Presidentiables on culture

Gloria Arroyo asks us to judge her by her performance as president of the country. Let us look at what she has for Philippine culture. Many artists have already pointed out that she is big on words but short on action. In fact, that is a charitable way of putting it: Gloria Arroyo does exactly the opposite of what she says. As far as culture is concerned, she is a cultural schizophrenic.

Let us take just one example. On Sept. 29, 2003, she gave a speech at a general conference of UNESCO in Paris. Among other things, she said these two sentences: "We take this opportunity to urge this conference to approve the draft UNESCO convention for the safeguarding of the intangible cultural heritage" and "I have adopted a policy of institutional accommodation of our various cultural traditions."

Just three months earlier, on June 28, 2003, she approved the construction of a bridge in Cagayan de Oro City, described by an artist who lived with the Hanunuo Mangyan tribe as "a bridge built without an Archaeological Impact Assessment (AIA), without consulting any cultural workers, and despite protests from the Heritage Conservation Advocates (HCA). This bridge and the road leading to it have destroyed a huge portion of the Huluga Open Site, our legally-protected ancestral home." (For particulars, you can visit www.heritage.sni.ph/huluga/views/elizaga_arroyo_speech.htm.)

How can anyone believe a candidate who says one thing but does the opposite? She says she wants to protect our cultural heritage but does something that has actually destroyed a significant portion of that heritage. This is just one example of how Gloria Arroyo does things. Her left hand has no idea what her right hand is doing. Or worse, maybe it does.

We would expect Fernando Poe Jr., being a film artist, to do better when it comes to crafting a platform about culture, but if we are to gauge by the vacuous statements of the group Artista para kay FPJ Movement, we will be sorely disappointed.

Take this pronouncement from Poe, as interpreted by that group: "There has been a decrease in the teaching of liberal arts in most schools and universities. We are concerned that we are being groomed not to think out-of-the-box; that the current education curriculum grooms us to be slaves and not masters."

What curriculum are they talking about? In the General Education Curriculum of CHED, 36 out of 63 required units (57 percent) are devoted exclusively to the humanities. If we include the social sciences as part of liberal arts (which is the way many schools look at the two different fields), then 45 out of 63 required units (71 percent) are in liberal arts. There is no way you can look at those figures as negative. Poe and his showbiz cohorts are living in a world of fantasy and illusion, not in the real world.

Eddie Villanueva, in his speech at the recent Arts Congress or Kilos Kultura para sa Kinabukasan, also revealed his ignorance about the real world. He said that the arts will be "a tool for national development, a pangunahing army for national transformation, and there will be outreach projects all the way to the barangay." The first two parts of that sentence are motherhood statements and deserve only our disdain, but the third part needs to be deconstructed.

Art does not come from the center or from the top and then filters down to the great unwashed. Art is part and parcel of everyday life, created by people in barangays, and then merely institutionalized by professional artists. Just look at your own home (and I am talking here to you, dear reader, whether you are a professional artist or not). You chose the color of paint on your walls, you put up the posters or photographs or whatever you have on your walls, you put those things — whatever they are — on your desk or table, you chose the clothes you are now wearing, you eat certain types of food but not all, you talk in a certain way to those around you. All of these things constitute art in its very essence (color as in painting, form as in sculpture, costume design as in theater, taste and prose as in literature). All that a professional artist does is to take the things that you and I do every minute of our lives and to put them in a form that can be preserved or watched or written about. A candidate who thinks that art has to be the subject of outreach projects rather than of research clearly does not deserve the vote of the artistic — and that is all of us.

I have been unable to find any statement of Panfilo Lacson directly addressing arts and culture, but I have to admit that his bill making ROTC optional opens the door to college students doing cultural work as part of the curriculum. Lacson’s Senate Bill 1358, now a law, states that, in lieu of ROTC, students may undergo training in "such other skills designed to inculcate in our youth a high sense of national discipline and community involvement." An imaginative college or university can read this provision to mean that students can paint meaningful murals on neighborhood walls, do landscaping in upscale neighborhoods, or conduct story-telling or poetry-reading sessions in disadvantaged communities. That would be very good for culture. Here, of course, I am giving Lacson the benefit of the doubt, because at least, he has not opened his mouth to reveal his ignorance, the way Poe invariably does, nor has he lied about what he has done, the way Arroyo so often does.

As for Raul Roco, who was a literature major before he became a lawyer and prides himself on being able to recite T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from memory, we can only expect good things for culture and the arts. He has himself written poems and produced films, and constantly quotes lines written by artists, both Filipino and foreign. He is clearly the most literate of our presidentiables. For Filipino artists, at least, who claim to command two million votes, the choice is fairly clear.

LANGUAGE MATTERS: Not to be outdone by other countries that distort the English language, the Philippines has come up with its own fractured English signs. Here are some of them, as circulated on the Web.

In a restaurant in Cebu: "Please help our comfort room clean." In a Baguio grocery store: "Fresh frozen chicken sold here." In a restaurant in Baguio: "Wanted: Boy Waitress." In a store in Cubao: "None ID nothing entry." On some EDSA buses (admittedly made abroad): "Before pay, tell where get the on before get the off." On a vacant lot in Makati: "Don’t parking."

CHILLING QUOTATION: "I only care about whether we can eat. It doesn’t matter who’s in power. We’ve never gotten anything from anyone in power." That quotation comes from someone interviewed by the New York Times in Haiti. Presidentiables, believe me when I say that the same sentence could have come from a lot of people in the Philippines. Look at Haiti and learn your lesson now, before you get elected!