Torn and frayed in Manila

Yale University linked to international war criminals

Now that tabloid headline caught your eye didn’t it?

Both major perpetrators of the Iraq war now have ties to Yale. As is well known, the accursed Bush was a graduate of that once reputable academic establishment and now his fellow crusader Blair is to join the faculty.

Yale University is pleased to announce the appointment of Prime Minister Tony Blair as the Howland Distinguished Fellow for the next academic year.

Mr. Blair will lead a seminar at Yale and participate in a number of events around the campus. The course in which he will participate with Yale faculty will examine issues of faith and globalization. His efforts at Yale relate to the work of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation that he will be launching later this year.

You can’t help wondering what the Yale President Richard C. Levin had been smoking when he stated:

The appointment of Mr. Blair provides a tremendous opportunity for our students and our community. As the world continues to become increasingly inter-dependent, it is essential that we explore how religious values can be channeled toward reconciliation rather than polarization. Mr. Blair has demonstrated outstanding leadership in these areas and is especially qualified to bring his perspective to bear.

How can warmonger Blair possibly regarded as an agent of “reconciliation rather than polarization”? This appointment is just absurd and a disgrace to Yale. I hope the students show better sense than their teachers and give slimy Tony Blair the reception he deserves when he arrives.

Incidentally, it is good to see that Yale's tradition of nepotism (dimwit Bush's family connections were the only reason he got in) are alive and well. I don't need to tell you where Blair's son Euan goes to college do I?

See the next story for a link between the university’s founder Elihu Yale and the Philippines.

Thanks for the information Steve and apologies for dissing your alma mater ...

Historical background to corruption in the Philippines

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil reviews English trade in Manila and Mindanao (1672-1699) by Serafin Quiason in the Philippine Star.

In the second half of the 17th century in Manila, things were pretty much what they are today. Smuggling, illegal trade, secret agenda, false labels flourished. The rulers were the worst offenders and foreign governments and traders made the most of greed in high places. Identities remained hidden and religion kept both eyes on heaven. The poor were never considered except as sources of hard, often forced, labor, the taxes and servility they provided. … “The bureaucracy was so plagued with corruption,” writes Serafin Quiason, “that bribery was a deeply ingrained part of the game at the Manila Customs House. The Hindu aides or the English sea captains, under a carefully contrived cloak of secrecy, were granted an audience at the Palace or the Town Hall, bearing suitable gifts and fictitious names, conducting trading operation during many years.”

The book sheds light on another cultural trait that can still be seen today.

Another side to the corruption in 17th- century Manila and the damage it inflicted on our ancestors sheds light on our lives today. The illegality flourished because there was a deep and wide market for imported goods. What we now call “the colonial mentality” of the Filipino consumer. That weakness in the national character is described by Dr. Quiason thus: “The indios Filipinos developed a special preference for the imported fabrics of bright colors (hand-woven chintz, muslin, calico, gingham, taffeta, especially the wovenfolk who made them into exquisite saya and tapis worn by the affluent indio women. The importing craze whetted the appetite for diamonds and precious stones brought by Armenian merchants.” Now we know where and when the taste for flamboyant clothes and accessories displayed by our generals’ wives and cabinet-members’ mistresses comes from.

Finally, the book explains the link between the Philippines and a famous seat of learning in the USA.

An interesting sidebar to this glimpse of illegality in 17th-century Spanish Manila is the little-known participation of at least one great man of American academe. A Welshman born and raised in America, he left for London at the age of 21 where he worked in various offices, then spent the rest of his life at Fort St. George on the Indian coast, finally becoming its governor, but also one of the richest merchants trading in diamonds, slaves, money-lending, spices shipping and other contraband enterprises in Manila and Maguindanao. It was from the great fortune he made in the “Indies,” specially “Manilha” and the Spanish Moluccas” as this country was called then, that he made mammoth donations to an obscure college in “Conecticot” which became one of the pillars of the US Ivy League and bore his name: Elihu Yale. Many of the most successful and learned Filipinos have been Yale men, graduates of Yale University like Dr. Serafin Quiason.

Welcome Barack and Farewell Accursed Bush

Some of you will have already seen these photos on Frayed's Facebook page but they tell the story of a day of anticipation and togetherness much better than I ever could.

First, one from the Chinatown bus from New York to DC on 19 January, the last full day of the accursed Bush.

The contrast between that desolate scene and the clear blue skies of inauguration day couldn't have been sharper.

The organizers deserved both cheers and rotten tomatoes. Full marks to the Washington Metro, which brought hundreds of thousands of participants in comfortably and efficiently.

At the station the crowds were moved on firmly but politely ...

... to meet, utter chaos! None of the police seemed to have clue what to do, or where to direct people with or without tickets. Thousands of people, including us, were shoved down a walled in area on 3rd Street, subsequently dubbed the "Tunnel of Doom".

This Post story describes the chaos well:

...in command centers around Washington, security officials were starting to get alarming e-mails and calls. A giant bottleneck of people had developed near a security checkpoint on the Capitol's north side. Thousands more people were stuck in the Third Street tunnel, many of whom had been standing for hours with their tickets. A combination of official miscalculations and inadequate response contributed to a breakdown in order at half a dozen ticket entrances and intersections around the Capitol before the swearing-in of President Obama.

Thank God we decided to get out of that horrible tunnel while we still could, another 5 minutes and it would have been impossible as thousands filed in behind us.

What followed was a couple of hours wandering the barricaded streets with the colorful crowds thinking "this is what we came 10,000 miles to do?"

"I'm not from here" this cop told us blithely. Thanks, mate.

But then ... thanks to modern technology (our friend called her husband at home who could check on the internet) we learned that if we walked almost to the end of the Mall, to 18th Street, we would get in. I tell you, once we realized this plan was going to work we went singing and dancing into the Mall. Hallelujah!

After that it was fantastic, everything went perfectly. The crowd,from eight months to eight decades, from African Americans to Scandinavians to Filipinos, was wonderful. I was concerned that there might be too much of a stadium rock band feel (and there were indeed some chants of O-BAM-A) but in general people were just happily taking it all in, just amazed that it was actually happening. The first photo below is of one of many great slogans, the second of Jamaicans for Obama.

Of course we gave a huge cheer when Barack first appeared on our jumbotron screen:

My favourite bit was definitely Aretha, I understand there is a Facebook group "fans of Aretha's hat" -- that almost makes me want to renounce my vow never to join. Somehow,hearing Aretha's still familiar voice, first heard in the Jim Crow South, singing "let freedom ring" at the inauguration of the first African-American president ... you'd have to have a heart of stone not shed a few tears over that.

But where exactly were they, I hear you ask. Well, you see this amazing photo? We were actually behind the Washington Monument, in other words not even in shot! But I don't care a bit -- we were there, close a screen, we were cold and happy, and it was worth every one of those 10,000 miles.

Thanks to the Washington Post for the photo of the Tunnel of Doom and to Boston.com for the aerial shot.

Inauguration Day

We are off to the States tomorrow to see the inauguration of Barack, among other things. Can't believe that a rush of post-election enthusiasm and a few glasses of wine is actually resulting in our going to this thing! We'll be gone for one frostbitten week.

Slumdog slush

I’m amazed at all the praise for Slumdog Millionaire, which has just won four Golden Globes and is being touted as "the movie to beat at the Academy Awards". “Dickens with rupees” the Village Voice called it (what a brilliant turn of phrase); that’s almost as much of an insult to Dickens as this clichéd and daftly plotted movie is to India.

There are good, even great, elements to Slumdog Millionaire (although many of them seem to have been borrowed from the much better Brazilian slum movie, City of God). The colours and cinematography are wonderful and they blend seamless with the atmospheric score by A.R. Rahman (which deserved the Golden Globe it won this week). The final faux Bollywood routine over the credits is a funny and appropriate ending. The child actors are beguiling.

But that is far as I can go.

There is nothing to say about the evil stereotypes that litter the film—the wicked Fagin-like character who kidnaps the children, the fat and sadistic police torturer, the boorish gang boss—except that the film-makers obviously didn’t see creating characters as part of their remit, not if you can buy them all at a fire-sale of worn out Indian “types”.

And the plot! OK, leaps of faith are a feature of Indian cinema, but this story just makes no sense. The only advantage of having a quiz show contestant fortunate enough to be served up a diet of questions that all miraculously echo incidents in his own life is that this implausible device enables the film-makers to tell his hackneyed story is a series of flashbacks.

However, Jamal’s story has holes big enough to drive a Tata truck through. Isn’t it a bit curious that these slum kids speak to each other mainly in English? Why would the police torture a nationwide TV celebrity? How come whenever Jamal, the main character, tries to locate his beloved (bearing in mind that this is Bombay, a city of 15 million people), she miraculously appears? The kids fall off a train and guess what, they’re at the Taj Mahal.

Some of this, especially the Taj Mahal sequence, is presumably intended to inject dreamlike interludes into the grimness of the main story line, but you have to be very good to carry that off. Slumdog Millionaire’s improbabilities just diminish your belief in the already far-fetched plot.

Despite its efforts to make a statement on modern India, and the transition from the slum culture to the media culture, Slumdog Millionaire is an old fashioned film, designed to pander to Western viewers’ biases about the dirtiness and brutality of life in India. It’s a bummer, despite what them Golden Globes folks say about it.

Jamby Madrigal’s reading matter

I was buying a book at the Rockwell Fully Booked this afternoon when I looked over at the somewhat dishevelled looking woman at the next cash register, hey it’s Jamby! I’ve chatted with her briefly a couple of times in the past so we sort of nodded at each other (being a multitasking politician she was also on the phone while making her purchases) and I craned my neck to check out what she was buying.

Jamby’s pile was nearly all Filipiniana. I spotted Nick Joaquin’s Culture and Society, a book called Kubrador, which I assume was something to do with the movie, and the wonderful An Anarchy of Families by Benedict Anderson and his Cornell colleagues (there were two or three others I couldn’t see the spine of). Anyway, I thought Jamby did pretty well there – I wonder how many of her fellow senators read such serious books…

Bizarrely, as I left the store I was almost knocked down by an old man striding in – Lito Atienza! Holy cow,. Now I would have really liked to have seen what he was going to buy. The economics of the mining industry? Family planning is the devil’s work? Destroying parks for dummies?

“Alabang Boys” – give us a break

Here’s a game I sometimes play.

Imagine you are a visiting businessman with no prior knowledge of the Philippines. You have stayed here for a week and gathered various impressions about the country from the copy of the Inquirer that arrives under your door every morning.

Here are three conclusions you might have arrived at from the relentless coverage of the “Alabang Boys” case in recent days.

• Drug taking in the Philippines is almost unknown — this is why this exceptional case has attracted so much attention.

• The Philippines must be as incorruptible as Singapore — this is why the papers are so outraged at this alleged bribery attempt.

• The Philippines has no serious problems to attend to — this is why the papers are devoting so many acres of newsprint to this trivial case (not to mention the ruckus at a golf club that competed for space on the front page).

• This place is weird.

Unlike the Inquirer, which has clearly decided that the Brodett family is guilty (or so it seems to me), I haven’t reached a conclusion about the rights and wrongs of the case.

Given the way things work here, it seems to me quite possible that the Brodetts may have tried to pay money for their sons’ release. Facing similar circumstances, many of us might have done the same.

On the other hand, it also seems quite possible that, realizing that the young men were from a wealthy family, members of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) either set them up or tried to use their sons’ predicament to “encourage” a bribe from their parents. After all, it would not be the first time such a thing has happened in the Philippines.

That’s why we have courts; to decide which of prima facie equally plausible explanations reflects what actually happened.

I have reached a couple of conclusions about the furor over the case though though.

• The PDEA claim that the three young men represented “a syndicate that sold illegal drugs at the Metro Manila club circuit and did business online” isn't too convincing, if only because it has supplied no evidence of this, beyond dropping the name of Embassy (surely an easy target), which the club has strongly denied.

• It seems much more likely that this whole thing is about young people taking drugs for fun, an activity that has been widespread throughout the world for at least 40 years and will still be practised long after the Brodetts, the PDEA officers, you, and me have all kicked the bucket. So why can’t we have a public policy that reflects the realities of the 21st century rather than those of the 1940s?

What bemuses me, as much as my imaginary visiting businessman, is why the press has treated this as such a vital issue. The Inquirer alone has published an incredible 92 articles on the “Alabang boys” in the last 12 days, some of which, such as today’s ridiculous front page article “Retired generals rally behind PDEA”, seem to have been written solely to keep ramming the issue down the throats of its long-suffering readers. What’s it all about?

Demotivational posters

You may have seen some of these demotivational posters before but they made me chuckle all the same (mainly because I hate the posters they mock so much).

View this photo

and of course:

Thanks to motivated posters.com, My PE Port Elizabeth Images, and Despair Inc.

Put it where you want it (Remi Gaillard)

In case you have been wondering what I think about before I drop off to sleep every night (go on admit it, it's a question that has been bothering you for a while) this video comes pretty close ...

Thanks Nige.

Child elopers’ marriage plans thwarted

Here is a heart-warming little story for you. These kids’ marriage plans are more logical than those of some adults I’ve known …

Two German children - aged five and six - have been stopped by police from eloping to Africa to tie the knot in the sun, reports say. The budding lovebirds, identified as Mika and Anna-Lena, packed bathing costumes, sunglasses and a lilo and headed for the airport. They even had the presence of mind to invite along an official witness - Anna-Lena's seven-year-old sister. The three got as far as Hanover railway station before police intervened. The young couple were "very much in love" and had decided to get married in Africa "where it is warm", police spokesman Holger Jureczko told the AFP news agency

You can read more about these young romantics here.