The people of Shibuya have an expression, “Wait for me at the Hachi.”  It simply means that they’ll wait by an exit of a train station, where a giant bronze statue of a dog stands.  That dog’s name is Hachiko.

Few things make me cry, or get all teary-eyed in my office cubicle, but the story of Hachiko the Dog was enough to make me feel really sad today.

I’m not a “dog lover,” but I’ve owned and been with enough dogs to know how faithful and loyal they can be.  When we lost our dog Spot to cancer, Dad was inconsolable for days; every Saturday night, Spot would bolt out the gate and run out to the road leading to town, and meet my dad there.  A dog of ours, Rickson, followed me to school once and Mom had to come to school to pick the mutt up.  While I’m not particularly affectionate towards dogs (or living creatures, for that matter), I’ve always admired the loyalty of dogs.

A couple of my officemates sent me trailers to “Hachiko: A Dog’s Tale” starring Richard Gere, and it really tore me up inside.

Among the Japanese, the faithful dog Hachiko is an endearing symbol of loyalty and friendship.  His owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, was a professor at the Imperial University in Japan, and brought the dog home.  A special bond developed between Hachiko and his master; every day, Hachiko accompanied his friend to the Shibuya train station, and waited for him there as he came home.  Passers-by were really touched by the friendship between Hachiko and Professor Ueno.  There wasn’t a day that Hachiko missed accompanying and meeting Professor Ueno at the train station.

One day, in May 1925, Professor Ueno died in the university.  There was Hachiko at the train station, waiting for his friend.  Yet the trains passed by, and still no sign of Professor Ueno.  Hachiko finally realized his friend was dead, but he kept waiting at that exact time, at that exact spot at the train station, for the next 10 years.

People warmed up to Hachiko, but in days where animal psychology and common sense prevailed, some people were skeptical.  Some people thought it was just a stimulus to the food and treats given to him by the vendors and sympathetic passers-by.  Some people thought that the dog was just responding to conditioned behavior.  Yet how would you explain that kind of faith, or that kind of skepticism, to a dog who just stood at the platform, waiting for his friend to come home?

A whole decade of waiting.  Hachiko escaped from the house-gates of his new owners to wait for Professor Ueno.  Days, weeks, seasons, and years passed.  The grand dog turned into a shivering mess of matted fur, his ears droopy, his body skin and bones from lack of nourishment, the weather, and for the time passed waiting for his friend.  Worms started eating at his stomach, his skin, and in a poetic irony known only to animal experts, worms started eating at his heart.  The loyal dog who waited for his master died in his sleep, at the very same path he walked home with his friend.

The heartwarming – and heartbreaking – story of Professor Ueno and Hachiko is a telling reminder of faith.  Not of religious ones or spiritual ones, but things we often take for granted.  Things like friendship, romance, family, and everything else that has to do with our relationships with people.  We always think of dogs as “lesser creatures,” but it seems that, at least in the charming story of Hachiko, they’re capable of a lot more loyalty than we are.  We shift, if only because we are capable of doing it.  We are more than capable of losing trust, of dropping friendships, of messing around with relationships we forge, and we do it simply because it “makes our lives better.”  Not to dogs, though.  They stay loyal, steadfast, and faithful.

In many human senses, that’s a fault, but what makes this so heart-wrenching for me was for Hachiko to know his friend died a long time ago, yet he still kept waiting by that same spot in the same station.  Had dogs been given the same judgment as humans those things would have been kept as matters of the heart, but not to dogs.  Some of us even purposefully forget those friendships “just because,” with too much emphasis on the art of letting go, but not much for holding on.

Maybe it has something to do with stimuli and Pavlovian responses to food, but I’m more inclined to believe the fantasy or the ideal; that Hachiko waited for his friend so that they can go home.  If parting is such sweet sorrow and togetherness is such joy, I think that waiting is the most important moment of all.

Here’s a poem I wrote for Hachiko.

You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege?  Many of us actually dislike milk and apples… I dislike them myself.  Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health.  Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig.  We pigs are brain-workers.  The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us.  Day and night we are watching over your welfare.  It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.

- Squealer, in “Animal Farm” by George Orwell

One of the lasting images of George Orwell’s Animal Farm was that the pigs – Napoleon, in particular – ended up being the dictatorial rulers of the farmstead.  “Us pigs have the milk and apples,” they justify; that eating the best food is apparently necessary for their functions as the overseers of the farm.

Baboy – the expression more than one disgruntled Filipino has used to describe the freewheeling expenses of the GMA party for the US diplomatic trip – is evoking images of disturbing chapters from “Animal Farm.”  In my head, at least.

Apparently, Le Cirque was not the only place that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and her hangers-on ate at at her recently-concluded trip to the United States.  The Washington Post now reports that our beloved, hardworking President just spent $15,000 – with a generous tip – at Bobby Van’s Steakhouse after she met with US President Barack Obama.  According to the report:

The group took over one of the restaurant’s private rooms and dined on lobster, steak and fine wines; at the conclusion of the meal, an unidentified woman opened a handbag stuffed with cash, counted out bills and paid the $15,000 tab — which included a generous tip.

Romy Macalintal says we should stay off the morality of it, and you have Raul Gonzales saying that we should instead sue.  On the one hand, the whole fiasco is incredibly funny, but on the other, incredibly disgusting.

To reduce – or for that matter, to elevate – this issue to a morality play is to disregard what the anger is all about: a sense of propriety.  Morals do encompass a lot of things in our lives, and there are differences that we have to live with.  Yet when such elementary concepts as conduct and propriety are not addressed (and disregarded) by our community of leaders, then there is – and there should be – a sense of righteous anger.  Like I said before, highlighting differences in class and status is one thing, but slapping that on everyone’s faces is another.

It’s not about being incredulous or bombastic, but if the President professes and encourages and underscores austerity in all levels of Government, then that too must apply to the highest echelons of Government.  Again, this is not a matter of high-brow morality, but a matter of meeting expectations.  It’s not just a matter of delicadeza, but propriety in manners and conduct.  If the situation does not call for it, then it must not be done.  More than moderating greed and extravagance, it’s about tempering excess.

The controversy, flak, and anger behind the President’s wheeling-dealing dining is situated at the core of what makes us human: in particular, eating.  The reason behind the revulsion is that it hits the Filipino taxpayer where it hurts and matters the most: the stomach.  There’s no high-minded legal brouhaha or political abracadabra here that can, admittedly, go above the heads of some Filipinos, brushed off as “pulitika lang yan,” or “di naman namin makakain yan.” This issue deals with makakain so much so that people are furious, livid, upset, and disgusted.

We Filipinos are a patient lot who value our food.  Entire culinary traditions have risen from our attitude towards waste.  The complaints and indignation that arise from the whole binging fiasco is not a matter of laws or technicalities or morality plays, but because the actions and the situations hit hungry people smack dab in the the stomach.  The uproar comes with what the President eats, and what the common Filipino does not eat.  It’s expectation-management, tasteful conduct, and good manners: that it’s improper for a President who is the steward of millions of hungry people to eat at places so expensive, to eat dishes that are so expensive, while people starve and make do with the scraps to fall from the table to the ground.

After all, a lot of revulsion and indignation came from hitting people right in the stomach.  Marie Antoinette, after telling the starving people of France to “eat cake,” was sent to the guillotine.  When Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle,” he wrote about children boiled in vats of lard and women’s fingers turning gangrenous from making sausage in musty cold-rooms: the first pure-food laws in the United States were passed in the early years of the 20th century.  At the most, that’s what we’re looking forward to.  Yet at the very least, all we demand is a receipt and an explanation from Government officials: an accounting of their expenses and a justification for the extravagance, pomposity, and outright boorishness of literally pigging out.

Do we have that?  No.  Yung masama, kayo pang kumain ang galit. Which makes the racket and ruckus all the more relevant: a bunch of pigs feeding in the trough cannot be disturbed, deaf and blind to all the whims of the world, just bowed over and gorging on the slop before them.  Never mind that one day, they’ll get slaughtered.

Did Napoleon and Squealer and the council of swine at Animal Farm have the milk and apples?  Of course they did; they had wine, too.  Good thing Orwell left the novel hanging, or else the pigs lording it over Animal Farm would have had suffered an interesting fate, flavored with milk and apples.

In a CNN.com article, Linda Rodriguez writes that toilet paper is deeply engrained in the practices and consciousness of the American way of life.  Much like Horace Miner’s descriptions of “charm boxes” and “holy-mouth-men” in his essay Body Ritual Among the Nacirema, toilet paper is as American as you’ll get (consider the term, “ass-wipe”).

I don’t think that a Cuban Two-Ply Crisis is in order, although many households would probably go nuts about the possibilities of losing the creature comforts of toilet paper.  For all the criticisms we have against American culture, we have to admit that no product of American provenance has been more pervasive than loo rolls: heck, you see them in McDonald’s and Starbucks.

Miner’s “ethnography” of the Nacirema (OK, that’s “American” spelled backwards) is most interesting because the funniness and humor comes from the taken-for-grantedness of body rituals.  It’s very difficult to imagine life without hygiene, and the many things that come along with it.  I’m sure you remember high school Filipino literature: in Rogelio Sicat’s Impeng Negro, for example, a whole social dynamic of bigotry, poverty, and differences in hygiene made an interesting conflict by the only source of water in the slum, when Impen beat up Ogor.

Here in the Philippines, a common point of contention when it comes to hygiene is shampoo.  A foreign acquaintance of mine frowned upon the idea of shampoo sachets: to her, our fixation with shampoo is unhealthy and uneconomical.  It’s quite a difficult sell, given the circumstances of shampoo-selling in the Philippines.  Rather than blame the media for everything and deny the agency of the individual, I talked about hiyang; that some shampoos are better than others for some hair types, and that in a culture and collective that values the look of your hair, shampoo bottles are not very economical.  It had more to do with economics than the media; a sachet of shampoo was good enough for any hair length, compared to the possibility of wasting the product if you have bottles of it.  My reasonable semi-semi explanation was sufficient for my friend, who took some sachets of Rejoice home as a souvenir of our “amusing” country.

As a people, though, our toilet habits have been more or less spared the brunt of colonization and cultural imperialism at its most… base, so to speak.  Filipino society is fragmented in very fun ways, that we can make delineations between people who use toilet paper and people who use tabo for the denouement to defecation, so to speak.  While wiping is the standard for Western society, many frown upon the use of paper to clean the rectal orifice, soap and water being a norm in the “no-wipe” segment of our society.  Remember that uproar caused by that dude who was apparently fired for using tabo in Australia?

We’re often accused of being a culture so deeply Americanized, colonized, and attached to the artifact more than anything else.  Like Balikbayan boxes and Libby’s Vienna sausages, for example.  Yet when all is said and done we just might survive a debacle of epic proportions in the future, like Cuba would if this whole toilet paper thing isn’t solved.  For us, at least, when in the bukid there’s no papel, you make-kiskis there in the pilapil.

So Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo gets Page Six’d again today, where the New York Post details the hypothetical bill – used for purposes of perspective – as a fact.  AJ already pointed it out earlier: it’s a theoretical bill illustrating the possibility of spending a million pesos at Le Cirque.  Sparks over at Filipino Voices hits the nail right on the head: lazy journalism, lazy reading.

We all went through a Wikipedia phase… no wonder I hate that site.  I’m sure that the President’s most ardent supporters are now giving each other high-fives and patting themselves on the back for “unverified information,” sloppy reporting, the laziness to fact-check, and the habit of some media practitioners and outfits to believe that if it’s on the Internet, it must be true.

So right now, maybe – just maybe – the President is not off the hook yet; maybe Cerge Remonde can now create the spin that this Le Cirque dinner did not happen after all.  Zing!

Not really: you’ll have to suffer from a serious case of faecocephalus* to deny what happened.  The Palace can act like self-righteous pa-victim types right now and play to the “conspiracy + destabilization attempts + black propaganda” card, and forget that there’s that one thing they cannot dispute at this point: they had dinner at Le Cirque, they can’t produce a receipt, and they’re all shut-up-like over the matter of how much the dinner cost, or who footed the bill.

For one, it’s deplorable for our media to commit an error due to plain and simple laziness.  The rule of all newspaper writing is check, check again, recheck, and recheck again: if your story has to go a hundred thousand times through the grinder of fact-checking, it has to, with the warning that a story must always be timely.  This is why the journalists that I know (and back in my days as a campus journalist, as well) describe their jobs in terms that describe a massacre movie: berdugong editor, madugong editing, dead na dead na deadline.

Breaking news stories, like any kind of news story, are written in templates: an exercise of fill-in-the-blanks that if the facts don’t exist, you look for it.  If you can’t find the facts at all, you don’t publish it.  If you find the fact, you comb through it.  Journalists are not exempt from that essential rule of writing: you can’t write if you don’t read.

Down the wire, though, this is not a matter of how much a dinner costs, or what they had for dinner.  The premise of the outrage does not change the fact that the hungry people of the Philippines are outraged that, at the expense of their taxes and at the expense of the prestige and respect and honor they accorded to their public officials, they did something galling by dining at the classiest of classy restaurants in one of the world’s classiest cities.  The premise remains unresolved.  It was a matter of potlatching that investment, and getting nothing in return but six o’clock sakit sa ulo, sakit sa bulsa, and more painful of all, sakit sa sikmura.

It was the gross act of highlighting and emphasizing the class biases that we avoid in daily conversation, rubbing that inequality in the faces of the people they’re supposed to represent, to walk with, to be stewards of.  And for that they refuse to explain themselves, much less show us a receipt of how much they spent.  Rather than address the issue, they misdirect it, and when all of this is done, we are expected to merely forget.  Yet that does not cancel the fact that the President had dinner at Le Cirque, was Page Six’d, and the explanations owed to the populace are still not here.  They have a faster service at that restaurant, than the speed by which explanations are served in this country.  Nobody’s telling me, Taxpayer, anything anymore.  There’s your bollocks.  There’s your fury.

I think it’s best expressed in the frustration and galling feeling of failing to ask someone, “Kumain ka na ba?” while you’re wining and dining at a party.  That’s your WTF moment right there: plain and simple pambabastos. Pissed?  Of course I am.

I think I’ve ranted long enough for the night, and I must attend to a simple dinner of whatever strikes my fancy.  Perhaps a cigarette, afterwards; nothing as fancy as Le Cirque dinners.

* – Faecocephalus.  Feces + cephalus.  Connect the dots.

Chura neto, jabongga na nga gastos ninyo sa dakilang lafang, di pa kayez nakuntento ang mga imbyerna!  Aber, pa-sucks-sucks pa ang beauty nyo, ha?  Carry naman ang Familia Zaragoza and supporting cast nyo sa cheapangga, sa morayta, sa chenelynbar, dun pa kayez sa one million pesosesoses!  Mag-gi-giraffe sa tom jones ng kabalay nyo? Etchosera pa ang Power Ranger nyo ha, ligwak ang kanyang gigi, baka mangigil sa kanya si madir.  Witchelles and kever to the nth power, mga hitad.

Uh… yeah.  500 internal server errors, and I start having a stream of thought in halting gayspeak.  No, I didn’t go France all of a sudden, but the news taking place is just turning me into a lukaret.  By the way, I’m straight, I just have a way with gayspeak.  LOL.

Anyway, the other stream of thought was more serious – and perhaps more relevant – than an opinion articulated in sward.

“Why are you so angry,” a friend of mine said, “when all of this is expected?”  That’s precisely the point: as Rom says, all of this is expected, and the indignation is the direct result of the injustice being rubbed in our faces.  One way or another, the President will have to “carry the flag,” as Manuel L. Quezon III writes, but it is only a matter of people getting detached from reality.  Manuel Buencamino over at FV is attracting a lot of debate (and LOL, too).  Sparks’ satirical take on the matter is awesome, as well.  So where do I throw my hat, considering that my blog’s suffering from a bit of sniffles, and everyone said something on the matter?

Fucking things up, that’s what.  (Gimme a break for once, LMAO.)

Potlatching: Social Climbing By Redistributing Stuff

Marcel Mauss, in The Gift, writes:

To refuse to give, or to fail to invite, is like refusing to accept — the equivalent of a declaration of war; it is a refusal of friendship and intercourse.  Again, one gives because one is forced to do so, because the recipient has a sort of proprietary right over everything which belongs to the donor.  This right is expressed and conceived as a sort of spiritual bond.

In some native American groups, there’s a practice called the “potlatch.”  At first glance, it seems like a useless waste of useful things, but it does serve a very important function in premodern society.

In a potlatch, the leader of a group gives away (and sometimes even burns or disposes or destroys) of useful items like food, fuel, utensils, currency, and so on and so forth.  The end goal of a potlatch is to a) redistribute wealth, and b) strengthen and fortify the status of an individual.  While the general conception of wealth would be who saves the most, a potlatch affirms one’s wealth by who gives away the most.

The most rudimentary understanding of the potlatch provides us, then, a good idea of what’s earned in the ceremonial destruction and distribution of resources: prestige.  You give things away instead of hoarding them, because the material value of useful stuff is easily disposable anyway; once the objects are used, they’re gone.  The prestige of giving stuff away, however, is more valuable than the actual thing because it is perpetuated, expected, and affirmed.  At the most, you can think of ceremonial Filipino traditions, like the cañao of the Cordilleras – or even a simple pa-bertdey - as a good example of potlatching.

Now did this happen in Le Cirque?  Was a kind of useful, valuable end met by the result of an alleged $20,000 dinner at one of the world’s most expensive restaurants?

Maybe, but consider this.

Conspicuous Consumption: Social Climbing By Wasting Stuff

Thorstein Veblen – the Viking god of economics – writes this in The Theory of the Leisure Class:

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.  As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method.  The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments.  Presents and feasts had probably another origin than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the substantial ground on which these usages rest.  Costly entertainments, such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end.

Veblen turns the potlatch on its head (somewhat).  Instead of giving away and redistributing useful stuff to the people, the people in the leisure class “redistribute” non-essential stuff amongst themselves.  At one level, you can think of Starbucks stickers, and on another level, you can think of seating and eating privileges at Le Cirque.  Prestige is still built, but the whole point is to rub it in everyone’s face.  Instead of redistribution, there is consumption. Rather than earn prestige, the end result is ignoble: show it off.

What (OK, allegedly) happened in Le Cirque is precisely that: a non-essential, non-useful redistribution of products and artefacts that don’t serve any useful, practical purpose in any level of society.  It was “showing the flag,” a canon of taste adapted to envy instead of prestige.

The whole “see and be seen” serves the function of prestige, and also serves the function of being counted among the prestigious.  Since not all of us can be accommodated in Le Cirque (much less judged), we do not share in what’s earned in the process.  The process is simple: when you consume, you also waste. When what is consumed is conspicuous, what is wasted is even more conspicuous.  And we all know how much we frown upon waste.

We partook of a delightful example of conspicuous consumption: snobbery and snootiness.  We were on the other end.

“Sayang”

If you’ve read my writings before, I always emphasize the value of charity: not because it’s conspicuous, but because it is a form of redistributing wealth, which keeps society together, a sort of communion for solidarity (take note of that catchphrase, kids).

We Filipinos have a very good word for it, a meaning that cannot be captured by the English language: sayang.  Sayang is not only about physical waste, but the feelings evoked from things that are wasted.  Never mind that there was nothing constructive gained over a meeting with Barack Obama, but there was nothing concrete gained over the President showing the flag.  In fact, we were even scandalized by the whole matter.

If we play by Remonde’s spin that it was a “simple dinner,” or Rep. Suarez’ claim that it was “no big deal,” then we expect it to be at its simplest, or that we should benefit from it.  That’s the whole point in ritual: everyone gains something from the redistribution of wealth.  In a cañao or a simple pa-bertdey, for example, everyone gets something: pork, a token of appreciation, or leftovers for that matter.  What did we gain, in the process?

The very names and prestige we accorded to them were abused and wasted, and we’re being spun around to think this is all “black propaganda.”

In the case of Le Cirque, we received absolutely nothing in return.  I’m not talking about leftovers or patikim, as much as the psycho-social benefits of having our officials and their hangers-on wine and dine in a fancy restaurant.  Our indignation is not as much caused by anyone rubbing ostentatious displays of personal wealth in our faces, but that whatever was spent at Le Cirque was from us.  It’s not just about bills or what was used to pay them, but the name and the prestige that came with them being Government officials of a country mired in the social injustices of hunger and poverty, dining in the sea bass and strip steaks and thousand-dollar wine bottles in a lavish dinner.  The name – pangalan - went to waste.

So were we screwed?  No.  Were we cheated?  Not exactly.  Were we hoodwinked, flim-flammed, and was the bill that big?  Absolutely not.  The root of our indignation, I think, is best expressed in a halting sort of sward:

Ine-etchos lang tayo ng mimijangu nating Prezidentebelles.

Wow.  That was an attack of Pagoda Cold Wave Lotion.  I’ll just sprak for the night.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to
the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his
own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in
evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore
brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive
feasts and entertainments. Presents and feasts had probably another
origin than that of naive ostentation, but they required their utility
for this purpose very early, and they have retained that character to
the present; so that their utility in this respect has now long been the
substantial ground on which these usages rest. Costly entertainments,
such as the potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this
end.

I’m ever upper class high society
God’s gift to ballroom notoriety
And I always fill my ballroom, the event is never small
The social pages say, I’ve got the biggest balls of all.

- AC/DC, Big Balls

“Insulting” and “brazen” are the best attacks the erudite critics of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo can come up with, following this “simple dinner” fiasco at Le Cirque.  Yet when the shit hits the fan, you look to the Presidential troubleshooter – Press Secretary Cerge Remonde – to run the kind of angry tirade expected of fuck-ups like these.  “Black propaganda,” he says, drinking McCarthyist Light to toast Bayan’s criticism of the alleged $20,000 dinner at one of New York’s fanciest restaurants.  This, Remonde says, is what you call “agitation propaganda” to make the people angry.

I call bollocks on this defense.

Now if it were a different group of big shots, there’s no reason to be angry at all.  A few eyebrows raised, yes; but when you’re the President of the Philippines, backed up with your delegation of supporters and hangers-on from the hollow halls of Congress, it’s a whole different ball game.  You have to play the ball a little different.  Those were simple acts of corruption, graft, and deceit – gratuitous, dirty balls – rubbed and slapped into the face of the public at the worst time possible, with the worst possible taste in the mouth.  So to speak.  The hell with “black propaganda;” this is a simple case of greed and tastelessness blown up to fit a global frame.

Ordinary employees are expected to turn in their receipts for trips or expenses with company money on the line.  The President should be no different; it’s not a matter of taste, it’s not a matter of delicadeza, but a simple matter of accounting.  A simple matter of standard operating procedure. It’s a matter of turning in the receipt to the proper channels the soonest you get home after paying for something.  It’s that simple.  Government officials do that on a regular basis.  Why should the President be any different?

That’s why people are angry.  It’s not because of “agitation propaganda,” black propaganda, cornflower propaganda, or what.  You shoved bollocks down their throats.  The anger that comes from simple acts of citizenship, the vigilance to guard taxes?  Now that’s agitation propaganda.

Never mind that Lito Lapid has to emphasize the sucky service in a French restaurant.  I changed my mind; they should have eaten at McDonald’s.  Or at the very least, hotdogs at Nathan’s: goes great with a bunch of balls.

At the end of the day, though, this is just another day, another walk in the park, another instance of corruption and excess by the Government.  It’s all expected, it’s all good.  Huff, sigh, bummer.  The blog madness will die down, people will start posting new shitty quotes on their Friendsterized Facebook accounts, and we’ll all be back in our fucked-up lives fucking everything up in the process.

I just hope that doesn’t happen.