Let’s agree on one thing. Indulging our fully justified sense of outrage, and calling on the government to stop the peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front because of last Tuesday’s barbaric ambush in Basilan, is the easier option. The harder (indeed, for some, almost impossible) choice is to keep one’s head.

Leave aside the posturing of the usual congressmen who have always been against the very notion of a peace agreement with Moro separatists; we are better off considering the opinion of the likes of Dean Bocobo of Philippine Commentary, who is undoubtedly an intelligent man. What does his screed against the measured position taken by the Inquirer, in the matter of the savage beheadings of our Marines in Basilan, tell us, but that even intelligent men can get it wrong?

The Inquirer editorial’s appeal for “an iron fist and an open mind” seems to me to strike the necessary balance between the need to bring the decapitators to swift justice —- preferably in the form of a massive military counterattack —- and the greater need to resolve the Moro separatist issue. Resolution, considering our history, the state of our military, and the nature of the separatist movement, may best be achieved through a peace agreement. Dean may not agree, but surely he can grant those who think differently from him the same reasonableness and patriotism he seems to assume for himself?

Tall order, that. Dean writes:

The editorial uses all the right buzz words, but it is dripping with insincerity, disingenuity and manages to blame the authorities for the tragedy. The motivation of the editorial is to embarrass the govt and excuse the terrorists.

Just because Dean cannot wrap his mind around it, doesn’t mean that the idea of a balanced response is unsound. In fact, by slyly equating “fair conclusion” with excuses for the terrorists, Dean is being intellectually dishonest. Is a fair peace agreement necessarily a surrender of the government’s sovereign prerogatives or a capitulation before the forces of terrorism? Dean protests too much.

The editorial, it seems to me, calls for retaliating with full force against those who beheaded our Marines. But it does not adopt the knee-jerk reaction of some, that the peace talks be scuttled, immediately, because of last Tuesday’s barbarity.

For once, an Inquirer editorial position agrees completely with the official Malacanang policy. A short statement from the Palace, employing a memorable turn of phrase, formulated it succinctly.

“We will run after those who killed our Marines, but we will not run away from the peace talks,” Arroyo said in a statement forwarded by Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye.

“Our desire to see the killers punished is matched only by our determination to forge peace,” she added.

That seems reasonable, and patriotic, enough.

It has been a month since my last post; my apologies for dropping off the radar screen, but I have been unusually busy. With luck, this busy-ness, or at least parts of it, should bear fruit starting next week. My thanks to colleague Manolo for keeping the blog going, and to our growing band of readers who continue to post very interesting comments indeed. (More about this, later this week.) 

On to the present, which, as luck would have it, is all about the past: I was struck last month by a column of Billy Esposo’s in the Star, which offered an assessment of the columnist’s reliability as a political crystal-ball gazer.

I thought Esposo did the honorable thing: Unlike any other mainstream media political commentator I know, he asked his readers to judge his political prognostications. But a close look at his column, and at other columns he had written (easily accessible here), tells us that Esposo undermined his own experiment, by choosing to write about only those predictions that had, willy-nilly, come true.

In other words, Esposo inserted a new mono-bloc into journalism’s musical chairs game —- and then promptly wrecked it.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

THAT phrase is being reported around the world, and locally: RP Catholic Church ready to hold Latin masses. As the religion to which most Filipinos, at least statistically, belong, goings-on in the Roman Catholic Church are always interesting -and relevant. What the present Pope, Benedict XVI, has decreed, Motu Proprio, that is, on his own initiative, is that many of the old limitations on celebrating the old Tridentine Rite of the Mass, have been removed. The Weight of Glory has a roundup of Catholic blogger reactions. See also The Byzantine Dominican, and First Things, which calls the Pope’s decree a “liberal document.” Incidentally, in Ad Orientem, there’s an entry from some time back, on why the Eastern Orthodox care about the Latin Mass. Since reunification with the Eastern Churches is a particular interest of the present Pope, his new decree might have fringe benefits not readily seen in terms of Christian unity.

Whispers in the Loggia is a blog I’ve mentioned before, it’s a good guide to goings-on in the R.C. Church, and it reports on what the Pope hoped to achieve by issuing his latest decree (it is, he says, “this pontificate’s most significant text”). Dr. Robert Moynihan is a well-known “Vaticanologist,” and his “Inside the Vatican”  Magazine and newsletter often give the inside scoop on the workings of the oldest government on earth. His report, The Old Mass Returns, gives the political and theological inside story on the Pope’s decision.

The Pope’s decree is already known as Summorum Pontificum (most Papal documents get their titles from the first few words in the definitive Latin text of those documents): see the English translation and other relevant texts. The Pope also issued a letter to the bishops of the Catholic world, explaining the reasons behind, and the objectives of, his decree.

Catholics pining for the old rite will be happy; most Catholics born since the 1960’s have no idea how the Mass used to be celebrated, and probably wouldn’t care for the rituals of the old rite. But around the world, there’s a growing number of young Catholics (including priests) unhappy with the jazz guitar masses and general relaxing of the old discipline of the Catholic church, and they might just be attracted to the old rituals. On the whole, it’s a sign that the Catholic Church, institutionally, is slowly backing away from its 60’s style activism and returning to a more traditional understanding and expression of the faith. Or, as the Pope put it, of “arbitrary deformations of the liturgy.” He was the one, after all, who columnist Maureen Dowd praised on his election, saying, “The cafteria is closed,” referring to the idea of  “cafeteria Catholics”.

Two articles make for thought-provoking reading this weekend.

The first is Michael Tan’s Tisoy Kasi!, a romp through history, language, how we currently see ourselves and how we can see ourselves not only in a better, but more realistic light:

The historian Benedict Anderson writes about how Filipinos seem to have gone through a lobotomy, a removal of a part of the brain responsible for memory. The amnesia is selective of course; we leave out bits and pieces of our colonial history, and practically all of our precolonial past.

Most Filipinos know little about the precolonial era. In part, this is because of colonialism, both Spanish and American, and the way the precolonial period was depicted as a kind of Dark Age, of ignorant pagan natives running around naked. With the nationalist period of the 1970s, the pendulum swung to the other end as we romanticized the precolonial period in our search for The Authentic Filipino.

It is important, certainly, to go back to our precolonial period, but not to look for a pure Filipino culture. In the first place, the “Filipino” did not come into existence until the 19th century, and initially, it was a term reserved for Spaniards born in the Philippines. Later, it was expropriated by Rizal and other ilustrados, the illuminated bourgeoisie, who could see a Filipino as a loyal subject of Spain.

The roots of what we call Filipino culture today do date back to the precolonial period, and there is still much to do here around archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics to reconstruct that period. But what we have so far is already fascinating, including the way it reflects how our cultures were constantly being hybridized during that time…

…We need to avoid two extremes: One is to continue wallowing in a colonial mentality that sees only Western influences as good. The other is to attempt to look for a pure precolonial past. All cultures are hybrids and it can be fascinating unraveling all the sources and processes involved in this hybridization. Once we recognize that we are all mestizo, the product of more than one culture, we might better appreciate ourselves — and humanity.

The second is Breaking the Colonial-Cum-Victim-Cum-Cinderella Mentality, by Big Mango:

It is the great and profound gift of the Internet that allows for conservative ideas as much as liberal ones. Those ideas flow freely both ways, creating diversity and discussion. That’s the most essential thing to raise the bar. Not only can we laugh at the mindless things we can find on the Internet or delve to the mundane, but we can also raise the bar of understanding and rationality or choose either the conservative or liberal route. Where else can we find such a rich diversity of ideas, beliefs, point of views, and focus?

that’s not the real test, is it? if you’re reading this you probably are part of the converted, as in converted to the wonders of the ‘Net. The test is getting others to see this beauty. The test is getting them all online to taste the richness and profoundness and quiet simplicity of this gift and open them to a world beyond celebrities’ scandalous lives.

The first point of this post is to state that every generation sees decadence in it and in the generation that it sired. We can reopen discourse, we can return to civility and reason and understanding and thus, raise the bar of expectation. the second point of this post is accepting ideas, even though we hate it in our guts. It means thinking out of the box. It means embracing the mundane to the serious in a holistic way and, that is how we break the vicious cycle of what {caffeine_sparks} called “our culture of colonial-cum-victim-cum-Cinderella mentality”.

Both articles happily remind me of something my father wrote on national identity way back in 1996:

Just what our culture consists of, I am not competent to say. I can say, however, that it is extremely complex. It is that very complexity which often leads Occidentals to classify us either as Occidentals with brown skins or Orientals with a very superficial Western veneer.

It is that same complexity which leads some Asians to say that we are not Asian at all, although Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesians, Nepalese, Syrians, etc. do not deny it of each other, much as they differ among themselves.

It is that same complexity which bewilders us and drives us to attempt a total identification with West or East (in the sense in which Asians sometimes exclude us from it), an attempt impossible in one case, meaningless in the other.

It is the same complexity from which some try to escape by taking refuge in an imaginative reconstruction, more or less accurate as the case may be, of Philippine culture at the time of Magellan’s arrival, setting up that culture as the only true Philippine culture and de-Filipinizing all subsequent generations, including our own.

In my opinion this attitude is untenable. It separates the pre-Spanish from subsequent cultural developments, considering the former as wholly indigenous—they were not, in the narrow sense of the word—and the latter as spurious. The attitude gives too much credit to the ability of Spanish and American culture to supplant our previous culture and replace it with something different; the attitude also gives no credit whatsoever to our ancestors for any capacity to transform and assimilate foreign influences, giving them a distinctively Filipino character.

One who holds such a view turns his back to the most significant and most remarkable—I would say most admirable—fact about our culture and ourselves: that complexity has not prevented unity, nor unity led to monotonous uniformity. Instead of our being proud of our unique cultural achievement—it is our achievement, not the Spaniards’ or the Americans’—we are ashamed of ourselves, see only the faults and dangers of our culture and see them magnified out of all proportion.