For hours we discussed the state of Philippine politics, American foreign policy, and neo-colonialism, complete with my requisite apologies for the sins of my ancestors, when the conversation turned to a recent piece of news. In an episode of a popular TV series in the United States, Desperate Housewives, a character had made a disparaging remark about medical schools in the Philippines. Why should Filipinos be so concerned about what goes on in American television? Why should Filipinos give American pop-culture much thought, if they ever give it any thought at all?

BY DENVER NICKS
DEMOCRATIC SPACE
Contributed to Bulatlat
Vol. VIII, No. 5, march 2-8, 2008

At a small table near the sea, on the pier in Tacloban jutting into the thin stretch of ocean that separates Leyte from Samar. I sat and drank with two friends. We laughed and chided one another, and slowly, imperceptibly, imbibed our way into that ever delicious, ever achievable buzz, in which the booze and conversation begins to flow, easy and passionate like the waves lapping against the seawall below.

I had been traveling throughout the south of the Philippines with a good Filipino friend, Rick, who I had temporarily employed as my translator and drinking buddy while I covered a story on a group of landless farmers from the southern island of Mindanao. Sitting with our host in Tacloban, a passionate activist and refreshingly assertive Filipina, Rick and I punctuated the clean sea-breeze with drags of our Marlboro brand American cigarettes, made in the Philippines for domestic consumption.

For hours we discussed the state of Philippine politics, American foreign policy, and neo-colonialism, complete with my requisite apologies for the sins of my ancestors, when the conversation turned to a recent piece of news. In an episode of a popular TV series in the United States, Desperate Housewives, a character had made a disparaging remark about medical schools in the Philippines. The TV moment was a nearly invisible blip in American popular culture, but an occasion for national uproar in the Philippines. Such was the hysteria that the Philippine Senate issued an official condemnation, and the President herself decried the comment as a “racist slur.” And across the great ocean, in that land of promise to where Filipino doctors and nurses emigrate every year in greater numbers than citizens of any other country in the world, the sound of crickets might have been heard on the landscape of pop-cultural debate. No one in the United States seemed to care, or even cared to notice.

My Filipino comrades-in-drink were upset at the ignorant and careless remark. Just look, they said, at what racists our former colonial masters continue to be – the evil superpower, the American neo-imperialists, the second coming of the eugenicists. Some things, they seemed to say, never change.

I took a long drink of my beer, and a longer drag of my cigarette. And then I really pissed them off. I told my friends that yes, I agreed, it was clearly an ignorant and careless thing to say. Yes, they have every right to express outrage and demand an apology from the TV show (which the Philippines received, incidentally). But at the end of the day, when all the American viewers of Desperate Housewives, and all the balikbayan doctors and nurses serving admirably in their indispensable roles, and all the outraged Filipinos, and everyone else is accounted for, none of it, really, matters at all.

What to Filipinos felt like an explicit and malevolent insult with insidious racial overtones and a clearly insensitive reference to a legacy of colonialism and racial hierarchy, was, in reality, nothing but a careless and almost surely harmless remark. While my friends were convinced that the show had written the comment into the script as a cheap joke, taking advantage of a recent scandal surrounding nursing schools in the Philippines, I was and remain certain that it was nothing of the sort.

The fact is, I tried to explain, that the writers of Desperate Housewives had probably not thought much about the line at all. A joke about bad doctors is needed … think of a poor country whence many a doctor comes … enter into word-processor … onto next line in script. There is simply no reason why any writer of a major American television show would malevolently write an insult about Philippine medical schools. And not because they aren’t dastardly, decaying disseminators of substandard medical education—which they aren’t—but because the writers of a major American television show simply wouldn’t care to.

Most Americans, I told my friends, don’t even know where the Philippines is. Americans, by and large, simply don’t give the Philippines much thought, if they ever give it any thought at all. Why then should Filipinos be so concerned about what goes on in American television? Why should Filipinos give American pop-culture much thought, if they ever give it any thought at all?

The truly sad part of the whole fiasco was not the ignorant and probably innocuous insult on a vapid piece of valueless American television, but that Filipinos were so outraged by it. Why should they care about an American television show that featured such a comment? Have we not, I asked my friends, spent the better part of an evening decrying American political intuitions, and condescendingly insulting the fabric of American culture? Do not people around the world burn American flags as fast as whatever factory it is that provides such flags for immolation can turn them out? They do, of course, and those Americans who get their panties in a twist over such empty displays of cultural mud slinging are equally misguided.

Of course there is a difference here between the cultural power of the United States, and that of the Philippines. American pop-culture is transmitted throughout the world so insidiously that today its influence is probably inescapable. But this inequality is only reinforced by expressing such outrage, and far more so than by B-list Hollywood movies and the mindless mainstream rap exported from modern day America. Were Filipinos to have simply shrugged it off as the ignorance of a few screenwriters, which is all that it was, it would have been a moment of quiet but powerful national assertiveness – a veritable declaration of cultural independence, the yearning for which is the genesis of all such over-sensitivity in the first place.

My comments weren’t particularly well received, the breezy air turned tense, and the gentle sound of the surf became jarring. After an edgy several moments of silent sips and long, brooding drags, the conversation slowly picked back up. Before long it was back on track, easy flowing, like those waves lapping the seawall beneath us. Perhaps my friends just decided that they didn’t care much what this American had to say about the Philippines and its people. (Bulatlat.com)