Outrage against the Matsing
By Tals Diaz
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 10:05:00 12/02/2008
Filed Under: Culture (general), Humor and Satire, Travel & Commuting
MADRID, SPAIN—SO there I was, waiting for the next train, when a curious ad flashed on a huge plasma screen in the middle of the railway.
It began with a dotted red line streaking across a sepia-toned atlas, tracing the journey of a balikbayan from Espańa to Filipinas. On a sputtering motorbike, with a mountain of pasalubong (homecoming presents) hogging his back, balikbayan Nanding rode past rice fields and languid carabaos. He came home to his remote town in the Mountain Province in the Philippines, and was greeted by an excited throng.
The barangay (village) then gathered in a spacious hut, and an elderly man asked the burning question, “O, kamusta naman ang Madrid nila (Well, how’s your Madrid)?”
“Ang Cibeles,” Nanding replied, “Okay lang.” (Cibeles Restaurant is okay – refers to a popular Spanish coffee shop.)
(Subtitles scribbled below the screen in Spanish: “La Cibeles está bien.”)
“Museo del Prado?” Nanding continued, “K lang.”
Everyone was nodding, in rapt attention.
“Ang Jamon... masarap! Pero ang pinakagrabe ay ang Metro (The ham is delicious, but the best is the Metro),” said Nanding with dramatic flourish.
“Metro?” the villagers asked in unison, in the exact tone as Scooby Doo says, “Shaggy?”
Nanding then magically conjured a map of Madrid’s renowned underground subway, and laid it on the bamboo table. The crowd let out oohs and...actually it was more like “Owwws...”
The barangay was so impressed by the concept that an elder suggested they build their own Metro. Using rudimentary pulleys, cement blocks, and of course, the trusty carabao, they hauled ass and built an exact replica of a station of the modern Madrid Metro, connecting two sides of their little town framed by rice paddies and lush mountains.
The last scene showed the enthralled crowd riding the underground subway. They stopped for a waiting goat.
The closing spiel, translated from Spanish, proclaimed, “The Metro that all cities would like to have.”
Diatribal groups
I burst out laughing in the blasé crowd in the station at that moment.
But something tugged at my conscience. I had bet my brown skin that not many other Pinoys would have found it that funny. Sure enough, when I checked out the ad on YouTube, I opened the same old can of worms; the comments were the usual diatribe posted by angry Pinoys from all over the globe:
“Offensive!” said one poster. “Why bring back those delicate issues in this commercial that has nothing to do with the fact that many Filipinos are proud of their Spanish heritage?”
“Insulting!” said another.
This one is my favorite. Pass the thesaurus. “The f***ing alacrity and braggadocio! It’s rather insulting, really.”
Another said that it depicts Pinoys as perennial copycats of our “colonial masters,” and that it plays on stereotypes that we are backward, naďve and chaotic, that it doesn’t help promote the ties between the two countries, yada yada, yada.
If I may now cue in The Joker: “Why so serious?”
Twitchy sensitivity
This is the same onion-skinned, twitchy sensitivity about our national image that sparked the brouhaha in 1999 about a chocolate-covered cookie named “Filipinos.”
Our government filed a diplomatic protest against the government of Spain, the manufacturer Nabisco Iberia and the European Commission, because the biscuit’s name, it said, was an offense to us as a race. The senator who authored the protest claimed that the candy’s name was offensive because it insinuated that we Filipinos are “dark on the outside and white on the inside.”
Ex-Philippine President Joseph Estrada called the brand “an insult.” (He was, after all, an expert on all things insulting.)
Honestly, I had tasted these Filipinos and thought they were really good. I wonder if Mongols had the same reaction after the pencils were named after them. Or if the French became all fired up when they became a prefix for oily potato sticks.
More recently, there was the “Desperate Housewives” issue, when an enraged multitude of Pinoys the world over demanded an apology from NBC and actress Terri Hatcher for a line in her script—“’coz I would just like to make sure they are not from some med school in the Philippines.”
On cue, like Pavlov’s dog salivating after a bell strike, the usual angry ripostes.
Victimhood
We truly wear this victimhood like a perpetual chip on our shoulder. Do we equate sensitivity with patriotism? If that were so, then colonial mentality has simply mutated into distorted nationalism.
How have we become so oversensitive to such things, and yet be so tolerant, “a resilient people” even (I bloody hate that description, by the way), of many other things I deem even more humiliating and dehumanizing?
We are so pained by others’ opinion of us and yet we are hardly critical of ourselves.
Come to think of it, what is an insult?
I find it more insulting to see people pissing shamelessly on our streets. I get even more pissed knowing the monkeys (matsing) that run our government are crapping on our democracy. (Apologies if that is an insult to monkeys everywhere). I am outraged that our treasured, most famous island is slowly sinking from the sheer weight of human waste and cut-and-paste development.
I am deeply upset that our seas are being polluted and forests plundered by The Corporation in the name of the bottomline. I am angry that I’ve been paying my income taxes for over a decade, but still wonder to this day if I had just funded the new SUVs in a congressman’s convoy.
I am offended by the fact that many of us hardly take offense at any of these.
Whew. All this bitter talk has left me hankering for something sweet. I think I’ll pass by a store and grab a pack of Filipinos. They’re really good, but sometimes can be a mouthful.
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