my parents. It was the highlight of my geeky tween life. Few kids had cellular phones at the time, and it made me feel special. And let’s face it: No matter how much we want to not show off, we’re bound to do it in a mock humble way. Believe me, did I show off my 3310 in a mock humble way! I was so proud of it. Shallow as it may seem, that phone—despite the fact that it lacked a camera, only served the purposes of texting and calling, and its most exciting game was Snake—made me happy for a very long time.

Paralleling this with the present, wherein the iPhone 4S is the epitome of all that is technologically great, I find it hard to derive that same sense or quality of happiness in a gadget. It gets harder to please people now, knowing that at some point (8 months or 1 year in from now), there’s probably going to be another version of the iPhone that trumps the latest’s features. In these snap-happy times, there are just so many things worth snapping up, that we tend to keep wanting more, more, and more. Contentment—a version of happiness, I believe—becomes harder to maintain and much harder to attain.

Relationship-wise, the same observations can be made. I’m not going so far as to say that the ones I have now are downright sucky. I like my friends, thank you very much. But forming them becomes a little bit more like an online search-and-select option as opposed to those let’s-get-to-know-each-other-by-talking-and-hanging-out connections. Admit it, you’ve probably “investigated” at least one of your friend-now-but-was-your-former-acquaintance’s Facebook profile to find out if this said person was worth your social time or shared any of your interests, at the very least. Maybe it’s just me, but I like finding out these things the old-fashioned way: by talking face-to-face. It gives me a chance to form my own impressions of others as opposed to the impression of their selves that they want me to form.

Most of the time, I find myself taking in my own snappy book cover judgments not by actually meeting people anymore, but with the mediation of online social networking sites. The Internet may be a helpful communication tool, but sometimes I wonder if we’re letting the Internet do the communicating for us. It’s a dangerous, snappy, online world we tread on. On a side note, this is why I like setting most of my social network accounts’ viewing options to private. It’s time for some self-preservation, people!

Anyway, to answer the question I posed earlier, when it comes to forming connections of the non-romantic kind, I think I was much happier pre-Facebook. But then again, I was also less moody, less psychologically nitpicky, and was willing to be friends with anyone as long as they shared their food with me.

The thing is, I’m not the only who feels this way. It may just be because my friends and I share the same brainwave, but we’re of the opinion that our childhood years were better than most. We were of the generation that could have water fights in the summer without fearing that we’d accidentally slurp down oil–or lead–contaminated hydrogen and oxygen. We were of the generation that actually knew what it meant to make a mixtape out of one’s own sweat and hard-pressed timing. Given that iTunes playlists and burning CDs had yet to be born, all we had going for us was a radio, a microphone, and a blank cassette tape. We were of the generation where it was inevitable that you took a side in the Spears-Aguilera, and not the Cyrus-Gomez, rivalry. We were of the generation that waited eagerly for our film photographs to develop, and not have them uploaded, tweaked, and edited for the admiration and Facebook likes of all.

Us 90’s kids, we’re going with the flow, but we tend to refer to our childhood years as the golden age of innocence and happiness. This is 90’s kid image. And I suppose this is also why Westlife, Blue, the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and A1 will always reap profits from our bunch whenever they stage a reunion concert in the Philippines.

Technically, it’s not wrong to consider ourselves as having a better understanding of the “simpler” (hence, more easily contented, and thus, happier) times. It’s not like we’re hurting anyone by airing our thoughts and opinions. And the fact that they are opinions, and not statements we want codified into textbooks, gives us leeway to be as judgmental as we want. Still though, just imagine what our parents feel and how their parents feel. Now, their experiences are what I would call simple. Minus World War II and Martial Law, I think that they tend to think they had it golden as well. They lived in a time of the Philippines having an unpolluted Pasig River and Manila Bay, traffic-free roads, and less debt and credit problems.

Happiness is indeed, relative. The maintenance of its image and its sensation and perception is based on standards that vary with time. What made me happy then may not make me happy now, and vice versa. While I’ll always be a 90’s kid, I know that I must acknowledge the fact that I must move on from my 90’s bubble should I wish to survive in this world. There’s a time for reminiscing and there’s a time for living. I’ll chalk it up to the fact that a new year is beginning, which is why I’m gushing about my 90’s love. But on the same premise, the fact that a new year is beginning means that it’s the time to start thinking of ways to grow—to be a better 90’s kid and to be a better 2012 me. Sounds preachy, I know, but would it hurt for you to do the same?

Julianne Pascual is a senior at UP Diliman. She’s usually preoccupied studying the psychology of life.

When she’s not overanalyzing details about humanity, she can be found munching on whatever’s edible in her refrigerator.

Throughout the course of a week, a six-strong team of writers puts together press releases, speeches, transcripts and statements that are email blasted or handed in person to a long list of journalists and news desks. A battalion of researchers train their thoughts solely on their laptops and smartphones finding the facts and figures necessary for the day’s policy briefs or talking points.

Executive assistants hurry frantically once beckoned but remain stoic when ordered to stand down and remain in plain sight. Alongside the tall, burly men speaking into their headsets or walkie-talkies, photographers and videographers stay attentive in preparation for whatever opportunity may come.

All this for a single man who just happens to be a revered lawmaker of the Republic of the Philippines.

Sticking to a very grueling, clockwork schedule, the staff members follow him to every meeting, legislative hearing, interview, roundtable discussion, and public appearance seeking to document every word uttered, every pronouncement made. Somehow, when spoken by a person who helped craft some of the most important institutions of the land, words become newsworthy and have the potential to become public policy.

The topics covered are numerous—from good governance to good graces, from basic legalese to basic living standards, from post-harvest facilities to students eating more vegetables. The knowledge of the solon is perhaps as encyclopedic as the breadth of his advocacies. After all, the researchers are there to feed him the data he needs.

Vast is the task at hand, that it is often challenging for the team to keep up.  Days are spent toiling through piles of reports, academic journals, and posterity recordings, if not on Xeroxing event programs, writing speech summaries, or filing news monitoring reports. Nights tend to be sleepless, not for lack of respite, but out of necessity. Several cups of coffee are served as lifelines, while cup noodles and Sky flakes become standard fare. Office spaces transform into temporary living quarters, blurring the line between work and home, between “that thing you do for a living” and “the thing you do that kills you.”

Many will not find the work environment ideal. The principal sometimes berates and scolds the staff for the errors in their work, as hurtful words do get thrown around even more than sticks and stones. A shaky disposition would easily crumble under the barrage of orders (and sometimes expletives) emanating from a man who can either be just a really impatient boss or a statesman. Of course, it may just be that the pressure is simply commensurate; the challenges the country faces are in no way insignificant, after all. Beset with lackluster economic growth, an impending constitutional impasse, a growing incidence of poverty, and natural disasters exacerbated by human blunder, the Philippines needs far-reaching solutions–and needs them fast.

And so one-hour deadlines become commonplace, multi-tasking cultivated into a core competency. Many hats are worn, while many coats are adorned. An agreement to be on call 24/7 stands as a precondition to having one’s appointment papers signed. Thus, no questions are asked if call times are set at 6:00 am, whether or not work ended at 10:00 pm the day before.

Perhaps there really should be no breaks and timeouts when it comes to facing the country’s incessant problems. Maybe it is all fueled by the optimism that something meaningful would come from all the hard work. Why else would an entire team of writers, videographers, and photographers devote so much time documenting the activities of one man? Why else would researchers and subject matter experts offer their brain power if not for the betterment of the nation? Why else would executive assistants and security professionals loom around often hours on end, patiently waiting for the next order to be given?

And yet, as one’s very existence may become the offering selflessly made in service of the people, it can also become the fodder for the maneuverings of a strongman operating at the top tier of this winner-take-all society. The stakes are only higher the longer power stays in the lawmaker’s hands, making the jobs of his staff all the more demanding. The passage of the years in office brings with it the accumulation of influence to peddle, largesse to dispense but also favors to repay. And so an entire legacy with a distinguished reputation at its core stands to be lost if ever a fall from grace ensues.

Scholars contend that politics has always been centered on rationality, ever since people banded together and tried to organize themselves. But rationality can just be another word for self-preservation, which can also be another word for selfishness or arrogance.

Thus, in a context where signs and symbols become the currency of power, any hint of wavering has the capacity to crumble a network of negotiations and all previously agreed upon arrangements.

Appearances have to be maintained and perceptions kept favorable, especially if modern politics is indeed war by any other means. The writers—or spin doctors—then aim for the article angles that get media mileage and not necessarily the story arcs that reflect reality. Researchers seek the data that boosts their case and gloss over the figures that dismantle it. Executive assistants are chosen for their good looks—not quite for their handle of the legislative process.

This fleet of people will be organized simply as a silent display of power. They will be deployed to control everything and make sure nothing is out of place.  No word shall be said out of turn and no course of action shall be undertaken without calculation. And again, all for one man’s power to be maintained. If some good does come about from a man staying in power, does it merit the long nights, the harsh words, the grueling schedule, or the exercise of discretion?

And somehow, he has managed to get elected term after term—neither an easy task nor one that comes without cost. And so some would cry that longevity in Philippine politics assumes depravity. Absolute power—or even small doses of it—is said to corrupt absolutely, especially in this land of dynasties, both familial and expedient in nature. Does in fact the betterment of the people necessitate vesting the elected few with almost unbridled power?

Others however point out that the longer the political career, the greater the opportunity to make a long-lasting impact and propose comprehensive policy solutions. In an immature democracy like the Philippines, some have said, the stability of its institutions is paramount over the progressiveness of its policies. The end justifies the means, Machiavelli once said and ever since he has been characterized as an evil and duplicitous man, favoring what is necessary over what is moral. Mass murder, genocide and political guile have all been attributed to his prescriptions of expediency in statecraft.

So is the lawmaker a selfless statesman or a self-serving strongman who simply wants to perpetuate his position? He might just be both. Maybe despite the system’s predilection to breed corruption, it is still possible to have a politician who gets his slice of cake, while making sure everybody else does, too.

I remember having a large shoe collection during my college years. (Well, okay, 10 pairs of shoes isn’t large, but it seemed a lot to me.) I would choose which pair to wear based on what I was wearing or the weather or the occasion, until I started having this feeling that I was neglecting some of them. Just as Andy’s toys in Toy Story would talk to each other when there was no one around, I would imagine my shoes were doing the same. From then on, some of my decisions were based on how a certain shoe I hadn’t worn in a while felt envious of its other footwear companions. I became attached to them. Shoes. Inanimate objects.

What’s crazy about us humans is that we become attached to our things, going so far as giving them names and showering them with love (a common practice amongst the owners of Apple Products). The moment we assign these affections to a gadget (or just about anything, really), we are recognizing that it has a personality.

You know how it is when someone has a baby, and they're like "This is the cutest baby ever, isn't it?!" and you're all, "Well...it's a baby." It's more or less the same as Helga Weber telling you that Montana is "super pretty". "Well, it's a macbook."

How many of us have gone to a mall and ended up listening to salesperson’s pitch just because something attracted you to him or her? Aarron Walter, author of Designing for Emotions, said that personality is a great tool in design because it influences our decisions. The author gave Volkswagen’s Beetle as an example: Have you ever looked at a Bettle and thought that it had an actual face? Its headlights represented eyes while the bumper suggested that it had a smile on its face? Smiles are friendly and inviting, which may very well be the reason for its success over the course of several decades.

It’s funny. I used to not care so much about how about gadgets looked as long as they had the internal specs I wanted. But here I was, in a mall, staring at all these laptops and I kept thinking just how ugly most of them were: the angles and edges were boring; screens were glossy (Matte for the win! Especially on a sunny day.);  a lot of them seemed to weigh as much as a block of cement and I certainly (thanks to my frail figure) couldn’t lug them around on a daily basis. And what’s with all that shiny plastic? Do these companies actually care about what their products look like? Do they actually think that we don’t care?

Great device designers are often the ones who are able to marry both function and form in perfect harmony with no room for divorce. The obvious example is, of course, Apple who have been largely successful with their devices, not only because they work well, but also due to the high regard that both the punditocracy and the average consumer give to their products. Design curator Paola Antonelli stated in her March 2007 TED talk “The best way to design a successful object – and also, an object that we were missing before – is to pretend that it never existed or that people will have a new behavior to it with it” and a lot of their devices, the iPod, iPhone and iPad most especially, were successful because they were created with this philosophy in mind.

Design in consumer electronics (and I could be wrong because, as I am not a pundit in this field), adopts a different philosophy as opposed to design applications in other fields. While some schools of thought use design as a way of conveying a message such as “The existentialist crises of a female vagina and its relationship with a higher being that watches over our souls as we struggle through a world riddled with war, poverty and, ultimately, chaos”, creations in consumer electronics require a large focus on functionality.

With computing devices most especially, software and how it interacts with the hardware play a major role. In fact, good hardware may be hampered by poor software. Just ask Nokia, whose recent smartphones have great hardware designs but held back by the aging, and now dead, Symbian OS. Software matters. I purchased my HTC HD7 mainly because I loved the look and feel of Windows Phone 7′s Metro UI and that it worked well with HTC’s hardware (my only caveat being the phone’s battery life). Microsoft’s decision to set the minimum hardware specs seems to be a good decision and avoids the sort of fragmentation that we’re seeing in Android devices. Hopefully though, Google will fulfill its promise of putting an end to their platform’s fragmentation via the next version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.

Design, and personality in design, applies to lines of code as well. Take websites as an example: Most of us love Google, not only because it searches well, but also because of the personality of their page and the people who work on it. I certainly find the Google Doodles enjoyable. Jesse Schell’s pageis a current favorite of mine. I love how it feels like an extension of his personality without doing too much. Yes, I like simplicity.

Even operating systems have their own personas, which is really the point of this entry. The current crop of popular mobile OS’s have their own stories to tell, and yes, I have created my way of telling that story.

The setting: corporate. The company: Smart Fonetix (Could be any name, really)

Apple iOS came in a few years ago and quickly climbed through the ranks, eventually becoming CEO of the company. And he did so with swagger but not being too abrasive with his methods. His ideas ushered in changes within the company’s culture and provided new solutions for the company to adopt. iOS had just updated some company initiatives and hired a a young, new secretary, Siri, who has quickly become the talk of the town.

Smart Fonetix CTO/COO is Android OS. People at the marketing department perceive him to be a boring guy, with ‘unfavorable’ fashion sense. The people in the IT department, however, know just how brilliant he is. He can even crack a joke or two. Still, he has been recently trying to improve his image. Maybe then the people at marketing might take a second look.

Windows Phone 7 is the newly hired manager already making noise with her fresh new ideas. She came from a company that began successfully, but was unable to make the necessary adjustments to be competitive. Marketing loves WP7 with her designer duds and trendy style. Those close to her a lot say her mango kani salad is to die for.

Then there’s Smart Fonteix’s Blackberry OS, the company’s executive vice president. He has been around for quite some time and working his last few months before retirement. He’s been trying to keep himself relevant but his methods seem to be stuck in a previous generation. Upon his exit, his protege is expected to take his place.

There are others like WebOS, the HR director who tried to shake things up, but no one really listened to. He ended with a nervous breakdown. Then there’s Symbian. He used to be CEO but was voted out by the board of directors. That separation pay was pretty sizable though.

I’m pretty sure that a lot of you already are aware of all these points that I’ve just mentioned. But why does it feel like some of these manufacturers don’t? Perhaps there are just some things that bear repeating.

Edu Ibazeta plays “physical emotions” for the “stupidest, most excellent band in the world”, Halik ni Gringo. Aside from working part-time as a host on Cge TV, his days are devoted to bear wrestling and bare wrestling. He is on call 24/7 to punch a hole in the universe whenever you need him to. His last appearance in these pages was with a review of bitches in business.

This post originally appeared in his very own repository for feelings about gadgets called, So I Started a Tech Blog.

My baby brother is getting married in July. He’s not the first one, either. To get married, I mean. It seems to be a thing that happens a lot. From what I can gather through various Google searches and Wikipedia, millions of people before him have also gotten married. And included among these millions is my older brother, who got hitched three months ago. So that makes two out of the three of we Darwin progeny to have tied the knot.

This, as you can perhaps imagine, is making my life fucking miserable.

Relatives I didn’t even know existed until now have emerged from the woodworking to ask me through pursed smiles How it’s possible that someone as fill-in-the-blank as me doesn’t have a girlfriend yet? and Might I just have a special someone tucked away in a suitcase somewhere that no one knows about? and How old are you again, Daniel, because you know that men are at their most virile between the ages of eighteen and thirty? I’m twenty-three. And, hysterically, they know that. I’m also gay. And, hysterically, they don’t know that. If they did, and though it’s now a viable option in a smattering of places, I somehow doubt they would be asking me these questions so vociferously.

Chief among these inquisitive relatives are my grandparents, who moved into our house at about the same time as my baby brother proposed to his fiancée and who, on top of serving as a constant – as in every day constant – reminder that I am not married, also serve as a constant example of exactly why I do not want to get married.

See the thing is, all of this marriage ballyhoo that’s brought on the onslaught of questions and kicked our family into high gear of late – the lace and the cake, the veils, the vows, the unions, the dresses, the gifts, the sobbing, the bloodshed – has just confirmed a quite concrete resolution that I’ve felt hovering above me for about six years now:

I am almost positive that I will never get married.

Like, I’m pretty sure that if China were to overthrow the world tomorrow morning and beat India into the ground and launch its nuclear devices at the ever-crumbling EU and the ever-deserving US of A and just fucking eradicate everyone in everywhere, and the only people left alive to re-propagate the human race were me, Beyoncé the day after her period ends, and a priest with two gold rings, I still wouldn’t get married.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against other people getting married. I’m thrilled that my brothers have found love and decided to perform a universally prized sacred ritual of commitment that reinforces centuries of patriarchal oppression. I think it’s peachy. I simply don’t want anything to do with it.

And, apparently, that’s odd. It makes no sense to almost anyone in my life. It used to. There was a time when I could tip back my whiskey and chortle at a young couple and say something flippant like “I’m never going to get married ever in a million years.” And every one around me would simply nod and smile sadly and after a few seconds of awkward tension the conversation would continue.

But then New York had to go and legalize gay marriage. And now the entire city has caught the bug, and by the time I left to come back to Manila, I couldn’t walk three blocks without getting hit in the face with a garter and stepping in dove-shit. And the fallout of all this is that I can no longer say I don’t want to get married without sounding like a selfish twat with standards so insurmountably high that unless you’re literally Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, you don’t have a prayer at getting a second date with me.

And, apart from the Heathcliff thing, that’s just not true.

It’s just that, at the end of the day, the fact remains that when New York added the optional “gay” before “marriage,” it did nothing whatsoever to change the distaste I feel toward “marriage.” Because at the end of the day, I still feel about marriage the way one might feel about being forced to sit in front of a kitchen counter and watch a pie rot for twenty-three years before someone finally cuts you a slice and and says, “Here! Look! I made a pie!”

I’m not sure if that metaphor makes complete sense. I tried it out on my brother and he responded by staring at me blankly for a couple seconds and then saying, “But, I like pie.” And that’s great! He should like pie! Munch away! All I’m trying to say is when you’re made to stare at a pie for twenty-three years, you can’t help but begin to notice its discrepancies – the burnt areas around the crust, the bit of soggy apple sticking out the side of the pan, Kim Kardashian, the 50% divorce rate, and that bitch who got married to the Eiffel Tower – such that when it is finally offered to you, you have to pause and ask yourself what it is exactly that you’re biting into when you bite into marriage?

I seem to be stuck in that pause.

And so far nothing has come along in my life to make me want to move past that pause. It certainly hasn’t helped at all that my grandparents now live in my house. They’ve been together for sixty years and I swear to God they have fought like rabid meth addicted honey badgers every single day of their  goddamn marriage. I honestly don’t know where they get their energy considering they’re in their mid-eighties. It’s astounding.

The other day I walked downstairs, and after my grandmother had asked me why I don’t have a girlfriend yet, she revealed to me that she was furious at my grandfather because she had been cold and he hadn’t moved the fan to point in a direction away from her. She hadn’t asked him to do this, mind you, he just “should have known.” Now, my grandfather was snoring on the couch as we had this conversation, but when he finally woke up and she confronted him about her anger, his response was to look directly into her eyes and let rip one of the loudest farts I’ve ever heard. He’s just ripping ass, and cackling in her face the entire time. And I’m sitting there watching all of this take place and I’m just absolutely mortified. Because what has been seen can not be unseen, and this is what conflict resolution becomes when you’ve been married for sixty years. This is the image I will have emblazoned indelibly in my head for all time of what it is like to grow old and die with someone.

And that’s another problem that I have with marriage: see, when you conceptualize marriage it demands that you conceptualize growing old and dying with someone. And I’ve realized of late that it’s impossible for me to conceptualize growing old and dying with someone, because it is impossible for me to conceptualize growing old and dying. In fact, a few days ago, I realized that I can’t imagine my life past the age of thirty-five.

I realized this, by the way, because, on top of serving as a constant reminder that I’m not married and that I don’t want to be married, my grandparents have also done an incredible job of constantly reminding me that one day I am in fact actually going to grow old, lose control of my faculties and die. The other day, I walked downstairs and after she had asked me why I didn’t have a girlfriend yet, my grandmother asked me if I had eaten. I said I hadn’t, so she called our helper and had her prepare me some Ma-Ling and rice. Which was totally sweet, right? But as I was devouring it – as my spoon literally dangled in mid-air en route to my mouth – my grandmother walked up to me and asked me if I had eaten. And I didn’t know what to say. Because, I mean, technically, as I was still in the process of eating, No, I hadn’t eaten. But had I said that to her, there’s no telling what she’d have done. She might just have called our helper and had her prepare me some more Ma-Ling and rice. So I just stared at her, mortified. Because what has been seen can not be unseen. And this is what being alive becomes when you’ve been doing it for 85 years.

And it shocked me because I’m looking at her, and I’m taking this whole almost-a-century-of-life thing in, and it’s just, like, a big, fuzzy white space in my imagination past the age of 35. And that struck me as odd. So I ran a poll. I sent out an email to a random sampling of about thirty different friends asking them if they could without any difficulty imagine their lives past the age of 35, and the results sent in by those who responded were pretty astonishing. Fudging the numbers a bit for dramatic effect, the findings were pretty much as follows:

• All of my straight female friends responded with something like “Yeah I’m going to be married and changing the world.”
• All of my gay female friends responded with “Yeah I’m going to be married and changing the world.”
• All of my trans friends save a couple responded with “Yeah I’m going to be married and changing the world.”
• And all of my straight male friends responded with “Yeah I’m going to be married and running the world.”

But oddly enough only one of the gay male friends who I asked responded in an affirmative. He can easily imagine his life well into his eighties. But he’s a Senator’s son, so it’s easy for him to imagine pretty much anything. The rest of them responded with confessions reminiscent of my own: anything past thirty-five is a big, fuzzy white space. Which left me with this big, fuzzy white box of what-the-fuck that I now had to try to unpack.

Why can’t my gay male friends or I imagine our lives past the age of 35 unless, of course, we’re a Senator’s son?

So far I’ve been able to boil it down to two essential ingredients that weave together to produce this incapacity within gay male culture…

Ingredient I: We have a cripplingly unhealthy obsession with youth.

I was at a bar the other night and ended up talking at length with an attractive guy in his mid-thirties whose approach to flirting consisted of alternately showering me with backhanded compliments about how young and nubile I was and proclamations about how generally terrible he was. At one point in our conversation, he referred to himself as a D.O.M. Now, I had had about six glasses of Jack Daniels at this point, so, as you might imagine, I didn’t quite follow.

I thought, idiotically, that he was simply spelling out Dom. So I responded with a slight laugh and casually admitted to him that “You’re in luck, because I happen to tend toward the Sub in sadomasochistic play.”

There was a moment of petrified stillness, and he explained that he had meant Dirty Old Man. And I felt like an absolute fool for about three seconds and then I didn’t because it is completely absurd that a thirty-five year old would feel the need to refer to himself in any context as a dirty old man. Dirty, fine. But, Old? I was having none of it. So I laid into him, asking him what gave him the right to refer to himself as a dirty old man? His response was to say that anyone would feel like a dirty old man when talking to Peter Pan.

And there you have it. The sad truth. I have never met a gay man who was not positively obsessed with at least one of the following group of literary archetypes: Peter Pan, The Little Prince, and Icarus. Now, it doesn’t take much investigation to confront the fact that of the three of these characters, two die while they’re children in an effort to escape the prisons of their own ennui, and the one who survives is abandoned by everyone he loves to live alone on his island for the rest of eternity.

It’s horrifying. Whether anyone likes it or not, gay male culture seems to be separated between the Icaruses and the Princes and the Peter Pans, and those who outgrow them. The Daedaluses, the Aviators, the Captain Hooks, looking on. Craving in vain an imagined youth, while the younger ones of us crave in vain an imagined future.

Ingredient II: To the extent that we conceptualize death, it is never a peaceful death at the end of a life fully lived.

Imagine the death of a gay man. What comes immediately to mind? If it’s a cozy bed with the shades drawn on a crisp morning in the arms of his eighty-five year old life-partner, I’ll buy you a bottle of french wine. Because, chances are good, it’s not. I know it’s certainly not for me. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because Lord knows it happens all the time. But it’s not what comes to mind. What comes to mind is a young death. A death wedged into a life half lived. And I’m not talking about going out in a blaze of glory like a River Phoenix or a Jimi Hendrix or a James Dean, living so hard that you just die of life in the middle of your hey day.

I’m talking about a death that involves years of extended and painful physical deterioration, blistering lesions, and cripplingly expensive experimental medication. The kind of death people don’t want to talk about because it’s just too horrid and wrapped up in shame and stigma and all of that other juicy shit. That’s what hits the mind when you think of a gay man dying.

Or, more colorful yet, it’s a death that involves a classmate named, say, Brandon McInerney bringing a gun to school, coming up behind me and shooting me twice in the back of the head at point blank range before being defended by a hung jury as a disturbed child who was pushed to murder by my flamboyancy and getting out of jail by the age of 37.

And how sickening! How sickening that these are the deaths that come readily to mind. These are the deaths with which we live. These are the deaths that I allow myself to imagine.

And now I’m all like, “Well, shit.” Because here I was trying to sit down to write a clever, dismissive piece about how hilarious it is that I hate marriage, and instead I end up talking about gay male ageism and fucking death by AIDS or crowbar.

And now I’m all like, “Well, fuck.” Because it’s dawning on me slowly that maybe I only hate marriage in the way that I hate it when I’m sitting at a kitchen counter and everyone around me starts speaking Spanish. Maybe marriage isn’t an idea that I don’t like so much as a language that I don’t know how to speak.

Because let’s face it, the ability to imagine your life joined with someone till death do you part requires a basic reliance on the understood trajectory of a “normal life” and its connoted “normal death”:

Marriage → Kids → Grandkids → Retirement → Death.

Well, honestly, nowadays it’s more like:

Marriage → Kids → Mortgage → Midlife crisis → Divorce → Therapy → Alimony → Remarriage → Grandkids every other Christmas → Drug Addiction → Death.

Either way, I’m realizing that I don’t fit in to this trajectory. And maybe I’m not okay with that. Because the other day I walked downstairs and, after she had asked me why I don’t have a girlfriend yet, my grandmother started singing her favorite hymns. She knows dozens of them by heart, so it lasted a while. And after a few stanzas my grandfather came out of their room and sat down beside her and sang with her. And there they were, holding hands and singing their favorite hymns – my grandmother correcting my tone-deaf grandfather. And I’m sitting there watching this and I realize that they may fight like meth addicts all day long but at the end of every day they have slept in the same bed for sixty years.

Whenever one of them leaves the room, the other asks me frantically where they’ve gone. And I chalk it off to burgeoning senility but I’m not sure that’s it. I think it might be that when you sleep in the same bed together for sixty years, one of you can’t leave the room without the other one feeling like an arm’s been wrenched off. And I make fun of my grandparents and their marriage all the time, but maybe I only make fun of it because it’s easier to make fun of something than it is to admit that you’re not sure you can ever have it. Because the fact of the matter is I don’t know how to imagine myself sleeping in the same bed with someone for sixty years.

And I’m only twenty-three, yes. I’m a puppy, to be sure. But if puppy love is real to puppies, then puppy loneliness sure as shit is, too. And for the first time in perhaps ever, I’m confronting the fact that… I don’t want to die young. And I don’t want to die alone.

And I don’t know if I know how not to.

And that’s funny.

…Isn’t it?

Daniel Darwin writes plays and plays with fire. He is based in New York.

An excerpt from this essay originally appeared in Brechtfast Cereal, Daniel’s blog.

Compiled by AISSA EREÑETA

… Sino kaya sa kanila ang valedictorian?

• Tambak Primary School (Buldon, Maguindanao),
• Dinaig Elementary School (DOS, Maguindanao),
• Sablay Primary School (Siasi, Sulu),
• Sirit Elementary School (Abulug, Cagayan),
• Bagsak Primary School (Parang, Sulu),
• Bobo Elementary School (Kapatagan, Lanao del Sur)

Bawal ang cheating pero meron pa ring…

• Madaya Primary School (Ganassi, Lanao del Sur)
• Gaya-Gaya Elementary School (San Jose Del Monte City, Bulacan).

Bahala na si Batman sa paghanap ng puwesto para sa mga mag-aaral ng…

• Sicsican Elementary School (Puerto Princesa, Palawan)
• Patongpatong Elementary School (Madrid, Surigao Del Sur)
• Durog Primary School (San Jose, Antique)
• Pisa Elementary School (Tingoloy, Batangas)?
• Pero meron namang Vacante Elementary School (Binalonan, Pangasinan).

Weather-weather lang

• Mga mag-aaral sa Baha Elementary School (Dimataling, Zamboanga del Sur) ay dapat nang lumipat sa…
• Mataas na Lupa Elementary School (San Pascual, Batangas).

Elementary School ng mga Tunay na Lalake

• Siga Elementary School (Sta. Rita, Wastern Samar),
• Angas Elementary School (Sta. Cruz, Marinduque),
• at Lupit Elementary School (Batan, Aklan).

Elementary School ng mga Tunay na Tunay na Lalake

Para wala na talagang duda, dito na tayo sa

• Upak Primary School (Datu Anggal, Maguindanao),
• Bugbog Elementary School (Bucay, Abra
• Sapakan Elementary School (Pagalungan, Maguindanao),
• Binabalian Elementary School (Bolinao, Pangasinan), at
• Nagpatayan Elementary School (Banna, Ilocos Norte).

Pero Huwag Natin Kalimutan ang mga DTNL, o ‘Di Tunay na Lalaki

• O ang mga kagila-gilalas at kamangha-manghang nilalang na nababalot ng chorva sa Bading Elementary School (Butuan City, Caraga),
• Tibo Community School (Panganiban, Catanduanes), at
• Rainbow School (San Carlos City, Negros Occidental).

Sa lahat ng mga parte ng katawan na pwedeng gawing pangalan ng paaralan, ito ang mga napili:

• Kilikili Central Elementary School (Wao, Lanao Del Sur),
• Suso Elementary School (Sta. Maria, Ilocos Sur),
• Dila Elementary School(Sta. Rosa, Laguna), at
• Libag Elementary School (Tuguegarao City, Cagayan).

Pang Demonyo o Para sa Mga Nandedemonyo Lamang?

• Satan Primary School (Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao)
• Sungay Elementary School (Tagaytay, Cavite)?


Photo taken from http://blogphilippines.com/2009/11/best-school-for-alcoholic-students.html




Kabilin-bilinan ng Lola ‘wag uminom ng serbesa sa mga magaaral ng…

• Inuman Elementary School (Antipolo, Rizal),
• Basag Integrated School (Butuan City, Agusan del Norte), at
• Bangag Elementary School (Aparri, Cagayan).
• Katapat naman nyan: ano kaya ang ginagawa ng mga mag-aaral sa Jabonga Central Elementary School (Jabonga, Agusan del Norte) mula gabi hangang umaga?

Para Sa Mga Bata pa Lang na Mataas na Ang Cholesterol:

• Babuyan Elementary School (Sta. Cruz, Zambales),
• Bacon Central School (Bacon, Sorsogon City),
• Bagnet Elementary School (Itogon, Benguet), at

Taba-Taba Elementary School (Basud, Camarines Norte)

Dagdagan na rin natin ng Mababoy Elementary School, picture from http://jayjaboneta.com/?p=387

Paalala: bago umaksyon, proteksyon para sa mga graduate ng:

Muling Paalala: May bukas pang naghihintay para sa mga mag-aaral ng:

Bata pa kayo, iibig kayo muli.

At ang masasabi ko lang, “Lahat ay may katapusan,” para sa mga mag-aaral ng:

Aissa works for a non-government organization, so rest assured she’s a credible source for this kind of information. If it were in her power, she would be more committed to making the world a better place, one unfortunately named public school at a time.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore–all are short on natural resources, but all have clawed their way up through hard study and hard work. Unfortunately for its people, the Philippines illustrates the contrary: that culture can make a naturally rich country poor.

By JAMES FALLOWS

This article first came out in the November 1987 issue of The Atlantic Monthly and appears here with the permission of the author. It was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in the United States and for a time remained the subject of controversy and attention in the Philippines.

The full article may be accessed here. All visual media content was provided by New Slang with captioned attributions.

from Hay Pinas! Overseas Filipino Channel, http://www.haypinas.org

This view of the New Philippines is comforting. But after six weeks in the country I don’t think it’s very realistic. Americans would like to believe that the only colony we ever had–a country that modeled its institutions on ours and still cares deeply about its relations with the United States–is progressing under our wing. It’s not, for reasons that go far beyond what the Marcoses did or stole. The countries that surround the Philippines have become the world’s most famous showcases for the impact of culture on economic development. Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore–all are short on natural resources, but all (as their officials never stop telling you) have clawed their way up through hard study and hard work. Unfortunately for its people, the Philippines illustrates the contrary: that culture can make a naturally rich country poor. There may be more miserable places to live in East Asia– Vietnam, Cambodia–but there are few others where the culture itself, rather than a communist political system, is the main barrier to development. The culture in question is Filipino, but it has been heavily shaped by nearly a hundred years of the “Fil-Am relationship.’ The result is apparently the only non-communist society in East Asia in which the average living standard is going down.

Now a few disclaimers. Some things obviously have gotten better since Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fled the country at the end of February last year (though most Filipinos seem to think that the threats to the Aquino government –of which the worst was the bloody August coup attempt –imperil such progress as the country has made [note that this was written in 1987 -ed.]). Not so much money is being sucked out at the top. More people are free to say what they like about the government, without being thrown in jail. Not so many peasants are having their chickens stolen by underpaid soldiers foraging for food, although the soldiers, whose pay has been increased, are still woefully short on equipment and supplies.

The economy has stopped shrinking, as it had been doing in the late Marcos years, and some rich Filipinos have brought capital back home. I was not in the Philippines during the Marcos era and can’t compare the atmosphere firsthand, but everyone says that the bloodless dethroning of Marcos gave Filipinos new dignity and pride. Early this year, on the first anniversary of the “EDSA revolution’ (named for Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, where many of the crucial events took place), television stations ran round-the-clock replays of all the most emotional moments: the nuns’ attempts to protect the ballot boxes, the defection of Marcos’s two main military supporters, Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel Ramos, the abortive swearing-in of Marcos, his sudden disappearance in an American helicopter. It was inspirational and moving and heroic, and as late as this summer, just before the attempted coup, some of the same atmosphere remained. Filipinos are famous for their love of religious icons. A visitor would have to be blind not to see the religious element in Corazon Aquino’s public role. Stores sell small Cory dolls with bright yellow dresses and round-rimmed glasses. They’re not exactly icons, but I’ve seen them displayed in homes and cars as if they were. Even when beginning to grumble about her government, many Filipinos speak of Cory’s goodness, patience, and piety in tones that suggest they think of her as a secular, widowed Blessed Virgin, and as the only person with even the potential to hold the country together.

Democracy has returned to the Philippines, in a big way. As if to make up for all the years when they could not vote, Filipinos have been analyzing the results of one election and preparing for another almost nonstop since early last year. Election disputes have returned too. For three months after the legislative elections last May, long recounts dragged on to determine whether Juan Ponce Enrile, Marcos’s former Defense Minister, whose switch to Aquino helped topple Marcos, would get one of the twenty-four seats in the Senate. Senators are elected nation-wide, in what often resembles a popularity contest. Among the new senators is a Charles Bronson–style action-movie star; Enrile is about as well known as the actor, and though he has made many enemies, most foreigners I spoke with found it hard to believe that in an honest vote count he would have lost to everyone on Aquino’s list of nominees, which included a number of newcomers and nobodies. Finally, in August, he squeaked in as number twenty-four.

Faces of the Revolution, ABOVE: Cory Aquino and Cardinal Sin commemorative stamps, BELOW: Enrile and Honasan at the 1986 Edsa Revolution, from http://newsbreak.ph

Democracy has unleashed a Philippine press so varied and licentious as to make even Americans feel nervous– or rather, to recall standing in grocery check-out lines looking at Midnight and Star. Newspapers are always starting up and closing, but at any given time Manila has at least twenty dailies, most of them in English. Each paper features its stable of hardworking star columnists, any of whom is capable of turning out 2,000 to 3,000 words of political commentary and inside gossip–the equivalent of a whole American op-ed page–in a single day. Philippine politics has a small-town feel, because so many of the principals have known one another all their lives. This adds to the velocity and intensity of gossip–especially the rumors of impending coups, which have cropped up every week or ten days since Aquino took power, and which preoccupy political Manila the way scandals preoccupy Washington.

One final disclaimer: it can seem bullying or graceless for an American to criticize the Philippines. Seen from Manila, the United States is strong and rich. Seen from anywhere, the Philippines is troubled and poor. Why pick on people who need help?

The Filipino ethic of delicadeza, their equivalent of saving face, encourages people to raise unpleasant topics indirectly, or, better still, not to raise them at all. Out of respect for delicadeza, or from a vague sense of guilt that the former colony is still floundering, or because of genuine fondness for the Filipino people, the United States tolerates polite fictions about the Philippines that it would ruthlessly puncture if they concerned France or even Mexico. I don’t pretend that my view of the Philippines is authoritative, but I’ve never before been in a country where my initial impressions were so totally at odds with the standard, comforting, let’s-all-pull-together view. It seems to me that the prospects for the Philippines are about as dismal as those for, say, South Korea are bright. In each case the basic explanation seems to be culture: in the one case a culture that brings out the productive best in the Koreans (or the Japanese, or now even the Thais), and in the other a culture that pulls many Filipinos toward their most self-destructive, self-defeating worst.

To quote the blog entry where this came from: "And it’s moments like these that prove just how amazing Wowowee can be." (http://http://dryedmangoez.wordpress.com)

The Post-Kleptocratic Economy

Consider first the overall economic picture. Officials in both South Korea and the Philippines have pointed out to me that in the mid-1960s, when the idealistic (as he then seemed) Ferdinand Marcos began his first term as President, the two countries were economically even with each other, with similar per capita incomes of a few hundred dollars a year. The officials used this fact to make very different points. The Koreans said it dramatized how utterly poor they used to be (“We were like the Philippines!’ said one somber Korean bureaucrat), while to the Filipinos it was a reminder of a golden, hopeful age. It demonstrated, they said, that the economy had been basically robust until the Marcoses launched their kleptocracy. Since the 1960s, of course, the Philippines has moved in the opposite direction from many other East Asian countries. South Korea’s per capita annual income is now about $ 2,500–which gives the country a low-wage advantage over Japan or the United States. That same income makes Korea look like a land of plenty relative to the Philippines, where the per capita income is about $ 600. The average income in the Manila area is much higher than that for the country as a whole; in many farming regions the per capita income is about $ 100. The government reports that about two thirds of the people in the country live below the proverty line, as opposed to half in the pre-Marcos era. There are technical arguments about where to draw the poverty line, but it is obvious that most Filipinos lack decent houses, can’t afford education, in some areas are short of food, and in general are very, very poor. The official unemployment rate is 12 percent, but if all the cigarette vendors, surplus bar girls, and other underemployed people are taken into account, something like half the human talent in the country must be unused.

Some Filipino economists contend that the country is about to turn the corner, is ready to make a new start economically as it has done politically. Is the world price of sugar stagnant? Plantation owners can flood seaside sugarcane fields and raise shrimp, which bring high prices and for which Japan has an insatiable demand. Are American, Japanese, and European companies shifting their production sites worldwide? Why not build more of the plants in the Philippines, which believes it has a well-educated work force and relatively low wages. Just before the first anniversary of the EDSA revolution I spoke with Jaime Ongpin, an intense, precise businessman in his late forties, who had become the new Finance Minister. For the immediate future, he said, the trends looked good. The government was breaking up some of the cartels run by Marcos’s “cronies’ and exposing them to competition. Construction and small-business activity were picking up. The price of copra (the country’s leading export) was finally rising. And the economy might grow by five or six percent this year–more than the economies of Japan and the U.S. Another economist, Bernardo Villegas, has been predicting an East Asian–style sustained boom for the Philippines.

Many man-on-the-street Filipinos share a version of this view, which is that Marcos was the source of all their problems, so his removal is itself a solution. There is some truth to what they say, especially as it concerns Marcos’s last ten years in office, when he had graduated from his earlier, nationalistic, land-reform-and-industrialization phase and formed the “conjugal dictatorship’ with his wife.

Still, for all the damage Marcos did, it’s not clear that he caused the country’s economic problems, as opposed to intensifying them. Most of the things that now seem wrong with the economy–grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty, land-ownership disputes, monopolistic industries in cozy, corrupt cahoots with the government–have been wrong for decades.

When reading Philippine novels or history books, I would come across a passage that resembled what I’d seen in the Manila slums or on a farm. Then I would read on and discover that the description was by an American soldier in the 1890s, or a Filipino nationalist in the 1930s, or a foreign economist in the 1950s, or a young politician like Ferdinand Marcos or Benigno Aquino in the 1960s. “Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. . . . Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite.’ The precise phrasing belongs to Benigno Aquino, in his early days in politics, but the thought has been expressed by hundreds of others. Koreans and Japanese love to taunt Americans by hauling out old, pompous predictions that obviously have not come true. “Made in Japan’ would always mean “shoddy.’ Korea would “always’ be poor. Hah hah hah! You smug Yankees were so wrong! Leafing back through Filipinology has the opposite effect: it is surprising, and depressing, to see how little has changed.

Because previous changes of government have meant so little to the Philippines, it is hard to believe that replacing Marcos with Aquino, desirable as it doubtless is, will do much besides stanching the flow of crony profits out of the country. In a sociological sense the elevation of Corazon Aquino through the EDSA revolution should probably be seen not as a revolution but as the restoration of the old order. Marcos’s rise represented the triumph of the nouveau riche. He was, of course, an Ilocano, from the tough, frugal Ilocos region, in the northwest corner of Luzon. Many of those whom he enriched were also outsiders to the old-money, old-family elite that had long dominated the country’s politics. These elite groups, often referred to in shorthand as Makati (the name of the wealthy district and business center of Manila), regarded Marcos the way high-toned Americans regarded Richard Nixon: clever and ambitious, but so uncouth.

Corazon Aquino’s family, the Cojuangcos, is part of this landowning elite. (Their name illustrates its Hispanic pretensions. Her great-grandfather came from China and was reportedly named Ko Hwan Ko, which was gentrified into Cojuangco. Most educated Filipinos speak fluent English, but in the stuffiest reaches of the upper class, I was told, the residual Spanish influence is so strong that it is a sign of greater refinement to speak perfect Castilian Spanish.) Her husband, Benigno Aquino, was also from a famous family. Her running mate in the 1986 elections, Salvador “Doy’ Laurel, is the son of Jose Laurel, who was the Quisling-like President under the Japanese. Many of her first Cabinet appointees and sponsored candidates for the Senate bear old, familiar names. And so when Corazon Aquino replaced Marcos, it was as if Katharine Graham, having driven Richard Nixon from office through her newspaper, succeeded him as President–or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, or Mrs. C. Douglas Dillon III. The traditional upper class was back in its traditional place. Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, a writer some of whose work was banned under Marcos, recently published a debunking biography of Imelda Marcos. Its killing blow, in its final chapters, was its assertion that while Imelda always pretended to be an aristocrat, Corazon Aquino really was one: “Her jewels were truly heirlooms, not recent purchases from Van Cleef and Arpels. She was a true blue stocking, educated in the United States, and fluent in French. She represented all that Imelda had ever aspired to.’

Especially on my second trip to the Philippines, in the summer, many Filipinos told me that Aquino had become strangely passive in office, acting as if her only task had been to get rid of Marcos and ride out the periodic coups, rumored and real. As long as she did those jobs–that is, stayed in office–she did not feel driven to do much else. Perhaps she will do something to prove that judgment unfair; the August mutiny and preceding social unrest may force her not only to control the army more tightly but also to take economic problems more seriously. But even with the best will in the world, she will have trouble dramatically improving the country’s prospects.

One morning this summer, as I stared out the window at the monsoon rain, I listened to two foreign economists describe the economic trap in which the Philippines is caught. The men had worked in the Philippines for years and had absorbed the ethic of delicadeza. They did not want their names, or the name of the bank they worked for, revealed. This reluctance might suggest that their views were unusually critical, which was not the case: they were remarkable only for how concisely they summarized what I’d heard in other banks, in embassies, in business offices, and from a few Philippine government officials. The men ticked off the list of possibilities for Philippine development and explained the problems in each case.

Manufacturing? “There were not many viable sectors to begin with, and most of them were taken over by cronies. The industrial sector is used to guarantee monopoly and high-tariff protection. It’s inward-looking, believes it cannot compete. People are used to paying a lot for goods that are okay-to-shoddy in quality. Labor costs are actually quite high for a country at this stage of development. They should be like Sri Lanka’s but they’re like Korea’s, because union organizing has run far ahead of productivity. It’s a poor country–but an expensive place in which to produce. American and Japanese firms have set up some electronics assembly plants, but they’re only buying labor, not building subsidiary industries or anything that adds real value.’

Agriculture? “It’s been heavily skewed for fifty years to plantation crops. All those traditional exports are down, sugar most of all. Copra is okay for the moment, but it’s never going to expand very much. Prawns are the only alternative anybody can think of now.’ Agriculture is also nearly paralyzed by arguments over land ownership. Since the Spanish days land has been concentrated in a few giant haciendas, including the 17,000-acre Hacienda Luisita of the Cojuangco family, and no government has done much to change the pattern. “You could argue that real land reform would lead to more productivity, but it’s an entirely hypothetical argument,’ an Australian economist told me. “This government simply is not going to cause a revolution in the social structure.’ Just before the new Congress convened, as her near-dictatorial powers were about to elapse, Aquino signed a generalized land-reform-should-happen decree. Most observers took this as an indication that land reform would not happen, since the decree left all the decisions about the when, where, and how of land reform to the landowner-heavy Congress.

from http://luisitamagsasaka.wordpress.com

Services and other industries? “They’re very much influenced by the political climate. I think this has tremendous potential as a tourist country–it’s so beautiful. But they don’t have many other ways to sell their labor, except the obvious one.’ The obvious one is the sex business, visible in every part of the country–and indeed throughout Asia, where Filipino “entertainers’ are common. In Davao, on the southern island of Mindanao, I watched TV one night and saw an ad repeated over and over. Women wanted for opportunities overseas. Qualifications: taller than five feet two inches, younger than twenty-one. When I took cabs in Manila, the drivers routinely inquired if I wanted a woman. When my wife returned our children’s rented inner tubes to a beach vendor at Argao, the vendor, a toothless old woman, asked if she was lonely in her room and needed a hired companion.

The economists went on: “Geographically, the country is fractured beyond belief. The most controllable area is right around Manila, but beyond that the government’s writ has never run very far.’

Resources? “Exploiting natural resources has always been the base here,’ one of the economists said. “But they’ve taken every tree they can easily get. It’s not like Brazil or Borneo, with another fifty years to rip out the heart of the earth.’ Every single day Japanese diners take hundreds of millions of pairs of chopsticks out of paper wrappers, use them for fifteen minutes, and throw them away. Most of the chopsticks started out as trees in the Philippines, though more and more of them now come from American forests. The Philippines has more naturally spectacular mountains and vistas than Malaysia or Indonesia, but you can travel for miles in the countryside and mainly see eroding hillsides stripped bare of trees. Like Americans who speak of “conquering’ the frontier, Filipinos sometimes take a more romantic view of what “taking every tree’ can mean. F. Sionil Jose, a prominent novelist in his early sixties, who grew up in Ilocos, has written a famous five-volume saga–the Rozales novels–about the migration from the harsh Ilocos region to the fertile plains of central Luzon. The Ilocano migrants made a new life for themselves, he observes, and they did it by cutting down the jungle and planting rice. “There is some hope with minerals and gold,’ one of the economists said. Indeed, a Forty-ninerstyle gold rush is now under way in Mindanao. I was told that communist rebels, Moslem separatists, and former Philippine Army soldiers now work side by side in the gold mines, proving that economic development can be the answer to political problems.

The economists went on: “Geographically, the country is fractured beyond belief. The most controllable area is right around Manila, but beyond that the government’s writ has never run very far.’ For instance, the newspapers that blanket Manila have virtually no circulation in the rest of the country: among a population of 55 million, the combined readership of all twenty-plus daily papers is about five million. “The education system has run down terribly.’ The Philippines spends about one eighth as much money per student as Malaysia does. Free education runs only through the lower grades, and after that the annual fee of $ 10 a student keeps enrollment down to 50 percent. “The fifteen-to-twenty billion dollars that Marcos creamed off has had a big effect. There’s a kind of corruption that just recycles the money, but all this was taken out.

“And then you have population growth, which is closer to three percent than two-point-five, even though the government says two-point-two. The population could go over a hundred million in fifteen years. Since the economy doesn’t grow that fast, the per capita income keeps going down.’ Most people I met in the Philippines asked me how many children I had. When I told them, the normal response was, “Only two!’ By the end of my stay I was experimenting, raising the number to test the response. “Only six!’ a priest said on my last day.

The economist concluded, “All in all, you’d have to say it’s a worrisome situation.’

from http://theparadoxicleyline.blogspot.com

The Meaning of Smoky Mountain

You’d have to say something more than that. Most of the time I spent in the Philippines, I walked around feeling angry–angry at myself when I brushed off the latest platoon of child beggars, angry at the beggars when I did give in, angry at the rich Filipinos for living behind high walls and guardhouses in the fortified Makati compounds euphemistically called villages, angry as I picked my way among piles of human feces left by homeless families living near the Philippine Navy headquarters on Roxas Boulevard, angry at a society that had degenerated into a war of every man against every man.

It’s not the mere fact of poverty that makes the Philippines so distressing, since some other Asian countries have lower living standards. China, for instance, is on the whole much poorer than the Philippines, and China’s human beasts of burden, who pull huge oxcarts full of bricks down streets in Shanghai or Beijing, must have lives that are among the hardest on the planet. But Philippine poverty seems more degrading, for reasons I will try to illustrate through the story of “Smoky Mountain.’

Smoky Mountain is, I will admit, something of a cliche, but it helps illustrate an important and non-cliched point. The “mountain’ is an enormous heap of garbage, forty acres in size and perhaps eighty feet high, in the port district north of Manila, and it is home to some 15,000 Filipinos. The living conditions would seem to be miserable: the smell of a vast city’s rotting garbage is so rank and powerful that I could not breathe through my nose without gagging. I did finally retch when I felt my foot sink into something soft and saw that I’d stepped on a discarded half-full blood-transfusion bag from the hospital, which was now emitting a dark, clotted ooze. “I have been going to the dumpsite for over ten years now and I still have not gotten used to the smell,’ Father Benigno Beltran, a young Mod Squad–style Dominican priest who works in Smoky Mountain, has written. “The place becomes infested with millions of flies that often get into the chalice when I say mass. The smell makes you deaf as it hits you like a blow to the solar plexus.’

Not Smokey Mountain, but close enough. This is the Payatas dumpsite, photograph by David Paul Morris

“It’s hard to get them to go to school,’ a man in his mid-twenties who lived there told me. “They can make twenty, thirty pesos a day this way’–$ 1 to $ 1.50. “Here the money is so good.’

The significance of Smoky Mountain, though, is not how bad it is but how good. People live and work in the garbage heap, and say they feel lucky to do so. Smoky Mountain is the center of an elaborate scavenging-and-recycling industry, which has many tiers and many specialized functional groups. As night falls in Manila, hundreds of scavengers, nearly all men, start walking out from Smoky Mountain pushing big wooden carts–about eight feet long and shaped like children’s wagons–in front of them. They spend all night crisscrossing the town, picking through the curbside garbage dumps and looking for the most valuable items: glass bottles and metal cans. At dawn they push their carts back to Smoky Mountain, where they sell what they’ve found to middlemen, who own fleets of carts and bail out their suppliers if they get picked up by the police in the occasional crackdowns on vagrancy.

Other scavengers work the garbage over once city trucks have collected it and brought it in. Some look for old plastic bags, some for rubber, some for bones that can be ground up for animal feed. In the late-afternoon at Smoky Mountain I could easily imagine I’d had my preview of hell. I stood on the summit, looking into the lowlands where trucks kept bringing new garbage and several bulldozers were at work, plowing through heaps of old black garbage. I’d of course heard of spontaneous combustion but had never believed in it until I saw the old garbage steam and smoke as it was exposed to the air. Inches behind the bulldozers, sometimes riding in the scoops, were about fifteen or twenty little children carrying baskets, as if at the beach. They darted among the machines and picked out valuables that had been newly revealed. “It’s hard to get them to go to school,’ a man in his mid-twenties who lived there told me. “They can make twenty, thirty pesos a day this way’–$ 1 to $ 1.50. “Here the money is so good.’

The residents of Smoky Mountain are mainly Visayans, who have come from the Visayas region of the central Philippines –Leyte, Negros, Cebu–over the past twenty years. From time to time the government, in embarrassment, has attempted to move them off the mountain, but they have come back: the money is so good compared with the pay for anything else they can do. A real community has grown up in the garbage dump, with the tight family bonds that hold together other Filipino barangays, or neighborhoods. About 10 percent of the people who live in Smoky Mountain hold normal, non-scavenger jobs elsewhere in Manila; they commute. The young man who guided me had just graduated from college with an engineering degree, but he planned to stay with his family, in Smoky Mountain, after he found a job. The people of Smoky Mountain complain about land-tenure problems– they want the city to give them title to the land on which they’ve built their shacks–but the one or two dozen I spoke with seemed very cheerful about their community and their lives. Father Beltran, the young Dominican, has worked up a thriving business speaking about Smoky Mountain to foreign audiences, and has used the lecture fees to pay for a paved basketball court, a community-center building, and, of course, a church. As I trudged down from the summit of the mountain, having watched little boys dart among the bulldozers, I passed the community center. It was full of little girls, sitting in a circle and singing nursery-school songs with glee. If I hadn’t come at the last minute, I would have suspected Father Beltran of putting on a Potemkin Village show.

The bizarre good cheer of Smoky Mountain undoubtedly says a lot about the Filipinos’ spiritual resilience. But like the sex industry, which is also fairly cheerful, it says something depressing about the other choices people have.

When I was in one of the countless squatter villages in Manila, talking with people who had built houses out of plywood and scavenged sheet metal, and who lived eight to a room, I assumed it must be better to be poor out in the countryside, where at least you had some space and clean air to breathe. Obviously, I was being romantic. Back home there was no way to earn money, and even in Smoky Mountain people were only a four-cent jeepney ride away from the amusements of the big city.

In Smoky Mountain and the other squatter districts, I couldn’t help myself: try as I would not to, I kept dwelling on the contrast with the other extreme of Filipino life, the wealthy one. The contrast is relatively hard to see in Manila itself, since so much of the town’s wealth is hidden, literally walled up in the fortified “villages.’ But one day, shortly after I’d listened to scavengers explain why some grades of animal bone were worth more on the resale market than others, I tagged along with a friend and visited one of Manila’s rich young families in the mountains outside town.

To enter the house we had to talk our way past a rifleman at the gate–a standard fixture not only of upper-class areas of Manila but also of banks, office buildings, McDonald’s–and then follow a long, twisting driveway to a mountaintop palace. The family was, of course, from old money; they were also well educated, public-spirited, sincere. But I spent my day with them in an ill-concealed stupor, wandering from room to room and estimating how many zillions of dollars had been sunk into the art, furniture, and fixtures. We ate lunch on the patio, four maids in white dresses standing at attention a few paces off, each bearing a platter of food and ready to respond instantly when we wanted more. Another maid stood behind my chair, leaning over the table and waving a fan back and forth to drive off any flies. As we ate, I noticed a strange rat-a-tat sound from inside the house, as if several reporters had set up a city room and were pounding away on old Underwoods. When we finished our dessert and went inside, I saw the explanation. Another two or three uniformed servants were stationed inside the cathedral-like living room, incessantly twitching their flyswatters against the walls.

The War of Every Man Against Every Man

Am I shooting fish in a barrel? Sure–you could work up an even starker contrast between Park Avenue and the South Bronx. But that would mean only that the United States and the Philippines share a problem, not that extremes of wealth and poverty are no problem at all. In New York and a few other places the extremes are so visible as to make many Americans uneasy about the every-man-for-himself principle on which our society is based. But while the South Bronix is an American problem, few people would think of it as typical of America. In the Philippines the contrasting extremes are, and have been, the norm.

What has created a society in which people feel fortunate to live in a garbage dump because the money is so good? Where some people shoo flies away from others for 300 pesos, or $ 15, a month?

It can’t be any inherent defect in the people: outside this culture they thrive. Filipino immigrants to the United States are more successful than immigrants from many other countries. Filipino contract laborers, working for Japanese and Korean construction companies, built many of the hotels, ports, and pipelines in the Middle East. “These are the same people who shined under the Japanese managers,’ Blas Ople, a veteran politician, told me. “But when they work for Filipino contractors, the schedule lags.’ It seems unlikely that the problem is capitalism itself, even though Philippine Marxists argue endlessly that it grinds up the poor to feed the rich. If capitalism were the cause of Philippine underdevelopment, why would its record be so different everywhere else in the region? In Japan, Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere Asian-style capitalism has not only led to trade surpluses but also created Asia’s first real middle class. Chinese economists can’t call what they’re doing capitalism, but they can go on for hours about how “market reforms’ will lead to a better life for most people.

If the problem in the Philippines does not lie in the people themselves or, it would seem, in their choice between capitalism and socialism, what is the problem? I think it is cultural, and that it should be thought of as a failure of nationalism.

It may seem perverse to wish for more nationalism in any part of the Third World. Americans have come to identify the term with the tiny-country excesses of the United Nations. Nationalism can of course be divisive, when it sets people of one country against another. But its absence can be even worse, if that leaves people in the grip of loyalties that are even narrower and more fragmented. When a country with extreme geographic, tribal, and social-class differences, like the Philippines, has only a weak offsetting sense of national unity, its public life does become the war of every man against every man.

Nationalism is valuable when it gives people a reason not to live in the world of Hobbes–when it allows them to look beyond themselves rather than pursuing their own interests to the ruination of everyone else. I assume that most people in the world have the same mixture of selfish and generous motives; their cultures tell them when to indulge each impulse. Japan is strong in large part because its nationalist-racial ethic teaches each Japanese that all other Japanese deserve decent treatment. Non-Japanese fall into a different category. Individual Filipinos are at least as brave, kind, and noble-spirited as individual Japanese, but their culture draws the boundaries of decent treatment much more narrowly. Filipinos pride themselves on their lifelong loyalty to family, schoolmates, compadres, members of the same tribe, residents of the same barangay. The mutual tenderness among the people of Smoky Mountain is enough to break your heart. But when observing Filipino friendships I thought often of the Mafia families portrayed in The Godfather: total devotion to those within the circle, total war on those outside. Because the boundaries of decedent treatment are limited to the family or tribe, they exclude at least 90 percent of the people in the country. And because of this fragmentation–this lack of nationalism–people treat each other worse in the Philippines than in any other Asian country I have seen.

Like many other things I am saying here, this judgment would be hotly disputed by most Filipinos. Time and again I heard in interviews about the Filipino people’s love of reconciliation and their proudly nationalistic spirit. The EDSA revolution seems emotionally so important in the Philippines not only because it got rid of Marcos but also because it demonstrated a brave, national-minded spirit. I would like to agree with the Filipinos that those four days revealed the country’s spiritual essence. To me, though, the episode seems an exception, even an aberration.

For more than a hundred years certain traits have turned up in domestic descriptions and foreign observations of Philippine society. The tradition of political corruption and cronyism, the extremes of wealth and poverty, the tribal fragmentation, the local elite’s willingness to make a separate profitable peace with colonial powers–all reflect a feeble sense of nationalism and a contempt for the public good. Practically everything that is public in the Philippines seems neglected or abused. On many street corners in downtown Manila an unwary step can mean a broken leg. Holes two feet square and five feet deep lurk just beyond the curb; they are supposed to be covered by metal grates, but scavengers have taken the grates to sell for scrap. Manila has a potentially beautiful setting, divided by the Pasig River and fronting on Manila Bay. But three fourths of the city’s sewage flows raw into the Pasig, which in turns empties into the bay; the smell of Smoky Mountain is not so different from the smell of some of the prettiest public vistas… In the first-class dining room aboard the steamer to Cebu, a Filipino at the table next to mine picked through his plate of fish. Whenever he found a piece he didn’t like, he pushed it off the edge of his plate, onto the floor. One case of bad manners? Maybe, but I’ve never seen its like in any other country… I felt I had a glimpse into the failures of the Philippines when I saw prosperous-looking matrons buying cakes and donuts in a bakery, eating them in a department store, and dropping the box and wrappers around them as they shopped.

It’s easy to observe that Japan’s habits are more useful economically than those of the Philippines, but it’s harder to figure out exactly where the destructive habits come from. The four hundred years that the Philippines spent under Spain’s thumb obviously left a lasting imprint: at first glance the country seems to have much more in common with Mexico than with any other place in Asia. The Spanish hammered home the idea of Filipino racial inferiority, discouraging the native indios from learning the Spanish language and refusing to consecrate them as priests. (The Spanish are also said to have forbidden the natives to wear tucked-in shirts, which is why the national shirt, the barong tagalog, is now worn untucked, in a rare flash of national pride.) As in Latin America, the Spanish friars taught that religion was a matter of submission to doctrine and authority, rather than of independent thought or gentleness to strangers in daily life. And the Spanish rulers set the stage for the country’s economic problems in the twentieth century, by giving out huge haciendas to royal favorites and consigning others to work as serfs. As in Latin America, the Spanish thereby implanted the idea that “success’ meant landed, idle (that is, non-entrepreneurial or commercial) wealth. The mainly Malay culture with which the Spanish interacted was different from the Aztec and other Indian cultures in Latin America; for instance, societies throughout the Malay regions (including what are now Indonesia and Malaysia) are usually described as being deferential to their leaders, passive rather than rebellious. Perhaps for this reason the Philippines has not overthrown its clergy or its landed elite in the twentieth century, the way most Latin American countries have tried to do.

But for all that might be said about the Spanish legacy, the major outside influence on the modern Philippines is clearly the United States. America prevented the Filipinos from consummating their rebellion against Spain. In 1898 the United States intervened to fight the Spanish and then turned around and fought the Filipino nationalists, too. It was a brutal guerrilla war, in which some half million Filipino soldiers and civilians died. Losing an ugly war has its costs, as we learned in Vietnam; but wining, as in the Philippines, does too. In opposing our policy in the Philippines, William James said, “We are puking up everything we believe in.’ His seems a prescient comment about the war, especially compared with President William McKinley’s announcement that conquest was necessary to “Christianize’ a country that in ironic point of fact was already overwhelmingly Catholic.

Gabaldon school, ca. 1915

In its brief fling with running a colony, America undeniably brought some material benefits to the Philippines: schools, hospitals, laws, and courts. Many older Filipinos still speak with fondness about the orderly old colonial days. But American rule seemed only to intensify the Filipino sense of dependence. The United States quickly earned or bought the loyalty of the ilustrados, the educated upper class, making them into what we would call collaborationists if the Germans or Japanese had received their favors. It rammed through a number of laws insisting on free “competition’ between American and Philippine industries, at a time when Philippine industries were in no position to compete with anyone. The countries that have most successfully rebuilt their economies, including Japan and Korea, went through extremely protectionist infant-industry phases, with America’s blessing; the United States never permitted the Philippines such a period. The Japanese and Koreans now believe they can take on anybody; the confidence of Filipino industrialists seems to have been permanently destroyed.

During the Second World War, Filipinos fought heroically against the Japanese, both before and after the fall of Corregidor brought on the American surrender of the Philippines, in early 1942. Following the war the United States “gave’ the Philippines its independence and was in most measurable ways its benefactor: offering aid, investing in businesses, providing the second largest payroll in the country at U.S. military bases. But in unmeasurable, intangible ways it seems to have eroded confidence even further, leaving Filipinos to believe that they aren’t really responsible for their country’s fate. Whether I was talking with Marcos-loving right-wingers or communists who hated the United States, whether the discussion was about economics or the U.S. bases or the course of the guerrilla war, most of my conversations in the Philippines ended on the same discouraging note. “Of course, it’s not really up to us,’ a soldier or politican or communist would tell me. “We have to wait and see what the Americans have in mind.’

In deeper and more pernicious ways Filipinos seem to have absorbed the idea that America is the center and they are the periphery. Much local advertising plays to the idea that if it’s American, it’s better. “It’s got that stateside caste!’ one grinning blonde model says in a whiskey ad. An ad for Ban deodorant warns, “Hold It! Is your deodorant making your skin dark?’ The most glamorous figures on TV shows are generally light-skinned and sound as if they grew up in Los Angeles. I spoke with a black American who said that the yearning toward “white’ culture resembled what he remembered about the black bourgeoisie of the 1950s. College or graduate education in America is a mark of social distinction for Filipinos, as it is for many other Asians. But while U.S.-trained Taiwanese and Korean technocrats return to improve factories and run government ministries, many Filipinos seem to consider the experience a purely social achievement, a trip to finishing school.

“This is a country where the national ambition is to change your nationality,’ an American who volunteers at Smoky Mountain told me.

The U.S. Navy accepts 400 Filipino recruits each year; last year 100,000 people applied. In 1982, in a survey, 207 grade-school students were asked what nationality they would prefer to be. Exactly ten replied “Filipino.’ “There is not necessarily a commitment by the upper class to making the Philippines successful as a nation,’ a foreign banker told me. “If things get dicey, they’re off, with their money.’ “You are dealing here with a damaged culture,’ four people told me, in more or less the same words, in different interviews…

America is full of people who have changed their “culture’ by moving away from the old country or the home town or the farm. But a culture-breaking change of scene is not an answer for the people still in the Philippines–there are 55 million of them, where would they go?–and it’s hard to know what else, within our lifetimes, the answer might be…

from balita.ph

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter’s chief speechwriter.
Copyright 1987 Atlantic Monthly Company

By ALICE SARMIENTO

There’s an idiom, “Look before you leap,” commonly applied to small businesses, the ones that alight with a spark and feed off the passions of both proprietors and the patrons alike. With documentaries like Faythe Levine’s Handmade Nation narrating the rise of the craft movement, and neighborhoods once known for low-rent and high-crime now finding themselves re-branded as “hip” and “up-and-coming” artist enclaves, the world we live in is giving new hope to the little guys. At least these are the impressions we get from the success stories of Etsy and Williamsburg, and their various counterparts around the region.

The Philippines, despite an undying fascination with material culture and iconic brands, paints a different picture for the survival of small scale businesses in the information age. As a writer, I could feed my dreams of one day owning a bookstore; but every time I visited Datelines, one of Manila’s early experiments in independent bookselling, I remember getting hit hard by the smell of blood.

from http://www.travelphilippineisland.com

Datelines used to occupy a prime spot in Cubao Expo, aka Cubao X, now known to most as Manila’s “hipster” hangout. Once a parking strip lined with local shoe manufacturers, Cubao X reinvented itself less than a decade ago through the usual formula of low rent and commercial zoning; however it hasn’t transcended indie status by encroaching upon the surrounding areas, and amidst rumors of demolition, has failed to properly capitalize on its alternative image. By feeding off the love of its patrons, it remains a case study of how well-wishes and sympathy are not enough to ensure a business’s survival. It takes some serious pushing (and by pushing, we mean sales) to keep up a foundation; otherwise, you’re just hemorrhaging money. Take, for instance, the case of Datelines.

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur in the Philippines? Or rather, how successful are Filipino youth at selling not only their merchandise, but their ideas in a market so deeply divided not only by class but by archaic and immovable systems? When I was fashion school undergraduate, I made a little extra on the side by consigning my designs to a friend’s store in another “up-and-coming” neighborhood. We worked on a foundation of trust wherein I supplied her with at least half a rack’s worth of clothes every other month, and if someone bought something, I could just ask her about it and she would fork over my share of the tag. With no contracts, of course this whole arrangement was kept very flexible, and in the long run would have been easy to manage–that is, if either of us had any idea how to manage things.

Creating the goods for a business is completely different from the realities of actually running it, and this is true in the case of fashion retailing–which are two terms that should probably never have been separated in a world where the creative expression once completely integral to the world of fashion is being replaced by what some would read as superficial blandness and herd mentality. But the story doesn’t end there, because anyone with a success story to tell has a few anecdotes of trial and error, overcome by sheer persistence and unparalleled work ethic.

How is it that these guys can manage to look anything but official or legit?

The end of my foray into the fashion business began with a Macbook. My friend and I were to embark on a partnership, one that involved me helping her develop a line of swimwear and graphic tees, something like Billabong meets Threadless. One morning, as I was driving to her shop, I received a text from the shopkeep. “The police are here. It’s probably not a good idea for you to come today.” Since I was already close by, I decided to wait a while at a nearby coffee shop then come by when the commotion died down a little.

It turned out a man had been skulking around the shop for a few days already. He had observed the daily routines that revolved around the business until he finally worked up the nerve to come in and, posing as a customer, stole some cash and a Macbook. Luckily he was caught before he could pawn it, but that incident was indicative of the security hazards beginning to plague a neighborhood that was (slowly but surely) on the rise.

Later that week, an armed guard was brought in and patrol cars began making the rounds, but even these weren’t enough to prevent a string of crimes around the area–ranging from petty to unspeakable–that would eventually convince my friend to permanently close up shop and seek regular employment elsewhere. All this happened in San Antonio Village, an area made up mostly of low buildings and warehouses that was just beginning to lure people in with the promise of low rent and the market potential of the yuppies who populated the nearby Makati Central Business District. However, the cropping up of small businesses in an area so close to the city’s fringes also meant temptation and access to wealth–no matter how modest–for those who had absolutely nothing, and for whom hunger and desperation was more palpable than the pursuit of entrepreneurial dreams.

If it's money you're after, there's always this.

Twitter is a good place to see how the more persistent (or stubborn) are doing. Come tax season, twitter feeds are full of tweets from young entrepreneurs standing in line at local government offices, filing permit after permit after permit. “I finally gave in and paid up” tweeted a friend, referring to the bribes she had to fork over after 3 weeks of trouble from getting a liquor license approved for her restaurant. To this series of roadblocks, you can add the lack of reassurance that the law will protect you in case something goes seriously wrong.

In every developing economy, the spirit of entrepreneurship has signaled hope. To avoid anymore of the typical cliches, it is not necessarily the light of a new day, but the light from the fire being lit under the ass of a formerly complacent generation. In the case of the Philippines, complacence is one thing, but there will always be the combination of social and cultural ills that have resulted in a system too complex to navigate with business acumen alone. And in times of desperation, are those who resort to simpler solutions, like bribes and clout, really to blame?

Alice Sarmiento is the Managing Editor of New Slang dot com. Stephen Elliott said that being rich is “Not having to do any shit you don’t want to do”.

“The Last I Loved” works both as a fragment and as a subject, with strong notes of grief and nostalgia, whatever grief and nostalgia may bring. How many ways can we read into this theme?

Right now, we’re looking for playlists for funerals, imagined conversations written as fictional interviews, and letters to past selves, whether these past selves come in the form of lost friends (after all, don’t our friends reflect some part of us?), lost lovers, or literally lost selves.

If this sounds too melodramatic, we can always blame the weather.

We welcome essays, annotated mixtapes, galleries with long-ass captions, even incomplete pitches: send these to NEWSLANGTEAM [at] gmail [dot] com with “The Last I Loved” as your subject heading.

Do you get a lot of interviews? Is being interviewed fun?

Yup! It’s fun sharing your thoughts and ideas.

What’s the last song you’ve listened to on repeat?

Starâlfur by Sigur Ros

You graduated with a BFA in Advertising, how do the disparities in the viewing of ads vs the viewing of art objects get in the way? Is there even a difference?

I think it’s almost the same… the end work is a product. It depends on how you see it. But for advertising it’s direct to the point, no need to think, it’s an instant message. For art… it can change your perspective, your views, make you think about the work, make new thoughts, you can even have a dialogue, to argue, to participate.

You started working as an artist in the age of 56K dial-up connections. How has your work been affected by the transition into an age where acquiring information is so instantaneous?

You have a wider audience, you can show your work in an instant and people from all over the world can see it. It’s a good way of exchanging ideas and crossing different boundaries in one click.

What has remained consistent in your body of work?

I don’t know about consistency, but I want to explore and experiment in my artistic process. I don’t have a pattern or formula that I am following…

I want to be flexible and to do inter-disciplinary projects. As much as

possible I also want to do collaborative works.

What kind of work ethic have you picked up from working abroad or dealing with foreign audiences?

I think you should just be true and honest with yourself and with your work – you don’t have to impress other people with your work… Just enjoy what you are doing.

What do you think of the term “foreign audience(s)”?

Nothing is foreign to us anymore… we are part of a big global culture… We make our own language, ideas, identity that everyone can understand.

In your show c_rafts, why use the _underscore_ to separate craft from raft?

I want to play with title… the underscore also looks like a raft.

It was interesting the way the show was received as a celebration of ingenuity through detritus. Was your intention to represent the raft as a metaphor for innovation or desperation in the face of survival?

The show represents different layers of life, like the objects that are stacked to each other and combined to build a raft. These objects are not related to each other but different meanings are built – memory from a door, a bed, a chair… that were once used for private use… but in times of calamity, it becomes public…and make another story from it. You make your own story.

The installations of the rafts are very direct, it’s a sign of innovation and the need to survive… but the layers build another relation… another memory…

I noticed your work completely separates the cynics from the optimists. Could Filipino audiences benefit more from higher doses of optimism or pessimism?

It’s complicated.

Is there any general way to characterize the Filipino audience?

I really don’t know… Filipinos are very smart – it can be bad or good. Oh, Pinoys are very sensitive also – it can be bad or good too.

c_rafts is ongoing at the Vargas Museum, UP Diliman, until August 17, 2011. There will be an artist walk-thru on the 16th at the museum. The image used in this article was lifted from Mark’s blog, http://marksalvatus.blogspot.com

Curatorial notes for c_rafts were written by Patrick Flores.