BANANACUE
REPUBLIC
Vol II, No. 05
Feb 2, 2005

 
 
 social criticism by
 Jojo Soria de Veyra

Table of
Contents


ARCHIVE:
2004
2005



Literary website:
Warphoto 

Charcoal Center of the Philippines

TACLOBAN HAS become a barbecue town. After six, the city is transformed into a large barbecue backyard on a Sunday. This happens every-friggin’-day. There are four sorts of barbecues, the pork, the pork blood, the chicken, and the chicken entrails, all of which ideally goes with puso, which is steamed rice inside a ball of palm leaves. The rice ball is the size and shape of a human heart, which somewhat provides the statement that rice is the heart of a meal, the master to which provincial poultry and piggery bow.

But the culture behind this transformation is one of contentment. It is a contentment that combines both luxury (on an island where fish is still cheaper) and the aesthetics of poverty (no fancy tables or coloration or lighting beyond the provincially dirty). And the reason why even the upper middle class patronizes this nocturnal environment is because it, too, is as simple as everybody else (to everybody else’s sorry state). Simplicity, contentment. Which in a sense is positive, proudly southern.

The bane to the soul in this kind of a meal, however, is not so much from where it comes from as from what it does. And, plainly, what it does is turn this nightly transformation into a celebration of stagnation. There’s your picture of a proud nation.

For one, this barbecue culture flourished from the business cowardice of conformity. Mana Nena put up a banana-cue stall, we can perhaps to put up our own. Mano Nino put up a barbecue shop, we can perhaps to follow.

Only a culture from without can transform this nightly Tacloban pseudo-transformation from one of stagnation into one of innovation. Only a culture from without can start to offer slightly higher-end barbecues with cumin, barbecues with cinnamon, or even local spices and herbs inspired barbecues, that may perhaps go with guava juice instead of the usual Coke. No, not something from within can inspire these transformations into one of constant innovation and further transformations. Not something from the conventions of provincial governance can inspire a renaissance.

Tacloban can only be transformed into a tourist-attracting phenomenon by a mayoral or gubernatorial immersion (vicariously perhaps via cable TV) in Bangkok nightlife and cuisine, otherwise through the whispers of somebody from Marikina or Olongapo. No Leyte tradition of interpreting governance as simple waste management can bring itself into new visions of governance as improvements infusion.

IMPROVEMENT is not a simple concept. Improvement cannot be represented by a family park beside the bay that can’t be watched by culture guards who’d keep Leyte kids (with Leyte parents) from climbing up the slide of slides instead of the ladder, slippers on. A new road that leads to a new astrodome where perhaps good ol’ basketball games can be held, or good ol’ singing contests, also cannot represent Improvement. An astrodome won’t improve a city’s people’s life by a centavo! That would be by the same old Imelda view of improvement as the building of cultural centers to guarantee the flourishing of a finally damaged culture outside of the edifices.

If government is by the people and for the people, then governance with improvements must be judged by the improvements in the lives of the people it governs. If not financially, then perhaps culturally or what-not. Again, no mayor or governor can claim to have provided a city or province with improvements if these tokens have not improved the lives of the place’s people in any way. The corrupt tradition of hiring expensive contractors to build schools without teachers or basketball courts without champions cannot claim to have made winners, or a difference in our lives other than a dent in our hopes.

IMPROVEMENT MUST be in the people. And one of the things that Olongapo and Marikina can teach us is that radical improvements can happen in a culture that welcomes influences from without. A culture, perchance, that might welcome tourists. A political culture too that doesn’t start with a desire to put up a mere tourist industry, but instead with a desire to establish a culture which might in the long run inevitably create a tourist industry.

Without this awareness, no political culture can be conscious of what tourism will require (and what this requirement can in turn do).

Often tourism is viewed as of decadent images of luxury and contentment. But I can promise you that behind the scenes are images of innovation, of innovation, and lastly of innovation. Or, at least, creativity. Creativity which must first dwell on the brains of governors and mayors and their consultants before they even think of gathering so many creative people and confronting them with the surprise question, “anybody here has an idea on how we can come up with a tourist industry boom hereabouts?”

In cultures are creativities that may be enhanced. In business are creativities that are necessary for survival in competitive environments. A tourist industry requires both a culture with enhanced creativity and business acumen or awareness. To build one, damaged cultures must be reawakened. Business alertness must be driven out of the anti-consumer cartel-reliant doldrums of provincial contentment.

What good ideas for tourism do to a people is provide them with jobs, good roads, unceasing supply of electricity and clean water, strict implementation of rules and laws, prompt incarceration of social warts, discipline among jeepney and tricycle drivers, the banishment of trash and dogs from our streets, and so on and so forth. And what all that brings along and likewise manifests is a transformed, reinvigorated culture altered beyond its contented stagnation within barbecue nights.

Good ideas for tourism spend a city’s coffers’ peso-contents on money-making investments that would put more peso-contents back in instead of merely subtract. That also includes investing in peoples’ livelihoods that will make a banker and partner of the city or provincial government instead of a mere spender of sales and consumer taxes.

TACLOBAN HAS become a barbecue town. After six, the city – most of whose spenders work for government agencies or pharmaceutical companies – sits down to eat barbecue and puso, and contentedly thinks this is the life.

The morning after, radios blare with the complaints of people. Their fists the size and shape of their untransformed hearts.

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Posted 01/19/05. Send comments to: bananacue_republic@yahoo.com

". . . one of the things that Olongapo and Marikina can teach us is that radical improvements can happen in a culture that welcomes influences from without."