My ID project

While — like many Pinoys — I might plead guilty to disliking, mistrusting, and resisting 90 percent of whatever the incumbent poobahs by the Pasig instruct me to do, there’s the 10 percent of the authoritarian mind that strikes a responsive chord in me. It’s a terrifying thought — this little fascist ventricle in an otherwise libertarian heart — but I’ve long suspected that many artists are so inclined; we, after all, like to think that we’re essentially engaged in imposing order upon chaos.

Or maybe that’s just my way of explaining why, disregarding the dismay of my friends on the Left, I’ve pronounced myself tentatively in favor of a national ID, or any kind of document that might replace (and only if it will replace) the four or five other pieces of identification I keep in my wallet, pretending to be real money. Or — wait a minute — maybe I should hold on to those four or five IDs, and add a couple more, given what we use IDs for in this country.

Let me explain. You and I know what IDs are for — they’re supposed to tell somebody who you are, or to prove that you are who you say you are. IDs work like magic wands — you wave them, and they open doors. Experience teaches us that some IDs open bigger doors than others: IDs with that “official” look, or — the better to drive the point home — that have the word “OFFICIAL” stamped on them; IDs with the word “Palace” or “President” somewhere, preferably in at least 20 points Arial bold (no, make that Gothic, looks more official); IDs with the bearer in a suit or a military uniform; IDs with a signature that looks like a roll of barbed wire; and, let’s not forget, IDs with the word PRESS or MEDIA screaming above the bearer’s mug shot, and it practically doesn’t matter if it was issued by The New York Times or the Barangay Bilibid Viejo Newsletter.

But woe unto you if you leave your ID at home, or lose it. In a flash, you become a virtual non-entity, crippled by your shameful inability to prove your right to exist and to be taken seriously. Every failure or refusal by some officious toad to recognize you becomes a rude reminder of your abject non-celebrity status, of the painfully visible distance between you and Piolo Pascual.

Thus do our relationships with our IDs — testy and tenuous to begin with, because I’ve yet to see an ID that truly flattered its owner — become vexatiously complicated. We like IDs when they get us into special places that people without IDs have to plaster their noses against a window to get a peek at. We like IDs when they protect our precious identities, such as over the counter at the bank. But we hate them when they become more us than us, when they turn into the tail that wags the dog. (Just ask any student trying to get into his own school without his ID.)

My ID anxieties mount whenever I drive into a subdivision — you know, the kind of gated, patrician enclave which might as well issue its own visas, especially to plebeians driving cars with anything less than a 2,000-cc. engine and plates that begin with an N or a P. I’m convinced that, just going by these indicators, private security guards are trained to identify you as a suspect from 30 meters away, and by the time you’ve driven up to them and rolled down your window, they’ve formed an attitude — one that will require you to present incontrovertible proof of your good moral character and benign intentions.

For some reason, the presentation of a driver’s license seems to satisfy these stringent requirements — as if no license-toting perp ever robbed a house; but maybe again that’s why security guards insist that you leave your driver’s license with them, because you can’t possibly do anything naughty in their neighborhood if you have to drive back to the guardhouse to recover your laminated mug.

Now, I hate doing that — leaving my license — not because I’m up to no good, but because I firmly believe it’s illegal for any non-cop to take my license for whatever reason, and also because I ‘m too lazy to unbuckle my seatbelt so I can pull out my wallet and the license in it (and then do that all over again in reverse when I take my license back).

So I’ve been offering these subdivision guards a number of hopefully acceptable alternatives, short of a passport: my university ID; my press card; my social security card; my US Library of Congress souvenir reader’s card. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The last thing you want to do is to argue constitutional rights with a sleepy guy holding a shotgun.

And you know the truly aggravating part of this deal. How many IDs have you left in parts unknown? How many IDs do you need to last a year of entering subdivisions, buildings, and offices which all require you to leave that little token of you behind, never to be seen again?

Thankfully, these problems are over — I think. Thanks to a discovery I made online, as I was nosing around the Flickr site (www.flickr.com), you can now produce as many IDs as you want, and introduce yourself as the Sultan of Samarkand or the CEO of IOU International Corp. (I won’t be held responsible for anything expressly or vaguely illegal that you do).

BigHugeLabs (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/badge.php) has a nifty program called Badge Maker that will help you “Make your own ID card, press pass, name tag, unofficial Flickr badge, or any other kind of identification. Print it out, laminate it, wear it with pride! Make any kind of identification easily in just a few seconds!” All you need is an Internet connection, a digital picture, a printer — and, of course, the freeware Badge Maker, which walks you through the simple process.

First, upload a picture file. (Hmm. Let’s find a dorky picture of me in a suit.) Then, a style (photo badge, portrait — long IDs that hang from lanyards seem to more impressive than wimpy ones that fit in a purse).

Next, header text. Now this is where you can put something like PRESS, even if all you do is smooth creases out of pants. But I want to be both inventive and honest (a very difficult combination), so I choose to write RESIDENT — a big word that sounds like PRESIDENT, and which is absolutely true, as you’ll surely see.

For the footer text — the bar that’ll run across the bottom edge of the ID — the template just says “OFFICIAL” (heck, the word has to appear somewhere), but I choose to say, “FOR OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION PURPOSES ONLY,” because it looks busy and, well, even more official.

Next on the checklist is an option that tickles me: “Include an official-looking barcode?” Heck, yes! Everyone loves a barcode, because nobody knows what it’s saying — which means that it was surely made by a superior intelligence who keeps secret tabs of everything and everyone, including supercilious security guards.

And then you put your name, and the text to go with it. I choose to say: “This certifies that JOSE Y. DALISAY JR. is an official resident of XXX Juan Luna Street, Barangay YYY, Quezon City.” And, for good measure, I add, “and is entitled to all the rights and privileges appurtenant thereto,” which again is absolutely true, except that there’s no more space to explain those privileges, which include playing with the house cats Chippy and Sophie, and staging poker marathons in the gazebo.

Then there are spaces to fill out for “Member since” (let’s put the date when we moved in, 31/10/03); “Expires” (that should be sometime in 2019, when I turn 65 and retire, so let’s put 30/06/19, the arbitrary date coming from the fact that all my credit cards seem to expire on June 30, so let’s just go ahead and copy that); and birthdate (15/01/54).

And finally you click on that big blue button that says “Create>>” and voila! — you have your own “official” ID badge, ready for lamination (after scrawling a signature somewhere) and presentation to every blue guard in the archipelago. Use it, lose it, reprint it, and if it doesn’t work, heck, enhance this and that element and make another one.

Come to think of it, who needs a national ID when you have Badge Maker?

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From our friends at the University of Sto. Tomas comes this announcement that the UST Graduate School, in cooperation with the UST Center for Intercultural Studies and the UST Department of Languages, Literature and Philosophy and with assistance from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, is holding a national conference titled “Inter/Sections: Crossroads and Crosscurrents of Literatures and Cultures” tomorrow until Jan. 31 at the UST Thomas Aquinas Research Complex.

I was scheduled to join a panel for this conference, but I had to excuse myself because I’m going to be in Singapore this week, for a British Council seminar on “Animating Literature.” (Boy, do we talk a lot about literature!) I’ll be traveling with fellow UP professor and performance poet Vim Nadera and publisher Karina Bolasco, and I hope to run into some writer-friends, both Pinoy and Singaporean, sometime these next few days. I haven’t had time to touch base with these guys, but just in case they come across this piece, we’ll be staying at the Orchard Parade Hotel on Tanglin Road, wherever that is.

And finally, let me share the news that the journals of the University of the Philippines Diliman can now be accessed online through the UP Diliman Journals Online (UPDJO), a Web portal designed to increase the visibility of the journals in the national and international community. The portal — which can be found at http://journals.upd.edu.ph — hosts several Diliman journals including Science Diliman, Humanities Diliman, Social Science Diliman, Kasarinlan, Plaridel, Review of Women’s Studies, and the Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature.

The UPDJO is now hooked up to Google Scholar, the most powerful search engine that scholars today can avail themselves of.  Some articles of UPDJO are also featured at ResearchSEA, a website dedicated to research in Southeast Asia. Better accessibility means citations and more impact for these journals on the international academic community. Check it out!

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.