THERE is a blog post that is going around and even its writer acknowledges that it has gone viral. There is nothing original about it: a foreigner, a white man, is disgusted because what was once a bright city is now “in shambles,” and his favorite hotel has lost its charm.
What is interesting in the put-down is the series of caveats and justifications. The essay swims in qualifiers so much so that when a line cites the negative points, a positive remark follows it. The effect is a kind of verbal see-saw, a game, if you wish, of someone who cannot make up his mind.
The writer suggests: “If you want to see the Philippines: get through Manila as quickly as you can, it has nothing to recommend it [sic]. Go out to the islands, Cebu, Mindanao, up to the cool of Bagio [sic] and see the people in the countryside and some of the spectacular scenery. That’s probably worth the trip. Otherwise pick almost anywhere else in Asia and you’ll get a better deal.” See, you can forgive him still, his thoughts and critiques, syntax and spelling included.
The guy admits, as well as claims, that he aspires to be a “flaneur,” which he defines using a dictionary definition as “an intellectual and physical wanderer, observer of life.” This aspiration actually shocks me more than his criticisms about Manila and its airport.
But then again he says he is no backpacker. Well and good: I have met and talked with many backpackers and I marveled at the elegance of their English, the sound of good and warm education felt in their thoughts verbalized. This guy is no backpacker. Just an aspiring intellectual and physical wanderer. Meaning he wanders with his body and not with his brain or soul, for that would make him a spiritual wanderer.
In the information about him as blogger, he states: “I travel extensively in Asia, the Middle East and East Africa as a development professional [I’m a faux-economist] and writer. My tales, stories and RANTS are part fact/part fiction but, I hope, always stimulating. PLEASE don’t take them too seriously—they are meant to inform but also to amuse.”
Believe me, I am amused. This blogger is a master in nonsequitur. He sounds almost, well, almost like some of the gems in Woody Allen’s Without Feathers. Listen to this statement: “Racist? Ha ha! LoL I’m actually married to an Asian and have lived in Asia for well over 20 years - love it.”
See. Wouldn’t you be amused by those flights of fancy? Racist? Ha ha! LOL I’m actually married to my career and have lived in Asia for well over 50 years—love it. You see, geography and civil status do not have a one-to-one correspondence with racism.
He talks how the other cities in Asia have gone ahead of Manila in the development process. He exclaims how the “city has got to be the disgrace of South-east Asia, all the more so because twenty years ago when I used to come through here en route to Papua New Guinea it was THE place in the region to come to for shopping and R&R. How the mighty are fallen!”
This guy, for all his rancid remarks against Manila, makes us sound like Rome.
He then goes on about the airports in Manila proceeding to castigate the kind of development that we have here. He pontificates: “There seems to be a theme here: the Philippines has many natural advantages and in fact a talented people who provide services everywhere in the world. But there has been no re-investment in the country, neither by the public sector [hence the terrible airport facilities], nor by private industry. People might build a hotel, but they run it into the ground rather than trying to build a long-term institution. Philippines can be described as an extractive or exploitive economy, not one where people want to build sustainably long term.”
At last, he delivers the strike: “As I say, the smart one’s [sic] all want to leave.”
The cruel thing is that despite the ignorant punctuations. this is the part of the blog post that generates the interest of those “smart ones who all want to leave” or have already left.
There are truths indeed in the so-called facts from this blogger and those who buttress those “facts” with their replies and comments, but the idea that the smart ones all want to leave or have long ago left and those who stay behind (or those who want to stay behind) are lacking in smarts, do not only disrespect the many who have no options but also the many whose options include the desire to stay and have, in fact, opted to stay.
Here lie in the grave of this illogical exercise the many other ill-placed principles that make those who leave for abroad as heroes. Which makes us who are all here what—heels?
Years back, there was the theory that people are pushed out of their country and pulled in by the jobs and opportunities in the other. This theory does not explain why brilliant people still are in this country. Thus comes the theory of human agency: individuals make choices; people make decisions.
For every individual who leaves this country is an individual who decides to stay behind. I like to make this personal.
I have a brother who is in London. I have two sisters-in-law who are here in the country. One works as a rural health worker. She rides the jeep to Magarao, a town some eight or nine kilometers from Naga. From the municipal health office, Beth takes a tricycle and stops at a barangay where she meets up with barangay health workers and other volunteers. They all walk to this village called Carangcang, where children receive vaccines and where mothers are taught lessons and facts about nutrition.
Another sister-in-law, Ate Naomi, teaches in Universidad de Sta. Isabel, a local university. She is a nurse who worked for two years in Zambia and now teaches nursing students. She tells the students that being a nurse does not mean that you have to leave for abroad. She knows too that many will leave—and many will also opt to stay. Two weeks back, she was telling me how scared she was crossing a rickety bridge to a village where people do not have water. That activity was for their engagement in community health care. A few days ago, I asked her if they were going back to that place and she told me, yes, they would. She would cross that wooden bridge again. By virtue of not being overseas Filipino workers, they and the rest of the nurses, engineers, teachers, etc. would never be declared “Bagong Bayani,” the New Heroes.
In the meantime, this blogger, who claims he is a Brit, believes that he is stating only his opinions. That Manila is where Asian Development Bank is, the reason he visits us. Does he have anything to do with development programs in the region? If he has, then it is no wonder there is underdevelopment in the area.
At the end of this blog post about an awfully disappointing place, he places a postscript: “No pictures because there’s nothing worth photographing in Manila, it’s drab and dirty.”
At least, I know he is not a photographer.
