It’s hardly surprising that everybody seems to want a minute of Sen. Noynoy Aquino’s time, or even to bend his ear, before we all start calling him Mr. President, which can’t come too soon. His predecessor didn’t seem too interested in listening to suggestions from people she didn’t know or didn’t like, and indeed her administration will long be remembered for that word, impunity, which she practiced with such, well, impunity.
All around town, I’m sure that memos are being written for the presumptive President-elect’s consideration. Gang Badoy’s “Dear Noynoy” page generated such a huge wave of responses that she’s had to move it from Facebook to its own website. Heftier efforts are underway in academia and civil society to draft all sorts of agenda for the incoming Chief Executive, the handler of whose inbox — online and snail mail — I can only sympathize with. Many of those notes and treatises will be in the nature of bills due and payable — not in the sense of political debts, although there will inevitably be a few of those to deal with, but rather yawning needs and shortcomings left unattended by the government, which Noynoy will now have to meet.
So I don’t suppose it’s going to hurt much more if I add my one small voice to that roaring chorus, following in the wake of Krip Yuson and F. Sionil Jose, among other writers. Mine’s really a simple prescription, or plea if you will, although like all things seemingly simple, the devil will be in the details, which more competent authority can flesh out in the future. Let me now address this to you, Senator Noynoy, in the vague if not vain hope that this message will get through.
First, some disclosures and disclaimers. I didn’t vote for you — my vote went to the Man of La Mancha, Dick Gordon, whom I truly believed was best qualified for the Presidency. I wrote Dick’s yet-unpublished biography, so I can be accused of believing my own prepaid prose, but that’s beside the point — or maybe not. I knew Dick better than I knew you; I’ve written speeches for many of your colleagues in the Senate, as well as a few for your mother, an honor that I cherish. But I don’t think we’ve ever met, so I didn’t really know you, and I suppose you can say the same even for many of those who voted for you. They did so on what could be the best reason — next to informed judgment — for voting for anyone: sheer hope and blind faith.
But you already know that, so I’ll go straight to my point, which has to do with an arts and culture policy that your administration will and should inevitably come around to formulating. I say “inevitably” because I know that arts and culture won’t be the first thing that will come to your mind, for understandable reasons. You’ll want to whip the government back into shape, create jobs, promote new business, strengthen education, boost food production, straighten out the judiciary and military, and try to stamp out corruption like you promised. These are all worthy priorities, and six years might not even be enough to move far forward on all of them.
But please try, one of these days, to devote an hour or two of your precious time to thinking about arts and culture, and what they can do four our country and people. You should, if only because, among your recent predecessors, no one really did — with the ironic exception of Mrs. Imelda Marcos. Granted, she wasn’t the President; she nearly was. Granted, her idea of culture was often appallingly elitist; but she did create institutions like the Cultural Center of the Philippines which now, for better or for worse, help shape the way we think and feel about ourselves, in our imaginations.
And that’s why arts and culture are important, and why they’re more than entertainment and tourism — as significant as these components may be to arts and culture. Culture defines us as a national community with shared values and visions, albeit with diverse ideas and expressions; the arts embody those ideas and enable those expressions. Culture is really more descriptive than prescriptive — it’s who and what we are at this very moment — but it can also be molded, through enlightened policy, into a vision of who and what we can become. What exactly does it mean to be a Filipino, and what are our national goals as Filipinos?
These are questions that not only your economic, political, military, or spiritual advisers should be dealing with. Believe it or not, they’re the questions to which our painters, musicians, and writers can provide the subtlest but also the strongest answers. If you want us to act like a nation of Filipinos, you’re going to have to make us think and feel like Filipinos — and again, that’s what you have artists and art educators for, beyond government poobahs prescribing how the National Anthem should be sung or what movies we should watch and shouldn’t.
And let’s not forget that the arts also belong to what we can call our creative industries — art-related activities from publishing and show business to graphic design and animation — that generate and contribute huge sums of money to the economy.
So what’s a new President to do, or at least to ponder? I’ll make two suggestions:
1. Give the arts and culture sector its proper prominence in government and streamline cultural administration by creating a Department of Culture. This won’t necessarily mean creating yet another lumbering bureaucracy with ill-defined functions, but will pull together — for better management and a firmer sense of purpose and direction — existing agencies such as the CCP and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and even possibly such bodies as the National Library, the National Historical Institute, the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa, the National Book Development Board, and (with apologies to my pal Krip) the MTRCB.
2. Whatever you do, Noynoy, please leave cultural and arts policy to the artists, and cultural administration to professional arts managers and administrators. Leave the politicians, socialites, retired generals and judges, hangers-on, and Presidential manicurists out the door. From your end, depoliticize cultural policy and administration. Of course, you can never really take politics out of arts and culture — our artists will keep arguing among themselves over how best to represent this and that — but it’s a debate they should be allowed to conduct as peers, and with their own constituencies.
Your predecessor made a mockery of the National Artist selection process — a relatively minor issue affecting just a few people, but highly indicative of the way arts and culture have been treated by our political leaders with callous disregard. Trust Filipino artists with their own judgments, and they will help restore our sense of ourselves, and help define our investment in a shared future.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.