There is a GIF cartoon I recently saw on the internet of PNP Chief Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana Jr feverishly licking a phallic bullet until it climaxes. Racy and graphic as it is, it captures the overall fixation of the Duterte administration upon guns and arms, and the unabashed resorting to militaristic solutions to current social problems: Bato and the so-called “War on Drugs” and Lorenzana with the declaration and upholding of Martial Law.
Why has the President’s own top economic officials written to him to veto the granting of universal free clean air? In a similar vein, why have economists been against the granting of free tertiary education as they were adamantly so (and still are) in a previous epoch? Are economists such an insensitive lot who care more about saving taxpayer money than helping others to breathe?
So-called Dutertards are often accused of drinking the Kool-Aid, the idiomatic expression used to mean the absolute internalization of a doctrine or complete fixation upon something or someone to the point that no possible flaw or fallibility can be attributed to it.
That logic woefully remains with us, with or without Martial Law. It’s what allows the drug wars to continue, it’s what places the blame on Kidapawan farmers for getting themselves shot. It’s what derides activists as troublemakers and rallies as provocations.
The venue that Sense8 provided for discussion of these liberal-democratic themes is needed, and indeed is probably the apparent take-away for many of its viewers. But there is another important thematic direction this series opens that offers a more radical imagining of present society beyond the limits of typical liberal-democratic discourse.
I felt none of that. I felt… uncomfortable. Underneath the poetry, something was up.
To our dear Dabarkads, I believe that I may speak for many women everywhere when I say thank you for being mindful of our fragility, and for refraining to use uncouth words in our presence, especially in statements that refer directly to us.
It is not to take revenge, or to punish, or to try to recapture a sense of correctness, for divine violence need not be imbued with such meanings to be able to register the wretchedness of this world.
A few days ago I readily accepted an invitation to serve as host of the special Davao screening of the independent film “Tu Pug Imatuy”, or “A Right to Kill” by Mindanawon director Arbi Barbosa. An entry in famed director Brillante Mendoza’s Sinag Pilipinas Film Festival, the story follows a Manobo family ripped apart by the sudden entrance of military forces into their community.
It was supposed to be a routine medical mission, so much so that we didn’t think twice about saying farewell to some our colleagues and students from UP Mindanao who were scheduled to leave the site a day later than we were.
