Let me provide a little background then get to the point, unkind though you may believe it to be.
My young son thinks books are toys. He has more fun with them than anything but a soccer ball. If he had his way, he wouldn't eat or sleep or do anything but kick a ball around the grass. But get him indoors and he would rather have a book in his hands than anything else.
Oddly, his favorite book when he was just a baby was his mother's Good Housekeeping guide on raising kids. He enjoyed the pictures that his dad brought to life in comic book fashion. “It's 'Dinosaur Boy'! Roaaarrrrrrrrr (hands above head in tyrannosaurus attack mode). Run for the rocks! Aieeeee!”.
So books are active for him as they are for his father. Ha, his mother mostly watches television and groans at the antics of the two whacko males planted on Dad's special chair playing with books. She never had books as a kid, her fishing-family being too poor to buy them. But she picked up on the importance when she saw the baby pointing at the animals and babbling. She immediately went out and bought huge posters with the alphabet and numbers and animals and shapes and colors on them and converted our apartment to Sesame Street East. Come to think of it, at 6'4”, I do rather look and walk like Big Bird.
The problem with books, though, is they bend your mind. An avid reader knows no bounds and will read anything that is reasonably well written. So walls come crashing down. Walls of propriety. Walls of superstition. Walls of ignorance. In books, you can end up looking through the eyes of an assassin or a Roman General or a lunatic Don Quixote peering at windmills or a microbiologist finding new cures for a plant disease threatening the wine crop.
“What does this have to do with Filipinos?” you might be wondering.
The truth is hard. I censor myself because I think most Filipinos cannot deal with unfettered thought.
“Wha? You are a little esoteric for me here, Joe. What do you mean by 'unfettered thought'?”
Well, I subscribe to the wisdom of Humpty Dumpty (refer to earlier blog), that a word means precisely what I say it means, nothing more, nothing less. I define “unfettered thought” as follows:
The unfettered thought is a concept that is outside the scope of existing comprehension, and to grasp it, we have to change inside.
“Huh? Change inside? I get the idea of coming across a concept that is new to me. But what do you mean by 'change inside'?”
To change inside is to adjust one's own thoughts or emotions, rather than deny that new concept or expect it to change.
“Please give me an example.”
Sure. Jonathan Swift, who penned Gulliver's Travels, wrote satire. His most biting piece “A Modest Proposal” suggested that Ireland, which was very poor at the time, adopt a policy of eating babies to control over-birthing. He outlined in explicit terms the rational implementation and advantages of this policy. It is a shocking work, now as it was then. The Philippines also has a birthing issue, and I am inclined to cite Swift, but can't. I don't feel the audience can handle it.
I feel readers, rather than striving to understand what Swift was saying, would rant against both Swift and good ol' Joe for bringing him to the Philippines. Rather than see Swift's point – that to correct poverty you have to do something about over-birthing - they would rather bring down the writer. Chase him out. Chastize him for being insensitive to Filipino values. Shoot him, maybe. But never, never ever simply grasp the point and change inside. Never focus the anger on over-birthing.
“Why do you feel that way, Joe? Maybe you underestimate us?”
Maybe, but you'd have to prove it to me rather than ask me to sacrifice my reputation to your lynch-mob mentality the way that Chinese satirist Tsau, or whatever his name is, got strung up for his “nation of servants” remark.
When I see the super-patriots throw a hissy fit over the way Martin Nevera interpreted the national anthem, I know there is not a lot of openness to unfettered thought here. It was a beautiful rendition; I was proud to reside in the Philippines. But was not a march so he was forced to apologize when he got back to Manila. The outraged would have jailed the artist.
It was a song, for chrissake.
Convention here is fairly conservative. Women generally don't wear miniskirts and sexy wear. Only geeky Americans with hairy white knobby legs or really unrestrained youth wear shorts at the mall.
Skins are onion, tender. Values are rigid. Pride is defensive.
Benign0 is seen as an offensive dolt rather than being respected as a master of argument, perspective and word smithing. Get outside the bounds of conservative thought here and you don't generate disagreement, you generate anger and a lynch mob mentality that seems to lurk just beneath the surface everywhere. One can easily choose to agree or disagree with what Benign0 says and move on. At least one can appreciate how well he combats opposing views. He's slick. He's consistent. But here, people cry “racist”, launch lawsuits and rant about his insulting demeanor. People try to change the writer rather than change themselves.
The notion of not reading him seems not to exist. The notion of understanding what he is saying and doing something about it seems not to exist.
I enjoy swimming, and can even swim upriver in an easy current. But it is not recommended that one try to swim against the flow of white-water rapids. There are rocks under the churning water.
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