Bagong bayan
“For Jose Rizal, Bagumbayan was not only the place of his own heroic martyrdom, but the very home and spirit of his dream of a free and prosperous Philippines... We now invoke that spirit in our quest for an even newer Bagumbayan… Bagumbayan is no longer just a place. It is we, the Filipino people, and all that we dream of being and becoming as a nation.”
THERE’S THE RUB
By Conrado de Quiros - Philippine Daily Inquirer
Last December 30, Rizal Day, I saw an interesting ad in this newspaper. It was a call for volunteers to join a “covenant for a new Philippines,” to be called Bagumbayan. It was signed by Richard Gordon and several public and private officials.
The Bagumbayan “manifesto” notes that this country has reached the utter pits: “Fear and helplessness have led many citizens to become inured to corruption and injustice” and “despair has driven many to hard and lonely work abroad... We need change on all levels of society -- not just of men, but in men… Above all we need to think, to feel, to act once again as one nation with one destiny, building on both our brightest prospects for the future and on the noblest traditions of our history.
“For Jose Rizal, Bagumbayan was not only the place of his own heroic martyrdom, but the very home and spirit of his dream of a free and prosperous Philippines... We now invoke that spirit in our quest for an even newer Bagumbayan… Bagumbayan is no longer just a place. It is we, the Filipino people, and all that we dream of being and becoming as a nation.”
It’s not entirely new in its call for some kind of moral renewal or for new -- and young -- leaders to come forth and set this country aright, replacing despair with hope, replacing fear and helplessness with purpose and potency. Kapatiran is doing that already and has the added virtue of being a political party. Yes, virtue: Nandy Pacheco is right to say that politics is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. It is how you use politics that makes it good or bad. It behooves every reasonable person to be more, rather than less, political because that is the only way to make politics serve the nation and not screw it.
It is not original either in that it is has all the earmarks of a campaign vehicle, not unlike “Jeep ni Erap” [“Joseph Estrada’s jeepney”], which like the jeepney maker Sarao has pretty much disappeared from the face of the earth. Or which stalled long ago on a lonely road after being driven by a drunken driver and has been picked clean by the neighborhood. Gordon at least has not been coy about his presidential ambitions.
But Bagumbayan does have something new and meritorious, which is that it harks back to a storied past. Indeed, calls on Filipinos today to look back at that past and draw threads of continuity from it. I know a bit of where Gordon’s inspiration for Bagumbayan came from, and that is from the Light and Sound historical tableau offered to the public at Baluarte San Diego (a block or so away from San Agustin Church) in Intramuros. I saw it some months back and was quite impressed by its insight as much as by its artistry.
It offers the fantastic image of the Filipino struggle for liberty, or for a “bagong bayan” [new nation] (“bagumbayan” being a contraction of it), a new world, a free world, as one of breaking down walls. Not least literally, as Intramuros means Walled City. But as the tableau points out, Spanish rule did not just build physical walls, it built spiritual walls as well. The latter included the walls of social caste (the inert, or immutable, social structures of the time openly invites the word “caste”), with the “indios” [natives] occupying the lowest rung, impregnably barred from going up, and the walls of an engendered inferiority complex, which even more impregnably barred the indios from becoming free men.
Rizal’s contributions to breaking down those walls were awesome, and you can’t help but feel a great sense of loss, and anger, as Rizal’s last moments on earth are reenacted -- or more than enacted, brought to life (and death) -- in that tableau. That death, of course, brought life to this nation by giving it to glimpse what it could be, or what it could build, which was a bagong bayan, a new world, a free world. Truly, bagumbayan is more than just a place, it is vision. Truly it is more than a spot where a martyred hero died, it is a place where a nation was born.
But here’s the part where I’m unhappy with the way the framers of Bagumbayan, the covenant, envision their cause, or have set their course about. It misses a great deal of what Rizal’s wall-breaking (or ball-breaking?) was all about.
Rizal, of course, didn’t just fight Spanish tyranny by criticizing it, he fought it by proving that the indio was the equal of any Spaniard. At the time that was the most subversive thought that could ever be ventured and Rizal was doubly subversive not just by venturing the thought but by embodying it. Indeed, he was triply subversive by proving not just that he was the equal of the Spaniard overlord but was superior to him. It wasn’t entirely ironic that the Spaniards executed him for rocking their rule to the core. He did. Arguably more than even Andres Bonifacio with his Katipunan.
But Rizal did also criticize tyranny, ferociously, resolutely, if also marvelously wittily and wisely. He was a satirist par excellence and wrote savagely about the friars, in particular, in his essays and novels. He arraigned ignorance and injustice and hypocrisy and fought them at every turn with every fiber of his being. You can’t build a new world on the rotting and rotten foundations of injustice and abuse. You can only do it by razing them down.
The last is the part I don’t see in Bagumbayan, as well indeed as in other similar crusades or campaigns or movements that claim to be “positive” in presumed contrast to the “negative” one of being intolerant of intolerance. Those two -- indicting injustice and abuse and discovering loftiness of purpose -- are not opposed; they are the two sides of the same coin. Leaders do not emerge by waiting for the old and cruel ones to die or go away so that they can replace them, leaders spring forth from the smithy of struggle.
Rizal did. And so even in death birthed a bagong bayan.
THERE’S THE RUB
By Conrado de Quiros - Philippine Daily Inquirer
Last December 30, Rizal Day, I saw an interesting ad in this newspaper. It was a call for volunteers to join a “covenant for a new Philippines,” to be called Bagumbayan. It was signed by Richard Gordon and several public and private officials.
The Bagumbayan “manifesto” notes that this country has reached the utter pits: “Fear and helplessness have led many citizens to become inured to corruption and injustice” and “despair has driven many to hard and lonely work abroad... We need change on all levels of society -- not just of men, but in men… Above all we need to think, to feel, to act once again as one nation with one destiny, building on both our brightest prospects for the future and on the noblest traditions of our history.
“For Jose Rizal, Bagumbayan was not only the place of his own heroic martyrdom, but the very home and spirit of his dream of a free and prosperous Philippines... We now invoke that spirit in our quest for an even newer Bagumbayan… Bagumbayan is no longer just a place. It is we, the Filipino people, and all that we dream of being and becoming as a nation.”
It’s not entirely new in its call for some kind of moral renewal or for new -- and young -- leaders to come forth and set this country aright, replacing despair with hope, replacing fear and helplessness with purpose and potency. Kapatiran is doing that already and has the added virtue of being a political party. Yes, virtue: Nandy Pacheco is right to say that politics is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. It is how you use politics that makes it good or bad. It behooves every reasonable person to be more, rather than less, political because that is the only way to make politics serve the nation and not screw it.
It is not original either in that it is has all the earmarks of a campaign vehicle, not unlike “Jeep ni Erap” [“Joseph Estrada’s jeepney”], which like the jeepney maker Sarao has pretty much disappeared from the face of the earth. Or which stalled long ago on a lonely road after being driven by a drunken driver and has been picked clean by the neighborhood. Gordon at least has not been coy about his presidential ambitions.
But Bagumbayan does have something new and meritorious, which is that it harks back to a storied past. Indeed, calls on Filipinos today to look back at that past and draw threads of continuity from it. I know a bit of where Gordon’s inspiration for Bagumbayan came from, and that is from the Light and Sound historical tableau offered to the public at Baluarte San Diego (a block or so away from San Agustin Church) in Intramuros. I saw it some months back and was quite impressed by its insight as much as by its artistry.
It offers the fantastic image of the Filipino struggle for liberty, or for a “bagong bayan” [new nation] (“bagumbayan” being a contraction of it), a new world, a free world, as one of breaking down walls. Not least literally, as Intramuros means Walled City. But as the tableau points out, Spanish rule did not just build physical walls, it built spiritual walls as well. The latter included the walls of social caste (the inert, or immutable, social structures of the time openly invites the word “caste”), with the “indios” [natives] occupying the lowest rung, impregnably barred from going up, and the walls of an engendered inferiority complex, which even more impregnably barred the indios from becoming free men.
Rizal’s contributions to breaking down those walls were awesome, and you can’t help but feel a great sense of loss, and anger, as Rizal’s last moments on earth are reenacted -- or more than enacted, brought to life (and death) -- in that tableau. That death, of course, brought life to this nation by giving it to glimpse what it could be, or what it could build, which was a bagong bayan, a new world, a free world. Truly, bagumbayan is more than just a place, it is vision. Truly it is more than a spot where a martyred hero died, it is a place where a nation was born.
But here’s the part where I’m unhappy with the way the framers of Bagumbayan, the covenant, envision their cause, or have set their course about. It misses a great deal of what Rizal’s wall-breaking (or ball-breaking?) was all about.
Rizal, of course, didn’t just fight Spanish tyranny by criticizing it, he fought it by proving that the indio was the equal of any Spaniard. At the time that was the most subversive thought that could ever be ventured and Rizal was doubly subversive not just by venturing the thought but by embodying it. Indeed, he was triply subversive by proving not just that he was the equal of the Spaniard overlord but was superior to him. It wasn’t entirely ironic that the Spaniards executed him for rocking their rule to the core. He did. Arguably more than even Andres Bonifacio with his Katipunan.
But Rizal did also criticize tyranny, ferociously, resolutely, if also marvelously wittily and wisely. He was a satirist par excellence and wrote savagely about the friars, in particular, in his essays and novels. He arraigned ignorance and injustice and hypocrisy and fought them at every turn with every fiber of his being. You can’t build a new world on the rotting and rotten foundations of injustice and abuse. You can only do it by razing them down.
The last is the part I don’t see in Bagumbayan, as well indeed as in other similar crusades or campaigns or movements that claim to be “positive” in presumed contrast to the “negative” one of being intolerant of intolerance. Those two -- indicting injustice and abuse and discovering loftiness of purpose -- are not opposed; they are the two sides of the same coin. Leaders do not emerge by waiting for the old and cruel ones to die or go away so that they can replace them, leaders spring forth from the smithy of struggle.
Rizal did. And so even in death birthed a bagong bayan.
Labels: bagong bayan, bagumbayan, president gordon
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