Noynoy and future cronies

It is hardly surprising that members of the Makati Business Club should cheer “Noynoy”. He is their candidate. But to say “he is not the meek and mild pushover type” is not what worries intelligent voters. He may be a ferocious bulldog but against whom will he train his ferocity is the question? Two candidates, Sen. Manuel Villar and Sen. Richard Gordon have both zeroed in on his lackluster legislative performance.

Many share this opinion of Aquino. It is worrying that big business has chosen a candidate who has nothing to show to prove his acumen or capacity to lead in critical times when leadership, is most needed.

He may be the son of Ninoy and Cory but many suspect that he is also the vehicle being used by big business with personal grievances against the Arroyo government.

Our task as ordinary citizens is to be informed from other sources not just the Makati Business Club. Most of us know what Noynoy’s candidacy is all about — borrowed popularity from his parents — to favor cronies left out in the cold by the Arroyo administration. Can you blame them if they should push a candidate with a name that had once been the magic word for getting into the inner circle of power and privilege in Malacanang?

Aquino promised an economic agenda that he would not impose more taxes, curb smuggling, level the playing field (?), private public-private sector partnership, education, and good governance.

(The problem is these are promises and his record hardly gives confidence that he has what it takes to fulfill them).

Speeches come easy. There are speechwriters galore for hire.

Challenging the status quo? A transformational politician? That requires more than just a forum sponsored by the Makati Business Club and frankly needs qualities not acquired overnight.

What about Noynoy saying I am being put up as the leader of a country where a few own the riches of this country while millions are shut out. And the few are once again scrambling for the spoils using the language of equality and democracy.

More believable are those who stood outside the posh Peninsula Hotel carrying placards to remind the audience of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program and the 23rd year of the Mendiola massacre. Those are not words, they are realities.

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It may help those who think that culture and politics should be kept apart to look into the books of the late Palestinian Edward Said. The most relevant to Filipinos is the book Culture and Imperialism.

Although he mentions the Philippines, he did not have the knowledge or experience of Filipinos.

If he had, his thesis would have been validated as the country where culture and imperialism were so interlocked. Maybe one day, we will have a Filipino Edward Said who will unravel the relationship between Filipinos and Americans from the perspective of culture and imperialism. “Western imperialism’s most effective tools for dominating other cultures have been literary in nature as much as political and economic.”

But if he believed that fiction and contemporary mass media are weapons of conquest, he also believed (and that is where his writings are original) that the conquered peoples were not just passive recipients. He shows how indigenous voices fought back with their own ‘voices’ as colonies. I don’t know if he was aware of Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo and how these books fired his compatriots to armed revolution even if Rizal said he never meant to. It would come under what he called “the rise of oppositional indigenous voices in the literatures of the “colonies.”

It was a Victorian Englishman, Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton who coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Said agrees. He takes up books by Western authors, among them Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness to show how words were used to conquer people through culture. The same cultures “can be liberated by resuscitating old voices or creating new voices for new times.”

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Having read Edward Said, I think that it should be one of the tasks of those who would promote Filipino culture: revive everything that can be revived in all the arts when we were being Hispanized or Americanized. That way we can see the interaction between the two forces. That may seem like culture only but to go by Said it is eminently political and who knows where it would lead us in shaping the identity that we yearn for. His book Orientalism is central to the postcolonial movement.

It encourages scholars “from non-western countries . . . to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with ‘narratives of oppression,’ creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western ‘other’.”(Source: Wikipedia)

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It is with Said’s perspective that I look forward to working with other members of the Board of Trustees of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

I met Fray Paolo Maria Diosdado Casurao y Granados, CSFP, one of the incoming trustees of the CCP board. At first I could not reconcile what an abbot should be doing in the board. My idea of an abbot is a recluse who spends his time in silence and prayer. Well, I had to eat my humble pie. He is no recluse at all. Indeed, when I met him I could not believe this was an abbot. As his CV says, he is a renaissance man in the ambit of culture and the arts, has spent four decades promoting, preserving, and popularizing culture, especially of Samar and the Visayan region.

Another personality I met was Gardy Labad the “indefatigable champion of Visayan Culture, a seven-time FAMAS Award winner and Hall of Fame Awardee for music.” He is the current project director of LIHOK Bisaya and the recently concluded TANGHALAN, a NCCA-National Committee for Dramatic Arts Theater Aesthetic Review project that encompasses Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao, and Metro Manila. He is regarded as a theater-pedagogue par excellence.

Most of my work in print media has been devoted to politics because of my advocacy for Charter change. But it is not just because Edward Said wrote that culture and politics are closely linked. Korea, Thailand, and Malaysia among others take pride in their culture not merely as culture but as the driver of the economy and politics of their countries.