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I confess: I only dare browse the news only after being dulled and
harried by all the mad chores of urban living and
livelihood—enduring the morning traffic, falling in line to pay
the bills and, despite my best efforts, being an accessory to the
crime of pollution and consumerist consumption. Only after these
things have filled the hours that lead to noon can I dare confront
local news.
It’s not the paper’s fault; the news is the
news. Stories about corruption, greed, ineptitude and brutality—of
a magnitude, complexity and pattern that makes one feel both
outraged and impotent—hurt me. This is my country. I take it
personally.
The only thing that eases the pain of reading
the news is doing my own little bit about it, be it my choice of who
to vote, when to protest and what products to patronize or boycott.
That, and enjoying the foreign news.
News abroad, even those of disasters, famine and
strife, can be morbid entertainment. It’s remote enough to put
aside. And knowing that things are bad elsewhere makes the situation
here seem less pathetic. Nonetheless, you can’t help but reflect
upon the Philippine culture when viewing other countries.
Take for example Iran. For the past few years,
America has been conditioning the rest of the world to see them as
the enemy with movies, comic books, press statements from the Bush
administration and other works of fiction.
A superpower that continues to maintain its
nuclear arsenal and that turns a blind eye to the fissile weapons
development of its allies, the US wants us ostracize a country for
acquiring the same technology.
The movies are no less fantastic than the news.
In Oliver Stone’s “Alexander,” Persians are cast as cowardly
and despotic. But it was the Greeks, the Macedonians and other
Hellenistic people from whom Western culture owes its roots that
practiced widespread slavery and refused equal rights to women.
To be fair, in Frank Miller’s “300,” the
monstrous exaggerations with which the comic book/movie portrays the
Persians were never meant to be taken as accurate or literal; they
are a projection of the Greek’s own superstitious fears, as Greeks
saw themselves as the vanguard of reason and logic. The movie is
told from their point of view. The comic book/movie uses the epic
battle with the Persians at Thermopylae as a metaphor for this
struggle against superstition. And somebody had to symbolize
superstition.
Somebody has to play the bad guy in Hollywood
films and Washington politics. It used to be the Germans and the
Japanese. Then it was the Russians. Now, it’s the Persians and the
Arabs.
In a roundtable discussion with The Times,
Iranian Ambassador Ali Mojtaba Rouzbehani remarked, “It was good
for us, because it made us more aware of our pre-Islamic history.”
We should ask: How has Western media and
politics portrayed Filipinos and other Asians? Should Filipino
artists accede to play such roles and should Filipino audiences
patronize such fare?
And take Palestine. The Palestinians suffer a
tragic history. They allow themselves to be misled by murderous and
corrupt leaders. Some of them continue to engage in
self-destructive, self-defeating and inexcusable means of struggle.
They are much like us Filipinos. And just like Filipinos, nobody
understands them. In my travel to Palestine, nearly every perception
fostered by Western media was proven wrong.
And just as it was for the Philippine’s First
Republic in 1899, nations today refuse to acknowledge a self-evident
and undeniable fact—that Palestine is a nation.
Whatever faults a people may have, no other
country has a right to judge their worthiness for nationhood. Some
of the most powerful, respected, prosperous and peaceable nations
today have in their history committed racial segregation (United
States), slavery (UK), systematic rape (Japan), government-sponsored
abductions (Australia) and genocide (Germany). But for all these
atrocities, these countries never had their nationhood denied or
their territories indefinitely occupied.
Liberty is as inevitable as it is indispensable.
People cannot help but struggle for it. No price is too dear for
them and no means too extreme. On the other hand, armed occupation
and suppression are a costly artifice to maintain. The question to
ask is not if but at what cost does a nation attain independence. As
with people, so too with nations: will an abusive parentage and a
war-torn childhood lead to a dysfunctional, dangerous or chronically
needy country? Just look at what kind of country the Philippines has
grown up to be.
And finally, take the US. The most entertaining
of news overseas are those of the American presidential elections.
Many bourgeois Filipinos watch the blow-by-blow account of the
electoral process as they would a basketball game, with some
impassionedly taking sides. It’s Barangay Hillary versus Barangay
Obama versus Barangay McCain.
It’s all good entertainment. But to believe
that the welfare of the Philippines depends on an American is
colonial mentality. An electoral contest that we have no say in does
little to determine our future. We should progress despite
circumstances beyond our control. Any foreign leader, as a patriot,
will always further the interests of that country, not our own.
If only our own President put our countrymen’s
interests first for a change, then we would be more than entertained
by the local news. But it looks like she, those opposed to her, the
entire lot of traditional politicians, the religious mafia and the
ideologically bankrupt leftists are but patriotic citizens of their
own fiefdoms.
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