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| Reference Material |
| An Epistle to the "Nationalists" ON BEING TOO WESTERNIZED By Ross Tipon, [email protected] Jan. 14, 2006 One of the common complaints of the Filipino "nationalist", one of whom I just spammed out of existence a short while ago, is that we are "too westernized. . Are we? We are westernized perhaps in the way that the cargo cultists are "Westernized". If we were truly westernized we would have gotten rid of the Gallilean man-god a long time ago (except at Christmas time where he is replaced by semi-pagan Santa Claus). Our mother country once removed, Spain, harbors more atheists per capita than our immediatemother country, America. Of course, if you look at the better America (roughly the seaboards) that has no use for the god of hinterland-bred William Jennings Bryan, Bush pere and fils, Reagan, indicted-for-crookedness Tom Delay or foot-on-his-mouth Pat Robertson we havean America no different in religiosity from Western Europe. If we were truly westernized then our ship of state would be sailing majestically on the robust winds of the rule of law instead of being marooned among the rotting riggings of the soft states.. We would have no use for the Office of the Ombudsman (rotten as it is) because ordinary prosecutors could prosecute the high and mighty. Thomas Dewey, attorney-general for the state of New York, sent crooks to jail. He did not have a high fallutin title. The present attorney general for this state makes the high and mighty tremble. If we were westernized, the SEC would be sending the stock manipulators to jail instead of attending cocktail parties with them. If we were westernized, why is it that we have ten thousand constitutional tinkerers, twenty thousand ideology spouters, five million maka-Diyos pietyists and not one Bill Gates? If we were Westernized, sales of books would be the multiple of hundred thousand or a million annually instead of a few thousands. What do Filipinos read? What the "nationalists" are trying in their various contortions is to pose as anti-Western like some Latin-American dictators, African thugs like Mugabe and the assortment of Arab power-holders. During the time of Marcos Conrado Quiroz under the direction of his maestro, Adrian Cristobal, wrote a book putatively authored by Marcos "An ideology for Filipinos" where the message drummed with numbing monotony was that Filipinos were too westernized and what was needed a Malakas and a Maganda. As in the corpulent heyday of Mexico's Part�do Revol�cionario Instit�cional the "nationalists" want to be a parasitic state-supported group which spews out anti-Western rhetoric for their places in the feeding trough. There is visual awkwardness in seeing a number of what the late historian William Henry Scott called "Fil-Ams", Filipinos (mostly little educated) who act superficially like Americans, meaning the worst of them. So what? The world of full of nuts. That is not a social or economic problem like the balance-of-payment or the problem that results if we were to turn the economy closed which is the nationalists' dream of their Middle Kingdom set amidst a twenty-first century theme-park.. Ideology, including nationalist ideology, which is what is left of secular ideology and found mostly in the Balkans and in the Andean poor lands, is the exoskeleton of the unformed humanoid. "Under the impact ideology culture retreats", observed Schiller. Sciller would have been my Nobel Laureate but there were no such laureates then. Nobel was not even an embryo, so lacking in soul, according to clerico-fascist Bernas. Quiroz, Buencamino, et. al., quit your ideology project and leave that to brainless creatures like too-late-the-caudillo Fortunato Abat or the not much more endowed perennial opportunist Jose Tan Almonte. Even Honasan knew when to quit and quietly comme il faut. You do not want to be "Westernized", eh, Mister Nationalist? Try the Taliban. And send all your offspring to the madrassas. ***** |