Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - This week’s top trends offer a glimpse of the old and the new. We know that new things trend because they’re new, they’re fresh, and they’re exciting. But old things trend for a more fascinating reason: they’re old and familiar. Cycles are what hold the haphazard universe of Twitter together — things like yearly festivals, greeting card occasions, and Senate privilege speeches, which happen more than once a year and are infinitely insane. We can always coin new terms and talk about new things, but the old, the reliable, and the predictable will always be there, our permanent well for endless Twitter material.

Senator Bong Revilla

Also spell: “complete and utter waste of time.” Everyone with a TV set is familiar with the “I’d like to clear my name” privilege speech template by now: indignation coupled with an emotional declaration of innocence, a long wagging-the-dog rant against the accusers, capped off by a self-aggrandizing spiel on one’s clear conscience and dedication to public service. This is uninteresting, of course, and not to mention grossly ineffective. The number of people who’ve ever said, “Well, I guess he’s innocent, then” as a response to a defensive privilege speech in history is zero. This isn’t based on any research, but it’s definitely 100 percent accurate.

So what Senator Bong Revilla did on Tuesday was actually kind of genius. No one ever takes privilege speeches seriously anymore anyway — we don’t look forward to Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago’s outbursts for their veracity, we tune in for their entertainment value — so might as well make it as ridiculous and insane as possible. Bring out the Tonka toy trucks, the weird, non-sequitur surveillance pictures, the punch lines, the ailing father — everything that has nothing to do with facts. Bong Revilla’s performance this week was easily the best one he’s had in his career. He should do more comedies.

Viva Sto. Niño

 Cultural appropriation is a phrase that gained currency in pop culture last year, a year that was owned by Miley Cyrus and her “appropriation” of black culture in her music and aesthetic. It’s a topic that remains controversial in the US, one that always leads to issues of racism and white entitlement over and over again. But this is a case of cultural appropriation at its infancy — artists like Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke belong to a generation of white Americans weaned on hip-hop music and black culture, which became widespread and normative only a couple of decades ago. If one needed to look into a future where cultural appropriation is considered simply as “culture” — a pre-existing aspect of life as we know it — then look no further than this week’s highest-trending festival: the feast of the Santo Niño.

 As celebrated this week in the streets of Tondo and in Cebu during Sinulog Festival, the Feast of the Sto. Niño commemorates Miguel Lopez de Legaspi’s rediscovery of the original figure of the Infant Jesus, 44 years after Ferdinand Magellan gave it as a gift to Rajah Humabon and his wife Hara Amihan, completely unaware that converting locals into Christianity would get him killed just a few months later. It turns out the locals would embrace the Santo Niño in the years after Magellan’s death and before de Legazpi’s arrival, integrating the image in their totally pagan “Sinulog” dance, which has been going on for generations.

 So, there you have it folks, cultural appropriation occurring silently, without the inherent noise of social media, until it becomes the status quo five centuries later, where it rises above the noise of social media and trends. It’s now our party — we can do what we want. And we can’t stop. And we won’t stop.

#IAmPogay

In Pinoy TV land, gay men have always been portrayed as grotesque and ridiculous, forever rendered as convenient punch lines for the humorless. Coming off its success with “That’s My Tomboy,” noontime show Showtime is bucking another trend with “I Am Pogay” — a contest segment featuring handsome gay men who do not talk or act like shrieking, cross-dressing caricatures. They are still the butt of the joke, except now it’s a long-standing running joke that Pinoy TV is finally in on — that all the handsome good men are either married or gay.

For now, we’ll reserve the terms “revolutionary” and “groundbreaking” for things that actually bring about sweeping change. For all its relative progressiveness, “I Am Pogay” is still very much limited by its freak show undertones — it is, after all, still a “pageant,” and not exactly an insightful piece of investigative reportage or even a big studio movie about gay men who look like regular dudes and who aren’t deemed hilarious by default. Still, the fact that Philippine television has finally been ushered into the 21st century by a populist noontime show cannot be discounted. Baby steps aren’t bad as long as the baby eventually grows up.

Spell ‘sayang’

There are many ways to spell “sayang” on Twitter, the most common being the “I Am Pogay”-inspired “guwapong bakla at magandang tomboy” and “T-A-Y-O.” The phrase does not just open up a sea of possibilities in expressing regret, it also opens up the potential for “spell” to be the new “What is ___,” the popular Twitter tic inspired by the game show Jeopardy. The trending topic has already produced the offshoot “Spell Masakit,” which seems to indicate that this fad is fast becoming the province of the bitter. But social media is nothing if not a compendium of mob rule — there will be no end to the ways in which we can spell anything in our lives from now on, and it won’t be surprising if it turns from bitter to completely inane in a matter of days. Through Twitter, we have somehow found a way to describe things aside from the standard subject-verb-adjective, because there are just too many tweets, and grammatically correct sentences are just too boring now. Twitter always aims for cute, until it trends, after which it ceases to become cute. Spell “so last week.”