Category: advocacy

behn cervantes

i never met him, i mean, we were never introduced, not even in the 80s when i was “running around town” (more like flitting around) with mitch valdes and i had really close encounters with showbiz peeps.  but i did have a rather unforgettable brush with him that he may not even have  been aware of, haha.

it happened in some studio set where peque gallaga was directing the pilot of a satiric sitcom that would have starred, if memory serves, mitch,  behn, and elvira manahan (this was at the height of her talk show, two for the road), and joey reyes was writing the script.  i was there because the sitcom was not the entire show.  half would be a talk show of sorts on current issues, and i was writing that.  and it was a good idea to be around because peque might have something to tell me bigla about writing my half — it was quite a radical format, i wasn’t sure, i didn’t see yet how, it would work (and never found out because the producer backed out).

so anyway.  i was behind the cameramen of course, along with other crew, staff, mirons.   there were no seats, standing room only.  except for one lounge chair, yung you’re half-reclining na, that was empty; i gathered that it was for the director, and while he was busy, one or another would take it briefly, pahinga ng paa, but it was mostly unoccupied, until one of the guys offered it to me (i must have been ready to sit on the floor or something).  so i took it.

not long after, ms. manahan and behn arrived.  they had to wait, though, stand around, until direk was ready for them, and siyempre, medyo imbiyerna ang mga lola na there were no seats around.  they had noted the one lounge chair, of course, and little me in it, on it, and i swear, when i stole a look at them, behn caught my eye, looked down his nose at me, and made irap, lol.  not that it was a laughing matter at the time.  i could have vacated the seat at once, left it free for them to take it over, if behn hadn’t been so isnooty.  had he given me even just the faintest smallest smile, i’d have smiled back, sabay get up and offer ms. manahan the seat myself.  instead, i sat on, went back to whispering nonsense with one of the guys for another minute or so, and got up in my own good time.

and then, again, i may have imagined it all.  right now, hearing that behn is in asian hospital with a septic infection, no visitors allowed, it doesn’t matter.  what matters is that he has a heart for nation, and he was one of the true machos, along with lino brocka, in the war against marcos all the way to EDSA.  stories of behn cervantes are writ large in the pages of martial law history, and i salute him.

Awards and Behn Cervantes
By Pablo A. Tariman

ONE wonders how actor-director Behn Cervantes feels about the sudden deluge of recognition coming his way.

Read on

Literature (art) and propaganda

The writers workshop method was imported from abroad by NVM Gonzalez and the Tiempos whose workshops continue to train our writers in the formalist manner. Generations of students fell under the spell of this pedagogy and a few of them, now grey-haired, are the ones quick to tag as propaganda works with varying degrees of advocacy. 

By Elmer Ordonez

The PEN forum on what I thought would be literature and propaganda proceeded on a false start.

The invitation I got said the subject was literature (art) and propaganda. It turned out the other panelists received invitations to speak on “the uses of literature.”

When speaker after speaker spoke on such a broad topic I thought I was in the wrong forum. But moderator Bien Lumbera began his introductory remarks that in the early days oral literature was used to instruct the young on the moral values of the community. He then made a leap in time and alluded to propaganda as “falling into disrepute” in the 50s. He cited this as a result of the Cold War, the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.

On the topic “the uses of lite-rature,” poet Gemino Abad cited his classic comment that without “language (or literature), we have no memory, no history, no culture, no civilization. But a people is only as strong as their memory.”

Another mentioned social realism but did not speak on it at length, and I remember that was what we discussed at the launching of Rony V. Diaz’s three part novel Canticles for Three Women – and comparing it with Jose Rizal’s novels, that were written during the Propaganda Movement, the prelude to armed rebellion waged by the Katipunan. Literature then was unabashedly propaganda but the term did not carry the stigma attached to it by art for art’s sake proponents and Cold Warriors in later years.

Jun Cruz Reyes ventured that all literature is propaganda. In fact, what imaginative literature has in common with outright propaganda is the appeal to emotion not to intellect. I was told that in the UP English department which taught literature for decades using formalist textbooks propaganda is no longer used as a tag for literary work with some kind of advocacy.

Corollary to Jun’s statement would be—no literature is ideology free. And this seems to be generally accepted..

We may well be beating a dead horse – the issue between literature and propaganda, which I earlier called “popular but banal.”

Mila Carreon Laurel of UP gave a periodization of lite-rature in the country, which with my emendations, started with the Propaganda Movement with the works of Rizal and the Solidaridad, the early decade of American Occupation with the “seditious playwrights” and Lope K. Santos’ Banaag at Sikat and early class conscious litera-ture, writing in both armed (e.g. Sakdal) and parliamentary struggles for independence, the proletarian trend pursued by the Philippine Writers League in the 30s, the formalist tendencies of the late 40s and 50s, the resuscitation of nationalist literature during the 60s, and the influence of Mao’s Talks at the Yenan forum on art and literature on national democ-ratic writers during the First Quarter Storm and martial law under which flourished under-ground literature.

Here was a literary and historical situation where indeed art and literature for art’s sake became totally irrelevant. When one professor of English said at a conference that the formalist approach was “non-negotiable” she sounded anachronistic. The professor was among the last survivors of the critical pedagogy developed by John Crowe Ransom, the father of New Criticism, in the early forties.

The Cold War at its height in the 50s saw the use of English text books written under the tenets of New Criticism. As a beginning instructor in the 50s I had to use the prescribed Approach to Literature by Cleanth Brooks, James Purser, and Robert Penn Warren, all New Critics. The writers workshop method was imported from abroad by NVM Gonzalez and the Tiempos whose workshops continue to train our writers in the formalist manner. Generations of students fell under the spell of this pedagogy and a few of them, now grey-haired, are the ones quick to tag as propaganda works with varying degrees of advocacy. During the 50s the literature produced by the left were invariably labeled propaganda by academics. The “free world” writers themselves like Ayn Rand and the disaffected ones in The God That Failed volume or Congress for Cultural Freedom were no slouches in the uses of propaganda.

Nowadays writers are urged to use their talents to combat environmental degradation (as in the last Philippine Pen conference on climate change), corruption in government, human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings. It is not enough for writers to bear witness; they are invited to take social or political action, write or sign petitions, join demonstrations, and even man barricades.

No more will writers just bask under the glory of prizes won in literary contests. Historically writers have given up their lives like Rizal (against Spanish tyranny), Andres Bonifacio (for independence), Manuel Arguilla (against Japanese fascism), Lorena Barros (for national democracy), or they have sacrificed their individual freedoms as did national democratic writers like Jose Maria Sison, Pete Lacaba, Bien Lumbera, Boni Ilagan, Petronilo Daroy, Luis Teodoro, Ed Maranan, Alan Jazmines, Mila Aguilar, and many others.

Hence, propaganda in its USIS and Cold War sense or formalist meaning should be laid to rest. Let it be used rather in the sense of the Propaganda Movement or the continuing people’s struggles for a safe and healthy environment, peace and social justice, freedom and sovereignty.

the krip & willie show

i hear the kill-willie burgis elements are lying low.   i wonder why.   good, if it’s to rethink the issue of child abuse, which is different from willie abuse.   good, if it’s to take stock and see that if you don’t watch local tv, if you don’t watch willie, and all you could be bothered to take in was the spliced/edited youtube video, then you don’t have a right to make any kind of judgement, which should never be removed from the context of Filipino mass culture, no matter how baduy or kadiri-to-death to burgis sensitivities.   good, if the self-righteous burgis elements are beginning to realize that the kill-willie save-janjan noise is a lynch-mob show of power that could should be used to fix government, fix the economy, fix the environment, fix education.   they’re just not up to it?   television’s dreadfulness is merely a reflection of filipino society’s larger dreadfulness, and it’s unfair to single out willie when everybody else in corridors of power are being as dreadful, if in more subtle, sometimes unthinking, ways.

in academe, i see that the plagiarist’s friends are very quiet, simply incapable, it would seem, of drawing a line between right and wrong — the friendship, the utang na loob, the samahan, are just too important.   instead they draw a line between friends and not-friends.   values of honesty and integrity can go hang.

lem garcellano puts it quite graphically:

…para lang kasong jan-jan yan. di ka ka-tropa, luto ka sa sarili mong mantika. hindi nila masikmurang i-crispy pata si Krip. kasi isalang mo ang isa, lahat sasagitisit sa isang kawa. (parang pagluluto ng bulig sa Bulacan, buhay pa ibubuhos lahat sa kawa ng kumukulong mantika tapos sasakluban. maririnig mo yung kasag ng dahandahang pagkamatay).  *let’s see them fry their own kind*

nah, this doesnt look like a social media lynch mob that would have the guts to lynch its own kind; the other kind, yes.   halatang halata in the krip case, because of the silence, and in the willie case, because of the hysteria.

the silence must be because they agree with krip’s lame excuse that since he had edited the work of joble considerably, kanya na yon?  i wish he or joble would show us the original and the edited so we can see the truth of that.   but even so,  the fact that he allowed the article to be published only with joble’s byline only means that he as editor gave up all rights to the material.   he can’t eat his cake (binayaran siya as editor) and have it, too (kanya pa rin ang artikulo as co-author).

as for the willie hysteria,  here’s a treat from james cordova, he whose profile pic is a pic of macario sakay.   a series of irreverent fb jabs at some leaders of the lynch mob.

@Momblogger, one of the noisiest anti-Willie Revillame bloggers who harassed advertisers into pulling out their ads from Willing Willie, admits that she doesn’t watch TV. And yet she judges its content? Is she on drugs or something. Hypocrites. 7:11 pm yesterday

At ikaw Emily Abrera, magtigil ka! You ran McCann-Erickson for years. Among your clients are the same advertisers who supported what you now denounce as TV game shows that dumb down Filipinos. Nakaupo ka lang sa CCP akala mo kung sino ka nang magsalita. Hypocrite! 7:15 pm yesterday

At ikaw John Silva, ikaw na hitad ka, wag kang magmalinis dahil, sa totoo lang, what you’re doing — seeking grants just for the sake of seeking grants and teaching others to do it — is pangraraket at panggagamit din ng ibang tao. Kung gusto niyo tulungan si Janjan, tulungan niyo lang. Wag niyo ng gamitin ang bata para lang mailabas nyo ang pagkamuhi niyo sa mga baduy na kagaya ni Willie Revillame. 7:27 pm yesterday

Ikaw naman Etta Rosales, grow some balls naman. Wag ka kaagad nagpapadala sa ingay ng ilang taong nag-aastang promoter and protector of good taste ng mga Pilipino. Dilawan ka na nga sa pulitika, dilawan ka pa rin sa isyu na to? Naknangtokwa ka.  7:32 pm yesterday

At ikaw Honey Carandang, una, palitan mo na palayaw mo. Kadiri pakinggan na Honey tawag sa isang may edad na na tulad mo. Pangalawa, ayusin mo naman yang practice mo. Wag kang pagamit sa ABS-CBN. Just because ikaw daw ang pinakasikat na child psychologist sa bansa e puede ka ng mag-diagnose sa isang bata without even talking to him first. (Regards kay Ricky.)  7:35 pm yesterday

At ikaw Dinky Soliman, ayusin mo trabaho mo. Sa kaso ni Janjan, saka lang kayo umaksyon nung nag-ingay na sa Internet, almost 2 weeks after the March 12 episode. Dapat March 13 pa lang, nagwala na kayo. E pinalampas niyo pa ilang araw. Ano hinintay niyo – matuyo ang highlights mo? Ang labas tuloy, ginawa niyo lang ito kasi may nag-ingay. E paano kung wala? (Lose the highlights, by the way. It affects your thinking.) 7:40 pm yesterday

environment 2: state of the planet

STATE OF THE PLANET

Junie Kalaw

We have been blessed with a beautiful planet and a beautiful country but we are destroying it at a beastly pace.

The earth’s green cover is a pre-requisite for life in this planet. It is responsible for converting energy from the sun into chemical energy that starts the food chain. It moderates our micro climate, retains our water supply, and renews our soil. Unfortunately we are cutting down this life-support system at a rate of 12 million hectares (an area the size of England) a year and degrading it at a rate of 10 million hectares a year. In the Philippines, we are deforesting at a rate of 105,000 hectares a year and reforesting only 40,000 hectares a year. From 1972 to 1988, we lost 8.45 million hectares of forest.

Land forms the foundation of our biospheric home. It is our primary resource, one that our tribal ancestors in Cotabato, the T’boli people, believed to have been a gift from the gods through the Batute Bird. This resource takes 50 years to build up to a 30-centimeter height and covers only 11% of the total area of the planet. We are losing it at a rate of 11 million hectares through erosion. By the year 2000 we would have lost 275 million hectares, or 18% of our total land area. In the Philippines we are losing our precious topsoil at the rate of 100,000 hectares a year, which means we will lose 1.2 million hectares, equivalent to 12% of our crop lands, by the year 2000.

Our oceans make up 70% of the total land area of our planet. It is the regulator of our climate and provider of our marine-based food supply and 70% of our oxygen. In return, it has been the recipient of 20 billion tons of garbage ranging from beer bottles to radioactive waste. In the Philippines, we dump 2,700 tons of garbage a year into the Pasig River and Manila Bay. As a result, our mangroves have been diminished from 500,000 hectares in 1920 to 38,000 hectares today. Fifty percent of our coral reefs have been destroyed by siltation, dynamite, cyanide, and muro-ami fishing methods.

Life-giving fresh water comprises only 3% of the total volume of water in our planetary home, and most of them are found locked in the polar ice caps. While there is enough to sustain life in our planet, it is unevenly distributed, so we have large areas with drought, water shortages, and polluted drinking-water supply. There are about 1.15 billion of us in the Third World without clean water. This results in 25 million deaths each year, with children composing 60% of that number. In the Philippines, our major inland waters such as Laguna de Bay — the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia — and rivers such as Pasig and Tulyahan are either heavily polluted or biologically dead, and many of the other 384 rivers and 59 lakes are in bad condition. Increasing salinity in the ground water reservoirs of major cities like Cebu, Negros, and Metro Manila is also a major problem. Metro Manila’s water supply is projected to run short by the year 2010.

Climate is an expression of the great interacting realms of atmosphere, land, and ocean. The burning of tremendous amounts of fossil fuel since the start of the industrial revolution has driven up the count of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from 265 parts per million in 1850 to 340 parts per million today, and could reach 600 parts per million by the year 2050. This has created, in combination with the burning of our tropical forests, a “greenhouse” effect and resulted in the steady warming of our planet. Global temperatures are projected to rise to a mean 30 degrees Centigrade above normal within the lifetime of our children. This could disrupt life on earth because of the effects on agriculture and the polar ice caps.

At present there are about 5 billion people in the world. This number is projected to increase to 10 billion before it peters out to zero growth by the 22nd century. By the year 2000 over 50% of us will be living in cities like Manila. In the Philippines, 14 million Filipinos are squatters in forest areas.

One billion people have no decent housing, and about 100 million have no roof over their heads. In the Philippines, we have about 2.6 million squatters in Metro Manila. Our national shelter gap is estimated to be around 2 million units. While five hundred million people worldwide are undernourished, caught in the cycle of poverty and land degradation, 30% of the world population consume three times the normal food requirement and waste 30% of food prepared.

Environmental degradation impacts on our health and mortality. In the Philippines, the crude death rate in 1983 was 8.2 per thousand population (Malaysia’s was 5.4, Singapore’s 5.3, and Thailand’s 5.1). Infant mortality was 59.3 per thousand, compared to Malaysia’s 20.2 and Singapore’s 9.4.

A June 1988 report to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources which would later be submitted to the Philippine Congress in the early stage of the log ban law-making process shows that with the aid of S.P.O.T. (Satellite Probatoire Pour d’Observatoire de la Terre) we have enough information and knowledge about the status of the various life-support systems of our country. However, its conclusion about the root causes of environmental decay is, at best, cautious and, at worst, self-serving in its evasiveness.

The report focuses on “high population growth and the ensuing poverty” as the major cause of environmental destruction, successfully hiding the fact that the cause of poverty is the social inequity in the access to, and benefits from, natural resources. Our forest resource provides the most glaring example. Statistics given by the Asian Development Bank show that from the years 1972 to 1988, the estimated profit from our natural resources was US$42 billion, which benefited only about 460 logging concessionaires.

Another root case cited is the “unecological orientation of our industrial activities.” This can be traced to a world view of man having dominion over nature, of nature being a mere stockpile of resources rather than a living life-support system, and of wealth as material accumulation and consumption rather than “life flow.”

The report states that lack of “operational knowledge” about our life-support system is the third root cause of environmental destruction. I feel, however, that our lack of knowledge lies more in the area of assessment of risk and of the technologies we use, which are constantly changing.

Finally, the report fails to mention lack of political will in enforcing constitutional provisions for equitable sharing of natural resources and in implementing environmental laws. This lack of political will reflects on the quality of governance and the extent of the leadership’s investment in the status quo.

The Sunday Journal, 13 November 1988