BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol II, No. 10
Mar 09, 2005

 
 
 social criticism by
 Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra III

CONTENTS


Literary website:
Warphoto 

 A Criticism of Criticism?

IT IS a rainy morning in Tacloban City, the pavements wet, the leaves greener, and there’s a light wind on the branches and the window curtains. On my CD player, light Latin guitar music. Wow. On such a fine start, where does one begin to write a social criticism piece? Is it even a welcome venture in such a laid-back, contented atmosphere after a breakfast of pansit and orange juice?

Well, we all deserve these tiny, little breaks from all the tension and conflicts and calumny and envy in the social world. And such breaks could be in the persona of one in luxurious aloneness or otherwise with a quiet friend flaunting a smile on the lips.

Ideally placed in a provincial setting, perhaps, as against the bustle of -- say -- a Cannes Film Festival-like joviality, these breaks must forego of the advantages and disadvantages of TV and the news radio. These breaks must even forget the shopping and to-do lists, even for just an hour, as the CD turns and turns to its last digital audio datum.

Forget these, yes. But how much more work, which one should forget often but often something one tends to unforget! Especially when one’s work requires one’s constant involvement in the social quirks and foibles and crimes of local and global humanity. No, one must leave work, even for just an hour -- as we said – to be enmeshed in the abovementioned comforts. Whether such comforts locate themselves by fate in a modest subdivision house or a farm hut among the dogs and geese or a lanai or slum window in the middle of the urban jungle, one must take advantage of these moments. No, this rare modicum of provinciality must be treasured, even sought, and independent as we said of the requisites of social awareness.

OF COURSE these don’t last long. As the CD nears the last song and the orange juice turns to acid to digest the MSG-laden pansit in the Darwinian tummy adapting to HMOs and mutant pesticide fruits, one perks up once again, ready to pounce on a pc whose expensive motherboard warranty life is ticking away with the threat of thrusting one into forced leave once again. One’s morning alertness, free of any caffeine shove, is up once more; ready now, as it were, to ride the electric guitar assonance of populating populations and their rulers’ country golf club politics.

So, where to begin? Must I, like a jackass, shy away now from the beautiful racket of birds on the jackfruit tree behind my window and turn on to ANC and Ces Drilon’s politician guest challenges and positive-negative people profiles? Must I read a Seamus Heaney poem to find that celebration of rustic living that would still inevitably allude to certain CNN-friendly issues of conflict and intolerance? Should I scream at the pina colada music still in a flurry with its bevy of string arpeggios to shut up now, replace it in the process with a (now-fearsome) modern Arabic lullaby or an American rock anthem on dysfunctions and careers? Must I challenge too my ears with some Gary Granada problem plays, uh, songs? Or must I watch a pirated Lav Diaz film on a “not branded” vcd player to awaken certain Marxist ideals into the present fray of thoughts, awaken thus my angry subconscious aware of the Imeldific histrionics of our debt-ridden history of corruption-fighting corrupt personas? Should I now forthwith dismiss my sofa pillows to buckle into another (possibly hopeless) lip-servicing venture of campaigning against governments and government leaders and legislators in our time who are servicing nothing but corporate and filial and “party” interests? Or should I exchange, even, this luxurious armchair politics for a more “proactive” decision of . . . joining the rebels? Must I succumb to frustration?

BEYOND the contentment of pansit and orange juice breakfasts, there will come the uneasy craving for lunch and the paeans to the slowly slipping buying power of our grocery money. And, beyond the frustration, there lies the realization that any call for changes that we make today will face once again nothing more than the usual apathy and deaf ear and thus will be impossibly fulfilled by anything other than a revolution, any revolution, and that to deny this fact would be mere cowardice disguising itself as rationality and civilized scruples. Beyond the talk shows and the EDSA congregations, the realization of a historical perspective that the same corruption-fighting corrupt will find themselves wallowing on the shoulders of the ignorant masses. The realization, too, that no mathematical genius will find us a way out of the fraudulent loans that Ferdinand Marcos and the later dispensations inserted into our collective credit list written on a balloon, a balloon carrying the corollary realization that only its bursting will create some change.  

". . . to appreciate life is to appreciate one’s duties and obligations to the attainment and sustenance of that life."