JANUAR E. YAP

life as a rough draft

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

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.

Friday, December 4, 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.