A Lessened Hobbesian View on Our Inferiors

photo borrowed from http://www.covershut.com/Television-Covers/43317-Mr-Bean-The-Animated-Series-Grin-And-Bean-It-Disc.html

I DO NOT know why the Mr. Bean animated series on cable TV’s The Disney Channel is popular with kids. Maybe it’s because cartoon drawings function like doll or mascot figures, referencing reality distortedly and thus not realistically, which makes cartooning the more honest portrayal of The Real qua progressing problematique in our continuing learning. Cartoon people likely come on not like office work problems, but more like crossword or sudoku puzzles we definitely need.
    Mr. Bean is an evil but fumbling character with the face of a stereotypical retardate. That personality combine (evil/funny) is probably what makes him amiable instead of despicable, enhanced of course by a recurring atmosphere that declares the "saner world" to be no less evil and corrupt than Bean's funny person.
    Now, if by Thomas Hobbes we can admit that man is by nature an evil animal only struggling to be virtuous (for one realized reason or another, which reasons still couldn’t make him selfless), then in the light of a world requiring bits of evil in order to survive Mr. Bean must be to adults a symbol of relative goodness in spite of his evil, if only because a face of sheer innocence or ignorance or retardation or stupidity might be considered exempt from the Hobbesian jungle-smart premise. Yes, Mr. Bean not the merely laughable but the ultimately amiable---amiable because how we wish we could be as innocent as he in both our rancorous mistakes and our cunning!
     Or is it the spirit of comic animation as an aesthetic that allows us to forgive evil, being a spirit where evil can get away with it because it, this evil, has become an animation or exaggeration of a hated object, that is to say, has been made demented or stupid or impossible?
    Christian authorities mostly stand by this declaration of innocent sinfulness, as being forgivable, in contrast with the knowledgeable's sinfulness as being unpardonable . Apart from that, what are animated beings but beings inferior to our presently perfect real-human selves?

BUT there are moments when we become "inferior" to ourselves, and to others watching us in those moments we become manifestations of saintliness. Perhaps God is an aesthete, then, for after watching way too many movies I’ve come to the conclusion that man is in his most saintly and beautiful state during those hours of extreme vulnerability, whether these span a few hours or---as in the case of the realistic character Robinson Crusoe---a few years. God should win at least a billion best director awards for giving us these images of saintliness and beauty based on true stories.

photo borrowed from http://www.boaterexam.com/blog/2011/05/real-castaways.aspx

    In the movie Cast Away (where the businesslike among us might notice only the production value of putting some all-star cast away for a while in making this one-actor blockbuster of a movie), the hero played by actor Tom Hanks is amiable from the start, even while at his most cranky-boss frame of mind. It seems like this modern-day Robinson Crusoe wasn’t exactly unaware of his crankiness as a put-on, consciously allowing underlings to make fun of him so he could get a desired result of projecting amiability on his person and extracting efficiency in others due to this combined amiability and fearsomeness they read in their boss.
    Hanks' amiability is of course enhanced a hundredfold by his later isolation in an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And it’s not just because we love to see people put in spots that weaken them but also because we kind of miss those spots in our lives. In present-day drabness amidst routine, the enjoyment of watching such movies as Cast Away are both a celebration of our good fortunes within our lives’ drabness as well as a vicarious adventure for our repressed-yuppie Survivor-ish desires to be put on the spot.

photo from http://www.lindsaybrothers.com/blog/survivor/survivor_thin/

    It’s the same double-edged and contradictory enjoyment that we get from action heroes in deadly self-assigned missions. It’s the same double-bladed knife that cuts our hearts while reading stories about heroes or anti-heroes who have gone through an oppressive treatment from a majority in a village, city, or country. It shouldn’t be a mystery therefore to find ourselves, every now and then, rooting for the underdog. Our rooting for a likely winner, in contrast, is often due to either our having perceived or witnessed or known some oppression upon this person’s person from somewhere in his story, otherwise to a tensive vulnerability through this likely winner’s limits-testing tragic vanity.
    Politicians have an all-too-conscious feel for this PR reality concerning the public’s attraction to the pained. So that when a most hated political opponent dies, they offer their possible presences or sympathies lest the suddenly-softened public steer away from the surviving politicians' hardened souls.
    Gossips also suddenly feel both triumphant and sympathetic and afraid when a subject of their hateful judgments begins to cry.
    Many women even possess a backhanded sexism towards their own/selves with the recurrent expression of pride in their being tagged "the weaker sex". For instance, in the Philippines, where women can freely wear mini skirts and can run for president, many Filipinas still believe that Real Men don’t fight with their wives but merely allow them to be the emotional and articulate ones. As if a woman’s outbursts are to be equated with a child’s tantrums, best left relatively unattended or reacted to not.
    That said, we can now perhaps conclude that humans are quasi-masochistic beings in the sense that they would have to imagine themselves pained in order to qualify for love solicitations. For they know that they, qua subjects to others' eyes, become truer persons in the tension of possible death or during cinematic moments of slow passing away into obsolescence in life.

THE REASON why we can easily fall for the gibber of actors in real life is because we’ve seen them play most vulnerable and oppressed characters in fiction or fictionalized cinema that have endeared them to us. To the public eye, too, artists and poets---once introduced as so---are often seen as likeable soft personae, despite the swagger or tough look that some of them might display. Rock stars became stars because they dramatized themselves as vulnerable gods forever on the brink of destruction.
    A national hero is a mere emblem of some political mythology that we generally can’t really relate to emotionally nor consign significance to as individuals, until we see a movie about the hero’s mistakes and demoralization. Then he becomes a true hero to us, almost a friend.
    This reaction doesn’t stop at our impressions upon others. It also extends to our regard for our respective selves. Although many find it hard to admit this truism, still it is not hard to remember that the moments where we have been most proud of ourselves were those wherein we faced a truth, admitted a mistake, or had to wear modesty (with a smile) like a torn suit.
    Races-wise, small Asians may prove themselves equal in political or military virility to superpowers’ braggadocio and bullying when they begin to feel comfortable about their difference to the Others, with their shorter penis or body height, thence taking strides forward in the aftermath of this humble acceptance. It’s like the realization that not everybody has to be a tall power forward in a basketball team; one can be a great shooting guard shooting from outside and from underneath. The Japanese, prime examples of Shintoist-Buddhist courage within humility and selflessness, demonstrate/d this pride well, at one time even extending it to arrogance within a different kind of mythical and nationalist humility.
    In the case of the social oppression of the individual, he, the individual, usually begins to take strides in a process of freely moving on when he finally concedes to the impossibility of enlightening a majority that is always wrong (or always right for the wrong reasons), proceeding thence to take care of himself and cease and desist from trying to help a public that refuses to be helped.
    Stories of a weakened existence, of tension threatening annihilation, or of an Achilles’ heel that took a step towards love, . . . these are human signals that make heroes real, enemies friends, the earlier-despised Malèna in the year-2000 Italian film suddenly adored. Never mind if it’s sometimes too late an acknowledgment, because it couldn’t really be otherwise.
    Given all the above, it is perhaps safe to say that the ideal human being would be that one who sincerely acknowledges, or is forced to acknowledge, these human characteristics of constant vulnerability and weakness, acknowledging them even while struggling to control the self’s righteousness or even its recurring greed. Christians call this being reminded of a higher God even while pursuing Mammon.
    Now, just today, Fernando Poe Jr. died. Before his demise he was declared, by his opponents of course, as a symbol of the Filipino supposedly good, however flawed, but all too willing to forgive all those who stood for greed, larceny, and hedonism, allowing himself be surrounded by these unrepentant male and female whores that comprised his disciples and puppeteers.

photo from http://www.nndb.com/people/278/000047137/

    The party of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo did indeed voice out the thoughts of that above paragraph at their political sorties in recent history, in the heat of the last election's campaign and after, never mind if they were wont to put aside their own questionable dealings and shortcomings in governance and power.
    Macapagal-Arroyo, however, recognizes that today Poe will presently be the people’s good man, having been weakened by Death and been Christianized completely. So the former called him a good man, and so on and so forth, never mind her party’s likely guffaws at the thought of Poe’s wife Susan Roces’ being touted by the opposition as Poe’s possible successor.
    This recognition is understandable. After all, politicians also understand that in the eyes of God and humanity we are all Mr. Beans. We are all, both the generally evil and the generally good, sooner or later exposed as but fumbling characters in funny lives, amiable as learning tools and as reminders of ourselves. That inevitability is what will make us to others amiable instead of despicable, on earth as in heaven; that amiability will further be enhanced of course by the cynical atmosphere of a sane world of governance replete with godly ambitions, evil, corruption working us, influencing us. At least while Hobbes' truth remains, God should win at least a trillion best writer-director awards for creating such affable characters, however true the fact is that these characters have at one time or another been friendly to self-appointed gods, those enemies of the poor and oppressed humans, or otherwise been too saintly and iconic for popular appreciation. These characters can't be other than our friendly dolls, being our educational clones.
    When the day comes, even the godlike Gloria Arroyo will be an affable Mr. Bean cartoon character. Even if only for a day, as the day's Sesame Street-word of a TV special. [END]

photo from http://maspnational.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/gma.jpg

Colors and Politics Are Like Apples and Oranges

photo borrowed from http://www.flickr.com/photos/agrippinamaior/2684909840/

THE YOUNG MAN I hired to cut the bamboo in my yard is now painting my ceiling. The ceiling is going to be painted orange, the color presently making the rounds of restaurants and fastfood shops in the country, not to mention the streets of Ukraine in an ongoing so-called Orange Revolution. Orange seems also to have only recently become a popular color among makers of button-down-collared short-sleeved shirts (polo shirts) and their buyers. And although gays seemed to have wanted to claim the color in the mid-‘90s as yet another of their flag and sofa/couch colors beside the traditional lavender or the recurrent pink, heterosexuals in their turn seemed to have acted in defiance of the virtual appropriation, thus denying gays the privilege.
    Pink itself has recently been liberated from the gay fences by corporate taste, thanks perhaps to Japanese TQM gurus and their pinku waishatsus and to the members of golf clubs in the US of A sporting pink shirts, to pink films and the Pink Grand Prix, to Pinky ofPinky and the Brain , and to John Edwards' use of John Mellencamp's "Pink Houses" in his presidential campaigning. Pink used to be the official color assigned to socialists in the USA and South Africa---the pinkos , remember?---and was the flag color of Hitler's panzer divisions.
    Deep purple, meanwhile, used to be a hippie band waxing psychedelic rock, but it---the color---was later re-assigned for gay usage, if only for being near lavender. Latinos, however, would every now and then proudly parade the color as a symbol of their race qua masters of color boldness and handling, but more likely because it is a decidedly liturgical color as well as part of the anti-Catholic Second Spanish Republic's flag. It later became the color of feminists, but heterosexual males' interior design plans for their offices are also slowly reclaiming it, as if to reassert the color’s early associations with male royalty. Hippies used the color, too, to allude both to Jesus' royalty or simply for psychedelic completeness. . . . So, having said all the above, what’s obvious is this: the quirky use of colors is almost at the level of people wanting to copyright them, if only they could, and all for certain political statuses.
    Anyway, some of the bamboo I and the young man I hired had earlier cut . . . well, we used them for scaffolding. But I'm still a little embarrassed with the cutting, being in this year and month when the Philippines once again figured in CNN's top three headlines with the news about the flash floods in Quezon province, the Bicol Region, and the Central Luzon area, which killed as many as 400+ Filipinos as of last accounting. A total logging ban was enforced, and I suppose bamboo shouldn’t be exempt if located on hills overlooking towns or otherwise inside flood-prone districts of a city or municipality.
    But in my neighborhood there might be that no-need-to-ask demand for the bamboo to be cut to help, please, the corrugated galvanized iron sheet roofing lengthen its life and likewise save on energy drink required for the daily sweeping of fallen bamboo leaves on my and my neighbor’s lawns. So, the bamboo had to go and found new function.
    The new function was as scaffolding, as we mentioned, initially for some decorative or psychological purpose, the painting of an orange ceiling.


ALL DECORATIVE things are psychological items, the reason why I've always put a premium on decorators in my lifetime, no lower a valuation than my regard for the great men of science and the philosopher-kings. But there are good decorators and bad decorators, or there are good decorations that are not good for you and so therefore do not serve their psychological purpose, unless their purpose is for psychological warfare, decidedly with the intent of hurting someone's eyes and make him want to go to sleep.
    So, back to my orange ceiling. Yellow-orange, to be precise. What are the politics around it, accompanying the politics of the bamboo used for scaffolding? Well, there is the quasi-science around it, the psychology of the décor. Orange makes you feel warm, a function handy in a city-subdivision that receives constant winds from the Pacific in the east bouncing off the recurrently damp hills in the west with their bamboo and coconut vegetation. One cannot anymore be suspected of being gay with an orange ceiling, unlike five years back when a Boy Abunda would visit the ad agency I worked for and exclaim "this orange sofa of yours is just so . . . gay. Only somebody like that can think of a color like this." Maybe because it was a more pinkish kind of orange, and at least one of our influential bosses was openly gay. No, especially with the proliferation of restaurants and doughnut or burger shops boasting of its supposedly appetite-enhancing function, orange is now for everybody and anybody. Recently also, as we mentioned above, the Ukrainian opposition carried the orange color as its symbol, and CNN averred this was probably intended to avert possible violence in the restless country, for reasons unknown to me. Anyway, orange has chiefly been associated with social democrat, Christian democrat and populist parties, whether liberal conservative- or conservative liberal-leaning. But we can't limit it to that, since in Northern Ireland it's been associated with unionism, while in the Netherlands it's the color of the monarchist right wing. Anyway, there is orange and there’s orange. The saffron kind is usually associated with pain and Hinduism. But put that same color in a Dunkin' Donuts shop and you’d get an entirely different context, more gustatory than yogi-tory. Put the same Dunkin’ Donuts scheme in an Indian shop and it’s another thing again.
    What does all this say? If color can be an indication of a person’s or building’s personality or mood, the opposite is also true---it cannot categorically say anything. The statements of certain persons and establishments can actually re-contextualize a color. If, for example, a neo-Nazi group were to be born somewhere, their displaying an orange flag with a black and white swastika circle in the middle would certainly displace the warmth of orange, as it would the Hinduist sacrifice context the color offers. It will become the new color of disguised or explicit hatred.
    Therefore, I could list down all the values the color orange will reflect into my living room and dining room and bedroom from the ceiling. But what I do in this, my parents' deserted Tacloban house, in the coming days when glossy yellow-orange remains my ceiling's color, will carry all the political and cultural shades of that color to several possibilities. Should I, one night, start throwing plates, hurry out of my orange house challenging my neighbors to some bolo knife-play, the color orange will certainly be stamped in my neighbors’ memories as that color once seen running amok in the city-subdivision. I could be tagged with a new nickname, Datu Oring the Bolo King, or something like that, even if my inspiration for the color was merely the sunset color from the hill in the west that would hit my white kitchen wall from 4pm onwards. I had that wall painted orange and green, too, to sort of meet the sunset orange and mimic the orange and green of the papayas on my kitchen dining table.

I MOST noticed and felt this flexibility in colors, swinging from banal amiability to social assertiveness, in corporate Manila. Manila offices have increasingly become more experimental with coloration. Undoubtedly, office designers of chicness have transformed some of today's offices into friendlier spaces.

    But, again, it all depends. Unsmiling faces manning the receptionist's or customer service desks could turn the whole atmospheric amiability of colors into a sort of fearsome plastic Trojan horse that, from your offended point of view, could suddenly look contrived, merely in it to get your approval. You'd then step back and withdraw your application or customership.
    A beautiful office with probably the best feng shui design may suddenly expose labor restlessness, quickly converting the friendly-colored establishment into a political arena containing mental gladiators and lions and possible blood vampires. Conversely, the worst-dressed lady executive despised by all for wearing that cheap perfume of hers on her horrifying violet and flowers-patterned office dress may actually suddenly turn out to be the champion of a corporation's workforce and become the union's heroine, her abominable coloration there instantly turning adorable.
    There are colors, on objects, that carry "intrinsic" psychological or cultural values. Such as those universal carriers of color-moods as fruits---for instance, the papayas we mentioned. However, there are also mental colors in gestures and body and facial language and in speech that will synaesthetically blend with the visual colors of the physical surround of any establishment during these human-derived movements' moments of special assertions. And that combination will be noticed, consciously or subconsciously, for a logical conclusion---much like how premises function for logic. Thus, perfect black worn by yuppies in coffeeshops makes for a different mood and signification against the fading black worn by those rock music fans who can’t afford P30 beers. Beyond black's classiness as well as silent dissent, that difference transcends the color's umbrella meaning, or rather divides it. The black of corporate people are usually new black, while punk and grunge rockers and underpaid artists may favor---for obvious reasons---the fading kind of lamp black that’s almost just soot. But yet, notice that when the yuppie wears the faded black color and the rogue rocker wears the perfect black one, neither the yuppie's yuppieness nor the rocker's rogueness changes, in the same way that a rich kid studying at Ateneo de Manila University won't exactly get his image changed by a pair of jeans ripped at a knee.
    Let us place ourselves in a fine arts college. A student who is often seen in light gray shirts could be regarded as a drab young person. After a certain college recognition of his prolificacy and creativity, however, the gray becomes a symbol of a modesty and moderation blanketing a flamboyance in his inner person. Most successful painters, after all, avoid colorful clothing in the same way that models pick up their blue jeans and white t-shirts after a glamorous ramp show.
    Ultimately, therefore, in the same sense that the BAD feng shui of an owner's soul may overshadow the GOOD feng shui of his building and office, a nicely-painted house may anytime be overwhelmed by a horrifying behavior from its inhabitants.
    Colors and you. The you will be the achievement, the colors the mere psychological facade. The colors you choose, with their politics and psychological effect, could speak of a truth about you, but also possibly a lie.
    I suggest we save money for the re-coloring of our houses and lives as our lives move forward, all in the service of truth---it is this truth, after all, that can in a blink of an eye re-contextualize the politics around a color.
    But I grant that a welcoming color is apt for guest-welcoming in a house. But, then, many offices (and some restaurants) also operate on lies! So, be careful with the contextual predetermination of your domestic use of oranges and apple greens. For, remember, that warning has proved true for the past's use of political colors. ###