But I find use of the term “colonial mentality” as mere name calling and not very useful. Certainly, Rudi Giuliani doesn’t know jack about leadership in the Philippine context, but I don’t know that he claims to.

In any event, colonial mentality, if at all, it’s a disease of the elite, not of the masa.

Go talk to just about any taxi driver or almost anyone living in the province. But head over to a coffee shop or hotel lobby in Makati or to a Forbes Park soiree and you’ll get another, more toxic view.

From the KMU website:

For the last two decades, the name Crispin B. Beltran has been associated with pickets, demonstrations, strikes, and generally everything connected to the militant labor movement. Not surprising with him being the chairman of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU).

Since August of 2001, however, he has become known as something else – a member of one of the biggest, most influential bastions of conservatism in the country, the House of Representatives. From 2001-2003, he was one of three Bayan Muna solons. From 2004 up to present, he now stands as the chairman and representative for labor and urban poor concerns of the Anakpawis partylist. Ka Bel breathes, lives and practices the politics of change and nationalism with the same fervor he does as a leader of the parliament of the streets

There’s more about him here and Carol Araullo has a nice summary here.

But if you want to read a real story - I mean a real, life story - read this pdf. It’s a love story. And it captures so much of the reality of life in the Philippines that I’ve come to understand so much better. So few people in the U.S. have any concept of the realities described in this story - truly Dickensian but oh so common here.

For you not familiar with the Philippines, the story above is set initially in Tondo. And it helps to understand the character of Tondo, which of course isn’t easily captured briefly. It’s captured beautifully in many many books and stories that I can’t recount here. But you might at least start with the Wikipedia entry.

This past weekend I didn’t get off may ass to go attend the 4th Philippines Blog Converence at U.P. (worked instead) even though I was at my pied-à-terre here in Diliman. I regret that.

I still have my “street cards” I bought about four years ago. Yes, they’re done by Hugh Macleod. And purchased back before he got web-famous. Before he did Stormhoek. Before he did English Cut for Thomas Mahon. The sucker was struggling by selling business cards. And even though I had to have them shipped from the U.K. to California - I bought.

And they are uniquely fitting for me (or anyone) here in the Philippines, I believe:

And I was struck by elegance and clearness of Thomas Paine’s writing in the initial quote. How deft is this turn of phrase?:

however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding

The size trumps!

This discussion on the Harvard campus two afternoons ago with Clay Sharky (as captured by Dr. Weinberger) is covering exactly what we (well, people like the Black & White Movement and others) are wrestling with here in the Philippines today, over the past few weeks, indeed over the last decade.

Just a taste:

Clay: What’s happened to the protest march?

Gene: Lack of a tie between the act and the long-term goal. The aim is to threaten a power structure. If it’s just a flash, it doesn’t have that effect.

My take on this is the title of this post.

The book wanders the fine line between fiction and memoir. It’s the story of a Nigerian intellectual living in New York returning home to Lagos, a story told in part on the Teju Cole blog. Reading it, I realized how many books I’ve read about northerners encountering Africa for the first time and how precious few I’ve read by Africans returning. There’s a commonality to the narratives - a narrative of discovery, combined with a search for one’s place in this overwhelming and beautiful world. But they diverge sharply - even in the best of the Northern narratives, there’s a sense of a search for the “real” Africa, which leads to either a xenophilic embrace or a recoiling from a Conradian heart of darkness.

Cole is looking for something else entirely - we see him search for his possible place in a Nigeria that’s unfamilar, strange and sometimes unfriendly to him. He gets ripped off by petrol dealers, threatened by “area boys” when his family imports a load of school supplies, and stands out as a kind of foreigner to bus drivers and market women. His childhood friends greet him with warmth, but he struggles to put himself in their shoes, surviving power cuts and insultingly low salaries. He’s stunned by the criminality, the corruption, the struggle each resident is occupied with, making it each day in Lagos.

The most moving moments, I found, were the ones where Cole sees reference points, not of the Nigeria he remembers, but of New York intellectual culture. A woman on the public bus is reading Michael Ondaatje, and we watch Cole struggle to place her within the Nigeria he’s encountering again, wondering where she found this thick, rich book. He finds a jazz record store that doesn’t sell records, but pirated copies, the source CDs too expensive to be sold legitimately. A music school teaches privleged Nigerian students the piano, the violin, the cello… but African teachers are paid a small fraction of the salary of foreign ones. He’s looking for a way he might live in this Lagos and continue life as he knows it, and it’s a losing battle.

Jenny, my wife, says I should write a book about my experience coming to the Philippines. I always thought it should be fiction, drawing upon my experiences. I dunno. Maybe.

In finding my place in the Philippines I’ve encountered the “unfamiliar, strange and sometimes unfriendly” and I can certainly identify with the feeling that it’s a “losing battle,” that I’m a piece of transplanted tissue the body is doing its best to reject.

It’s not a losing battle, of course. And I’m no more of a piece of foreign tissue being rejected than any of us here, in our own ways, are. I’m claiming my place, as part of society here. And that’s one of the concepts that the book would lead to, I believe.

This is fabulous. It’s advanced for a traditional media outlet. But it goes to the heart of the (now ages old) hypertext concept Tim Berners-Lee implemented when he put forth the foundations of the internet and specifically www services with http.

If they provided, on the same page, the ability to comment and read comments made by those of us formerly referred to as the audience but who are actually also producers of informed news and opinion, we would really be transforming things here in the Philippines.

He’s basically saying that just because something deserves to be covered (in the media, including the blogosphere) doesn’t mean bloggers will blog it.

But he’s presuming that the criteria for “deserves to be covered” is something other than something that someone, somewhere cares to blog about.

What qualifies something as deserving of being covered? I take the apparently contrarian view that it’s something that someone, somewhere cares to blog about. How else are you going to define “deserving”?

Update: Ah, he’s saying it “doesn’t rise to the top of the blogosphere.” Well, shoot. In a long tail, miscellaneous environment, rising to the top is meaningless, isn’t it?