Perhaps the biggest opening round controversy that happened before the Pacquiao-Hatton (or any of Pacman’s fights) fight in Las Vegas last week was when singer Martin Nievera sang the Philippine National Anthem and exposed the level of maturity (or immaturity for that matter) of the Filipino people. I didn’t see the fight live, but I did see a taped copy, which unfortunately did not include the allegedly “offensive” way that Nievera sang the Anthem. So allow me to join the fray with my ten centavos worth!
I don’t know why a lot of Filipinos are making so much fuss about the way our national anthem is sung, to the point that they even have a law that penalizes anyone who sings it differently or in another language. That law states that the national anthem should be sung in Filipino, which to Cebuanos is a language that still doesn’t exist as the “Filipino” language that is being rammed down our throats by the National Center for Culture and Arts (NCCA) is 99.9% taken from the Tagalog language. Now you know why “Land of the Morning” disappeared from the Philippine landscape!
Hence, singing the national anthem in Cebuano, like the way they do in the Province of Cebu and the Cebu City Council (including my Rotary Club, the Rotary Club of Cebu-Mother) does before the session is, for all intents and purposes, a violation of that law and therefore a criminal act! So did Martin Nievera commit a crime? If he did, then they should file cases not only against Martin Nievera, but also against the entire Cebu Provincial Board or the Cebu City Council for violating this law!
In truth, everyone knows that rebellious Cebuanos have been singing the “Yutang Tabunon” for a long time now with no one threatening to file any cases against the offenders. In short, this is a stupid law, which was concocted by so-called Tagalog Nationalists who did not want the national anthem “mangled” by another language, like Cebuano. Hence they enacted a law that prevents people from singing it in another language other than “Filipino” and of course in another way, shape and form just to show that it is not only the language they are after.
These are the people whom we dub as “Tagalistas” who pursue only Tagalog nationalism insisting that all Filipinos should be Tagalog-speaking! We are diametrically opposed to this people for they don’t care if the Visayan or Cebuano languages or all the other spoken languages in this archipelago would become as extinct as the dinosaur! These are the very same people who say that if you don’t speak in Filipino, you do not love your country! This is why during a Workshop on Language, we showed these people a slogan, “I am a Cebuano and I love my country, the Philippines!”
Here we are, a nation that prides itself as one of the first and major countries to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that embodies the Right to the Freedom of Speech. Yet, we enact laws that curtail these very same freedoms. Surely by now we have learned that America is the land of the free, but they don’t even have a National Language and anyone can sing the national anthem anyway they want. Indeed that is true!
During the iconic Woodstock Rock festival in 1969 we heard the great Jimi Hendrix turn the US anthem into rock music. That didn’t cause a howl in America, because it is truly the land of the free! But in the Philippines we have unenforceable laws that shows our immaturity; where indigenous peoples living in their own land cannot even sing our national anthem in the language they were born; thus playing into the hands of Tagalog nationalists that for all the years we have been independent from the United States (since July 4,1946) we have never achieved Pinoy unity under one language!
Even at the height of the conjugal Marcos Dictatorship, he rammed down our throats that Tagalog slogan, “Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa” purportedly to help unite Filipinos under one tongue. Those where the days of our “New Society” where other languages were “exterminated” by this Jacobinistic ideology, which emanated in France during the French Revolution espousing a centralized form of government which we still have today and forcing all the other spoken languages in France to disappear by having them speak only the language of the Parisienne in Paris.
As my late mentor Max Soliven (he was an Ilocano and an anti-Marcos) would say, “The Philippines was under 400 years in a Spanish Convent and 50 years in Hollywood; now the Tagalogs want to force their language upon this archipelago?” So now these same so-called nationalists are outraged by Martin Nievera’s style of singing the national anthem? These people do not respect our freedom to speak and to sing!