For the sake of encouraging domestic tourism...

I WANT to make it of record that - subject to certain conditions - I am declaring my Philippine travel photographs to be part of the public domain.  This means that any picture I uploaded in my social networking sites, i.e. multiply and facebook, showing tourist spots (and related sites) in the Philippines can be copied and distributed by anyone even without acknowledging me. 

It is my hope that by doing this, I would be doing my part to encourage my fellow Filipinos to explore our very beautiful country, and for them to do so while young.

(...And besides, I'm fully at peace with the fact that I'll never be making money from my photographs so I might as well give some away for free.) 

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Here are the conditions:

1.  Photos showing myself or anybody I know are not included in this declaration.  (As this condition might have a lot of gray areas, you can send me a private message to inquire whether a particular picture is covered by this declaration.)
2.  You are not allowed to claim the photographs as your creation, nor are you allowed to use it as a template for digital manipulation of any sort and pass it off as your work.
3.  I reserve the right to withdraw this declaration at any future time.  Such withdrawal however will not be retroactive and would only apply to any subsequent photograph posted.

All that blood and gore for a friggin' King James Version? The Book of Eli sucks.

Things that this country needs to let go of (part 1)

(I've always meant to write something like this but I just kept on postponing and/or forgetting all about it.  Now that I've come back from the self-imposed hiatus from all the Batanes blogs I've been making, I'm making it a point to write about this topic and get it over with.)

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There a number of things that keep holding us back as a country from moving on to more relevant concerns.  These are actually dead issues that are somehow resurrected for political purposes, which serves absolutely no one's interest but our politicians' (who, if anything, are jackasses).  Here's the first in a hopefully ongoing series of those things.

The ownership of Sabah

The fact that successive Philippine administrations have done practically nothing to advance our claim (and that a Filipino needs a friggin' passport to enter Kota Kinabalu) serves notice to the fact that we will never get this chunk of Borneo, which was never really ours in the first place. 

Consider this: Sabah was once part of the Sultanate of Sulu, which at one time was a political entity (i.e. a country).  We will probably never know the exact reason why Sultan Jamalul Kiram and his advisors did the unthinkably brainless deed of leasing out to a westerner (the British) a mind-boggling 90% of their territory, but they did.  So they sat on their asses while the British tried to make Sabah productive.  The Sultan meanwhile encouraged his heirs to do some more ass-sitting because, hey, they're royalty.

that's Junior sanctimoniusly ass-sitting at the middle

Fast forward to the mid-20th century. Nationalism and self-determination was all the rage, and the people of Sabah, who were probably unaware that they were still nominally subjects of the Sultan of Sulu, simply voted in a U.N.-supervised referendum that they wanted to be Malaysians.  (To be sure, the British did have a hand in railroading Malaysia's statehood, but that's no excuse.)  Meanwhile, a few decades back, the Sultanate of Sulu ceased to be a political entity - no doubt brought about by a legacy of mind-boggling incompetence (see previous paragraph) - and got absorbed by the fledgling Philippine republic.

[Now this deserves a bit of digression: Why, oh why, did Sulu become part of the Philippines when it was not even conquered by the Spanish according to our grade school history books?  Apparently our grade school history books were filled with bullshit (especially if the author had "Zaide" as his/her last name), because if they were never conquered by the Spanish, then what the hell was a Spanish garrison doing at the main island of Jolo up to the last day of it's Philippine occupation?  By the way, the Spanish was able to force a "peace treaty" with Sulu during the term of Sultan Jamalul Kiram - remember him?]

an impressive genealogy of royal incompetence

Now, the new Philippine state, then as now, didn't really give a fart about what was happening in Mindanao.  That was until probably some lowly bureaucrat somehow found out about resources-rich Sabah once belonging to the Sultanate of Sulu ("Wow, we have a province named 'Sulu'?" - Philippine bureaucrat).  At about this same time, the new Sultan (Mawallil Wasit Kiram) wanted to do away with his predecessors' dismal legacy and set out to prove his decisiveness on the Sabah issue - by giving all authority and decision-making to recover Sabah to the Philippines through President Diosdado Macapagal.  (He then proceeded to perform the very noble and royal act of doing more ass-sitting because, damn it, he's royalty!)

"What do you mean Sabah is not a banana?"

Lowly bureaucrat probably informed Pres. Macapagal on the value of such a "delegation of authority".  What subsequently followed was the most long-winding and lameass legal attempt to get land without fighting for it - interrupted only by Operation Merdeka, which was a failure before it even begun. 

So at best, we have been trying to claim ownership of a piece of land that the original owner effectively lost ownership of even before our government entered the picture.

I don't really want to go through the indignity of enumerating all the reasons why Malaysia will never give us Sabah on a silver platter (which seems to be the manner we are expecting them to.)  I'll just end with this - do you think Sabahans (i.e. the people of Sabah) would trade their first world we've-got-the-Petronas-Towers-beat-that citizenship with a festering American-wannabe third-world one?  I don't think so.

So let's just forget about the whole thing and move on.

Sabahans, truly Asia!

(In related news, the heirs of the Sultan of Sulu claim that they are ready to reconquer Sabah by force of arms if the Philippine Government continues to drag it's feet on the Sabah claim.)

(Idiots.)

Riiiiiight. So prancing around and giving away condoms and pills is today's definition of a model government official? Bollocks. (Secretary Cabral, you were appointed as Secretary of Health but all you ended up proving is that you are a third-rate health worker.)

El Indio

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Comics & Graphic Novels
Author:	Francisco V. Coching

EVERY now and then, I purchase graphic novels by local authors as a show of support for their efforts to break through the mainstream market dominated by American and Japanese pop culture. It is for this reason that I bought Francisco Coching's El Indio. Having been a bit disappointed with my last purchase, Underpass, I was looking forward to something different. By its very title - "El Indio" - I was assured that I'd at least find it satisfying because I always did like historical fiction, and this one is surely set in the Philippines, which I like all the more.

Let me just say on the onset that I had no idea who Francisco Coching was, and I have never heard of El Indio before. But I have a sneaking suspicion that even if I did, I would still have been blown away by the sheer scale of the talent that I saw when reading El Indio.

The graphic novel was great in so many levels. First, the art. El Indio was created by Coching in the 1950s - a time when there was no such thing as digital artistry. But his attention to detail is a case study on just how talented 50's "Komiks" artists were. With only paper, pencil and ink (which so very fortunately survived the ravages of time) Coching was able to create a black-and-white masterpiece of anatomically correct, culturally accurate, emotionally charged and intricately detailed drawings that enabled one to see images of, and consequently transport oneself to, a forgotten time in our collective history and our Spanish heritage.

Second, the language. Coching's language was Tagalog at its finest. This was Tagalog at its flowering prime - when it has not yet been bloated by English loan words and when the creativity of native Tagalog speakers was not yet hampered by modern conventions and simplistic short-cuts. It was a proud language of a cultured people that had not yet sank to its current depths (as when one listens to FM radio or watches noontime television nowadays.)

In effect, Coching preserved for all time and for all future generations the beauty of the Tagalog language, which was already experiencing a radical transformation (and in many ways a decline) at the time when he was creating El Indio. His work also proves that the depth and beauty of the language was not confined to the academe and the dustbins of the past, but was alive and well in popular culture - El Indio being sold as a bi-weekly comic leaflet.

And lastly, history. When Filipinos think about the Spanish occupation, only two images come to mind: (1) the start, when Filipinos were Christianized and first made subjects of the Spanish crown; and (2) the violent end, when the revolution dismantled the last remnants of Spanish authority. Coching's El Indio, however is set in the gray area between those two times (but much nearer the latter), and one which most Filipinos are unfamiliar with. It harks back to that crucial point in time when Filipinos, though already ripe for revolution, were still comfortable being subjects of Spain and who, though they rebelled at times, still essentially viewed and fought Spanish injustices on a local level and not within the larger context of a worldwide trend towards self-determination of colonized peoples.

Coching educates us on a Filipino mindset that has yet been untouched by liberal ideas brought Europe. His work is an excellent presentation of the identity crisis that Filipinos had, both on the individual level and the national level, under the Spanish. It shows us a time when ties to the so-called motherland (Spain) were heavily romanticized, and despite the story's happy ending, shows a physically and psychologically tormented people - a condition that would only find it's cure and it's release through the flames of revolution.

El Indio is a national cultural treasure, and Francisco Coching deserves the respect and honor of a national artist for this masterpiece.