Free speech is dead (but tsismis is still cheap and abundant)

Think government spying on the media is confined to places like the Philippines? Think again. Post 9/11, the United States has entered a troubling new era in which American cartoonists are questioned by the Secret Service; in which its country singers are muffled, gagged and hooted offstage for disagreeing with the President; in which actors and actresses are shunned (and fired) for their political views. A time when even that avatar of controversial video product – Madonna – backs down from the heat.

Want proof? The most recent example comes in the form of a political cartoon published in The Los Angeles Times recently. Cartoonist Michael Ramirez’s parody of a famous 1968 photograph showing a South Vietnamese police captain assassinating an alleged Vietcong on Saigon’s streets was meant to be pro Bush. In the cartoon, Bush stands against a backdrop of Baghdad; an assassin with the single word "politics" holds a gun to his head. Ramirez says the cartoon merely suggests how President George W. Bush is the victim of "political assassination" over his Iraq policies.

Not funny, according to the Secret Service. The agency charged with protecting the US President is investigating whether the cartoon constitutes a death threat.

"We’re aware of the image and we’re in the process of determining what action, if any, can be taken," S.S. spokesman John Gill told Reuters. "The Secret Service does take threats against all of their protectees very seriously."

Hey, guys. Lighten up. If you’re going to wrestle a cartoonist to the ground, next you’ll have to go after half of Hollywood, which routinely produces movies depicting fictional US presidents in far greater peril (The Sum of All Fears, Air Force One and In the Line of Fire, which is practically an illustrated manual on how to kill a President).

Meanwhile, despite a few heavyhanded statements from GMA’s administration, free speech is still cheap and abundant in the Philippines. Why, Filipinos are practically gagging on it. Newspaper columnists are giddy from it; they’re drunk on its ether, high on its helium.

That’s because in the Philippines you can say pretty much whatever you want – in print, on radio, on television – because words have so little connection to actual, provable reality that their effect is like a passing wind. Talk may indeed be cheap, but in most cases, it is quite free. There is never a clampdown on tsismis.

But in America these days, free speech is not so free or so cheap. It’s easy to say that 9/11 killed America’s sense of humor about itself. Either that, or it helped solidify a long-dormant (though slightly calcified) sense of patriotism. But such reflexive, hair-trigger patriotism often allows the worst political abuses to flourish (the McCarthy hearings of the ’50s, for instance). It also allows leaders to overstep their boundaries more easily.

Mostly it creates an atmosphere of fear, paranoia and self-monitoring. Like the Hollywood studio that changed its print ad for the movie What a Girl Wants, released amid the Gulf War II, because the original ad showed a young girl flashing a peace sign. The new ad shows her with arms at her sides. Now, that’s patriotism.

Or witness the way CNN pulled broadcast of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart during the war, finding its biting (and quite funny) political satire a bit too... satirical. Of course in the middle of the war, you don’t want to laugh too loudly, or too much. But laughter was one way to break the tension that kept an iron grip on the media during that war. That’s why, after a while, I found myself repeatedly watching a copy of Jackass: The Movie as a contrast to the constant footage of tanks rolling through Iraqi deserts.

Laughter was furthest from the minds of those Texas radio stations that banned all music by The Dixie Chicks prior to the war after their singer, Natalie Maines, dared to bash George Bush Jr. onstage in London with this comment: "All I can say is I’m ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas." Apparently, that’s enough to get your band’s CDs burned in bonfires and your name associated with the devil. (It turned out fine in the end for the Chicks, who recently played Washington, DC to roaring crowds and posed on the cover of Entertainment Weekly as "Saddam’s Angels".) Even Madonna – the high priestess of controversy – decided to delay release of her video for "American Life" prior to the war, saying its depiction of runway models being overtaken by a military assault was not "supportive" of US troops.

It seems speaking your mind – especially in a post-9/11 environment – can be dangerous in America, at least to your career. Perhaps President Arroyo was taking her cue from the US in trying to strike fear into the hearts of the media. Her visit to a local TV station to "question" a reporter may remind one of tactics used on The Sopranos, but note the immediate counterfire of outrage from the local media. No one is going to stop Filipino journalists from talking.

That’s because, regardless of its faults, political discussion in the Philippines is an active, volatile process – almost as volatile as the political structure itself. Since nobody ever really finds out who did what to whom, the air here is constantly saturated with talk, talk, talk. The streets are lined with newspapers opening the lid on this scandal or that, though nothing ever really comes of it. Yet, praise God, you live in a country where every halfwit can shoot his mouth off in a public forum – TV, radio, newsprint – with little concern about ever actually getting it right. Because at the end of the day, there are no answers in the Philippines; only more questions.

And this makes for a vigorous give-and-take between the electorate and the elected, if you can believe it. If only this volatile energy – political fervor – could be bottled up and directed like a champagne cork in the right direction, why, who knows what could happen?

The disgruntled grunts who took over a commercial complex in Makati a while back would have done better by going directly to the media – because the media, if nothing else, loves drama and a good scandal. Instead, the troops entered in a far dicier media arena: the political happening. Political happenings can be famously effective: EDSA’s People Power, Gandhi’s sit-ins; Martin Luther King Jr.’s boycotts. But nobody in Manila has sympathy for a bunch of soldiers who dare to close down a mall. That’s hitting people – literally – where they live. No, these sad sacks would have stood a better chance before the TV cameras at a press conference. If, in fact, they had something to say.

In the coming months, expect the political rhetoric and attacks to ratchet the way up as the Philippines braces itself for another presidential election. Everybody laughs at the months spent counting ballots, the rampant "flying voters," the accusations of dagdag-bawas. But again, this is no longer much different from US elections, where the last President was elected by only about 22 percent of the voting public, and even that low number of votes was in question. Yes, it now seems that most basic freedom of expression in America, casting a ballot, was handled under murky, hazy circumstances. Nobody can say with absolute certainty who won the presidential election of 2000. And yet most Americans seemed to want to shrug it off and get on with their lives after the dust settled. Fatalism, if not cynicism, seems to be the prevailing political ideology these days. Perhaps Americans are becoming more like Filipinos every day.