Search Results for "luis teodoro"

Not quite goodbye to all that

By Elmer Ordonez

Eight years is not a particularly long time for a columnist but having started late (2004) I feel a need to take a leave to attend to unfinished matters in my other writing.

Rony Diaz, the Manila Times editor-in-chief who started me out in column writing, himself felt that need and took time off. Hence he was able to finish three novels under the title Canticles for Three Women.

December 2012 has been both a sad and gratifying month. For one typhoon Pablo wreaked havoc in Mindanao particularly the Compostela Valley, with 1500 dead, hundreds of thousands rendered homeless, and countless millions lost in destroyed crops and property.

On the other, long delayed laws were passed: the RH, the sin tax and the anti-enforced disappearance bills. The victory of Donato Donaire over Jorge Arce of Mexico, redeeming somewhat lost national honor with the humiliating defeat of Pacquiao.

Closer to home, Philippine PEN held a “feel good” annual conference in Manila on the theme “The Writer as Public Intellectual,” all in all. UP Dean Luis Teodoro as keynote speaker reasserted what he and fellow writers in the late 50s had believed in all along that “the philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”

Anyone who visits the London High Gate cemetery would see the author himself memorialized in an imposing granite bust and his famous lines etched in stone. Luis paraphrased Marx’s quotation by stating “every writer/public intellectual . . . can contribute, in these times of crisis, to the realization of that human need for coherence and understanding that can arm men and women with the consciousness and will to change the world. To interpret the world is to begin to transform it.”

In the panel on “Filipino intellectual tradition” John Nery, author of a book on the national hero, brought out Rizal’s concept, in condensed form, of an intellectual tradition: Write it down, pass it on. Rizal had learned from fellow exile Mariano Ponce that an old Filipino priest and theologian, Fr. Vicente Garcia, at the Manila Cathedral, had defended the Noli from the attacks of Augustinian friar, Jose Rodriguez. No direct quotes cited by Ponce, but Rizal was moved by Fr. Garcia’s defense whom he saw as telling him to continue with his writing.

Indeed, revolutionary writers like Rizal first write about the human condition in a specific time and place and may live or not to see the consequences of their writing. Incendiary is the word to describe the effects of what Rizal, del Pilar, Lopez Jaena, Bonifacio, Jacinto, and Aguinaldo wrote at the turn of the century. As Rizal presciently said through Elias in his first novel, I die without seeing the dawn. He was shot in Bagumbayan facing the west, as history tells us.

Rony Diaz brought in the literary tradition (e.g. the debates between social consciousness and art for art’s sake in writing) giving the panel a literary justification and a more contemporary dimension. Filipino writers in English who came of age during the 30s have been primarily the ones preoccupied with the aesthetics of writing.

The other panels were participated in by writers/public intellectuals/academics who made the conference a very lively one. Philippine PEN, the oldest existing writers group, is notable not only for keeping the discourse on literature (in all its aspects (craft, technique, form and context) alive but also in sustaining the intellectual and cultural life of the nation, with public intellectuals Salvador Lopez, Alfredo Morales, Alejandro Roces, F. Sionil Jose, and Bienvenido Lumbera, chairs in the span of fifty years—whom Frankie himself described as the “parade horses” of Philippine PEN. The “workhorses” of PEN are the national secretaries with Frankie serving for about forty years, followed by Isagani Cruz, Elmer Ordonez, and Lito Zulueta (incumbent).

I enjoyed helping organize PEN conferences around a theme, forming panels, and inviting speakers. The Rizal lecture is a regular feature of the PEN annual conference, and we look forward to the PEN anthology of Rizal lectures.

Writing this column has enabled me to pursue an alternative outlook, the “other view” first used as a title of a book on writing and culture. (1989) After five years of this column, I have put two volumes through the University of the Philippines Press, the first book on literature, culture and society, the second on academe, politics and memory. The last three years of writing (2010-2012)—the third volume is in my bucket list.

Among my readers who have encouraged me in writing this column are readers who send comments like the following from Connecticut-based Prof Sonny San Juan about my piece on Edward Said:

“I wonder how many Diliman colleagues and counterparts in Ateneo and La Salle still quote Said. He did play an important role in the criticism of Zionism but his criticism is a throw back to an abstract, safe, Eurocentric version idolizing Gramsci and French intellectuals. He rejected the PLO later on for the Oslo accords. Not very many Palestinian militants quote Said nowadays.

Academic fashions here are rapid in adjusting to market demands. No one pays attention to Jameson or any American Marxists here. Eagleton is still active in the UK in his reviews of books. Unionism is on the defensive.

“The last spark of mass activism was the OCCUPY movement which is mutating or sublimating into many other organizations and campaigns but humanism is not their slogan; it is 99 percent versus 1 percent, real material inequality more down than to earth than Said’s pebble-throwing gesture.”

With reminders from Rizal and Marx (thanks to John and Luis) how can one turn his back on writing? As the song goes, we’ll meet again some sunny day.

Information control

By Luis Teodoro

CONTROLLING THE flow of information — deciding what citizens are told, how it’s presented to them and even determining what they should and shouldn’t know — has always been a critical concern among the powerful. Whether in the Philippines, its neighbors, or in the most backward or most developed countries of the world, the kind of information that reaches citizens is crucial to the outcome of elections, the making of the policies that decide the quality of life of millions, the staying power of dictators, and even the prospects for war or peace.

The entire planet is inundated with tsunamis of information daily, thanks to the international media organizations’ relentless transmission of reports, commentary and images via cable, print and the Internet. The swift advance of information and communication technology has also made national borders of no consequence to filtering information. At the national level, radio, TV and print assail the senses daily in most countries including those yet to achieve the same level of development as Japan and most Western nations.

But only at first blush does the control of information seem futile. For all the billions of characters, bytes and pixels they transmit daily, the world’s biggest media conglomerates, thanks to the incessant mergers and acquisitions that have made them a mere handful (seven media conglomerates have a global monopoly over news and entertainment), share a homogenous view of the world. Built into the international media system is a common perspective rooted in the culture and politics of the handful of Western countries where the global media organizations had their origins. This perspective is inevitably, and often unknowingly, assimilated by the broadcasters, reporters, and commentators in the countries where the international corporate media have a monopoly over the transmission of news and entertainment from the rest of the world.

A homogenous view of the world has taken root in most countries, where how events in the Middle East, Asia, the Americas, Africa and anywhere else are perceived is crucial to the making of public opinion. The consequence is the absorption on a nearly universal scale of values and ideas that taken together constitute the most formidable obstacle to change even in the most desperate of circumstances, human consciousness and perception being a critical factor in the transformation of nations and the world.

The Philippines’ recent experience with two bills — one already a law, the constitutionality of which will be debated in the Supreme Court in January, the other practically on its last gasps in the 15th Congress — is instructive. The control of information-what and how much citizens need to learn about themselves, their governance, and the rest of their society — is basically what drove the almost immediate passage of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, and what has prevented the Freedom of Information bill, after nearly two decades, from being passed.

The FOI bill, despite nearly two decades of debate and discussion, and, during the Aquino III administration, the drafting of at least three versions, has aroused the most violent opposition in the House of Representatives. And yet, an FOI Act has been in place in Thailand for years. Even Pakistan has one. It is not particularly revolutionary, and an FOI act should have long ago been part of the country’s laws.

The version of the Freedom of Information bill that’s still up for discussion in the House plenary even falls below the standards to which the United Nations encourages compliance. It enshrines executive privilege in law, exempts from public access information on “national security” — a particularly contentious phrase in this country because of its experience with authoritarian rule — and leaves it to the President to declare as an exception any information that in his opinion falls under that category.

As passed by the House committee on public information, the FOI bill doesn’t have the “sunshine provision” that would automatically make information exempt from public scrutiny available after a specific period. Instead, the bill leaves such a declaration to the President’s discretion. Inputs in discussions over policy are also exempt from disclosure, thus preventing citizens from participation in the making of public policy.

Despite these provisions that actually favor State secrecy, resistance to the FOI bill remains strong in the House of Representatives, and its fate as of this writing (December 20) was still uncertain, since Congress adjourns for the holiday recess today, December 21. The scope and power of the opposition to it is indicative of the mindset among the country’s power elite that regards information as dangerous, and looks at the citizenry as immature, of limited capacity for discernment, or likely to abuse its own freedoms to be worthy of the information that’s readily available to the powerful and privileged. For all the ringing rhetoric, however, the very bottom line is that Philippine officialdom has too many secrets it would rather not be made public.

The fear of the citizenry is evident in the severe restrictions the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 puts in place against those who regularly use the Internet to report and comment on issues of public concern — most of them ordinary citizens who have discovered the empowering character of the new media. The Act punishes free expression by ordinary citizens even more harshly than the 82-year-old libel law does professional journalists.

To what end this enthusiasm for curtailing free expression and this resistance to access to information? In the hostility to an FOI act is not only the fear that the media would be even more powerful. Implicit in that fear is fear of citizen empowerment as well. What makes governments suspicious of the press is that it can — and it is no more than a possibility — provide the public with, among others, the information it needs on the problems and issues of governance and society, what they mean, and, either directly or indirectly, what the possible solutions are. The media by themselves have no power beyond shaping the consciousness of their audiences, the power to change things being ultimately resident in the citizenry.

Change in the country of our sorrows is possible only when the realities of poverty and injustice are in conjunction with citizen consciousness of the roots and causes of those realities. It’s an awareness that could lead to the exploration of possible solutions. The Philippine experience demonstrates that information is crucial in the shaping of the predisposition for change and citizen openness to the means as to how it may be achieved. It is the absence among the people of meaningful information that has made change of any kind in the Philippines problematic. It is the instinct to keep things as they are that makes control of information so crucial to the Philippine elite.

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.

claudine, tulfo, media

i disagree with senior journalist luis teodoro that the naia brawl deserved only “passing mention” in the news, the scuffle was a mere “incident of no public consequence,” and “most of us don’t really care” who threw the first punch.

it’s not as if such a public brawl, involving a celebrity couple and a media personality, were an everyday event around here; in fact it was the first of its kind, and what a sapakan show it was, with a spectacular touch of irony, to boot.

imagine — claudine baretto and raymart santiago* confronted mon tulfo because he was taking photos of her ranting at a cebu pacific rep about missing luggage, photos that would add documentary spice to the story tulfo must have been planning to write which would surely hurt her image, reputation, whatever.  in the end, it was a one-minute video (taken surreptitiously and uploaded on the internet by unknown parties) that was made public and it was a hundred times more maanghang, showing the couple and friends ganging up on tulfo the senior citizen.  unfortunately for claudine and raymart, the video was incomplete and doesn’t show who threw the first punch.

that’s of no public consequence?  we all have lessons to learn from the naia thrilla and the lack of working CCTVs, as well as from all the talk it has generated especially about media, mainstream and new, and appropriate public behavior in a world where everyone has a celfone with camera and can publish on the worldwideweb in a flash.

and, hey, if teodoro is correct that most of us don’t really care who threw the first punch, then media’s job is to make people CARE to know: we should WANT to know who’s telling the truth and who’s lying.

already, media people have passed judgment on claudine based only on tulfo’s story, and tulfo’s after-thoughts, and the viral youtube video.  basta, tulfo, their media colleague, is the aggrieved party, and the basagulero moviestar couple and friends are guilty of assaulting, ganging up, on a lone senior citizen who was only doing his job.   even inquirer columnist rina jimenez-david was quick to defend him: tulfo daw has a soft spot for the underdog, whereas claudine… and she dredged up past chismis about the actress as though to say, well, what can we expect.  the unspoken is, next to tulfo the gutsy reporter, claudine is just a movie actress with a spoiled-brat iskandalosa reputation.

naturally, tulfo is milking the media sympathy for all it’s worth, more confidently and vehemently insisting now that he did NOT throw the first punch, he had no reason to want to hurt the couple: wala akong dahilan na sipain o sumipa dahil, unang-una, hindi ko sila kakilala.  i suppose he has been advised: deny and deny until you die, ‘wag aamin — the conventional macho advice to pinoys caught with their pants down.

but there’s this anonymous account from an alleged eyewitness who, it would seem, was closely watching the sequence of events from start to finish.  thanks to  interaksyon.com:

A woman who claims to have witnessed the Sunday airport brawl involving columnist Ramon ‘Mon’ Tulfo and celebrity-couple Raymart Santiago and Claudine Barretto is corroborating the claims of the actors that Tulfo had kicked Barretto in the moments just prior to the melee.

The woman, who had also arrived at the airport’s Terminal 3 within the same hour as Tulfo and Santiago and Barretto, said she was within 20 meters and “hearing distance” of the three personalities last Sunday when the fight – captured and made infamous by a video posted on YouTube – erupted. By the woman’s estimate, up to 100 other people – airport workers as well as mostly passengers from various flights standing around baggage carousels – also witnessed the incident.

“We saw this woman ranting at these personnel over what I presumed was lost baggage,” the alleged witness going by the pseudonym “Anna” told InterAksyon.com over a phone interview. “But what really made me turn and take notice was when she started addressing this man in a photographer’s jacket.”

Anna says she did not recognize Barretto, her husband, Raymart, nor Tulfo, and did not realize who they were until she got home and some hours later saw news reports and the YouTube video of what transpired next.

“The woman started shouting, ‘Abusado yan!’ and ‘Are you taking photographs of us?'”

She said she saw “the man in the gray shirt” – apparently referring to Santiago – approach “the man in the photographer’s jacket” – Tulfo – asking, “Ano ‘yan? Ano ‘yan?”

Tulfo, she said, started making “fast” movements, “not really punches the way a boxer would do, but more like kung fu moves.” He jabbed and “pushed with a kick” – a hand and a foot moving forward simultaneously – apparently trying to create space and ward off the approaching Santiago.

Tulfo has acknowledged shoving Santiago, saying the actor was trying to confiscate his cellphone.

“Sinapak niya,” Anna said, though she could not say exactly where Santiago was hit.

Claudine then started approaching as well, Anna said. Tulfo again moved with his arms and legs, while Claudine was shouting, “What are you doing?” the witness said.

“Tumili si Claudine, and at this point, security was rushing,” Anna said. She then noticed how Tulfo hid his phone in a breast pocket, and, with empty hands waving the air, “mocked” Claudine.

“Wala, wala akong cellphone,” Anna quoted Tulfo.  [emphasis mine]

At this point, Anna said, “we had thought that the whole thing was about this dirty old tourist who was taking pictures of this lady. And so we were actually trying to support her.” She admits she wasn’t aware of Tulfo’s own claimed context behind Sunday’s confrontation. The Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist, radio commentator and TV5 talent says he was taking pictures to document Barretto’s behaviour towards the Cebu Pacific ground crew, which he suggested had gone from being rude to being abusive.

In any case, Anna said, they could only make out how Tulfo had hidden his phone and was denying he even had one on his person.

“Nasa bulsa ang cellphone! Nasa bulsa ang cellphone!” Anna said.

Santiago and Barretto supposedly asked aloud if there were any policemen or security personnel who could compel Tulfo to give up his cellphone.

Anna quotes Barretto as saying, “Hanapin niyo ang cellphone. Pakita niyo sa akin.” Within arm’s length, supposedly, of Tulfo, she was egging on security personnel to get Tulfo’s phone, ostensibly to verify whether or not he had taken pictures of Barretto.

Then, Anna said, “We saw him assault Claudine.” She said Tulfo “pushed and kicked” again.

“Natamaan si Claudine. I can’t say where exactly, but sa may thigh area,” she said.

That, Anna said, is what caused Santiago and his companions to pounce on Tulfo. “The video that we saw and that everybody has seen, that was the end of the whole thing na.”

She insists that Tulfo’s account of the incident, as she’s seen in the news, “is not correct.”

sounds credible to me, because unbiased.  and it’s consistent with claudine’s and raymart’s stories.  if true, it would seem that tulfo was not quite innocent, he was ready to rumble — why else that “kung-fu” stance and those “fast” moves with his hands and feet — and start the rumble he did.  he was so palaban, for a senior citizen, which would have been quite in keeping with his brusque belligerent macho persona.  all to defend his right to take photos of claudine, sabay deny daw that he even had a celfone?  how honest was that.

that tulfo, according to his own account,  started out siding with claudine vs cebu pacific, and then ended up siding with the cebu pacific rep, naawa na daw kasi siya, only tells me that by then he knew it was claudine, and nagkick-in na ang paparazzi mode, at biglang si claudine na ang villain.  how opportunistic was that.

claudine had every right to be angry and to express her anger at cebu pacific — 9 out 11 bags offloaded without notice!  and cebu pacific representatives, as frontline for the company, should have known how to handle irate customers like her, and should know better than to take any of it personally.  suing claudine now for abusive language, whatever, is just another distraction, it seems to me, and i wonder if cebu pacific is behind it.  hala, bawal nang mag-complain, what a twist.

what if tulfo had been big enough to join forces with claudine vs the real villain, cebu pacific.  wouldn’t that have made a bigger better story?  claudine and tulfo taking on cebu pacific for its dismal service that has long been a public issue?  what a scoop that would have been.  instead, tulfo ended up being complicit with cebu pacific.

read cito beltran’s “Aviation crisis in the Philippines”:

Are spin-doctors or public relations specialists working double overtime, or are Filipino consumers easily distracted that we can no longer focus on the REAL problems?

Up until this week, the big consumer issue was about how budget airlines have failed to deliver on their promises to customers and the growing discontent or anger of consumers because of government’s inability to do anything about the problem.

All that have taken a back seat as members of media and opinion leaders are “suddenly” focused on the “Thrilla in NAIA” or the brawl involving columnist Mon Tulfo and the tag team of Raymart and Claudine Santiago. It is sickening how government officials are now redirecting media and public attention to the brawl at NAIA and the non-existent CCTV because at the end of the day the aviation authorities along with DOTC officials should be held responsible for the whole mess.

I can understand the momentary attraction of watching the protagonists in this made for TV celebrity brawl. Unfortunately there was no actual or good video on the brief scuffle so you have to wonder who has been stoking the interest on air, in print or on the web for the “Thrilla in NAIA” instead of abuses in the airline industry?

It’s ironic that Tulfo and the Santiagos, who are both unhappy with the business practice of a budget airline actually ended up slugging each other, presumably because of their frustration, providing the airline timely and awesome distraction that effectively takes away the bad publicity from the airline. In the US, lawyers would have looked at the big picture and initiated a combined civil suit against the airline instead of each other.

read “Claudine’s ‘taray’ is refreshing,” which drew this retort addressed to readers vehemently disagreeing with katrina in the comment thread:

Roy Quintoa: If you wanted Claudine or Raymart to act like children respecting their elders, then TULFO should have acted like a father respecting his children and talked to them with proper manners as well… I would rather see a MEDIA MAN who would show some concern in such situations like approaching them properly and offering some help and suggestions and doing efforts in resolving problems like that. 11 may 1:23 pm

meanwhile, luis teodoro has kind of changed his tune.  read “Hyping it” where he takes media to task for its “tayo-tayo” culture:

… although it’s been said before, it still bears repeating: some if not most press people dish out criticism with such enthusiasm you’d think they were perfect. But when the other shoe drops, they can’t take criticism, especially when it’s other members of the media and press community who’re doing it. In one more demonstration of the “tayo-tayo” culture, they demand that everyone should look out for everyone else in the community, and should hype what’s basically an encounter between people who’re simply too quick with their fists (and feet) into an issue of principle. And they use not only Twitter and Facebook, but also the pages of their newspapers and their networks’ airtime to do so — acts that, while ethically dubious, they apparently think they can commit with impunity.

and what about the lady broadcaster who said on her radio-TV show that what happened to claudine happens to everyone, why get so angry, accept it na lang.  made me wonder if cebu pacific and/or tulfo has been passing out envelopes or calling in favors.  then, again, maybe she sincerely thinks she’s right.  i don’t know na which is worse.

and the whole spin that it was so wa-class and ill-bred of claudine to lose her temper and then to throw in some punches, too, no matter how provoked? — the lady columnist has even brought up claudine’s pink halter top and shorts, as if that were indecent, too, hello — is just so telling of how messed up we are.

anger is good, people, and the situation called for it.  let’s not lose our capacity for anger because there is much to be angry about.  and never mind “class” or “breeding” if “class” or “breeding” means doing nothing, or not fighting back, in the face of oppression.

*no, we’re not related to raymart