Tuesday, December 25, 2007
I'm going to sleep through most of Christmas day, considering it's already past 4 am of December 25. Now that may be considered a shame by most people, but hey! It is a holiday, isn't it? And since I'm only nominally a roman catholic, I don't feel any extra ordinary need to go visit a church. Jesus can hear my birthday greetings just fine wherever I am.
Monday, December 24, 2007
If I were ever to write about what Christmas truly means, I would give up and say that that story has already been written. Here it is, for all you kids who may have never read it before and for you kids who have but may want to read it again.
THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
by O. Henry
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young."
The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling--something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Della.
"I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it."
Down rippled the brown cascade.
"Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
"Give it to me quick," said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do--oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?"
At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice-- what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you."
"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Jim looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?"
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first."
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs--the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims--just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!"
And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!"
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
"Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it."
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
"Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em a while. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on."
The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
Friday, December 21, 2007
This blew me away ... not because it was particularly insightful, but because it points out a lot of things that are pretty self-evident but to which we have blinded ourselves.
....
This 1987 Atlantic Monthly article was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in the United States and has remained the subject of controversy and attention in the Philippines. This is the text as originally published in the magazine.
Copyright 1987 Atlantic Monthly Company
The Atlantic Monthly: November, 1987
A DAMAGED CULTURE
A New Philippines?
IN THE UNITED STATES THE COMING OF THE AQUINO government seemed to make the Philippines into a success story. The evil Marcos was out, the saintly Cory was in, the worldwide march of democracy went on. All that was left was to argue about why we stuck with our tawdry pet dictator for so long, and to support Corazon Aquino as she danced around coup attempts and worked her way out of the problems the Marcoses had caused.
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). 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.'
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. The Philippine telephone system is worse than its counterparts anywhere else in non-communist Asia--which bogs down the country's business and inconveniences its people--but the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company has a long history of high (and not reinvested) profits. 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. Outsiders feel they have understood something small but significant about Japan's success when they watch a bar man carefully wipe the condensation off a bottle of beer and twirl it on the table until the label faces the customer exactly. 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, discourging 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.
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 damanged culture,' four people told me, in more or less the same words, in different interviews.
It may be too pessimistic to think of culture as a kind of large-scale genetics, channeling whole societies toward progress or stagnation. A hundred years ago not even the crusading Emperor Meiji would have dreamed that "Japanese culture' would come to mean "efficiency.' 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.
America knows just what it will do to defend Corazon Aquino against usurpers, like those who planned the last attempted coup. We'll say that we support a demoncratically chosen government, that this one is the country's best hope, that we'll use every tool from economic aid to public-relations pressure to help her serve out her term. But we might start thinking ahead, to what we'll do if the anticoup campaign is successful--to what will happen when Aquino stays in, and the culture doesn't change, and everything gets worse.
Since, as a noted blogger pointed out, this piece is more than two decades old, one wonders why no social scientist has ever tried to validate these observations? Instead, we have blanket denials and equally blanket assertions of how un-damaged our culture really is and how it's always someone else's (preferably whoever is in power at any given time) fault?
My guess is that it's because the minute we accept that we've got a damaged culture, we're faced with a gargantuan problem we all must work hard to solve. Whereas, if we simply blamed someone else, we can always rest easy and avoid responsibility. Just kick out whoever we've tagged as the source of the problem and the age of aquarius will dawn.
That's the real problem I think. That we're too damned scared to look at ourselves in the mirror and acknowledge our faults. That we're so goddamned lazy that we welcome any sort of argument that shifts the blame - and therefore the responsibility to make change happen - away from us. That we're too fucking steeped in the belief that we are entitled to a better life, even when we do precious little to make a better life possible for us and our countrymen.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Hmm. Christmas cheer is always tinged with melancholy once you realize that everyone's leaving. For someone like me whose family is pretty much scattered throughout, Christmas usually means being stuck alone - or almost alone - at home because all my friends are with their families.
If it weren't so geeky, I'd stay at the dorm through the season. but even the old aunties tend to hie off for the holidays and I don't think anyone of them would entrust the dorm keys to me.
so it's back home for me, to spend the coming few days cooped up i a house with the computer and my mom for company. oh sure, we're gonna go visit relatives and all that, but that's never been my scene. I would much rather get cozy with the remote and a cold coke. Or, even better, catch up on all the paper work that needs to get done. If the Grinch ever resigned, or Scrooge retired, I'd be top candidate for their positions. Hahaha.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
It doesn't feel like Christmas, does it?
When I was younger, Christmas always signaled a real palpable change in the way things were. Streets that used to be lit only by street lights suddenly got all brighter with the addition of huge Christmas lanterns and string lights. Street corners that used to be empty would suddenly sprout huge chestnut cooking things. You'd have a hard time finding an apple or a grape until late November, and the only hams you'd see in public were elected officials trying to impress voters.
Today, I've noticed that we've got Christmas-y lights strung up on our streets all year round. Street repairs and whatnot even use christmas lights as barricades! Chestnuts, apples and grapes are available 24/7; hams and those little round red cheese balls have become fixtures in grocery stores.
But the greatest change I've seen is in how malls operate. Not too long ago, there was still a distinct difference in the atmosphere of malls during the holidays and during the rest of the year. I don't know if it was the decor - more sedate before and after the holidays; or the number of sale days - yes! i remember how midnight madness and bazaars used to be almost exclusively used for holiday shopping! - but there was a difference that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, even on Maundy Thursday, the inside of a mall looks like it's yuletide.
Could it be that we have become so inured to the trappings of Christmas that the actual event no longer registers? No longer excites? It seems to me that we've become so commercialized that even the most commercial of observances has been relegated to background noise - just another reason to go shopping in a country where commercial interests hype up nearly endless reasons for sheep, er, people to go shopping at christmas-levels 365 days a year.
Yep. I think that might be it. Christmas colors may be red and green and white, but we're all mostly just jaded.
Friday, December 14, 2007
The recent news about government employees receiving bonuses has reaped for the administration a fresh round of criticism from the usual suspects. Being the daughter of a government employee - well I used to be, before she got fed up with the interoffice politics and got out - I asked about bonuses (boni? As in the plural of alumnus being alumni? LOL).
Apparently, there are more government officials who tend to be dissatisfied with the bonuses they get, rather than thankful. This even tho' they usually get more than the usual 13th month. On top of that, most government employees get some kind of rice subsidy, clothing allowance, calamity assistance (sometimes even when the calamity is in some other corner of the country! haha), hazard pay (even for pencil pushers who never leave the office!), anniversary bonus, and a variety of monetized special leaves (my favorite by far being the birthday leave!). My mom even mentioned that in the judiciary, they get additional bonuses like dole-outs from the Judiciary Development Fund (JDF), and retirement bonuses when a Justice retires. Sound like a lot? Well, that's not all. Some government agencies authorize even authorize over time until sunday! No wonder some government employees move so slowly! They figure they've got the whole week to do what they could have finished in half-a-day!
Now, on the other side of the scale, I realize that government employees get paid a measly sum. Peanuts, really, compared to what comparative positions in the private sector pay. As such, bonuses really act as a kind of equalizer, letting government working stiffs catch up with their counterparts in the private sector. But do they deserve it?
I don't think so. If we want to establish parity between the financial rewards of working in the public vis-a-vis the private sector, we must also first establish parity in the standards of performance demanded by both. More bluntly put, if government employees want to be paid like private sector employees, they had damn well better work as though they were private sector employees.
Take over time, for instance. Working over time should not be considered a right or a goddamned perk! Over time should be considered a last resort, and to be perfectly honest about it, without good justification for its necessity, a request to render OT should be considered a shameful thing. It only means you were unable to finish your work on time. By treating it as a perk, government employees foster procrastination. As they say, work expands to fill the time alloted to it. After all, assuming that work is completed on time, what need is there for over time? Oh, but OT is still claimed. OT for what? For just being there! And I've heard that some bigwigs even worsen things by requiring that, as long as they're in the office, staff (who have nothing to do but sit around and wait to be bossed around) should remain - even late into the night.
So, no. I think in general government employees don't deserve the bonuses they get. They need it, for sure, and humanitarian consideration prolly dictate that they be given bonuses, but in my book, deserving something is a far cry from needing it. Or vice versa.
... just because I can't shut up about this ....
As a necessary consequence of this conclusion - that government employees do not generally deserve their bonuses - is my contempt for those who ask for more as though they were entitled for more. My mom told me stories of people threatening walk-outs and strikes and spilling their guts to the media simply because they were not getting the bonuses they felt they deserved. I was flabbergasted.
Ok, not really. But I was annoyed. People really ought to be better able to judge the worth of their service, rather than just putting their hands out, palms up, waiting for the dole out. I mean, does the person who sits at her table all day, dissing people who come to her for some government service, making people wait long hours for one stupid signature .... does this person actually believe she deserves a productivity bonus? I guess the problem is that she really does. Even though she doesn't even deserve the air she's breathing.
Unfortunately, there's more of this kind of government employee out there than the good kind - the one that gives government far more value than their salaries are worth. People like ... my MOM! LOL. Honestly, I know they're out there, but I haven't heard any good-government-employee stories lately, so I can't name anyone. Too bad, really.
And because the good employees are in the minority, it follows that the gross inefficiency of government cannot be attributed solely to top management. Nor can it be said that this rot started with the present administration, but certainly, this admin has been doing very little to address the problem. Going after the big fish is great - especially for PR purposes - but what people in the PAGC or the Ombudsman forget is that the people they bag prolly didn't start out being corrupt, much less invent the mechanisms of corruption. In many cases, these people simply found themselves in a position to exploit a pre-existing corruption mechanism nurtured by the invisible rank and file. So, rooting out the big fish really only rips out the tops of the weeds, leaving the vast root network untouched and ready to sprout new leaves.
...
Man, I think I've flown off tangent waaaay too much now. But that's how stream of consciousness goes, bitchez. Deal with it.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
She really shouldn't make promises she can't keep.
How can she vow zero political violence when everyone knows you can't legislate good behavior? At best, she may be promising that there will be zero political violence from her, because herself is the only person she can actually commit. Well, maybe from her and her goons.
And speaking of goons, my favorite goon - Lily Allen - recently dropped loads of pounds after finding out she had a heart condition. And now that she's trim, she does this gorgeous photoshoot for GQ UK. Thought I'd share it. Enjoy pervs!
And speaking of ... wait. This really isn't connected. Except in the sense that space is my other obsession.
Great news from MARS! The Mars Rover Spirit recently uncovered evidence that there may have been habitable niches on the surface of Mars. Read the full story, but the point is, the rover discovered significant concentrations of silica - the stuff that makes up window glass - on the surface. On Earth, the only place where you can find concentrations of silica like that are in hot springs and fumaroles - places where steam from the interior of the earth escapes through cracks in the ground. In both places, there's lotsa lotsa life! No, not what you're thinking, but simple organisms wriggling around and dying before anyone even knows their there. But that's not the point! The point is that there MAY HAVE BEEN life on Mars! And if that's true, then we are NOT alone.
I am so geeky excited about this!!! wOOt!
Equally exciting is that the Mars mission has finally solved the riddle of Martian spiders!!! No more von Daniken shit from now on!
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Why do we press harder on a remote control when we know the batteries are getting weak?
Why does someone believe you when you say there are four billion stars, but check when you say the paint is wet?
Why doesn't glue stick to the bottle?
Why do they use sterilized needles for death by lethal injection?
Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard?
Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but ducks when you throw a revolver at him?
Why do Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?
Whose idea was it to put an 'S' in the word 'lisp'?
If people evolved from apes, why are there still apes?
Why is it that no matter what color bubble bath you use the bubbles are always white?
Why do people constantly return to the refrigerator with hopes that something new to eat will have materialized?
Why is it that no plastic bag will open from the end on your first try?
How do those dead bugs get into those enclosed light fixtures?
When we are in the supermarket and someone rams our ankle with a shopping cart then apologizes for doing so, why do we say, 'It's all right?' Well, it isn't all right, so why don't we say, 'That hurt, you stupid idiot?'
Why is it that whenever you attempt to catch something that's falling off the table you always manage to knock something else over?
Now, the question implies that more people are signing up for the oust gloria petition. I don't think that's a fair implication.
First of all, Oust Gloria started 21 October. In contrast, Expel Tonyo started 1 December and Condemn Mutiny presumably started after 29 November. Simply put, the Oust Gloria petition has been around much longer.
And second, if you look at the figures cited, what they really break down to is that Expel Trillanes increased by 112 votes, from December 3 to December 11, and Condemn Mutiny - increased by 61 signatures in the same period. Again contrast that with Oust Gloria increasing by 31 signatures only in the same period. Now, the slow increase in Oust Gloria may be due to the maturity of the petition, but since that specific period was cited as a point of comparison, I figure it's fair game.
Bottom line, the implication is unfair and as a starting point for discussion, kinda flawed.
Nevertheless, assuming that future trends prove the implication valid - a definite possibility - and because I'm OCD, I can think of a few reasons.
1. Something a friend of a friend of a neighbor of a cousin of an uncle twice removed had read one time - the emperor's new clothes. The anti-gloria sentiment has become so en vogue that to espouse a different line would be looked upon as stupid, ignorant, blind, or worse, complicit.
2. People rarely ever step up to defend the establishment. Of course, Canada might be an exception, but then again, it is with good reason. On a trip once, I happened to be stuck in the same row as a Canadian who couldn't stop talking about how wonderful Canada was. They have one of the healthiest economies, health care is superb, and they have oil. I couldn't help contrast that with the Philippines and would have gotten so terminally depressed had I not realized that, well hell, they didn't exactly go through the same shit as us, did they?
3. The surveys quoted are all on-line. And we all know that on-line is where you can find a lot of the discontented - some with better reason than others. Plus, they're not all in the Philippines either. And it's somehow become well accepted that Filipinos living abroad tend to be more critical of the home government than Filipinos stuck here - most of whom probably don't have such regular access to the internet that they can't afford to waste their P25/30mins waiting for a petition page to load, filling it out, and waiting for the confirmation to load as well.
4. There are more romantic Filipinos than pragmatic. We all do so love the noble heroic fight and it's oh-so-accessible twin, the scorched earth policy. Don't believe me? Check out any Estrada or FPJ flick and start counting the bodies. Vendetta is just italian for ubusan ng lahi, kiddies.
5. The political opposition is far more media-savvy than the establishment. More tech-savvy too. Have you seen government websites lately? Ew. Clunky bullshit filled with flashing marquees. You'd think that their web designers were still working off of those on-line HTML tutorials.
And so on ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Well ok. Not exactly infinitum but definitely nauseam.
The point I'm trying to make is, there prolly isn't much sense in trying to read anything into the results of on-line polls (OMG! I just dissed the on-line poll! I must be one of those admin flunkies! LOL). It's tempting, certainly, to try to divine meaning from those numbers, but I think that doing that ultimately just feeds our biases - and in no small measure, our egos because we reinforce our conviction that we are on the right side of history.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
I've been chasing down anything I can find on the intarnets about the other Boleyn girl and I stumbled across the SOOOPERLATIVE blog of Kevin Ang.
I totally agree with his top 10 choices of movies to watch, and he has gotten me interested in a book I've never heard of - something that no one has managed in quite a while.
Monday, December 3, 2007
As early as last year, Democrats and Republicans, aiming to win their parties' nominations for the Presidential elections of 2008, began articulating their platforms of government. Since then, they have articulated in various public arenas and forums their positions on a wide range of issues - from foreign policy to health care; from the economy to the environment; from stem cell research to the the AIDS virus.
As a result, the people who will be voting for President in 2008 will have an idea of what kind of government they will be voting into office.
Not so in the Philippines.
A little over two years before the next presidential elections (2010), we have only one definite aspirant - Mar Roxas. From every other political group, we hear only insinuations and opinion-testers. So, for taking a concrete stand, I suppose the Liberals should be applauded.
I am also much in favor of their strategy of early positioning - IF (and that would be a humongous IF) the early positioning is used in order to ensure that there is ample time to articulate Roxas' platform of government.
Just off the top of my head, Roxas should explain:
1. What his foreign policy will be like. More specifically, how does he intend to shape RP-US relations? What are his plans for RP-OIC relations (we recently lost observer status, and the OIC is one of the strongest allies of the separatist cause)? How does he see the Philippines' role in the new ASEAN? Why should we continue the one-China policy when increasingly, more and more of our compatriots end up as OFWs in Taiwan? What do we do about the Spratleys, or Sabah, for that matter? That sort of thing.
2. What his budget policies will be like. Will he retain automatic appropriations for debt service? Why? or why not? Any shmuck can say he will prioritize education, but how will Roxas' actually do that? Does he have any concrete plan to improve the educational system? Or will he stick to his predecessors' ad hoc approach (Look! Call centers coming in! Let's prioritize english!!!!)? What about health care? We've heard all about the cheap medicines bill (pushed by the country's largest importer of generics, who also happens to be a congressman, by the way), but it's still just a bill, isn't it? Will that change under a Roxas presidency? We also hear about so many people being turned away from hospitals because they can't find the money for a deposit - how about that? What does Roxas intend to do about that?
3. Taxes. Sure, he didn't invent taxes, but maybe Roxas has plans for our system of taxation. Hasn't he been attacking the eVAT? Maybe he has a better solution. What is it? And I don't mean motherhood statements about boosting collections.
4. What his domestic policies will be. What will Roxas do about urban congestion and it's spawn - traffic, high crime rates, rubbish in the streets, pollution?
These and other issues have to be discussed by Roxas in the next two years. Him, and anyone else who dares to run for President. And hopefully, they realize that "discuss" doesn't mean delivering as many platitudes as possible in a 5 minute campaign speech (just before the dancing girls come on stage), but truly articulating their position - not just for the masses (for whom politicians dumb down policy talk ... you know they do!); but also for people who have the knowledge and the expertise to intelligently critique their plans. That way, we can have a reasonable assurance that it isn't just a snow job.
And yes, I hope they touch ALL issues, not just pay attention to one issue - the way Enrile won numerous re-elections: by focusing almost exclusively on the PPA; or the way nearly every GO member won the last polls: by focusing on their hatred for Gloria Arroyo. I don't buy into the bullshit that focusing on only one issue assures that all-important win, and that we can trust the politician to be more holistic once he assumes his position.
That's the argument UP-wannabees use when they pick non-quota courses. No course is ever stupid if it allows you to get into the University. Bullshit. All that does is teach you that it's ok to be mediocre, as long as you have some higher, nobler, purpose you can trot out for your friends and family. If it's stupid for high school grads to think like that, then it's grossly inexcusable for someone who wants to be president of the entire country.
This is my advocacy: MAKE THE 2010 ELECTIONS ISSUES BASED. I hope I don't find myself alone.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Imagine this. You're entering a building where you know armed men are waiting for you. You try to sneak into the place, hoping to surprise the bad guys, when suddenly, you bump into a guy with a camera, trying to take a picture of you. The flash goes off in your face, blinds you, and worse, tells the bad guys where you are. Unless you're real lucky, you end up on your back, with a bullet in you.
Next day, you're laid out in a hospital bed and you see your picture in the paper, with a little paragraph in the story praising the courage of the photo-journalist who 'braved the cross-fire' to take your photo - all in the name of journalistic integrity and under the aegis of press freedom. You vainly scan the story for some mention of the fact that you - the subject of the photo - are lying wounded in a hospital somewhere. Nada.
Now imagine the same scenario where, instead of the little fuck taking your picture, a stray bullet happens to hit him in the foot. (Remember that pig Dolan Castro? He walked right into a cross fire and got shot in the foot. He had about 5 seconds of airtime where all he does is shout "Putang-ina! Na-baril ako!" The rest of the raid he intruded on got about 6 seconds or something.) Next day, imagine the headlines - "Photojournalist killed in crossfire. Philippines deadly to journalists. Government can't protect media!"
Now, how about you imagine the scene the way it should play out. You sneak into the building where you know an armed hostile lurks. You see a photographer in your way. What do you do? You hustle him away from the lines of fire. Ah. But do you do it gently? No you don't. Blame it on adrenaline. Next day, you hear whining on the radio - "we were only doing our job! We were exercising freedom of the press!"
Ah. The life of a soldier is a thankless one.
I agree that those media men should have been hustled down the stairs.
I agree that those media men should have been taken to Bicutan for a debriefing.
I agree that those who resisted should have been placed in wrist restraints.
I agree that those media men should not have been in the Penn in the first place.
If the world is fair, those who persisted on staying and endangering the lives of soldiers (who had to worry about protecting reporters instead of just focusing on the job at hand) should be charged with obstruction of justice or something.
My words will mean little to those soldiers who were only doing their job, but I stand by them anyway.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Well, well. The prince of petulance walked out of his own trial and it seems like he's now holed up in the Peninsula. From everything that's been reported so far, it seems like a wonderfully coordinated series of events, from people smuggling firearms into the courthouse - later to brandish them as Trillanes staged his walk-out - to Makati Ave being eerily empty.
Looks serious, folks.
Ohgawd. We are such a banana republic.
UPDATE1 > Bishop Tobias or something is on the radio spouting the usual rhetoric. Sheesh.
UPDATE2 >
Can you say Oakwood part 2? This Trillanes is giving me a head ache. So much dramatic build-up, so intellectual Rambo, so Che, and then ... pfft .... a priest whining to the cops to "puhleeze stop teargassing us!" Trillanes has the ability to throw an uncannily convincing temper tantrum (the Makati trial court probably didn't have the brand of soda Trilly wanted, so he walked) and the equally uncanny ability to show that he hasn't got the balls to deliver on the promise of his own hype. Honestly, it's like coitus fuckin' interruptus.
It's really funny because at around 5:11 pm, Trillanes was all chest beating and saying: "Well they can try, they can do anything. I'm going to expect the worst from these people. One thing I can assure you is we have more than enough will power and fighting spirit to bring this government down." Less than thirty minutes later, he's on TV telling everyone that he doesn't want bloodshed, so he's surrendering.
Hold up - he doesn't want bloodshed? Well, what the fuck did he expect would come from his actions? Did he honestly think that the government would roll over for him? Nah. I have my own theories.
Up to a point this was a carefully orchestrated event, starting with civilians smuggling long guns into the court house. And then that triumphal strutting along Makati Ave that was strangely empty of cars (I can smell Jojo Binay trying to be the unseen hand in all this). And then there was that stupid priest asking for people to come and protect Trilly in pathetic imitation of Cardinal Sin. But when the people didn't come, and the government showed that it had the balls to come in and get him (It's that whole Duterte doctrine: "the government is here to overwhelm you, not to give you a fair chance."), the whole charade collapsed.
And a charade it really was. And a pitiful miscalculation by a spoiled brat who thought that his 11 millions would troop to the streets for him. It's a good thing he's a civilian now. I shudder to think of the safety of the men in any platoon he leads, considering his colossal ineptitude as a commander.
If he really, truly, didn't want bloodshed, he should not have run away in the first place. His cohort, Lim, keeps saying "Dissent without action is consent." Maybe so, but what it boils down to is what sort of action are you ready to take. There is as much honor in lambasting a judge in a courthouse for being a tool of the administration, as there is in staging a highly dramatic armed walk-out. The difference is, if - like a civilized man - he had used words instead of the implicit threat of force, he would not have even darkened society's doorstep with the danger of bloodshed.
If he really, truly, didn't want bloodshed, AND he really, truly needed to walk-out, he should not have made a beeline for a place where civilians congregated. That he walked straight to the Penn was a clearly a military decision, a guerilla tactic meant to maximize protection for a very small force facing a much larger enemy. Having lots of civilians around, meant there would be no shortage of human shields. So, the possibility of bloodshed was brought about by his precipitate action, and AGGRAVATED by his choice of where to make a stand.
If he didn't want bloodshed, and - as he tries to imply now - only wanted to send a message, he should have taken his Magdalo into a park or some open ground where the targets would be clear, and the government would have absolutely no justification to bring in their Simbas. There, any blood spilled would be the blood of those who make such a big production number of being ready to die for their beliefs. More importantly, the blood spilled would be unequivocally on the hands of the government.
Going by what I've been reading over at a noted blogger's stomping grounds, this bears all the hallmarks of an attempt to force a 'Bastille moment.' Yet another pathetic attempt to cloak these petty machinations with the patina of legitimacy by evoking glorious moments in the past. That's a very reactionary strategy, and a very crude version of the 'activation of symbols' strategy Hitler used so effectively.
Enough with the blood, rom!
Anyway, all is not lost for Trillanes. Sure, this tail-between-the-legs-with-your-nose-held-high routine is getting old and might lose him some support, but true to form, the clumsy government attempt to take him prisoner will probably win him more supporters than he loses.
First of all, did the government really have to ram the Penn? That place is so old and so entrneched in Philippine society, the damned place has a constituency of its own! So to wreck it so gleefully is bound to be counter-productive for the government. The fact that they were only going after a handful of men makes it even worse. The Duterte doctrine, as satisfying as it may sound, is actually stupid.
One way the government could have played this to its advantage was to treat Trilly exactly how you would treat a kid having a tantrum. Gently but firmly. I mean, if a kid were sitting on the floor bawling, you don't swat him with a baseball bat, do you? Government forces should have simply armored their men as best they could, and tried to engage Trilly's gang of thugs on a man-to-man basis.
Government would have gained a lot of face for showing that sort of restraint, whereas Trilly would be placed in a position where the decision to spill blood would be on his hands. As things turned out, Trilly was able to make it appear that the government was out for blood. And in fairness to him, it probably was.
Second, the clumsy handling of the media has turned that pack of ravening wolves against government once again. Sure, media has no right to complain about the gassing. I heard the media were given ample warnings to clear the place. But as the drama lengthened, it became clear that the gassing was continued, even though they knew that media was still around. That was stupid.
And now, they're harassing ABSCBN. Oooooooh, to be in the position to torture those arrogant sonsofbitches! But still, they are media - one of the most powerful in fact - and common sense dictates that they should handle these idiots with kid gloves. Now Marichu Lambino is getting in on the act. Under other circumstances, the military taking ABSCBN to Bicutan would have been understandable, but in the heightened drama of the Penn, well, people will only see harassment and bullying. At worst, a case could be made for a human rights violation.
So in the end, I think the sports card will read like this: Trillanes will have lost two popularity points (because he once again buckled under pressure), but gained one (because government made him look like a hero, nevertheless), for a net loss of one popularity point. Not bad.
ABS CBN will have gained something like a gazillion sympathy points for the spectacular visuals of reporters and crew being rounded up like cattle.
Government will have lost so many popularity points that, just when we all thought government had hit rock bottom, we discovered a basement.
The big loser is of course you and me. With visuals like a Simba ramming a hotel entrance, dislodging Christmas decorations (ohferchrissakes!), you can rest assured that investors will once again be spooked. Hopefully all the economic gains we've had so far won't be screwed, but they prolly will be. And when the money stays away, national recovery goes directly to the pits. Don't pass GO. Don't collect 200.
UPDATE3 > For the opposite point of view - the point of view that rhapsodizes this entire business - check out ellen's blog. Great pics.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
I took the online political compass diagnostic, as suggested by cvj and, to my great surprise, I more closely mirror the Dalai Lama than Stalin. :D Check out my results here. Or, you can just scroll down ...
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
I was a happy camper with Windows XP. Really, I was. Oh sure, I wanted a Mac, but with the price tag on that baby ... Anyway, so I settled for a PC, running on XP.
And then came Vista. Like almost everyone else, I bought into the hype. Even attended a launch event where I salivated over everything they said Vista could do. So, when I finally got around to upgrading my hardware, naturally, I went with Vista.
Ready (OMG! Those gorgeous graphics!!!) ...
STEADY (OMFG! My productivity will effing triple!!!) ...
GO!!!!
pfft.
Right. Vista brought me to a crashing halt. WTF?! Nearly everything I did with my new toy prompted a dialogue box. Are you sure you want to do this? Who are you and are you authorized to make this change? No no no, you can't do that!
Well, hell. If I had wanted a computer to talk back to me as much as Vista does, I would've sprung for HAL.
So, after a thoroughly inconvenient downgrade to XP - not to mention at least three days of hunting down all the old drivers and customizations I needed - I got re-acquainted with productivity. For awhile, I suffered in silence. I was embarrassed. I felt - and still do - that I had been taken for a ride with my eyes wide-open. I jumped onto the Vista bandwagon like some tech newbie and paid the price for it. Yes I did.
Fortunately for my self-esteem, I ran across this article that says: " Windows XP trounced Windows Vista in all tests -- regardless of the versions used or the amount of memory running on the computer. In fact, XP proved to be roughly twice as fast as Vista in most of the tests."
No kidding.
UNfortunately, I also read somewhere that Microsoft was pushing Vista hard and planned to phase out XP. So, while I can stay loyal to XP, I know that MS is soon going to drop all internal support for the thing. No more updates and shit. 4-5 years tops, I suppose even XP is gonna go the way of the sabre-toothed tiger. But that's exactly my gripe. Couldn't MS have rolled out a mature product? One that didn't have all those compatibility issues? One that didn't need service packs to do what the damned thing should have been able to do in the first place?
A friend told me it was all about money. YA THINK? Of course its about money, but how about customer satisfaction, man? I really think consumers like us ought to be more responsible. I mean, these megacorps wouldn't be making shoddy product if we refused to buy 'em, right? If the buying stops, the hoodwinking can stop too.
Well, maybe. After all, MS has what? like 90% of the market? How am I gonna shake that beast?
...
So I suppose I'll just go on living my otaku life in quiet desperation, eh? Until XP finally joins the vacuum tube in tech-xtinction.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
I love earthquakes. They make me feel so uhm ... frisky ... afterward. I don't know. Maybe it's some deep biological response - y'know? The threat of injury or death kinda prods your body to take action to make sure that you leave something behind. Ever notice how in the movies, after a chase or a big fight, the guy and the girl (there's ALWAYS a guy and a girl) end up making out and, depending on the rating, fucking?
Monday, November 26, 2007
I don't want him to be President - at least that's how I feel right now. Sure, he's kept a relatively low profile on the more stupid causes that have sent the likes of Nene Pimentel to orgiastic heights of camera whorage, but when he has spoken up, he hasn't struck me as someone I'd want to be president.
His question time during the NBN hearings, for instance, showed how easily he could be peeved and how he apparently thinks its okay to show up for a Senate hearing without boning up on the subject matter.
Of course, 2010 is like an eternity away, and well, I might change my mind. My prerogative and all that. But the way I'm thinking, if he's going to show presidential timbre only during the run-up (however long that might be) to the elections, then maybe it's all going to be for show.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
I've always loved that e-heads song where the singer talks about all those places he wants to drive to, then later in the song reveals that it's all wishful thinking and that he's begging anyone to teach him how to drive. Well, today, I got his wish. I'm learning to DRIVE!
Plus, HEROES rocks! For the next few days, people have got to call me Yaeko. LOL. If you don't know why, man, you are missing alot.
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