Of contradictions, edifying Anne Curtis and celebrating the fall of Bataan

Anne Curtis, she who allegedly told some of her showbiz colleagues that she can easily buy them off. The same Anne just recently again allegedly told the ex-boyfriend of her sister that he is not even classy enough to be in a party.  Such a bad-ass attitude allegedly for a celebrity whose pouting lips and beautiful face have endorsed so many beauty products, and yet her endorsement apparently is working.  Her face is all over billboards and print-ads, her alleged bitchiness notwithstanding.

This rumored attitude of Anne has turned her into an easy target for criticism, if one follows the tweets and posts of her detractors in social media.  When she was reportedly stung by a jelly-fish in the set of her soap opera where she plays a mermaid in love with a human, cyberspace exploded with a frenzy of celebratory jubilation.  To her critics, karma was the clear writing on Anne’s wall.

Yet, Anne remains as an adored icon to many of her fans.  Her pouting, thick lips and mestiza look are symbolic of a beauty that many idolize and worship, regardless of her alleged bad-ass attitude. She remains a prized asset to her network and a prized possession to her handlers and managers.  She is a dream worth treasuring, even if she can be a nightmare to those she allegedly threatened to buy, or demeaned to be not classy enough.

Indeed, as Anne Curtis has shown, we are a country that is so preoccupied with celebrity that sometimes we can overlook the ugliness and just focus on the beauty.

This is also true even in the confused ways we celebrate the heroes in us.

We devote days to celebrate Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, and even Ninoy Aquino.  August 21 is the day for Ninoy, a day when he was gunned down at the tarmac of the airport now named after him, while the day we celebrate in honor of Rizal is the day he was executed in Luneta.  But for Bonifacio, it is the day he was born that we celebrate.

What are we really celebrating for in our heroes—a birthday or a death anniversary?

April 9, a day of infamy, as it is the Fall of Bataan, is a day we also celebrate.  Many brave soldiers, Filipino and American, died on this day.  It was the beginning of three years of hell.  It is a day worth remembering for the images of death and defeat that it evoked, and yet we celebrate it as a holiday.  We now call it as the Day of Valor (Araw ng Kagitingan), which to a critical mind can appear as effectively implicating our sense of valor in a discourse of defeat in death instead of triumph in life.
 
The question is this: should we celebrate a day when our brave soldiers, which included two of my paternal uncles one of whom I was named after, succumbed to the forces of the Japanese Imperial Army?

My paternal grandmother, bless her soul, never ever saw the remains of Pay Tonio and Pay Peping, two of the many Filipino soldiers who became casualties of the fall of Bataan.  Until now, we don’t know how they died.  Whether in battle, or bayonetted by the Japanese while marching to Capas, or died in the concentration camps there, whatever was the manner of their deaths, April 9 is a day that my Lola Owa never celebrated until the day she died.

But we do.  We celebrate the day they, and other nameless heroes like them, suffered their deaths.

And we don’t even call it a commemoration.  We don’t even call it a day of mourning.

We celebrate April 9 as a holiday.

One may find it hard to make a connection between the way we celebrate a day of death and defeat, and the manner many idolize Anne Curtis despite her alleged bad attitude.

But a deeper excursion into the structure of the seemingly contradictory celebration of a day of mourning, and of an actress reportedly having a hefty dose of being full of herself, is a journey not only into the depths of our complexity as a people, but also on how we cope in the face of crisis. We are a country deeply enmeshed with fascinating contradictions.

Our mixed templates for judging what and who to celebrate may render us vulnerable to criticism of being confused as a people.  These criticisms can further be used to ground and define our lack of development, as an explanatory variable for our current economic and political troubles.

For one, the fact that a big part of the fan-base of Anne still blindly defends and idolizes her, in the face of all the allegations against her, can be used as evidence of how our sense of propriety are so messed up. This, critics can quickly add, is the very reason why we have corrupt and inept politicians still winning elections.  People can easily ignore their dirty deeds, or their laziness and ineptitude, as long as they possess the charisma, evoke a sense of being with the people, and directly feed people’s fantasies of princes, celluloid heroes, and benighted messiahs being sons of heroes and near-saints, and people from the masses, riding jeepneys and roaming the palengkes.

When we just laugh at our tragedies, and turn our pain into materials for comic relief, critics can easily call us as petty, silly and deserving of our fate to be in the lower echelons of development and at the top of corruption index rankings.  A people who will celebrate a day that is associated with defeat and death can easily be dismissed to have no sense of history, no recollection of collective pain, and no idea of how to translate the bitter memory of war into righteous anger to exorcise our past of its ghosts.  People who idolize the corrupt and the human rights violator par excellence have lost their moral bearings.

Our critics are calling us confused.

Indeed, our tendency to worship, which we reserve not only for those we have elevated as heroes in our history, but also now include those who we have elevated as celebrities in our present—from actors like Anne Curtis, to boxers like Manny Pacquiao, to politicians like Chiz Escudero, may appear to have undermined our material and emotional state of development as a people.

Indeed, our tendency to make light of our tragedies is easily criticized.  Our tendency to trade images with substance, and to set aside the pain and bad attitude in favor of the pleasure and the good vibes may appear to have diluted our ethical sense of what is right.  The ease by which we idolize politicians rumored to be plunderers, or womanizers, or human rights abusers, but who assume images to which we can relate to; or edify bitching actresses who ease a bit of the pain we feel every time we see their beautiful faces on TV, are said to have compromised our moral compass of what is good.

Other people are bound to explode in violent anger when one assaults their sensibilities.  Riots, bloody revolutions, and ethnic violence have all marred the historical landscapes of many societies.  We saw this in Libya and Egypt, during the Arab spring.  We continue to see it in Syria and in Ukraine.

But we have not seen these here in us.

We have gone through the most painful years of a dictatorship, but we only managed to vent our anger at its pictures and shadows.  We have seen the corrupt pass through us in a procession of greed but the only violence we have inflicted on them is by turning them into a bad joke, and by painting them as our harshest caricatures using cyberspace as a canvass.  

We have learned the trick of ignoring the pain and just move on to face the challenges that come our way.  And it did not harm at all that we evinced a smile or even break into laughter along the way.

And at the height of a crisis moment, as in the case of Typhoon Yolanda, when everything that can be lost are actually lost—from properties, to spouses, to children, to siblings, to sanity—those that have the most right to be in pain, are also the ones who can muster strength and celebrate life, and in the process, teach the rest of the world on how to live.

In short, deeply embedded in our arsenal is a kind of positive thinking that may make us appear confused.  We may look naïve and gullible, easy to be exploited by the corrupt and the venal. We may look dense, unaware of the evil that lurks.  We may seem to be historically unaware of our past, unable to correctly interpret its relevance to our present, leading us to celebrate our defeat and elevate as heroes those who do not deserve the title.

This is why we edify Anne Curtis, the beautiful face allegedly having a bad attitude.  This is also why we celebrate in a day where we should actually be mourning.

But what our critics easily forget is that when some of us celebrate the Fall of Bataan, it is not the death of our soldiers and the defeat of our army that is celebrated.  When some celebrate Anne Curtis, it is not her bad-ass attitude that is edified.

Some people celebrate the lessons of hope despite the tragedy.  Some edify the gift of beauty despite the ugliness of human frailty.

You see, an ordinary person can only see the pain and the ugliness.

It takes a bit of courage and a lot of spunk to go beyond them, while being cognizant of them.

The challenge therefore is to cultivate a sense of consciousness that goes beyond the pain and the ugliness, but without forgetting these.

For indeed, if we are not careful, then we will keep on celebrating days of infamy without understanding their relevance to our quest for our ideal as a community of Filipino nations of various ethnicities, genders and classes under one country.  And we will be edifying celebrities with bad-ass attitudes as if they are the epitome of virtue.

After all, hope is much stronger when one appreciates the wounds of despair.  And beauty is even more rewarding when one sees it in opposition to the ugliness that it seeks to negate.

In the end, hope without consciousness of the past is merely an illusion.  And beauty without virtue is nothing but terror masked by fantasy.   



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of this website.