Now, I know I also used the word "pleasant" just last week to describe De Pere, Wisconsin, a small town of about 22,000 people (about 20,000 of whom must have been indoors watching football when we were there, because we never saw them). I don’t mean to turn that description into a cliché, but it happens to fit these two places I’ve been in recently.
De Pere’s pleasantness comes from old-fashioned manners and good-neighborliness; there wasn’t a person I met on the street who didn’t say hello or at least flash me a smile. Centreville, on the other hand, is almost single-mindedly safe and uneventful, a cluster of neat, new subdivisions serving as bedroom, kitchen, and playground to Washington’s working stiffs.
While De Pere can look back to centuries of trading between the Indians and the French voyageurs on the banks of the Fox River, Centreville had always been something of an aspirant or claimant to grander destinies. Its name derives from a wishful notion – expressed sometime in the 1700s – that it was going to sit smack in the path of a major road about to be built; as it happened, the road escaped the village.
While its neighbors such as Manassas and Chantilly proudly wear their scars as Civil War battlegrounds, Centreville served as little more than a supply depot for the Confederacy. This might explain the decidedly low profile it keeps today; it hosts a population of CIA spooks, blue-jeaned software engineers like my bayaw Eddie, Foggy Bottom drones, and enough Korean expats to warrant the erection of the most interesting place in town, an Asian grocery the size of a basketball gym. I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that Centreville is pleasant because it has to be, thereby making a virtue out of its irrepressible modesty.
Where was I? Oh, yes, we were going to see a movie. I’d wanted to see Apocalypto because I’d seen the trailer, which promised gory action (truly, nothing relaxes me as much as grievous injury inflicted on someone else; some people call that sick, the Greeks called it "catharsis"). And while I’d also seen all the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies – and let’s not forget Braveheart – I didn’t think all that much of or about Mel Gibson until I saw The Passion of the Christ, which inexplicably made me shed a tear, in that scene between the son and the mother. I’m not a churchgoing person (much to the dismay, I suppose, of my Catholic hosts in De Pere) so that was probably cinema, and not religion, at work.
I’d like to say that Mel Gibson might do better staying clear of hard liquor and anti-Jewish diatribes; on the other hand, that subliminal mess could be where his intensity as a director comes from. Gibson’s view of life is anything but pleasant, and his reconstruction of a Mayan civilization in the throes of decay has a few forced moments that challenge credulity (his protagonist’s energy would put the Eveready bunny to shame). But overall, I thought, it was a great action movie – a chase movie, to be more precise, where the hare outfoxes the hounds (did I just get my animal metaphors all mixed up?).
Take it as anything more than that and you run into the kind of flak Apocalypto has received from critics who obviously didn’t get treated to the movies and popcorn by their sisters and brothers-in-law. Here’s a few of those swipes, lovingly chronicled by rottentomatoes.com:
"It is Mel Gibson’s latest proof that as a director, his ambition is boundless and his energy nearly so, but his judgment is sorely lacking." – Amy Biancolli, Houston Chronicle
"The premise of Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey, the jungle savagery of a 1980s Italian cannibal film and the sadomasochistic martyr-complex obsessions that apparently churn like a ball of snakes inside Mel Gibson’s head are all here." – John Beifuss, Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
"Apocalypto wants us to believe there is an overpowering darkness in the land, while I can’t quite get past a suspicion of overpowering darkness in the filmmaker." – Michael Booth, Denver Post
"In this family-values action film, you could never accuse Gibson of being unconvincing where blood and sadism are concerned." – Jules Brenner, Cinema Signals
Well, you get the idea. I don’t know if and when Apocalypto will be showing in Manila – it wouldn’t be my first choice for a Christmas movie to take the kids to, in lieu of Enteng Kabisote – but if and when it does, ask yourself first what you’re having for dinner later, because those plans could change.
Whatever brought me then to think and talk about Apocalypto on Christmas Day? There’s a third point or vertex to this strange confluence of ideas besetting me this season, and it’s a take-off in a way on the quotation from the historian Will Durant that Apocalypto opens with: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."
I’ve been talking about what a pleasant place America has been for me, but even this Christmas, it’s been hard to escape reminders – some of them quite rude – of what a fractured society America remains, despite its mighty efforts to promote multiculturalism and racial harmony.
The first was when we were visiting the Library of Congress, and admiring, as most tourists do, its magnificent Reading Room from the balcony. A guide was giving a lecture to another group of tourists, and explaining all the figures and symbols that crowned the inner dome of that building, the great civilizations that had contributed to humankind’s progress: "The Greeks," the tour guide said, "gave us democracy…. Islam gave us mathematics – and terrorism," he added with a chuckle.
But never mind the lowly tour guide, who probably thought he was just being uncannily witty. There’s a US Congressman named Virgil Goode – a Republican from Virginia (yes, Virginia, there is a Congressman named Goode) – who issued a statement the other day reacting to the request of newly-elected Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota) to be sworn into office using the Quran. Ellison happens to be the first Muslim elected to the US Congress.
Rep. Goode, presumably a Christian (or some kind of Christian) had this to say about his new colleague’s plan: "When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Quran in any way.
"The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran.
"We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.
"I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped."
Merry Christmas to you, too, Congressman Goode. Why do I get the feeling that I saw you somewhere in that Gibson movie, brandishing an obsidian knife and thundering about how great and strong your civilization was and how weak your enemies were?
At that movie’s end, we trudged back home, but compared to the ancient horrors and labors we had witnessed onscreen, our little march was like a walk in the park – and indeed it was, as life in America seems, sometimes.
I must admit that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have traveled so much for so little, thanks largely to my work as a writer, but it takes an army of piggybanks to bring Beng and Demi with me anywhere farther than Mindoro or Bulacan. The important thing is, we’re all here, reasonably healthy and safe, for which I’m deeply thankful.
I’d like to take this opportunity as well to thank and to send our warmest Christmas greetings to some very special people whose friendship and support made our American visit a most productive and delightful one: John and Gertie Holder, Bob and Barb Boyer, Jiji and Susie Palines, Kokkeong Wong, Sarah Griffiths, Julie Hill, Jody and Marivi Blanco, Elaine and Eddie Sudeikis, Jana and Senen Ricasio, Connie and Jun Capati, Mike and Gloria Galang, Louie and Anna Galang, Joe and Rose Jaucian, Rudy Ledesma, Efren and Gie Salvaleon, Monroe and Karin Lerner, Maurice and Janet Kilwein-Guevara, Peter and Mary Blewett, Romy and Necie Aquino, Deling Weller, Pat Naylor, and Juanito Co.
May the best of the New Year come to you and to all my readers!