Jack The Scribbler

I’m sorry sir, that it had come to this.
If I had any kind of influence, I would gladly use it to have the blacklist against you revoked.
I would have wanted a multi-awarded actor such as yourself to visit our capital and appreciate its charms, which includes the stench of cockroaches.
Or at least that’s according to Claire Danes who made that remarkable, if brave observation fifteen years ago.
Of the world’s many poor, underdeveloped capitals that stank to high heavens, she had to choose to visit Manila, thereby forcing her to take in the powerful scent of the city’s armpit districts.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pleasant.

Alec Baldwin on a block of Monterrey cheese as conceptualized and created by an artist named Rakka on Flickr.com who has been gracious enough to allow use of his/her work. For more of the artist's work, please click on the photo.

However, Manila’s City Council felt differently about the whole matter.
Just days after Ms. Danes reportedly embarrassed the Philippine capital, the body issued a resolution that banned the actress from Manila.
While the move was hailed by all manner of lobbyists, sycophants, and self-proclaimed patriots, the order didn’t do anyone any good. Like most laws in this country, the resolution only showed the public that council members were indeed hard at work, protecting the nation’s pride and integrity at the expense of the truth. After Manila’s supposed assault on her olfactory senses (and her critical faculties), little was heard from Ms. Danes.
I’m sure the actress was hardly interested about ever coming back to the Philippines, a sentiment shared to this day by little brown Americans headed for — or currently living in — North America and various parts of the world.
Thankfully, ever since that incident, progress has arrived in Manila and in the country in general.
Fifteen years after Ms. Danes showed that she was right on the nose, the city and its offended residents have moved on.
No longer does Manila carry the stench that so repelled Ms. Danes, although on hot summer nights, it retains a slight hint of piss and sweat, making beggars and street people long for the good, old days.
Meanwhile, its residents have discovered the wonders of perfume, which many of them use in cloying amounts.
Indeed, many Filipinos may live in hovels, earn starvation wages, encounter regular police harassment, suffer from daily hunger, but we do smell good (and our prepaid cellphones have enough credit to send a text message to say that we’ll be late).
After all, looking and smelling good is a matter of national priority and cultural pride, besides making babies and allowing ourselves to be raped by US servicemen so that we could get US visas.
During the past decade and a half, many Filipinos have also been  introduced to the internet, a vast computer network developed by former US vice president Al Gore.
Faster and easier access to information — false, factual, and trivial — have made many of them more small-minded and parochial, jingoistic and oversensitive.
When you cracked that joke about Filipina mail order brides on US television, the whole country heard it via YouTube and read all about it through their email inboxes.
Naturally, they were appalled and disgusted at your remark, even though they cared little for Filipinas who dreamed of marrying foreign males they hardly ever knew.
In any case, the remark earned you a ban from the Philippines’ Bureau of Immigration.
You’re in good company.
After Danes, a Hong Kong-based journalist was also banned for telling the truth.
In his column, Mr. Chip Tsao called the Philippines “a nation of servants,” a piece of information that was factually accurate.
Except that it wasn’t something that enhanced our exalted sense of self.
I guess you very well know by now that Filipinos take everything seriously, save for political and economic reform.
This is the reason why it might take awhile before you can get the ban lifted.
In the meantime, let me just say that as a Filipino who is obviously in the minority, I apologize. I am so sorry that you had to be prompted to say you were sorry.

N. B. Good luck with having kids. And send my regards to Ms. Basinger. That is, if you’re still on good terms.

Chip Tsao should take a break from beating deadlines.
Or perhaps even quit the writing business altogether.
Just recently, the Hong Kong-based writer wrote a column that failed to bring his message across to his readers.
Not that that’s such a big deal.
Many of his Filipino counterparts are a chip off the old block.
Even on slow news days — in which deadline beaters have more time to check their facts, grammar, and sentence construction — Filipino journalists regularly fail their readers, a fault of either their education, intelligence, career choice, or their publishers.
Of course, I may be unduly incriminating myself, being currently employed by a media company.

Hong Kong-based columnist Chip Tsao said he was being satirical when he wrote that the Philippines was a "nation of servants." Photo courtesy of www.pep.ph

Nevertheless, as a struggling semi-professional humorist, I have yet to encounter a situation similar to the one faced by Tsao a week or two ago.
Our man in Hong Kong was roundly criticized for writing that the Philippines was a “nation of servants,” in a column entitled “The War at Home.”
The remark prompted many Filipinos — especially leftists who have nothing better to do — to openly condemn what he wrote, express their heartfelt indignation, organize demonstrations, and pressure Manila to file a protest against Hong Kong, and its parent company, China Inc.
In less than 48 hours, Tsao and his publisher apologized, with our man saying that what he wrote was, you know, satire.
Like most bloggers and self-proclaimed journalists, I remain grossly uninformed about abstruse issues that govern humanity, including, but not limited to, the life and times of crazy, middle-aged Asian men (i.e., myself in a few years).
But I’m not exactly stupid, despite appearances to the contrary.
I happen to know a thing or two about satire, having read the Bible when I was in seventh grade, Gary Lising’s “How Green is Your Mind?” in high school, and Amado Guerrero’s “Philippine Society and Revolution” as a zit-faced college freshman.
Upon hearing Mr. T use the “S” word to justify his writing, my built-in bullshit detector went off, a device whose batteries I thought had long expired.
I went online to see what the hell the whole thing was all about.
I read Tsao’s column. Several times.
It was satire, no question about it.
But it was not that well-written.
As a result, functionally illiterate Filipinos — including those who believe that Al Gore invented the internet — were misled into thinking that Tsao was serious.
Owing to his failure to make his point obvious, Tsao should apply for a sabbatical while taking comfort in reading the badly-written comments and/or reviews about Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
But at the same time, we Filipinos should get a grip.
For starters, we should stop being oversensitive.
Filipinos are fair game, much like Americans and Australians, Canadians and Kazakhs.
And that means no unnecessary outbursts of patriotic sentiment, no overdramatized acts of nationalism whenever someone makes a pejorative comment about us and our country.
After all, however anyone looks at it, there appears to be very little to rejoice about being Filipino nowadays.
And our collective inability to appreciate satire, however poorly-written, doesn’t really help our race any.