GMA, back from the Sheikh’s palace, brought home the mail

We’re glad our President GMA is back home, safe and sound. We’re happy Kuwait’s hospitable Emir – namely Sheikh Jabir al-Almad al-Jabir al-Sabah – not only welcomed her with open arms, but invited her to stay in the Palace instead of at the Sheraton Hotel where she had been previously booked.

It’s always a thrill, particularly for a lady President, to be able to sojourn in the palace of the Sheikh of Araby. Somebody, perhaps, even crooned the Desert Song.

On her arrival yesterday, the President even brought home the mail – meaning hundreds (thousands?) of letters from overseas Filipino workers in the region, as many as could be compressed into the cargo section of her relatively small chartered "Challenger" 12-seater Learjet. Newscasters, naturally, went to town on this, referring to her as "Madam Postmaster".

I saw an Agence France-Presse story yesterday which disturbed me a bit. The report said that President Macapagal-Arroyo had "apologized to an unidentified Filipino man who was slapped by a presidential bodyguard when he tried to kiss the president during a visit to Kuwait."

The AFP story went: ‘There was an OFW who tried to steal a kiss from me, so one of my aides prevented him,’ Arroyo recounted during an arrival speech to relatives of workers working in the Middle East. ‘I apologize if he is your relative: In our culture, a woman cannot just allow herself to be kissed by a man in public," said Arroyo, a 55-year-old grandmother.

"In the picture," the report noted, "the unidentified kissing bandit was dressed in a suit. A woman presidential bodyguard’s palm is shown smacking into his left cheek as he tried to buss a smiling Arroyo."

I think that the word "apologize" shouldn’t have been used, even if it was meant to deliver a good-humored rebuke. That insolent fellow merited no apology. I’m sure the President’s words were not meant as a reproof to the alert, and quick-acting lady bodyguard belonging to her Presidential Security Command, but it sounded like one. The woman bodyguard deserved to be highly commended, instead. She reacted right, and that impudent man shouldn’t just have been slapped in the kisser. Kuwaiti police should have hustled him off to jail for the offense. In an Islamic country, women are not kissed in public – much less a visiting President, whose dignity – not merely safety – must be respected at all times.

And what if, not really intent on just stealing a kiss, the offender had meant GMA harm?

Okay. Welcome home, Madam President! Let’s move on to the next problem.

* * *

The President was right to direct that our schools return to English as the medium of instruction. Of course this has provoked a howl about those deeming themselves super-patriots, who are demanding that English be abolished instead and instruction be in "Filipino", which is Tagalog, really.

In this world, everybody is learning English, while we are insisting on learning Tagalog. (The truth is, the way things are, we have been learning neither of the two languages, mostly Taglish instead.) Let’s be realistic. Filipinos have been using English for more than 100 years – it’s no longer a "foreign" language. True enough, it’s not "native", but how many years does it take for a language to be "naturalized" and belong to a nation? A century? Two centuries? A thousand years?

As for Tagalog, it will always be one of our mother tongues. The others are Ilocano, Cebuano, Ilongo, Taosug, Samal, Maguindanao et cetera, depending on where we were born and raised – in sum, we have 87 major dialects. All of us use Tagalog or our native dialects at home, in the streets, and in everyday conversation: But English we need, let’s face it, from north to south, and beyond our seas. It has become the Global Language, not merely in every land, but in cyberspace. Just check out the Inter-net.

A generation ago, Filipinos were able to brag about their "edge in English". Sorry. This is long gone. Everyday, particularly now that Beijing is fervidly preparing for the Olympics and a bigger role in World Trade, 200 million Chinese are studying and practicing English everyday. Even the taxi drivers are being required to learn English.

In contrast, until President GMA had the courage to issue a directive sensibly directing that English be the medium of instruction in elementary and high schools, our educational system was trying to impose Tagalog, alias "Filipino", on everyone. Of course, we’re proud of speaking "Filipino" or Tagalog – it’s the language of the heart. But English is the language of everyday life, of promotion, of progress and our passport to the outside world.

* * *

When Singapore was founded, the Founding Father Lee Kuan Yew was faced with the dilemma of what language to choose. Earlier, in 1956, the Cambridge-educated Lee, a Chinese Hakka himself, had exclaimed: "I was sent to an English school to equip me for an English university in order that I could be an educated man – the equal of any Englishman – the model of perfection! . . . When I read Jawaharlal Nehru (of India) I understood him when he said: ‘I cry when I think I cannot speak my own mother-tongue as well as I can speak the English language.’ (Yet) I am a less emotional man."

Lee Kuan Yew was a practical man. He had pinned his hopes on Singapore being incorporated as part of the new Federation of Malaysia in 1963, and had been shocked when Singapore was booted out of that federation two years later. (Mostly, I recall, because our friend, the late Prime Minister and Prince, Tunku Abdul Rahman, and his UMNO, feared that Lee was ambitious to become the Federation’s next Prime Minister and usher in an era of Sino supremacy).

Lee shed a tear, then decided that Singapore – a former British colonial seaport, part swamp, part rock, part tropical forest, whose food and drinking water had to be brought in from somewhere else – possessed only one important resource, its people. However, even these people constituted a nightmare of nationalities, almost all of whom had come from somewhere else. In 1960, when Lee assumed office, 76 percent of the new "Singaporeans" were Chinese, 15 percent Malay, seven percent Indian (mainly Tamil), two percent Europeans, Eurasians, and other races. Among the Chinese was a still more complicated mish-mash: Hookiens (two-fifths), Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Hainanese, Foochow and a smattering of Shanghainese.

Did Mr. Lee select Hookien or Fookien to be the language of Singapore? Or any of the Chinese dialects? Or Malay? Sure, the national anthem is sung in the very much minority language of Malay, whom few Singaporeans really speak, but Singapore’s chosen language, both official and lingua franca was and remains English. It’s the three million Singaporeans, from businessman to janitor, who have the English edge today.

In next-door Malaysia, across the Causeway (although a dispute over the price of the water Malaysia sells to Singapore daily has erupted), the feisty Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad is trying to reverse the language trend. Years ago, when he assumed office, Dr. Mahathir had declared that Bahasa Melayu, the Malay language, be exclusively used in teaching. In the past few years, realizing to his horror that the use of Malay in education had led to Malaysia losing out in commerce, trade, international intercourse, and even in IT, the pragmatic and forceful Mahathir put on the brakes, and has manfully tried to restore English as the language of instruction, initially in major subjects like math and science, and ultimately in education in general. Since Mahathir, by his own pronouncement, is due to "retire" next year, it appears he has accelerated his efforts to this end. Of course the "Malay-firsters" are angrily resisting the government’s new tack, but the resolute Mahathir is the kind of authoritarian ruler who can make his directives stick.

Having returned from my old "hometown" of Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) as well as Hanoi last week, I can testify that the Vietnamese – who defeated the French, bested the Americans, and rejected the former South Vietnamese regime in 1975, and whose nationalism cannot be faulted – are now trying their best to learn English.

As for us, we’ve forgotten English just as fast as the rest of the world has acquired facility in it – even, to my surprise, the young Japanese.

Is this "nationalism"? It doesn’t even add up to the politics of survival in this perilous and challenging world. And where would our 7.6 million OFWs be, if they didn’t speak English? Back in the bukid and the barrio, perhaps, earning peanuts. Surely, we are a nation capable of speaking two or three languages with ease and confidence. We’ll never lose Tagalog, which is already well-disseminated in cinema, radio, television, and in daily intercourse, even though my fellow Saluyots, Cebuanos, Ilongos, and other Visayans, and our brethren down in the Muslim South resist.

But English we need. If we don’t want to march our nation into darkness, we’ll have to regain the proficiency we lost. We’re not even hoping, at this stage, to recover an "edge".

The President must not be dismayed by the noise generated by a few superduper "nationalists". She must stay the course, for the sake of this and generations to come. English is what opens the door to the present and to the future. Way off in the far future, it could be something else – even Chinese or Hindi, who knows? But not yet.