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The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) recently issued a statement entitled: "Corruption: A Social and Moral Cancer"which, as you might expect from the title, is a denunciation of corruption in the government in light of recent studies showing that the Philippines has almost cracked the top 10 of the world's most corrupt countries, while remaining on top of our game, so to speak, in regards to poverty and hunger.
As a concerned Filipino Catholic, I read the statement - and then I remembered why I rarely read such statements. I thought about it, and rather than just comment here on the blog, I thought I'd attempt to engage my church's hierarchy in a bit of dialogue. Let's see if anything comes out of it.
I think I got my main issue about the statement off my chest, but here are a few minor points I'd still like to raise (though I didn't do so in the comment, since I didn't want to distract from my main point):
First, this bothers me. A lot:
Asked whether the statement is a call for the public to organize a move to oust President Arroyo, Lagdameo said it is up to the public to decide on what course of action they want to use.
“Kailangan ang taong bayan ay magsama-sama kung paano sila mag-response together dun sa sulat namin na sinabi naming communal discernment and communal action," he explained.
Now, I am a fan of nuanced responses and shades of gray, but there are some issues wherein you simply cannot take a position on the fence. If someone asks you, as an influential religious leader, whether or not something you yourself wrote means that you are asking people to "organize a move to oust" a sitting President, I don't think you should be allowed to wash your hands and basically say "bahala sila."
Second, why did they subtitle the piece "Quotes from Prophets of Hope"? The people they cited do, I think, qualify as performing a prophetic function, speaking truth to power and all that - but, er, none of the quotations used seemed particularly hopeful. I don't think I'd call a doctor who diagnosed me with cancer as a "prophet of hope."
Read an interesting excerpt of an article over at the PGS Blog (via Village Idiot Savant) and I thought I'd make a post out of my somewhat truncated comment at Kyu's.
While the gist of the excerpt was that most if not all of the books we've read that changed our lives were books we read when we were children, I think I might be strange in the sense that there have been several books I've read since coming of age (so to speak) that have changed the way I view life - or at least, have tinted the way I view it. That's probably because my reading habits expanded beyond genre fiction as I grew older, and a lot of non-fiction out there can really expand your horizons. Here are a few:
* The Canon by Natalie Angier
If science had been taught to me with this much verve and enthusiasm, wonder and playfulness, I might have been very tempted to walk down the path of a scientist rather than a lawyer. The book does a masterful job of allowing the reader to wrap his head around the beauty, interconnectedness and sheer scale of science. (It's genius that one of the first chapters discusses calibration and scale, so that the reader begins to have an idea of, for instance, just how small a gene really is.) When you realize that a good 90+% of any object we see is actually, well, emptiness, it's hard to look at anything in quite the same way again.
* What Jesus Meant by Gary Wills
Being Filipino and having basically reared by the Jesuits, I've been a part of the Catholic Church practically all my life. As I grew older though, that self-same Jesuit education that gave me my Catholic foundation early on, was the same education that allowed me to scrutinize, question, and eventually disagree with certain structures, teachings and traditions of my church. Mr. Wills was the first author I read who could articulate these discomforts, these cognitive dissonances if you will, and still remain a Catholic. I don't think I quite agree with certain consequences Mr. Wills reads into his interpretation of the Gospel, but he's certainly given me the theological grounding on which to source my own disagreements with the One, Holy and Apostolic.
* The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The death of a loved one is not something I bear thinking about - but reading this book was, for a newly wed like me, urgent and necessary. I don't think there is any more effective way to enable yourself to truly savor each moment you have with the one you love, than by allowing yourself to be be drowned in the memories and emotions, the grief and loneliness, of one for whom those moments will never come again.
This isn't to say that genre fiction hasn't exerted a pull on me as well, but usually it's a particular scene or even a particular line in the book that will color my viewpoint from then on. The most recent one I can recall takes place in "The Curse of Chalion" by Lois McMaster Bujold, when the protagonist is explaining divine grace using a metaphor of an upturned cup.
I have to admit though that, by sheer dint of having been read during my formative years, many of the early books which influenced me, had a profound influence, mainly in terms of giving me a certain outlook on ethics and faith. The early God-Tales books by Nil Guillemette allowed me to form a kinder, gentler relationship with God than one reinforced by the threat of eternal damnation (They are a series of short 'parable' type stories, quite a few of which take on elements of sci-fi/fantasy). The book that moved me the most however, was "A Plague of Angels" by Sherri S. Tepper:
Even as a child, I could not quite reconcile how an All-Loving, All-Powerful, All-Knowing God would need to make his Son a sacrifice (as I understood it then) in order to forgive the sins of men. While I can't say that this book had the answer to that question (and yes this is a genre book, not an outwardly religious one), the beautiful ending - and the questions asked therein - continues to this day to color what I understand by the term 'Sacrifice'. Plague of Angels remains to be the only book that ever made me weep - not cry mind you. Weep.
Hm... I'm sure I'm missing a few (a lot of the philosophical books I read in college, especially in Eddieboy Calasanz's class), but these are the ones that stand out the most at the moment. It's strange looking at that list now and seeing how the aspect of my life most often impacted by books was my relation to God and the church - but then, that's one aspect of life for which I found it hard to go to my traditional sources of guidance in my youth. (Jesuits may be amongst the most open-minded priests I know, but I somehow didn't feel that they could be entirely objective with me should I choose to discuss the logical fallacies I perceived in the concept of Hell. Same goes for my Mom.)
So... a retired PNP officer and his wife were prevented from leaving Moscow on October 11 because Russian airport authorities discovered he was about to carry out more than €10,000 currency limit - a small sum of €120,000, or about P7.7 million actually.
In defending the officer, Chief Superintendent Nicanor Bartolome stated that the money was merely a "contingency fund."
Three questions then:
1) Were they somehow unaware of Philippine and foreign laws requiring the declaration of such large sums of money?
2) Were they aware of the obscure modern conveniences called "credit cards" "ATM cards" and "banks"?
3) By contingency, do they mean the sudden inexplicable urge to, say, buy a house? It was a 3 day conference! With free meals.
Oh Norby... you say the most adorable things...
And by adorable, I mean absolutely-deplorable.
For once, as tasteless and ill-handled as it may have been, the administration has the law on their side on this one. Of course, the law itself will say that even if you have the legal right to do something, this doesn't mean you can abuse that right without consequences...
Still, it comforts me to know that even when the administration does something that is, not strictly speaking illegal, I can always count on ol' Norby Gonzales to say something that will make me feel completely justified in hating their guts.
Enough with the Vilma-Pallin comparisons (and not just because these are eminently unfair to Vilma): it's the eerie Norby-Cheney similarities that should be making the news.
UPDATE: (9 Oct 08) Norby, Norby, Norby... if you simply must engage in inappropriate verbal abuse at least use the right word: the only way you could say the Hultmans are hypocrites would be if they facilitated the pardon of someone who murdered your child in perhaps the most unsympathetic and abrasive way possible, then told you to alternatively complain to Jesus or jump in a lake - and then had the gall to call you to task when you did the exact same thing.
Apparently there's been a bit of a discussion going on (the Philippine Genre Stories blog contains links and a roundup to the pertinent posts), and while I find the back and forth of ideas (or, as is more common in the internet, the near simultaneous barrage of ideas, coiling and colliding in a kind of babble-ferment) interesting, I am nowhere near to being enticed to contribute.
I've always had a bit of a problem with being critical and analytical when it comes to literature - it was probably why I didn't last long as a member of Heights, and why I find it difficult to criticize the substance (as opposed to the form - grammar, tense, etc.) of another fiction writer's works. I just can't really get beyond the story, and I know a lot of my taste in stories is subjective. It's sort of like my taste in food: I'm sure that shark's fin soup is a delicacy (moral-environmental issues aside of course) but I still prefer a can of vienna sausages, I have to admit. That doesn't mean I think a can of Libby's counts as high cuisine, but it also means I can't very well give an accurate answer if someone asked me if it was better or worse food than, say, duck l'orange. I can say whether or not I liked a story, but not whether it is or isn't better than another because of so-and-so literary mechanism or genre trope.
Promotion of Philippine Spec Fic as a genre is fine with me as long as it spurs more good stories - and I think any new emerging market for stories will do that (I still await with bated breath the Philippine baby zoo animal slash fiction genre). Could such a label be abused for marketing purposes? Sure it could - but the discerning reader won't be fooled, and the non-discerning reader will be happy either way, so I don't really see the harm.
