Hefty sum for some and a shake-off feast: a talk show with three artists as Imelda reappears at the CCP

“Members of a militant teachers’ organization criticized on Wednesday [Sept. 2] the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP)’s planned gala tribute for former First Lady Imelda Marcos, saying it is an ‘utter disrespect’ for the Filipino people,” reported GMANews.tv last Tuesday [Sept. 8], and said “the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) vowed to stage a protest rally on Friday [Sept. 11] during the invitational gala event in honor of Marcos, the founding chairperson of the CCP.”

     Update Sept. 11: “Flamboyant former first lady Imelda Marcos arrives at the government-run Cultural Center of the Philippines for a special ‘gala tribute’, held in her honour, in Manila on September 11, 2009 despite angry protests that the event should not go ahead.”—Tumblr.com

     And as a way of reminding ourselves, we might be interested in re-reading novelist F. Sionil Jose’s letter to the CCP in August of 2008, explaining his reason for walking out of the “necrological services” [see Wikipedia entry on ‘Philippine English’ on the meaning of that phrase, eulogy actually] for composer and conductor Lucrecia Kasilag—click here

Well, . . . you know, modesty aside, I can only say it a hundred times. My blog post of last Thursday [Sept. 3] regarding the “five fruits of the nationalization of art” had blabbered so much already about these normal consequences, and cannot say anything more. As did other earlier blog posts here with the ‘art and the state’ label that have whispered quite enough warnings about more inanities to come at/from the CCP, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, or whatever else state institution for the arts, be it in the near or far future. What can I say? The CCP, the NCCA, and the nationalization of art by government and its willing subjects, is Imelda Marcos. Has always been, always will be. And even if this country by dint of a miracle (a nightmarish one, some say) is to fall into the hands of the Communists, wouldn’t the CCP and the NCCA then simply be tasting the other end of the same banana? Except that this time it’ll all be about social realism, away from the dictates of the present ruling parties’ standards of good and tolerable art. What can I say? I can only be tremendously honored by that guest appearance of my earlier blog on this subject which appeared in its entirety in a major online column.

     To bore you for a second, let me just narrate a bit of what happened. When Philstar Online critic-columnist Sylvia Mayuga read my blog essay of last week titled “Five fruits of the National Art tree,” she thought of making way in her online column so that that blog of mine can appear there, in her Only One World column (at philstar.com) as a guest column. She intimated to me this thought one day [afternoon of Sept. 3] and quickly notified me of its being “a go” the very next day [Sept. 4]. The streamlined version that finally appeared on Philstar.com can still be read here. Again, it was already quite an honor for me even just to be asked. And even before this guest appearance, in the preceding week, Ms. Mayuga had already generously featured my name—embarrassed and elated—in the concluding paragraphs of her column essay “New Morning for Inang Bayan” in a supposed exchange between “two young minds” contemplating the issues, the other mind being that of an Oxford University doctoral student of postcolonial literature and former CCP employee and member of the Gawad CCP committee, a mental warrior named Lila Shahani. (Ms. Mayuga also provided a link at her column to another blog of mine that she mentioned in this latter column, “Two fruits, one tree [or, why there is no such thing as a national artist],” and an attached interview with Ms. Shahani).

     Now, after those two Mayuga-column guestings, and after getting wind of a lot of comments supposedly addressed my way but not delivered this way (many not posted, in fact)—comments that were either in agreement or partial agreement or total disagreement with the essay, or even critical of the necessity of the essay in the heat of the moment of awaiting the results of a fight at the Supreme Court—I thought that I have written enough about the subject with those blog essays on the National Artist issue in this site (again, with the ‘National Artist’ “label”; in blog jargon, a “label” means “a subject or theme keyword assigned by the blogger to a set of articles or postings”). Yet, as I sense this will not just be another fleeting issue for the blogosphere chatter but something that might have to stay with us for a long, long time, to perhaps remind us to return to it again and again in the form of other Carlo Caparases and Cecile Guidote-Alvarezes and Imeldas, I thought I may give the issue concerning the inherent evil of a nationalized artistic culture just one more exposure . . . as I here make way in my turn (S. Mayuga-fashion) for the guest appearance of three Facebook friends of mine, each from a distinct representation in the visual arts, to have their say on the issue as moderated by me.

     One of our guests is Bob Bernardo A. Nuestro, a visual artist who—along with other independent artists—proudly runs a gallery called Artist-Run Independent Art Space and is the head of the painting department of the Philippine Women’s University School of Fine Arts. Our second guest is Ronald Achacoso, a quite articulate and subtle painter whose stark intelligent works often show at the West Gallery aside from Mag:net Gallery; Ronald was one of the Thirteen Artists Award grantees chosen by the CCP in the year 2000. Our third guest is Dulz Cuna, a restlessly independent painter from the Visayas, art events organizer, and humanities professor at the University of the Philippines in the Visayas, Tacloban campus.

     So, without further ado, let’s go to our guests. Welcome, guests.

# # #

JSV: Bob, Ronald, Dulz. Could you tell us of any experiences you've had regarding state sponsorship of your art, if any, whether through the CCP or the NCCA or any other government institution?

     Bob Bernardo A. Nuestro: I have no experience with state sponsorship because I’m not comfortable with having to deal with these institutions, although I have some friends there. That is why my gallery is called Artist-Run Independent Art Space [ARIAS]: we are independent, we never ask support from the NCCA.

     Ronald Achacoso: I received a modest grant in 1988 to do a large-scale painting at the CCP. I enjoyed that project. I had the energy then to do very ambitious works and I thought Judy Sibayan, who was Officer-In-Charge at the time, did a good job following up and corresponding with the artists. I was nominated a couple of times for the Thirteen Artists Award and finally received it in 2000. Very political, and I was the token representative at the time of the “unanointed” crowd. I filled up the walls with drawing exercises on paper—cost almost next to nothing—and I think it was an issue of sorts: people were ribbing me about what I did with the money. I think if they give you a cash award it should really be up to you what you want to do with it. Pero yung parang bibigyan ka ng award, tapos you have to prove you deserve it? Ano yon?

     Dulz Cuna: As an artist and cultural worker, the main feeling I get is the alipin saguiguilid (slave in the corner) effect. They use me to get this and that, research on this and that, paint this and that—honestly, I get the preemption that I am some Indio Cinderella and my sovereign rights are in the coffers of a wicked Stepmother. I remember a long time ago, when I helped out in CCP’s Museo ng Kalinganan by bringing their Outreach people to the Orasyon tattoos in Olegario Larrazabal’s warlord fiefdom, an island called Gayad, the barangay started teaming up with folk religious cults and mambabarangs (black magic/witchcraft practitioners) that I feared for my dear mental life torn between the sacred and the profane. . . . Some articles and data were gathered (which I could not include in my paper, for it was sacredly and gingerly possessed by the Museo) and bagged, to my dismay, because it was “guests first,” you know what I mean? Well, when the Museo opened I saw my name in a 10 pt.-font typeface in the Acknowledgements section, among many others in a brochure, as boon. . . . Another one. When the NCCA launched “Sambayan” (National Arts Month), my fellow visual artists and I individually made long paintings for our (Leyte) provincial stage. . . . Ms. Guidote-Alvarez (director of the NCCA) was impressed by them and she “borrowed” the nice ones and brought them to Manila. When we asked the provincial government later where the other painting banners were, they told us Ms. Alvarez did not return them. . . . There are many other experiences where I felt the alipin syndrome, if I enumerate them all I warn this reply won't be short and sweet. . . .

     JSV: Well, do you think private sponsorship is better?

     BBAN: It’s better. Private sponsorship is more businesslike and professional; you must really have good ideas for the sponsor and, of course, for the artists themselves.

     RA: Not in a position to say, really; depends on who’s giving it and for what purpose, I guess.

     DC: I can’t judge yet. This alipin syndrome with the government system that stocks me with projects that I missed the Metrobank, AAP, Shell etc. art contests, robbing me of time and eligible age for joining . . . and now there’s the Philip Morris Philippine Art Awards Competition . . . I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to.

     (giggles from everyone)

     JSV: But don’t you think everyone who got a grant deserved it, or at least one you know who got one?

     BBAN: No, I don’t believe they deserve it; it’s all from the same kami-kami, tayo-tayo, connect-connect thing. Except for a few, maybe. Maybe?

     RA: Obviously not. I said I would join the funeral march for the National Artist of the Philippines title award if the most vociferous awardee were inside the coffin himself. I kind of like the idea that Carlo Caparas’ winning is there to agitate. Anyway, the National Artist award is a relic of a fascistic regime that has seen better days and I sincerely believe we should lay this award to rest, Caparas or no Caparas. Essentially the same thing with the other minor awards. Masyado tayong pang-award mentality.

     JSV: Dulz? Don’t you think everyone who got a grant deserved it?

     DC: No!

     (laughter)

     JSV: So, what do you have to say about the CCP?

     BBAN: The same. CCP is politically manipulated. Even the succession is blurred, not published. Politics in art is natural; it is part of some people’s survival tactics to eke out a living.

     RA: CCP is a mausoleum more than anything. It even looks like one. It failed to fulfill its role and it needs the artists to validate it instead of the other way around. It’s a non-entity. In the ’80s it still retained some prestige, but the signs of erosion and decay were already there.

     DC: Launder the Imeldific diaspora that seems to be seeping out of the Center stealthily!

     JSV: And the NCCA?

     BBAN: The same. They are all just easily manipulated by active professional parasite artists into giving the latter government money.

     RA: I know nothing about it. I’ve met some people who get to show here and there because of it, they seem to be nice and all that but not very intelligent.

     DC: Don’t handle Artist or Culture awards. Be sentinels in the ramparts instead and leave us to be Rapunzels swinging by our hair in our Ivory Towers like in a mad Cirque de Soleil!

     JSV: So, how do you get funding for your art?

     BBAN: I get funding from my collectors from our gallery, they are all private citizens but always have a concern for the development of art.

     JSV: How ‘bout you, Ronald?

     RA: Now that’s a big problem.

     (laughter)

     JSV: Dulz?

     DC: The parian or tabo (tiangge) system with my fellow visual artists (from the VIVA, MAWF, TIVA, KANSIAGU collectives); we paint, sell, and put aside funds for materials . . . or write friends abroad, sell online, market, mountebank, etc. . . .

     (laughter)

     JSV: Do you feel comfortable about your fellow artists getting funding from the government while you don’t?

     BBAN: I do not feel comfortable with that, with those professional applicants for all available grants and residencies, because their body of works can’t settle on real art statements. Instead, they live their artistic lives like parasites. Some suck out government funding for, say, critiquing the government! With this last type, it is all part daw kuno of post-modernist discourses, which is actually creating false myth-making and just manipulating the thick-skinned government funding agencies like the NCCA to give them money. Getting funding from the government is OK if the artist is really creating significant work, but in my twenty years in the art scene I have not seen any significant exhibition funded by the NCCA. Or maybe I am not aware of any.

     JSV: Ronald?

     DC: (shrugs)

     JSV: What about you, Dulz, were you comfortable with your getting funding from the government, fully aware that some of your peers didn’t?

     DC: Nope. That DARN LIQUIDATION scares the itch mites off our pores! And the Commission on Audit rushes after us with a Beeeeg Steeeek!

     (laughter)

     JSV: Would you say you’re against it, then, this government funding for the arts?

     BBAN: I am against the government’s funding of exhibiting artists or professional artists. I’d be okay with funding for students, those who really study art. I am the head of the painting department of the PWU SFAD. . . . I believe institutions like schools of fine arts should be the ones funded, along with students considered as marginalized.

     RA: Can’t really say I’m against it but really think I could use their money.

     DC: Not really; we like the allocation part. But I remember the time when we had the fluvial festival regatta contests in Tacloban—the “Layag (Sail) Painting Contest” had a cash prize of P5,000, while the banqueros racing with the sails had P20,000 to boot. When we questioned the disparity, the government organizers said: “But you are just painting! They have to row the boat!” Ergo, there should be an intrinsic system for grants and allocations.

     JSV: Bob, you’ve never had any state-supported art made, but don’t you sometimes wish you had?

     BBAN: I wish I had but it must be more businesslike. It’s like commissioning, for—say—public art or socially-concerned works.

     JSV: Ronald, wouldn’t you want to have another shot at state-supported art? As you said, you could really use their money.

     RA: Some people have the talent or tenacity to avail of these things. I’m not one of them.

     JSV: Dulz, you wouldn’t mind, would you?

     DC: Yeah, well, we were jealous when our good friend Nemiranda of Angono, Rizal had landmark edifices made in Tacloban and was paid a hefty million sum. We felt slighted ’cause we have good sculptors in our group, so why naman didn’t our local government support us and instead gave the award to an out-of-towner? No offense meant to Ka Nemi, blinow-out naman kami, hehehe.

     JSV: To shake you off, huh. [FIN]

Five fruits of the National Art tree

from left to right: Cinemalaya Foundation founder Nestor O. Jardin, National Artist for Theater Design Salvador Bernal, CCP Chair Emily Abrera, National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose, National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera, in a press conference regarding their questioning the decision of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to add four new National Artist awardees without consulting the selection committee. (Photo from http://www.pep.ph/news/22724/CCP:-Malaca%C3%B1ang-bypassed-rules-of-the-selection-process-for-National-Artists/1/2)

THE tug of war between those who want Gloria Arroyo to retract her insertion of the names of Carlo Caparas and Cecile Guidote-Alvarez into the year's National Artist of the Philippines status roster, on the one hand, and those who want to defend the President's prerogative through either legal terms or a rare aesthetic liberalism, on the other, continues. "I'm happy that it's in the court," Alvarez told the press. "There will be no more shouting in the streets. We can have a civilized discussion."

     Really? I predict that come the day of the awarding ceremony, a few will yet reel, others be shaking their heads, and some be in a self-congratulatory mood. I shall merely ask the question again: where does this really end?

1. Battles

I do not just mean this one about Caparas and Alvarez, but the whole shebang of battling it out for an aesthetic hegemony and political accommodation which has long been here, only not as loudly annoying in the past as now: there were the less raucous protestation by some quarters over composer Ernani Cuenco's recognition by Joseph Estrada's government, the questioning eyebrows over Fernando Poe Jr.'s conferment, the rumors spread about town regarding Virgilio Almario's, weird glances towards Ben Cabrera's, and a few more. Who is to say these guys don't deserve the elephantine Recognition? Who is to say they do? I declare that, like the first EDSA (or EdlSA) revolution that birthed a thousand EdlSA-like mini-rallies all over the country that always spring up every time a mayor is asked to vacate his seat, the Caparas and Guidote-Alvarez affair will henceforth birth an annual parade of protests from the Cultural Center of the Philippines to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts over the coming years' (decades') new National Artist recognitions. And why is that? Because everybody still agrees it's not the "system" that's rotten, at present it's only Gloria Arroyo and Carlo Caparas and Cecile Guidote-Alvarez who stink in the minds of their opposition; in fact, almost everyone agrees, with a constant nod toward each other, Catholic Church mass-fashion, that the National Artist award is holy.

     In her Philstar.com column of last Saturday, "New Morning for Inang Bayan," Sylvia Mayuga wrote: "Only 15 days had passed since this fighting spirit went to court for arbitration of this controversy weighted to the side of the Muse."
     I'm wondering, though, if the Muse is aware that the defendant in court is her own son (Caparas), daughter (Alvarez), and spouse (Arroyo). When the Muse allowed herself to marry and remarry and remarry, again and again, always at the disposal of any government for a husband (even while Eastern Europe's artists were celebrating their divorce from the clutches of their respective governments' domestic violence), this Philippine Muse virtually allowed herself to be tied to a monster system she would forever have to contend with. It's not going to stop at Caparas and Alvarez, as it did not at Ernani Cuenco or Fernando Poe Jr., as it did not when whispers crawled the gutters over Virgilio Almario's "canonization." Again, who is to say they don't or do deserve the honor? There will always be this battle, because the Muse told her children to scramble for their father's (the government's) blessing. And I'm not just talking about the government at Malacañang, but the government of cultural institutions whereby the process of nationalizing art has forever been celebrated in this country as every artistic child's ideal reference. But I wouldn't blame the children. Nor would I blame the approached or welcomed spouse. I'd blame the Muse. The Muse in us all.

     Or Muses, if you will. From the Philippines on to Europe and on until we reach the US's National Endowment for the Arts, the same combats over judgments, marginalization, mis-appreciations, the deserving and the undeserving, unworthy authority, and so on, within this system of state art patronage, rankle on like an irritating global itch no one wants to finally cure.

2. Dependence

The Muses. It's all over the country. Everywhere you go in the archipelago, in every province, the classic complaint goes like this: our government here is not supportive of the arts. We heard the same complaint hurled against then Cory Aquino's press secretary Teddy Boy Locsin when he expressed the taboo declaration: "culture is not a priority." We hurled the same pail of tears at President Fidel Ramos, whose government echoed Locsin's plea.

     I say we, and why not?—almost every one of us in the arts is guilty of having benefited at one time or another from this system. I say we, because it is not seldom that we are all led by our artistic hunger to approach anyone and anything dangling the possibility of sponsorship that would boost our careers. And whether you've failed a thousand times to get that grant or won a thousand times at getting that funding, the fact remains that we are all affected. Grant winners and funding application losers both marched to the NCCA to protest the new "scandalous affair" or expressed disgust on their respective Facebook Walls. Isn't it about time, though, we examine whether this cycle of dependence is really what we want, this mode of measuring art and achievements or this route of guaranteeing production really what we prefer?

     I'm surely going to be despised by a lot of my peers for sticking to my belief that the state should have no business interfering in the arts. The arts are exchanges among artists and audiences. When government favors certain voices, that is to say, favors them with grants using public money, that's tantamount to asking another voice (say, an unfavored one) to contribute via taxation to the fund for the government-favored voices who are actually his government-favored competitors. I say, why not allow the arts to be handled by the individual and by the private sector and free the state from the headache of choosing artists to favor? Why not leave the state alone, so it can focus on the running of museums and education and social services? If government is to put a stake in the arts, should it not only be for education purposes? Doesn't it look legitimate when universities handle the arts instead of Commission bureaucrats, if only because in the universities it’s often for education purposes?

     When government interferes in education it does so in cognizance of its duty to equality. When it interferes in the people's various arts, it does so out of an ignorance of its people's variety. As to who among my friends enjoy having to pay a cultural tax every time he/she buys a movie ticket, with the awareness that this collection might be used to fund the art or literature of his/her peers whose art make him/her puke, I do not know. What I know is I might not mind contributing materials to some, and only some, of the artists being presently funded by the government, but that the government would dictate me to do so (through the tax system) does not make me feel happy about my contribution. Why does my contribution have to be regulated? I will go visit my friend artists and lend them loans anytime I want, not because government tells me to. It's quite ironic. While Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe fought to liberate its artists from the hold of the state, here we are as a nation with even communist-hating elements of the educated or financial elite asking government to put its hands deeper into the arts pot. The National Artist title controversy of 2009 is the monster everybody in the arts helped create. And this controversy will not be the last, until we face the fact that there will always be this battle for who gets the blessing of government and of art authorities with government appointments. I asked in one of my blogs in my blog series on the National Artist award, why are we so into the nationalization of the arts that Lino Brocka so hated?

     And why is it that it's the arts profession alone that's getting this favor? Why not, say, the baking profession? Imagine this to be the case among bakers, for example. The bakers would rally around a town plaza with placards saying "Give More Support to Baking!" "Support the Baking Culture!" And each one of the bakers approaches a journalist and testifies to this lack of the government's support for baking. Not support in terms of flour price regulation/subsidies, but in terms of flour-making grants or for the awarding of the National Baker of the Philippines title. Would Dunkin' Donuts and Country Style enjoy watching bakers from Mister Donut go home with the favor, knowing that they (DD and CS) contributed modest or hefty sums into that baking subsidy fund? Why can't the bakeshops and the bakers just compete without a public option? This is not healthcare, for god's sake, it's baking! And what is true for baking or skateboard manufacturing or the party event business should be true for painting, for filmmaking, or for making those cute little poems too!

3. Stultification

I had a discussion again on this issue with Lila Shahani, an Oxford University doctoral candidate working on postcolonial writing in English, who recently became one of my Facebook friends and a main character in my blog of last week titled "Two fruits, one tree (or, why there is no such thing as a national artist)"—also a part of my series of blogs about the National Artist title award. Ms. Shahani agrees I should present my following query to each and every artist in this artistic nation: "I think the larger question—should government be funding the arts and, if so, in what manner?—begs serious attention." But then, she also lays down on the table her own take and queries: "You apparently think that government shouldn't interfere, period. I feel that it should be involved in terms of funding indigenous or larger ethnic and regional communities so they can produce the art more easily (venues, workshops, materials, etc). Should there be academic/cultural canon-makers, however? I'd have to think about that some more. Where it might appear, at first blush, that this encourages creativity, it might in fact be the case that too much of it can actually stultify the very creativity it hopes to engender."

     Too much of it, not enough of it, stultify it will. The nationalization of art produces acceptable art, safe art, pretty art, nationalistic art, protest art that doth not protest too much towards the government that maketh it eat—certainly not art that questions the standards and clichés of those in "authority," certainly not art that explores virgin forests of beauty that have long been regarded as ugly by those who have to approve your funding, certainly not art that defies the codes of prettiness, not art that defies convention or conventional "fashionable rebellion," not art that questions long-established definitions of nationhood and good citizenry. And the reason for that is simple: guided art is un-free art.

     So, am I saying that much of the art sponsored by government funds have been mediocre? No. Some of them may even be revolutionary. But that would be because their revolutions got approval; in short, approved revolutions. What about those who didn't get their revolutions approved? What happens to their revolutions? How many have been sponsored that turned out to be mediocre, how many turned out to be great? How many got hefty grants for forgettable performances? Critics in their various fields of specialty can answer those questions and tell us whether government funding has really wrought out champions. How many revolutionary (or simply innovative) art got disapproved? Why? And even assuming that critics of the future will all agree that the CCP under, say, former advertising-industry stalwart Emily Abrera was a grand phase in CCP's history, what is to stop the institution from degenerating into a less grand epoch under new management?

4. Death of the Individual

Creativity is anywhere and everywhere. Apart from artists supporting themselves, not all of whom are well-to-do, how many times do we witness support for artists given by private individuals and foundations? And, lacking that support, how many times have we heard the phrase "aesthetics of poverty" passed around in areas where a lack of funds for expensive oil paint exists and creativity is still running wild? Why should government dip its powerful hands in the free exchange as if it wants to put up a propaganda TV station to compete with the private networks, yet operated via those networks' large tax contributions?

     The nurture of achievements? Artistic achievement can neither be a property of the state nor the claim of the state. Many experiences in communist countries have shown us a thousand times the futility of achieving high artistic standards under the state's guidance defining what is the highest art, unless the art products in their pedestals are read in the context of irony. The National Endowment for the Arts in the US, with its more advanced guidelines for approval in terms of communal representation or democratic accommodation, is still constantly pestered by questions of too much interference by the boards (and I'm not just talking about the Robert Mapplethorpe affair). Artistic achievement is finally by the individual and for critics to debate on, and many an individual artistic genius proved to have better achieved their stature through the minimal interference of somebody else's guidance. To say that it is worthwhile for the government to spend twenty million pesos for twelve artists with the hope that the investment will catch one genius is baloney. Artists become lesser geniuses with their patron's interference and become visceral geniuses when they have a falling out with their patrons. Or, as in the case of Ludwig van Beethoven, when they don't care much for what their patrons demand and seek to surprise them instead with what these patrons didn't expect.

5. Brainwashed Art

Who will be mother to the arts if government opts out? This has been the classic blackmail verse flaunted by those who have come to believe that if government opts out of arts-funding, the arts will die. But even such frightened dependence can be inspired by a lot of branding they can see around them. Booker or Man Booker, Pulitzer, Nobel, Palanca, Ayala, among other names—these are private efforts that can boast of better patronage than their counterparts in government. And if you don't agree with the various institutions' standards of the good and the beautiful, fine, it's their money, not yours. A government arts commission, in contrast, would tell you to go to hell if you can't agree with their standards but still ask you to pay your cultural taxes so they can continue to operate.

     Who will be mother to the arts if government opts out? Ask that to the artists from the provinces who do not have access to public funding, who never had access to such public funding. Ask that to the urban artists who scoff at the approval demands and inane requirements by the committees lording it over artists' theses as masters of the acceptable.

     "France is pretty heavily centralized this way and there hasn't been as much new blood as, say, England or the US," says Shahani. That is a critical opinion. But my friend brings out an example of long dependence that has not adapted well to the globalized valuation of respect for the market. As with the US National Endowment for the Arts, long been a topic for contention in the US, as with the Philippine cycle of cliques' battling it out for a hold on the CCP or the NCCA, as with France's proclivity for subsidies, artists—for a long time now alienated from the popular artists of the middle to latter 20th-century—have come to distrust the market. Artists have called the market, or the popular audience, stupid. They have called the market uneducated. And so, as if to wound it with vengeance, indirectly want to tax it for their nurture and survival so they can ram their respective weirdness on the masses' uncomprehending throats.

     "But leaving artistic recognition to the invisible hand of the market," as Ms. Shahani points out, "might not necessarily be a bad thing (as long as production itself has been subsidized) since it will generate competition and creativity, which is exactly what we want and need. This might in fact be more effective in the long run than having artists wait for—and conform to—government dole-outs."

The Pith

This is all understandable, really. Many a book have been written about how art veered too far away from the popular audience. And although there are still, say, the Juzo Itamis and the Quentin Tarantinos in "art cinema" or "film festival cinema" who have found ways of addressing both the needs of professors and those of ordinary sarariman (salary men), all in one product, the bulk of the artist population still prefers to talk to their fellow artists. Or to the art societies' embedded critics. Or to the well-heeled patrons of the art.

     Which is just fine, really. I do that, too. My poetry and fiction in English are mostly not for the masses. Not yet, anyway, and maybe never will be. But we, artists, shouldn't tax the people so we can concoct forever our esoteric kind of stuff. Who will be mother to the arts if government opts out? Well, no one! And I mean no one should baby artists, and certainly not the state. An artist should work his butt off and fund himself. He should be able to see that when he begins to do that, he would not just have learned how to work, he would have learned how to think and compete. And what if our artists cannot start to do that? I'd say no number of Caparases and Alvarezes will ever wake us to the real problem: artists' scrambling for, and consequent embarrassing dependence on, blessings from the State.

     I ask, why should your art as one artist be subsidized by a hundred of your peers and a thousand of your uncomprehending neighbors? Isn't that by itself no less shameful than what we're presently protesting against as political patronage? [FIN]

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Author's note: This author wishes to acknowledge Sylvia Mayuga for the guest display of this blog essay on her Philstar.com column, appearing there as a wonderfully-streamlined version of the blog care of Mayuga's own experienced hands. I am tremendously honored.

Two fruits, one tree (or, why there is no such thing as a national artist)

pulled from National Artist of the Philippines - Wikipedia

THROUGH our friendly exchange of comments on Sylvia Mayuga’s Facebook wall regarding the ongoing National Artist of the Philippines title award debacle, Lila Shahani, a doctoral candidate at Oxford University (London) working on her postcolonial literature in English degree and who used to work for the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Gawad CCP committee, observed a “somewhat promiscuous and occasionally rather putrid need to constantly canonize in the Philippines.” She went on to propose a national art completed through a process “more natural, more organic, where the cultural minutiae come alive on its own.” Still, the hanging question was, Why this eternal craze for “canonization” and official recognition by a nation?

     Well, apart from the lack of an audience for many artists which might require forcing such an audience by legal declaration, my other quick explanation to that hanging query is this: we are not a nation. We have never been, and we just might never be. You see, a long time ago a colonizer declared the people of this archipelago “of ours” as one nation of “Filipinos”; then that colonizer left and we were likewise left with the vague duty of continuing the realization of that declaration. However, there are many factors keeping us from realizing that mission—regional, regionalist and religious divisions are just some of these. But I would like to focus on two very important factors, two basic ones responsible for the constant and unflagging division in our nation and which I believe are at the root of such cultural issues as this surrounding the recent National Artist of the Philippines title debacle—viz., language and education. (Let’s lay aside for the moment the issue of politics governing National Artist selection, as I am more concerned in this essay with the masses’ unconcern).
     Okay. Now, some will say we are divided into two nations, the rich Filipinos’ nation and the poor Filipinos’ nation. That is also true. But that view can be tricky in the art of explaining the economics behind it, so I’d rather trace things to the more obvious dividing tool: language. (As I write this, for instance, I’m fully aware of my readership, and that readership does not include my neighbors in our barangay).
     In the Spanish era we were introduced to feudalism, and within that feudal system was entrenched a wedge that would forever keep the poor from reaching the landlord’s sons’ and daughters’ level. That tool was language. Spanish became the mode of instruction in the academies, and—since society operated under a feudal system—the academies would mostly be affordable only to the landed gentry or the merchant class, seldom to working class elements or the peasantry who could only rely on the charity of private or public scholarships. The learned from Spanish, therefore, could thus only become more learned by Spanish. Those denied access to the language from childhood might be able to keep up a bit, but only up to a point (the same way that what we now regard as OFW English can only function for certain functions but not in the alta sociedad ballroom functions, unless you are Manny Pacquiao’s mom).
     Now, when the Americans came and went, that systemic bent of wedging a divide between the poor (Tagalog-speakers) and the rich (now English-speakers) was not removed. Sure, there were efforts to come up with a language we could call our own, which my great grand-uncle Jaime de Veyra was party to. Declared as the national language, Tagalog (which would later be academicized to be known as Filipino) had a nationalist rationale-cum-agenda; but it did not seem to be aware of its potential in ultimately removing the poor-rich wedge tool, the language divide. The nationalists spoke Tagalog in public functions, but kept their snobbery by English’s way with the rest of the upper class in their daily exclusivist conversations concerning keeping up with the white Joneses. The national language mission was designed for nation-making, never for nation-uniting. And the problem with that was, the nation got to be made by the new landed gentry and the new merchant class who were being educated by Thomasite standards.
     Since language and education are like the left and right arms of every citizen that makes coping with daily life a whole lot easier, that wedge in Philippine society separating the left arm and the right arm to make life more difficult necessarily manifested itself in all facets of society’s operations, including that activity called the arts. And so the poor Filipino nation generally listened to radio soap operas and pop music and watched cinema entertainment in Tagalog, while the rich Filipino nation primarily listened to radio news and music in both Tagalog and English and watched English soap operas on TV and English movie-theater movies. Sure, rich entrepreneurs made Tagalog literary masterpieces for the masses, but that doesn’t mean they preferred these to their self-Americanization or self-Europeanization ideals.
     It was logical therefore to see a two-pronged development of the arts. The Tagalogeros’ arts included, among others, still life and Last Supper paintings on plywood or katsa (low-grade cotton canvas) made by maglalako painters (painter-vendors) who intended these for dining room display. Their art, similarly colonial as their upper-class masters’, also included American jet fighter jeepney sticker art, and such other manifestations of colonial idolatry. The Ingleseros’ arts, meanwhile, included—among others—painting inspired by the painting concerns of the moment in New York/Berlin/London/etc., emulations of Italian industrial design, and so on. The former became prisoners in their own country and were only able to do so much artistically, while the latter generally became prisoners of their old and continuing colonialist ideals—but that is a different issue.
     Thus, today, by virtue of that language divide that entrenched an educational divide that in turn created artistic divides, we continue to face the problem of addressing the concepts of what a national art is, who a national artist is, when a national art or artist is, and how national is a national artist.
     Politicians would find it easy to give out answers since their usual concern with the arts is political. Artists seem to have a more difficult time with it, since they would be more genuinely concerned with defining what is art and what is national.

NOW, I forget who it was who wrote in the ’80s, in the American magazine The Saturday Review, something like this: “every time I see an I Love New York sticker, I know New York is in decline.” Something like that. Well, every time I see a symbol of canonization, like a National Artist award for someone, I know it’s ultimately a symbol of desperation.

     Desperation, I say, because we (consciously or subconsciously) know we have not yet realized the old proposal to be a nation and have thus remained constantly divided—not just regionally but regionalistically, religiously, linguistically, economically. The compounded result of which is finding ourselves eternally crazy about such exercises of false nationhood as following a rigid performance of the national anthem (as against the US’ allowing much leeway in the performance of its own). We have acquired thus a hunger for perfect symbols: a national hero, a national flower, a national fruit, a national fist, a national pasalubong, a national book store, whatever national else. Subconsciously, we know that we really don’t represent anything collectively. Culturally, Sudan’s infighters seem better off, for they know they are fighting for specific ethnic rights and also ownership of specific oil territories. We, on the other hand, celebrate our symbols the way we celebrate our religious days and icons—blindly most of the time, wishfully at best. Rizal the fighter for autonomy or independence is loved on Rizal Day even as we continue to embrace the dictates of the economists of foreign creditors, which is the same behavior we display every time we congratulate ourselves for a nice mass (on a Sunday or Saturday), even as we’ve come to love the things Jesus of Nazareth used to hate.

     Blindly, therefore, unfazed do we march forward—albeit in a haze—toward what could bring us true nationhood. Nationalizing anything and everything has become our desperate and self-assuring habit. I find it easy to say that by simply trying to be a nation and trying blindly, we will never attain our objective. For nationhood, you see, cannot be constructed by imposing wishful thinking on a people within a territory via momentary spurts of sloganeering and songs of “magkaisa tayong mga Pilipino” every time there’s a news-friendly event requiring commonality, or every time we come up with a utopia of obedience under the rubric of a “Strong Republic.” Nationhood takes a lot more effort than that. Some even had to build a nation through a war cause. Or a peace cause. There was always a uniform direction within the internal divide.
     But that’s on the one hand. On the other hand, there is the Karl Popperian idea of a democratic society that proposes to create a nation by constant democratic exchanges, internal economic exchanges, and pluralism. What these exchanges demand is the achievement not of uniformity for the sake of nation-building but plurality and variety for the sake of “free society”-building. This demands an atmosphere akin to a town fair with competing booths, the thesis being that unifying by way of unifying breaks a nation, while enhancing differences under the parameters of opinionated aggression as well as the “acceptance of one’s obsolescence” (Popper) creates the necessary physical human unity consisting precisely of more exchanges and the consequent nurturing of a continuing mutual respect. We do not have that in our idea of democracy. Our idea of democracy remains: to have the freedom to speak and not to own the responsibility to listen—but this, too, is another issue.
      Suffice to say that our nation is not made up of a demos of a people, which should be one and the same thing; instead we have educated lords lording it over the demos, creating two peoples. Thus we continue to nationalize anything and everything to embark on this subconscious mission to hide the truth; it has become our reflex action and attitude towards every frustrating event that occurs in our midst. Instead of decentralizing culture to create that town fair atmosphere, we announce on the speakers that everyone in the town fair should wear blue and red shirts and jeans. We do not just crave for a nation, we try to design a nation, and we take it upon ourselves to act on that duty. The problem is, even with an obedient people we cannot acknowledge the fact that we cannot even give them orders if they are speaking a different language.
     The process of elitist nation-making can be quite funny, too—it shows us how nation-shapers can become parodies of themselves. And that is not just in our archipelago where things are not even funny anymore. The American Grammy Awards, for instance, has a system wherein peers can nominate only those artists who have reached a certain number of sales in the market; this is similar to the Hall of Fame awards system wherein mayors and governors and sports investors take the ritual photo op on the day of conferment, not realizing they actually waited decades before they could say, “oh okay, he's still not forgotten, maybe we can give him the award now.” Who the hell needs that conferment in the first place when the people already gave it to the man/woman centuries ago? What the hell is a Grammy nod all about if what is required is a market nod first? Now, of course there are honors that really honor, and these are usually the awards that do not pretend to derive from somewhere else. But the rest are crap, and these are usually the awards that pretend to have been conferred by an Academy when in fact it had indirectly been conferred by the people firstly, or these are the ones that pretend to have been conferred by the nation, or by the city, or by the barangay, when in fact an institution took it upon itself to speak for the nation/city/barangay. The National Artist title award is that latter type of carabao dung. And the sad part of it is it not only pretends to be an award by the nation for an “artist of the nation,” sans a definition of who a nation is composed of, it even wastes the people’s tax money—the only thing truly of the people and by the people in that award. And from now on, the filmmakers of our land will pay their cultural taxes to pay for C-movie filmmaker Carlo Caparas’ monthly stipend, the new controversial awardee.
     Consider, however, that Carlo Caparas—a product of profit-based movie marketing for the masses created by rich movie producers—is not an “academic” artist, and perhaps also why a lot of arts people were astounded by the conferment. Now, Caparas may be a bad artist, but that says something else again: the world of academic artists and the world of an educated politician like Gloria Arroyo cannot seem to meet on the same plain. Why is this? Perhaps Gloria Arroyo does not really believe Caparas to be worthy of the award; she has been so wily a politician, as many of us have been wont to say. If so, then it would make perfect sense that Gloria Arroyo chose to confer the award on somebody who in her opinion might be her people’s champ able to go against the elite artists’ preferred refined champ.

“WHAT is this constant need to deify, whether it’s the Gawad CCP or National Artist award?” asked Lila Shahani.

     Apart from the Gawad CCP and National Artist awards, which are national efforts, let me digress to the Palanca Awards, which is a private effort. Some would aver that it would be unfair of me to touch this last as it is not of the same bunch—but they are of the same bunch. First, though, the disclaimer. Palanca’s sin is not a grave one, for it only pretends to be an “award” even as it is really a contest prize for contest applicants with three judges sitting for each category instead of a committee like, say, the Swedish Academy for the conferment of one award. It only pretends to be like the National Critics Circle awards (an honor honest about its being a circle’s honoring someone) even as it is actually the American Idol of Philippine literature. And Philippine writers play along—for the money, or for the credentials (since the literati have already attached themselves to it as an institution). A writer-friend says some of these Palanca-participating writers would even adjust their writing styles for whoever is going to sit as a major judge in a year’s contest (it’s a small community, you can’t keep a secret), but that’s another matter and I cannot name names.
     But at least the Palanca doesn’t pretend very much to be of and for a nation. It acknowledges that it is of and for writers and is only an opportunity medium for . . . actually I think for the propagation of the easy transfer of styles of patronage.
     I do not, however, think the Palanca to be entirely useless. I would only rather that it was a publishing and distribution grant so readers can access/check its winners. In short, so it can be a part of a potential literary market and potentially of the nation.
     Let me discourse further on Palanca’s role in my arguments here later. First, Lila Shahani points out that international publishers like Random House seem more interested in ethnic voices than in national voices, in an Australian aborigine writer than in an Australian writer, at least presently. And that is really because book publishers are moved by the forces of market tastes and market availability and marketability and market niches. They are moved by such principles as positioning, product image, product identity. They know what they are looking for.
     “If you want to make it in the Philippine market,” Ms. Shahani opines from experience to provide a contrast, “it is useful to celebrate some aspect of our national identity. So would a Filipino version of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger make it back home [Shahani is writing from India], with all its criticisms of India? Unlikely. Instead, even if one is not necessarily formally gifted, as long as one celebrates the pastoral, the indigenous or the national, one is bound to be awarded eventually. Isn’t this as dubious as the criteria for multicultural writing internationally?” In my two earlier blog essays here under the National Artist label, this was what I referred to as a propensity to institutionalize—through the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the CCP—safe art.
     And this is precisely how Filipino movements for idealizations operate, however various the approaches are by the different NCCA directors or CCP chairmen. And if we are to go back to the Palanca, which is governed more by the standards of its sitting judges from a previous or newly-established generation of writers than by any government interest, it sadly still turns out to be another form of convention propagation, or conventional innovation, and all because judges would not be inclined to interest a market, or a people, or a readership. Its judges would be mostly concerned with their aesthetic idealizations for an imagined market, an imagined people, and the small readership who may or may not love those idealizations since the judges and writers would have no way of knowing since Philippine literature is often for free. Almost nobody in my barangay has probably even read a poem or story by a Palanca winner. And if you say not all barangays are like my barangay, I would bet you my whole year’s salary if you can give me a barangay with even at least 20% of its population having read a book by a Filipino creative writer apart from the required Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo in college. I know this is not Czechoslovakia, and I know that neither is this Russia with taxi drivers reading Russian novels in Russian by Russian writers.
     So, what am I saying? Am I preaching nation-making by proposing a mono-lingual utopia?

IN the early post-Marcos decades, there have been efforts to democratize the elite arts. The CCP even toured ballet performances to the provinces in the late ’80s through its outreach program. It was the institution’s way of hoping that if you bring a thing to the people, the people would eat that thing. If you give them caviar, they’d go “ooh.” Well, that seemed to be the prayer, at least. The CCP’s nationalizers were understandably offended when they didn’t get those bravos, or got offended more when they got a “mas masarap pa ang bagoong dyan e” sort of response to their West-inspired art.

     But, get this. This approach was not exclusive to the elitist in the arts who thought like Imelda Marcos in saying, the way to erase an elite is to make an elite element out of everyone. No, even the Marxists in the academic world did come up with their own designs for nation-making. They said people should have access to our books, and so our writers should start writing in the people’s language, Filipino. The problem was, and still is, this: language doesn’t seem to operate merely through words, it also takes its personality from the education it got (and the jobs and wages that this education got it), and from the access to a bookstore that went along with its being able to find that meager job thanks to the meager education it got. Sure you can tell a people and their language, “hey, pare, mare, hindi ito sonnet, ito ay isang soneto,” but that, ladies and gentleman, would not change the politics around the art commodity—coining a new local word for an alien object would not readily assimilate that object into the accepted culture of the larger society nor guarantee its acceptance after having been understood. In short, you may change the politics within an art, the language and its contents, but that would not change the elitist aura of all Philippine art that do not derive from the barangays or the people themselves and their education (the education afforded them by a poorly-accorded privilege).

     Ms. Shahani also shared this observation: “the ones we seem to idealize (in this context I have more experience with Gawad CCP) are the ones with fairly obvious and identifiable nationalist references.” That would be emulating or aping the Pulitzer, but at least the Pulitzer is clear on that in all its press releases, and the Pulitzer had had material that involved American characters in foreign lands (Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King almost won). Still and all, nationalism as a rationale for a Gawad is still merely tinkering with the content of the message, not fixing the real root of the absence of a nation-audience. “Unless you’re in awe of the greats, you’re in trouble, it seems,” Lila adds, and to me that’s a signal frustration with our collective fear for the “nationalist greats,” nationalist greats who are however unperturbed by the threat of the nationally uneducated (or unperturbed at least by our money-wasting in all this arts funding).
     So, in the end, what am I preaching? Well, if I am to preach here at all, I shall do it by referencing my admiration for what the novelist and short story writer Jose Dalisay wrote somewhere, sometime ago, to the effect of confessing that he is a bourgeois writer writing in a bourgeois way on non-bourgeois themes for a bourgeois audience. He didn’t put it that way, really; I did. But that’s basically what he was saying and basically what he has been doing. Now, if only the national arts committees of this god-forsaken nation could muster the same boldness to acknowledge its standing in the nation and stop pretending to be of the nation, then maybe we can begin the job of really making this nation one.
     Until that time comes, I will continue to refuse to call any Filipino artist—including myself—a national artist or an artist of the nation. There can be no such animal in this jungle. [END]

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After reading the above blog essay, Sylvia Mayuga emailed me an article that shall be a part of her new anthology to be published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press. The article is actually a review of the book A Country of Our Own by California-based Cebuano writer David Martinez, a poet who---it turns out---seems to carry the same belief as mine concerning the mythology of our nationhood, though he develops his piece in a more researched though perhaps less sanguine way to produce his "tour de force" on the issue (Ms. Mayuga's phrase). Mabuhay sab ka, bay.

     But it gets better. Sylvia wrote "New Morning for Inang Bayan," extolling the positive coming off a negative event, including this blog---along with an interview with Ms. Shahani---in the limelight of her prose as she rose to her finale. That was quite embarrassing and an honor.

The aesthetics of the economics of vanity

Vanitas (Latin for vanity) by Léon Bazille Perrault, 1886 (pulled from Vanity - Wikipedia) 

IT is not as exclusive as many think it is. And I'm referring to what many assail as the vanity of tummy tucks, butt implants, liposuction, and what-not. For steep as the price of any of these operations may be, vanity is universal, and its many aesthetic variants would betray just as many pricing levels in the market. In fact, vanity is the market.

     I write this as my way of recording my recent debate with my neighbor's aunt at her diner in front of our barangay market when I went there this morning to buy a rare cup of barako coffee and enviable thick Visayan latik on suman for breakfast. My mother-in-law wakes up so early in the morning and I wake up so late and my wife leaves for the office for the usual rush hour along with the kids, so I'm left with the delightful experience of having special suman with latik syrup for breakfast. But this morning, a debate with my neighbor's aunt ensued when she started to scream all over the place over the issue of a lady on her TV screen, a lady who was saying Vicki Belo's clinic botched her buttock augmentation which endangered her life at a later stage when the silicone started to decay and harbor all sorts of microbial pirates inside her ass of a colony, or something to that effect. But, oh no, my neighbor's aunt was not concerned with the legalese favoring the butt-reshape customer and "victim," nor was she fuming at those who "do not follow the doctor's post-operation instructions," as some of my other neighbors in the diner cockily put it. My neighbor's aunt was merely feeling victorious, or---all right---simply glad, that an apostle of vanity had been punished by the anti-aesthetics god(s) of modesty that she says she devoutly worships.

     Reader, note that it is not my wont to argue with my neighbor's aunt, modest and behaved boy that I am. However, I have to confess I could not contain myself in my coffee cup meditation this morning and went outside my private circle in an outburst of fecund wordplay in defense of vanity itself. Not because I felt I was one of those whose vain pain she might later mock, I was still in my cheap flip-flops and am pretty past my high school days of wearing a look-at-me KISS-band makeup, but because I felt my economic philosophy was being trampled on, my belief and aesthetic religion insulted to the edge of the moon.

     How vanity is't in her, mesaid, when livest it yet in all---I said, in mock archaic English. "Ha? Ano yun?" she asked. "Unsa'y imong ingon, dodong? (What are you saying, kid?)" went she further, my neighbor's aunt from the modest island of Bohol.

     And, to my surprise, she listened. She listened, shocked perhaps that this good son-in-law of her neighbor mahjong mate who had up till now only listened and listened well to all her rantings against everything pro-labor, this boy who seemed to agree (if she only knew) with everything she said in defense of Gloria (Arroyo) not the U2 song, this son-in-law of her friend who would just say nothing but flash a series of smiles towards her articulateness, . . . shocking that he would now turn the tables and do the podium work in defense of his, his . . . "philosophy"---but she listened. "Philosophy gradweyt diay ka, dong? Unsa man, nganong wa kag mag-law? (You're a philosophy graduate, then, kid? Then why didn't you take up law?)"

     And though I forgot if I told her "no, I was never officially a philosophy student, I don't even finish the books I read," I remember that this was what I told her, to the amusement of my other neighbors in the diner (the butcher, the baker, and the candy stick vendor):

"'NANG (Mother)," I said, "all of us, all of us, without exception, plot our lives in the name of vanity. Perhaps not all in the nurture of their facial beauty, perhaps not all in the maintenance of youthful hubris, but all in the service of vanity, nonetheless.

     "You, for one," I said. "As much as I. We all, sinners that we all are as our parish pastor's wont to say, we all are children of vanity as we are of god [I believe she read god with a capital G]. Me, embarrassingly fortyish, I yet sport my long greying hair as if to spite the regal Romanness of Rome in favor of the long-haired Druids, old as I am who should be saluting the conventions of the short-haired and conventional now. And you, you in your modest 'duster' (sundress), you also take pride in such modesty and allow the arrogance of conventionality to dictate on those who sway from the barangay's ways, don't you, Aling Britney? And your name, your name itself is an identity which you subconsciously wear like a logo, don't you?"

     "Aba, aba, aba, ang galing mo palang magsalita a, dapat pala tumakbo ka sa susunod na barangay eleksyon, no. Sus, ninduta uy; hayaan mo, kakausapin ko si Kapitan, baka puwede kang . . ."

     I said I'd be back to my telework now, presently, and will just bring back her coffee mug later, and she said all right but I should consider really running for the barangay council.

     So, what was it I really wanted to say?---

     Well, I wanted to enumerate as many aesthetic variations of vanity. Sure, there are the usual vanities of art, of architecture, of cookery, of musical taste, of car and garage design, of lawns, of cycling jerseys, of religion, of politics, of engineering, of science, of a language and its poetry. . . . But there are also the more latent aesthetic vanities, aside from the vanity of modesty (simplicity's arrogant utopia against rococo tastes) and the vain righteousness of village mob wisdom. For one, there's the vanity of the view that our lives are what we make them. There's even the classic vanity of those who have long loved the status of wearing the stamp of poverty on their shoulders, with nary an absence of pride, wearing poverty like a unionist's tag on one's branded social-realist shirt. And being one of those who have concluded that, in this country, where there's smoke there's fire's one of the stupidest things you'd ever hear, I sat content with the Thoreau-bred thought that where there's a society there shall always be vanity.

AND so, what now? How do we escape it, then? If we cannot escape it, must we then just embrace it, make a religion out of it, in Moses' absence?

     I thought about this question and, vainly, came up with this conclusion:

     Our problem with vanity now should not be so much with the difficulty (nay, the impossibility) of escaping it. Our problem with vanity has always been that we have constantly been told to escape it. The problem is we have been told it is bad to be vain. And yet those very same people who say so have the vanity to dictate on us what is vain and what is not. To get a liposuction is vain. But him getting a gas-guzzler of a gigantic truck for to pick his daughter from school is not, because anyway he just drives in his Jockey-branded undershirt.

     It's about time we chuck all this bullshit about what's vain and what's not. In the end, it all boils down to the same old Marxist issue of powers who label and non-powers who get labeled (and by powers I do not mean just the rich, for the stupid mob is just as much a force to reckon with as any landlord's army of goons). But lest I be mistaken again for a Communist (predisposed as everyone is in this country to do so) by my adherence to Marxist critical views, allow me once again the vanity of aggression in saying this: the examination of who said something and to whom it was said benefits not just a party, not any one party, including a Communist party, but an entire market of sellers and buyers!

     Telling our people that it is okay to be vain will do nothing less than get us moving forward. Telling our people that they should not apologize for their way of life will move nothing less than money that should be moved to stimulate an economy. It'll move our rotting butts off to the marketplace to make us buy lunch break lipo, a gourmet doughnut over a vainly simple glazed one, a sports car perhaps or a medium-sized Anton del Castillo more expensive than a Pajero, or a new fancy church in a new fancy spot. What is wrong with that, as long as it's your money? Here's my big what-is-wrong-with-that? If to do one of those is to do wrong, then everything in life is wrong. If doing one of those is bad, then everything in life is bad.

     (Sure, there's the argument that too much consumption is bad for the environment, but even that presupposes the vanity of humankind [anthropocentrism] thinking itself superior to dinosaurs and must therefore not go.)

     I finished my coffee. Having sat in front of my computer monitor for so long and said to myself all that I needed to say to deflate my chest, I vainly walked over to my neighbor's aunt and asked her, in quirky Cebuano, "Manang, you take pride in your coffee, right" She nodded, puzzled. I said, with syllabic emphases, "you're so vain kaayo, uy, but I'm so proud of you." I handed her the empty cup.

THE marketplace in front of the diner went on its busy and merry way, exchanging money and judgments and all sorts of harassment in that mini-divine comedy of a day. But divine---however you put it---in celebration of selves' lives, all in the name of pure vanity.