Carlos Celdran may indeed be a bad influence on the Filipino
Maybe
it is true — that Carlos Celdran is a bad influence on the Filipino.
After all, hasn’t one of the biggest issues with us Filipinos always
been about our lack of ability to think things through properly and act
consistently upon said thinking within some sort of rules-based
framework — such as the Law? In that context, it is quite clear that
this Damaso stunt has set us back a bit as far as our aspirations to becoming a modern thinking society.
Apart
from the clear offenses that Celdran had been convicted for, he is
guilty of a couple other crimes against Filipino intelligence:
(1) Propagating demagoguery
Damaso. Celdran puts up a single word — a single name — to encapsulate what is really a nebulous issue. It’s sort of like the way Mein Kampf and Communist Manifesto were
encapsulated in the swastika and the hammer-and-sickle respectively. Or
like how the whole “people power” thing is expressed by Filipinos with
the hand gesture for “loser”. The difference between the demagoguery of
Nazism and communism and the vacuous demagoguery of the Filipino secular
and freedom movements is that at least Nazism and communism had written
treatises and manifestos. Last I recall there is no equivalent Mein Kampf for the Aquinoist Laban movement.
(2) Failure to crystallize a nebulous issue
Ok, perhaps one can argue that Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere is the underpinning manifesto of Celdran’s Damaso stunt.
But why then, did that other blogger stammer out a doozy of a clarification in an attempt to lend substance to Damaso?
The guy claimed that Celdran’s stunt “stirred the ambiguity between the
secular and the religious” and, get this, provided us “the kind of
animus that helps us rethink the relationship between Church and State.”
Obviously “Damaso” dumbed down something. What that something
is, not even Celdran’s most die-hard fans can quite explain clearly even
given a few more words to work with. Maybe they should re-read the Noli. Yikes! I’d market that book as therapy for people with bad sleeping disorders.
I
noted the comment of ChinoF there and agree it was spot-on: “Rosa Parks
was never trying to get attention. She only wanted a seat.” By
contrast, to the question of what it is exactly that Celdran hoped to
achieve back in 2010, the best anyone could come up with is a blurb that
makes use of head-scratchers like “stirring up ambiguity” and “animus.”
You gotta wonder. Maybe the proverbial Emperor is in actual fact naked.
(3) Furthering the Philippine idiocracy
The
thing with these catch-word/phrase and one-symbol “movements” in the
Philippines is that said words and said symbols distract people from the
reality that there is really nothing under the hood. And, in all
ironies, it is for this very reason that stupid idiotic politicians get
elected to office — because they have mastered the art of harnessing the
idiocracy using these age-old mind tricks.
One
moment we are urging voters to “vote wisely” — to look underneath the
slogans, dig deeper into the issues, and evaluate how consistent the
relevant ones are to our politicians’ platforms (if they do have
one). Then the next moment we are cheering side-show costumed clowns
like Carlos Celdran and the sort of sloganeering they do that, if you
think about it, isn’t really much different from the campaign styles of
the very politicians we claim to detest.
Houston we have a problem.
It
seems the Philippine political debate lacks serious diversity as far as
ideas go. The noisiest elite “communicators” dominate the discourse
with their lame slogans and shallow appeal-to-emotion roadshows. Aren’t
we glad Get Real Philippines is around to single-handedly fill that otherwise yawning intellectual chasm in Philippine society?
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