Suspension of disbelief | SunStar Cebu Dec. 29. 2009 | Meanwhile

DEAR readers: Assuming that you exist, you’re probably such a vanishing tribe, given the fugitive nature of this column. Let me use a cliché—that even while I was away, I was always thinking of you. Don’t laugh.

For instance, a few weeks ago, I was in some kind of toy train circumnavigating Disneyland Hong Kong. With all my pretensions at being cool, it was rather unsettling. In that kitschy ride, I began to think how erstwhile Maoist China, on the eve of the HK turnover years ago, could’ve dealt with what is probably the shining symbol of Western capitalism—reduced into the face of one cute mouse.

The first turn skirted a jungle, and in the thickets were pocket clearings that revealed elephants, zebras, and giraffes made of concrete. Some crude robotics made their heads sway and their ears stand. Tucked in the leafage were speakers secretly blaring the jungle’s ambient sound.

I felt both fear and sadness. The first one because, given the rate mankind is blotting out everything that breathes, zebras will be zeroes. The second is a result of the first. Right that moment I swore I’d write my two-cents worth and email it to Op Ed Bong Wenceslao immediately. That did not happen.

The following day, I took a walk to a news stand and bought an English-language newspaper for HK $6. The other papers were in Chinese, but I’m an heir to a lost ancestry. My Chinese is limited to counting one to ten.

One news item caught my attention, and it went by the headline: “First government-backed gay bar opens in mainland China.” No joke. And this was at the height of the Comelec rejection of party-list applicant Ang Ladlad back home, a country that takes pride in being a dogged disciple of American “democracy.”

For one moment, I wanted to roll the paper, take the next flight home and thump the heads of all proclaimed morality messiahs in our midst. I remember one national artist advising a gay writer to move on and write other things because there is a multitude of them that are larger than themes of gayness. The young writer said he wrote large because gay rights are a social justice issue.

Mainland China is funding the gay bar as a means to fight Aids.

Right that moment, I wanted to write, but failed.

I failed, but I did not notice, too, that the afternoon passed and I was well into the “wonderful world of Disney.” I simply forgot at some point that I was right in the navel of kitsch.

Some 3D orchestra banged its finale and sent Donald Duck in a trajectory and crashing into the wall. When the lights were on, we burst in laughter and awe to see him stuck with his limbs sticking out. Humbug, that’s what slapstick is, but the crazy duck’s act quite strangely had me.

Ah, so finally, I could write something down this Christmas.

I’ve been a wee bit flat myself being at odds with most things about the season. Except for one, and I noticed that despite the season’s surfeit, there is something to be said about giving, not only as a sort of spirit, but as a concrete, collective expression. Without this, we seem to be short of chances the entire year.

In a scale you could not ignore, Christmas seems to re-appropriate kindness and love into a social rite. If you lost the child in you, you have at least that sense of community to count yourself in. But I bet you will still find yourself snickering to see that crazy duck stuck on the wall. To rest, said one writer, is to suspend all your judgments of the world.

Indeed, the season does what Exupery did in his book—which is to constantly remind us that we were all children once. Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on December 29, 2009.

Zeitgeist | Sun.Star Cebu | Dec. 4, 2009

THERE'S a rather esoteric study that goes by the title, “Dynamics of emotions in political game theory.” In one breath, you know it’s a crack at merging the disciplines of psychology, political science and mathematics.

The attempt pretty much succeeds—it had quantified emotions and systematically configured their contagiousness in a certain populace. The study, a joint effort of an eclectic clique of professors from the University of Berkeley, was able to draw a line between emotional response and political circumstances, something we know only too instinctively, but this time pinned down to the level of theory.

Someone raised an ante over an infomercial for its emotional overload, and one can’t help but find that rather naïve.

What can you say or do in a thirty-second TV ad, anyway, but drive the dagger into the hearts of voters?

The Democrats in the US learned their lesson well, and for the first time changed tack during the Barack Obama campaign.

Many credit his victory to the thousands of volunteers who walked the talk, but I think the value of emotions in the campaign was pretty much underrated. For years, the Democrats loaded their campaigns with policy debates, statistics and facts, and most often put an entire town hall to sleep.

Drew Westin, a clinical psychologist who doubles as a political strategist, found that despite how the Democrats’ belief are in line with most of the Americans’ feelings, the party repeatedly failed in translating that capital into electoral success.

Westin suggested during the campaign that the Democrats should better drop its “laundry list of issues,” and begin speaking in terms of passion.

Those single-worded campaign posters with Obama’s face make sense to me now. A friend of mine gave me a campaign shirt with the word “progress” under an image of Obama. The other posters also carried the word “change.” It was a matter of paring down otherwise complex issues into what feels right in the guts.

You listen to Obama’s speeches, and you’ll find how he cuts to the chase with what is household and basic, fanning the fire of the body politic with the simplest of words.

At home, this is the kind of tack we saw in most of our infomercials. But Westin added that there is no substitute for telling the truth in the “marketplace of emotions.” Nothing, he says, is more compelling than a candidate who is “genuine.”

So we have these theories—political game theory, emotions, and passion campaign—on the plate, but as Sigmund Freud said, “The theories are there, but it does not stop the world from happening.”

What possible emotions can hit the Filipinos right at the breadbasket? In the age of innocence, you think the elections are pretty much the turf of political scientists and forget that all the other fields that use every breathing human body as a specimen are just as valuable. Even literature, and all its discourse analyses on the grand narratives of good versus evil or the forgettable creation story of Malakas and Maganda.

You look around and these mythologies come alive in our political terrain.

Do they work? Of course, they do, which is why Greg Sanchez doesn’t quite fit in the scene of a creation story. You bet, the storyline, in all its mutations, will sell like a real road show in the proper season.

My friend Radel says some sort of spirit permeates in the course of history. I remember the term “zeitgeist,” which means “spirit of the times.” Zeitgeist you can add into the Berkeley boys’ theory, and you’ll find a way to make sense of why, despite how some candidates strain their neck in the political plunge, still fall behind the race.

That, while others are simply buoyed by zeitgeist.

What machinery | Sun.Star Cebu | Oct. 30, 2009

I REMEMBER the late Raul Roco say that in the coming years, which is to say now, the old guards of politics would be, well, old, and there’d be a terrible need for fresh supply. You look around now, and you often wonder if “fresh supply” automatically means novel minds or new politics.

I ended up in a table with a young man ranting against Noynoy Aquino. It was such an impassioned assault, and I don’t need to tell you, reader, the usual points people like him would hurl against Aquino. Which are so not unlike the low-blows those cheap hacks churn out on AM radio or some gossip columns.

I knew where the young man was coming from. Ambitious and, well, maybe well-meaning in some ways, he finds himself, in this rowdy season, feeling his way up the political ladder.

I should have called it “compromise,” but that word assumes that he had something to give up.

No, I didn’t catch a glimmer of principled politics or anything to begin with. What does the young man stand for anyway, I asked myself. It was pointless to argue with someone whose arguments really just boil down to self-preservation or promotion. I’d rather spend my time with loftier things, like MJ’s “This Is It.”

So when the young man’s attacks drove to the point on “political machinery,” I wanted to do a moon-walk and strut MJ’s vintage “Oww!” and hurl a finger into the air.

Many are still stuck with the Jurassic notion of “political machinery.” All it can ever do these days is bring truckloads of voters into the right places or plant an autistic mouthpiece in a radio booth. You’d have a whole assembly of local officials saying one thing when you’re around, but doesn’t really care when you’re out.

When, among themselves, the local officials can not really pin down the choices into one, the whole terrain practically becomes free zone. Time and again, political machinery has been proven to do only so much and by the end of the day it leaves you with a tab that looks like the defense budget.

Why did this happen? Simple, because the LGU’s have been empowered by laws to the point that it almost leaves the national positions irrelevant. That turned things around.

By the end of the day, the locals will only spend their efforts in saving their own skin.

Who cares about who will be president or senator just as long as the turfs are well and secure? When the smoke clears, whoever will be in power up there will, just the same, seek the good graces of local officials for practical reasons. Or, the other way around.

So where’s the machinery these days? It has become literal—the TV and the internet, the 21st century’s most powerful tools.

A visiting politician can only spend a few minutes, or if lucky a few hours, in a barangay, and flash the widest grimace of his life and leaves a chip of the kitty, but the television stays in the living room the entire day.

The “machinery” does its best work on a primetime when everyone’s stuck like zombies. This is old news, actually, and the communications theorist and cultural critic Marshall MacLuhan said this in the ‘70s yet.

So each time I hear someone gloat about “political machinery,” it will make my day to have spotted yet again another deluded creature bound to the fate of a male praying mantis in a sexual act. The better half will eat him up.

A cultural critic said, “The mark of our time is the revulsion against imposed patterns.” That pretty much leaves us with fair game.

Sex and LTO | Sun.Star Cebu | June 12, 2009

THE Land Transportation Office (LTO) is less then ten minutes from the house. There was only a trickle of people in the waiting area when I arrived. I went to one of the windows and inquired how to go about with my transaction.

The guy behind the glass said they were “off-line,” by which he meant that all works that required the computer network were stalled. He said I could go upstairs for physical exam and drug test meantime, the other parts of the procedure I can continue the following day. I obliged, I was anyway deferring a call of nature, and I supposed they needed the specimen.

So I went back the following day, handed in my requirements (birth certificate and TIN) and willingly went through the procedure. I was headed for adventure.

After decades of resisting the idea of driving, I gave in.

I have always imagined all my life’s stations to be merely walking distance apart, but life’s tectonic shifts sometimes rearrange the possibilities. Besides, some LTO procedure wasn’t like going to the dentist or something anyway. I was in for some spying in the wonderful world of government bureaucracy.

First off that morning, I found myself in a room of about 25 people. We were to be given a lecture on basic traffic rules.

This was interesting. When I looked to my right, I thought I had Bob Marley for a seatmate. I looked around and for one moment it looked like a peace conference between the Bloods and Crips. Further back though, there were a few quiet souls, and one of them said she drove a Fortuner.

So I guess the country’s citizenry was well represented in that room, or so I supposed. I brought the voice of the sleepless and hypertensive.

In an hour I learned a lot, no small thanks to the lecturer who tossed in whatever funny thing he could think of. I learned that a motorcycle is termed “single” because, legally, it can only take in one passenger at a time. That, in Dumaguete, people use the “series name” Easyride to call their passenger multicabs. That, under LTO speak, a “tricycle” wasn’t named so because it has three wheels, but because it is only allowed to have three passengers. Talisay’s fleet is a perverted species because it could take in six to seven passengers.

I also learned what “restriction code” means, and it says that if you have a code 15, you can drive a dinosaur.

Anyway, the lecturer told us that the LTO is doing its best to follow ISO standard, which compresses the whole procedure of getting a license into one day. No sweat.

An entire morning is spent on lectures and an examination. The afternoon is for practical driving, after which you can wait at the releasing window for your magic card. That day, I was going to be a direct witness of ISO compliance.

After an hour, we were back downstairs for the exam. Jeepney dispatchers, I realized, aren’t free from this procedure.

They were to answer a few questions, too. Non-professionals needed to answer forty. A leakage was impossible because each of us have varied sets of questions, which were by the way in the English language.

I looked around and saw Bob Marley with a tormented look; he could be ready to shoot another sheriff. I hope the LTO can make a Cebuano translation of the exams. I’m willing to translate them pro bono provided I get a non-criminal looking mugshot on my next license.

So the day ends, and congratulations to the LTO for being ISO-compliant. I had my license by the end of the day, spic and span. I headed home, took another look at the card and saw that, under sex was “female.” By international standards, I could be a feminist.