MAN IS A POLITICAL ANIMAL

Twenty times in an hour, Senator Estampador
Uttered the word: "democracy"
Uttered the word in the snare of a sad snore:
His tongue as a clapper, metallic, on his steeled palate.

In the bed of Procustes: hardly a mind to matter.

But his speech had imperceptible blasts.
He spoke like a queen of harlots, for,
He suffered to be bought and sold by the phallic paroxysm of the hoi polloi.

Senator Estampador had exultations.
He fed upon the cunning of impossibility, fed upon
The foul pollution of proletarian insensibility: the foul
Humbug of bourgeois incompatibility.
"Woe to you suckers! woe to capitalist racketeers!"
Occasions of anguish by Catholicism? Mind you, one can hardly suspect...

His party machine was a Roman phalanx.
The gauntlet of propaganda slightly narcissistic.
I remark however in his manner the public darling of Coriolanus.

Senator Estampador had ecstasies.
He entertained a flair for the Supreme, i.e., fasces and swastika.
Obscenities of rabble-rattlers on the dungheap of comrades-in-arms
Mephitical as they beat hurrah-hurrah, hammer on kettle-drum,
The fleshpots, majestic, of their damned Utopia!

Die! Gunshot!
Amid the infernal age,
load- with gunpowder of meter and rhyme-
Exultations, ecstasies: blackout in the lure of labyrinths-
Yes, surely the media were used for misinformation:
"... exhumed lately from the balloting booth..."

Mental Colonization

I am colonization personified.
The foundation of my being,
my language of thought
belongs not to those ancestors
whose blood now feeds my freedom,
but to the slave master
whose oppressive bark
echoes deep in my mind.

I am colonization personified.
My strengths have died
as I have tried
with Filipinocentricity exemplified,
to show my mother; whose eyes cry
as they scan the horizon
and leave her with a sigh,
that in her smile
Philippineswill never lie.

I am colonization personified.
Read these words
and you will know this is true!

(originally by Thabiso Nkoana, an African... modifed for Filipino contextualization)

Thoughts V: Mental colonization by Mondar M. M. A. NOVO

The greatest colonization is the colonization of the mind. In the initial stages of colonization, the conquered people are enslaved and controlled with the force of arms. The weakness of this form of colonization is that the colonized people can rise up in revolution and send the colonizer packing, permanently. This colonization is transient. However, the colonizer has other weapons in his arsenal and these are used to colonize the minds of the conquered people, since colonization of the mind has more permanency.

There are various degrees of this mental colonization. Specialized education and exposure to carefully controlled media are used to partially colonize the minds of the people. This is not a thing of the past and is still done with greater vigor. The big guns for this colonization are the televisions, radios and newspapers and other forms of media – often this is called deculturization by people labeled as conservative.

Entertainment, News, TV, and radio programs are slanted to allow the people to form the “desired” opinions and the “desired” prejudices. Primarily, however, it is education that is controlled. The media adds to the colonization by controlled education.

Books and curricula are chosen more or less by the existing powers (corporate, government, and religious) reflecting their wishes. Students learn what the “powers” wish them to learn. The choice of material for the student from which the student learns is pre-selected. The material which will enable the student to go beyond the classroom are also controlled either by subtly discouraging the student from going too far from what is taught in the classroom or it is controlled directly by making certain types of material more available than others and some simply unavailable.

This affects the freedom of thought. Freedom of thought depends heavily on the diversity of knowledge and the control of education greatly curtails this freedom. Where the freedom of knowledge is controlled, freedom of thought is dead and thus freedom of speech becomes irrelevant. And democracy thus becomes a mere tool of the existing powers.

Effects of even this partial colonization can be seen in much of the world. It has grave cultural effects such as in India (subcontinental) where many people, however they shout out their nationalism, associate native male clothes with the “lower class” and western clothes with the “higher class”. Even on national days, such as the Language Martyrs’ Day in Bangladesh , wearing the Lungi is considered unseemly. Even eating with forks and knives is often considered more “civilized” than eating with the hand, which is the Indian tradition. Many do not stop to think that eating utensils and many other customs of the west developed out of what their environment demanded. For people in colder climates eating with the hand meant washing it, which is not comfortable in their climate and as such, there was a necessity to invent eating utensils. This also goes for shoes that enclose the whole foot. Those kind of shoes are not necessary and rather uncomfortably hot in warm weather but today, Indians and many other warm climate inhabitants use the shoes where more stringy sandal-shoes would suffice.

Much of India (subcontinental) is westernized – and this does not exclude Gandhi who wore Indian clothes but was an utter admirer and supporter of the British Raj. The attitude towards clothes and utensils represents the mindset of the still colonized Indians. Westernization (the culture of the colonizer) is seen as modern and more acceptable. Apparently, Macaulay was successful.

... The mentally colonized individual even looks for his heritage in the land of the colonizer. They feel pride in the colonizers’ history and glory. They hero-worship the very aggressors who parasitize their country like leeches as colonizers or in their most recent form – neo-colonialists. Still slaves just without chains!

... A very tiny section of the colonized, usually those who were affluent before the arrival of the colonialists or those who were servants of the colonizer deal with the colonialist to achieve pseudo-independence and gain power, just as Marx said. Through these “educated” natives, the colonialists practice neo-colonialism, in which the wealth of the colonized nation still flows to the colonialists. This tiny group becomes the elite and extremely rich and powerful while the rest of the people fight each other, intoxicated by the scarcity principle, for the scraps that fall down the cracks of the system according to Reagan’s highly insulting “trickle down” theory.

One might trivialize the use of foreign names. However, it is a bigger issue than one realizes. It does not only symbolize the loss of culture and ultimate colonization, it also has many consequences. A name is one of the most intimate possessions and control of the name has a lot of significance and effect on one’s mind. It molds the world around a person. It encourages generalization. A person with a Bengali name will be perceived generally as a Hindu and the circle of friends around him will form partially filtered by that name. The outlook of the person born in an Islamic family with a Bengali name will be much different from that of one with an Arabic name...

LET US LEARN FROM OUR NEIGHBORS...

Philippines: Patriarchal State

In a lucid, insightful and scholarly manner, Hutchcroft skillfully argues that the organization of Philippine political economy, which he calls a "patrimonial oligarchic state," facilitated the development of "booty capitalism." He defines booty capitalism as a situation where a group or groups "with an economic base outside the state is (are) plundering the state for particularistic resources." In other words, powerful and influential groups try to exact what they can from the state to satisfy their own interests.

Ladder To Power

• More than 2 out of 3 representatives in the Congress have at least one close relative in public office. At least 1 in every 3 comes from a family that has maintained political influence through several generations despite changes of presidents and regimes. Many trace their origins to late 19th century ilustrado and mestizo families.
• The most prominent legislators are also business tycoons and industry leaders- demonstrating that the link between wealth and power is really strong.
• Very real conflicts of interest therefore exist in the House among members who must deliberate and decide on issues that touch on their propriety concerns.