“As the mob crucified Mideo, swooning fans rolled out the red carpet for Paris Hilton, the hotel heiress and celebrity. There was even this talk of setting up a meeting with the president ... and Paris, the self-promoting celebrity, our twisted values rolled out the carpet for the latter.”
Written by : MARLEN V. RONQUILLO
Men of a certain age still remember Polly Cayetano, the anti-smut crusader of the yore. The main gig was the burning at public squares of tabloids and magazines that she and her group had deemed as offensive to their puritanical values and public morals.
In their view of the world, the bikini-clad women of the tabloids and the lurid sex stories in the cheap magazines (that can’t even get the Tagalog right) incited otherwise tame and timid men to go on raping and molesting sprees You get the picture: saliva-dripping, crotch-bulging, lust-addled men tearing the fabric of Philippine society apart. One step to Sodom and Gomorrah .
But there was an ennobling side to this spectacle of puritanism.
The broader society in which Polly Cayetano performed her puritanical acts largely tolerated her and made room for her and her public display of outrage. Just as it tolerated the tabloids (and their bikini-clad women and gory headlines) and the cheap magazines that sold cheaper sex stories. Across the board tolerance was the ennobling reaction.
Nobody minded Polly’s outrage, except maybe for the church-based groups that viewed an exposed thigh as a reason to offer more novenas and masses. The crusade failed to get traction and public support—and Polly Caye-tano quietly returned to her more temporal affairs, that of tending to her retail stores .
So the lynching mob that recently descended on an art exhibit at the Cultural Center of the Philippines—complete with volcanic, irrepressible rage and TV crews (they can’t be without them) Polly Cayetano and her group failed to muster half a century ago—forced the silent majority to raise a question. What kind of country is this?
Is there still space for the morality police in the 21st century?
What was the (unrighteous) point of the whole outrage?
Was the exhibit of Mideo Cruz worth all the bloviation from the political and church leaders and the so-called vanguards of decency and morality?
Is not freedom of expression sacrosanct, a fundamental right that cannot be violated and diminished ?
Many of us who belong to the silent majority, of course, can’t discuss things from aesthetic perspectives and artistic merits. We are totally blank about what the closed exhibit was all about. As a farmer, the only thing that I did in life that was remotely connected to art was to pick guavas and star apples for a young Cecile Licad. And that was because her kind-hearted doctor-dad, Dr, Jesus V. Licad, was a doctor to the peasants in our Lubao barrio pro bono, something we had to repay through guavas and star apples for his kids, Cecile included.
Art is alien to us. But not the Inquisition-era mind set and bent that forced an artist and the Cultural Center of the Philippines to close an exhibit to appease the offended sensibilities of the morality police and the phony arbiters of right and wrong. We cant stand phoniness. Neither can we stand assaults on basic human freedoms.
Sorry, Mideo, for our delayed reaction, for our failure to make our voices heard much earlier and our failure to form a phalanx of warm bodies at the exhibit site. We should have formed a human barricade to ward off the lynching mob. To tell them to back off and take their puritanism elsewhere. Man, we were too busy eking out survival that we even failed to take notice early on.
Plus this: we all thought that the morality police, having retreated into the caves during the time of Polly Cayetano, dare not make another assault on the freedom of expression in the context of the 21st century. Is this not, on theory, the borderless world? More tolerant. More open, more embracing of others.
We have truly underestimated the nine lives of failed orthodoxies, the phony puritanism, the resurrection of the Inquisition, which instead of decapitating lives, is now breaking the spirit of tolerance and basic freedoms.
Sorry Man, truly sorry.
It is just now that I recall what the prime minister of Norway said in the aftermath of a bloodbath in his peaceful country. Reacting to the mass murder committed by a crazed-xenophobic gunman who went on a killing spree to protest the tolerance and openness of Norwegian society, Jolt Stoltenberg, said: more openness, more tolerance and more humanity.
The answer to violence, he said, is more democracy.
On the bloody assault of a crazed gunman on the values of Norway, the leadership pledged more democracy. On an innocuous exhibit of an artist perhaps trying to drive home a point on the deeper angst of a society, the reaction from the morality police was “lynch, lynch, lynch.”
You cant help but frame the two reactions and give them context. Then feel truly and deeply sad for our country.
What kind of country is this?
As the mob crucified Mideo, swooning fans rolled out the red carpet for Paris Hilton, the hotel heiress and celebrity. There was even this talk of setting up a meeting with the president . She met with her friends, the Pacquiaos, the boxing royalty .
In the US, if you are in a position of political leadership, the worst thing that can be said of you this: you are some sort of Paris Hilton. Meaning, you are a celebrity focused only on your selfish self. Or you are a vacuous human being. Her name is spoken in the same genre as the Kardashians, or Lindsay Lohan. If that is a positive thing, you be the judge.
About a year ago, Paris Hilton was arrested for the possession of cocaine in Las Vegas. Before that she was questioned in South Africa for marijuana possession .
Mideo Cruz, according to written accounts, has not been obsessing over himself. He is an artist who has done a lot of exhibits, here and overseas. He is reportedly a keen student of “religious iconography and religious symbolism.”
How religious beliefs insert themselves into the developments of a country often unsettled by economic and political turmoil has been a recurring theme of Mideo’s work.
And between Mideo, a secular humanist trying to send a message through his work about the dominant (and often negative) role played by religion in almost every aspect of Philippine life, and Paris, the self-promoting celebrity, our twisted values rolled out the carpet for the latter. And nearly lynched the serious man.
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