A little while back, Rodel Rodis posted the full contents of his Philippine News column as comments to my previous entry (you can see Rodis’s column at that link), and I wasn’t sure how to respond — primarily because its contents were pretty much the opposite of what our source (whom the SFSU Pinoy faculty tried to protect) told us directly.

Rodis’s column made us, well, look like fools, and I think I would have appreciated it if he gave my colleagues a little benefit of the doubt; surely Rodis himself has been placed on “non-existent” government blacklists both before and after his immigration to the U.S.!

But now our previously unnamed source has stepped forward demanding a retraction from him; to make a long story short, Emil Guillermo’s latest
article has excerpts from Lorraine Mallare’s long letter, rebutting Rodis’s points.

It’s the “Secret Service list” part that’s quite scary; since Vice Consul Antony Mandap has already pooh-poohed the suggestion that a list came from “a Philippine Secret Service” because “there’s no such entity” (and therefore the list could not exist), we can perhaps assume that:

a) Of course there’s some sort of a Philippine Secret Service, and Vice Consul Mandap may simply be playing with semantics here; or

b) that the non-existent Philippine Secret Service may have compiled the list with help from their American counterparts, which may mean

c) that this now non-existent list may have came from the U.S. Secret Service itself (who after all were protecting a visiting head of state), and was handed directly to the Philippine Consulate.

We academics like to joke that the government must have files on us somewhere, but it’s frightening when my colleagues are smacked directly with it.

(I’ll be flying to the Philippines in a few weeks; wish me luck.)

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A couple of things below: the San Francisco State University Pinoy faculty’s response,

November 17, 2004

To the Filipina/o American Community,

We, the undersigned, denounce the recent actions of the Philippine Consulate surrounding the investiture of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo with an honorary doctorate from the University of San Francisco. Three Filipino American faculty members of San Francisco State University — Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Danilo Begonia and Dawn Bohulano Mabalon – were specifically excluded from attending the November 18th conferral ceremony.

Dr. Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, assistant professor of Asian American Studies, had accepted an invitation to attend the ceremony and was told that tickets would be procured for her by a USF colleague. On Wednesday, November 10, Dr. Tintiangco-Cubales was informed that the Philippine Consulate requested that her tickets be returned because her name, along with two other San Francisco State University professors, were on a list of “activists.” The other faculty members were Professor Danilo Begonia of Asian American Studies, and Dawn B. Mabalon, assistant professor of History. She was further informed that she, the other named faculty members, and our students were on a list that barred all of them from attending the ceremony.

Dr. Mabalon called the Philippine Consulate and spoke to Vice Consul Anthony Mandap on Friday, November 12. She was told by an assistant that Vice Consul Mandap “has the list.” Vice Consul Mandap admitted that the consulate had concerns about SF State faculty and students, and told her that the Consulate had received information from anonymous sources at USF that we and “our students are intending to rally.” Vice Consul Mandap now denies any existence of a list of barred professors and students, possibly fearing the kind of public backlash a list of this kind would elicit. As of Friday, November 12, the consulate changed their position and maintained that all are welcome, but there are no more tickets for anyone.

We are shocked and outraged that the Philippine Consulate would, without substantive evidence, bar San Francisco State University faculty and students from the ceremony. It is a slap in the face to all of us who are community advocates, educators, and professionals. The implication that we are directing our students to disrupt this ceremony is truly ridiculous. We believe this targeting of Filipino American faculty and students as potential threats to national and international security is an unreasonable and anti-democratic exercise of power by the Philippine government. It also places the professional careers and personal reputations of faculty and students unnecessarily at risk. This exclusion from the event is not only embarrassing, it could also cause unreasonable risk of harm to our professional careers, personal reputations and work in the community.

The existence of this list and these practices create an atmosphere of fear, suspicion, hysteria and division in which legitimate and constitutionally protected political discourse between academics and their students will be considered subversive. Placement on this list presents an immediate chilling effect on academic freedom.

In this situation, the only individuals that have been marked have been educators. This appears to be scapegoating of academics and students. Although we were not involved in planning an action against the Philippine President’s visit to USF, we are against the unjust suppression of political discourse and peaceful demonstrations. No one should ever be condemned for exercising their constitutional right to engage and participate in political discussion. These are fundamental elements of the American educational and political processes.

Because of this unfortunate occurrence, we feel that our professional reputations have been smeared. We have long-standing, important, positive and productive relationships with faculty, staff and students at USF, relationships strengthened by our academic collaborations, networks, and community partnerships. Because of the actions of the Consulate, relations have been strained between our faculty and our colleagues at University of San Francisco.

As educators who are well aware of the importance of academic freedom and its rational limits, we believe the actions of the Philippine Consulate constitute suppression of legitimate political discussion. The many adverse effects of the Patriot Act on political expression and civil discourse in the United States are already well-documented, and we deplore the Philippine Consulate’s clear complicity in this regard.

We, the undersigned, are concerned Filipina/o American faculty at San Francisco State University.

Danilo Begonia
Professor, Asian American Studies

Daniel Gonzales
Associate Professor, Asian American Studies

Benito Vergara
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies

Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales
Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies

Dawn Bohulano Mabalon
Assistant Professor, History

and another from the Critical Filipino Studies Collective:

Wednesday, November 17, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Dr. Peter Chua
San Jose State University
408-829-7347

FILIPINO STUDIES COLLECTIVE PROTESTS BLACKLIST OF FILIPINOS, PATRIOT ACT EXPOSED

San Francisco, November 17

The banning of three Filipino American scholars and university students from a dinner to invest Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of an honorary doctorate degree has revealed the existence of a blacklist of Filipino scholars and students, says the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective, a group of educators and activists. The existence of a blacklist has been denied by the San Francisco Consul General’s office though what has been confirmed is that the Philippine Consul received a list from the Philippine secret service, and this list was compiled by another U.S. agency under the aegis of the Patriot Act.

In an interview with Dr. Dawn Mabalon of San Francisco State University, one of the Filipino scholars banned from the dinner, she was told that she and others were “disinvited” since they were on “a list given to [the Philippine Consul] by the Philippine secret service.”

This has led scholars to believe that the blacklist was prepared by a U.S. government agency and was submitted to the Philippine representatives.

The blacklist represents what Dr. Dylan Rodriguez of the University of California-Riverside has described as “a form of low-intensity political repression that has directly enabled the U.S. Homeland Security apparatus. It is not just Arroyo who is facilitating a proto-martial law, we are encountering a version of it in the U.S.” Members of the Critical Filipino Studies Collective observed that there is a kinship between
the torture, domestic warfare, and human rights violations in the Philippines and the torture, domestic warfare, and human rights violations that occur on the everyday within the United States. As Dr. Rodriguez observes, “This is, after all, where the
Arroyo government learned its craft.”

The chilling implications of the U.S.-Philippine blacklist are the effects it will have on Filipino immigrants, both those who are permanent residents and those who are undocumented. Many Filipinos will be afraid to join mobilizations because of their future dealings with the U.S. and Philippine state. Dr. Nerissa Balce, a member of the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective, says, “Every time a Filipino migrant, writer, or scholar will cross the U.S. or Philippine borders, you will never know if you
will be asked to step aside, be delayed, or not be allowed to travel at all. Some Filipino migrants will not be allowed to return to the U.S. if their names are on this blacklist.”

Dr. Jody Blanco of the University of California-San Diego says, “On a larger level, the blacklist exploits and exacerbates the atmosphere of mistrust, fear, and intolerance that has gripped the American public since the arbitrary and unlawful arrest, detention, and torture of U.S. citizens and foreign residents alike in the wake of 9/11.”

According to Dr. Lucy Burns of the University of California-Santa Cruz, the blacklist “illustrates how academia, believed to be the last bastion of democracy in this age of corporate media, is not exempt from Bush’s War on Terror.” Dr. Burns adds, “This is a time to be vigilant and be vocal about the ideals of democracy. We in the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies want our colleagues at San Francisco State University to know that we support their concerns. We also call for Filipino communities and everyone to support their educators threatened under the surveillance of both the Philippine and U.S. states in service of this War on Terror.”

The Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collective was one of the leading groups to support the Cuevas family, a Bay Area Filipino family who were deported in June 2004. The Collective will soon be releasing a report on the deportations of Filipino families in the era of Homeland Security.

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Okay, now I’m a little worried, but it’s probably just paranoia on my part.

All throughout this whole blogging business I’ve taken great pains to separate the personal opinions on my blog from my professional career, even though the latter seeps into the former a good amount of the time. My students can probably testify that I’ve almost bent over backwards to accommodate — no, welcome — opposing viewpoints and have people decide for themselves. (Playing devil’s advocate is also something I do well, without even presenting it as such.)

But my last post was probably the angriest one I’ve posted in a while. And despite previous posts explaining my ambivalence, I am still very deeply troubled about the results of the election, and it comes out in the classroom every now and then. I cannot imagine teaching an Anthropology class (or especially an Asian American Studies class) without engaging with it in some fashion.

The atmosphere here on my campus is, in any case, very tense, and when the wingnuts in the academe are already busy watching SF State — well, maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

The point is that it is very easy for someone to print my posts out and demand that they be placed in my tenure file, and then I’ll probably be toast. Or, even worse, deported. But there is nothing wrong with being motivated, even professionally, by a sense of outrage. I am convinced, in any case, that my behavior in the classroom remains accommodating and objective, and I will ensure that it stays that way.

Let me make something of a quick confession: I do understand, quite clearly, where evangelical Christians are coming from, mostly because I used to be one.

Yes, not only was I the youth coordinator at my church back in the Philippines, I even led my own Bible study group and had my own “disciples.”

Yes, I used to firmly believe that abortion and homosexuality were sins, and that anyone who believed otherwise was hellbound.

Yes, I was held sway by Campus Crusade for Christ for about 4 years, up to the point that I would accost strangers in the street and ask them, “Have you heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?”

And this is precisely why I can understand where their sense of outrage is coming from — and it is also why it pains me to see how Jesus’s teachings could be so ignored, especially by people who profess to use him as an example for their lives.

(The part about voting against their own economic interests — that part I still can’t understand.)

You may think you hear the sound of furious backpedalling in the background, but you’re not. So yes, any Bush supporters reading this: consider this as something of an apology for how I wrote my angry piece — but not what I wrote.

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(Man. I’m going to get into trouble for this. Some prospective editor or person on a grant review board will google my name and find this. But I won’t edit it: consider it the work of someone very pissed off, and who should know better — we anthropologists, after all, have to be a little more… nuanced in our analysis, shall we say, and this is fairly off-the-cuff. But at least I’ve removed most of the expletives.)

Maybe the problem is that class is indeed dead — moribund in terms of an organizing principle, as a framework for understanding the social world around you. Perhaps it has to do with the overwhelming, unquestioned victory of the capitalist system and the similarly unquestioned inequalities it perpertuates. To successfully persuade people to vote for tax breaks for billionaires, as the Republican Party did, implies a couple of things: that people willingly accept their lot as economic destiny, or that they cling stubbornly to a trickle-down theory from heaven. Or that Cheney’s profits from Halliburton floats all boats somehow. Or that the immense power of the credit card to function as surrogate domestic partner renders one’s class status insignificant.

In contrast, gender and racial difference is perhaps a lot more stunning in its clarity in people’s everyday lives. I teach Gerald Berreman’s essay on caste, class and race every semester and that’s a lot easier to understand. But in general I don’t think the American middle class can see themselves as belonging to a mobilizable group with a common cause — perhaps the middle class exists simply because they are neither dirt poor nor filthy rich. What most concretely distinguishes classes from one another isn’t the amount of labor or who controls the means of production, but consumption. And since credit theoretically allows the middle class to consume their way “into the elite” (though of course the levels of distinction will always be maintained), class becomes irrelevant.

But class, I suppose, wasn’t the point. We’re told anyway that Bush supporters didn’t come out to vote because of the economy, or because of the war, but because of “moral values.” (As if the war on Iraq wasn’t a moral issue.)

This, at least for me, is what has made mourning such a protracted process. We are told that Kerry was never really an advocate for gays in the first place; we are told that the left neglected the liberal Christians among them; we are told that Democrats should start thinking about faith-based initiatives now; we are told that Gavin Newsom single-handedly created a moral panic and practically handed the presidency to Bush. These should feed into tactical considerations, sure, but please, please don’t call what happened in San Francisco “too much too fast” — about time, I’d say.

Similarly, we are told that mourning is over, and it is time to get to work. Roll up your sleeves, they say. Or, worst of all, repeated ad nauseam: “Don’t mourn; organize.”

But it hasn’t gotten any easier. I’d roll up my sleeves, sure… in order to take a swing at some Republican twit. (Those who know me personally would know this is a little ludicrous, as I’m a total physical coward.)* Don’t mourn — confront some Republican jerk, I’d say. Make the Christians ashamed of what they did.

We are told that we should not be angry, that this is a time for healing, that this is a time for building bridges. But these truisms are uttered without recognizing a simple, brutal truth: they hate us. They hate what we’ve “done to their country.” They hate how feminists have contributed to the degeneracy of the American way of life — after all, the reason 9/11 happened, according to Jerry Falwell. They “hate the sin but love the sinner,” in all the convoluted doublespeak that entails.

The problem is that it really has been a war for quite some time now, with battle lines drawn between God and Satan, and the Christian right took this very seriously. I’m afraid the Democrats didn’t. Ellen DeGeneres somehow constituted a greater threat to the American way of life, which says everything about the depths of homophobia in American society.

The 1100 American soldiers-and-counting killed in Iraq died because of Bush’s lies, and all these morons can do… Well, god knows what they’re thinking. They probably think the military occupation of Iraq means “freedom.” Or that Saddam Hussein flew the planes into the WTC himself.

You’re probably thinking, well, this is the result of a horribly misinformed electorate — “dumb,” as the Daily Mirror famously wrote — and we should do what we can to educate them. You’re right, but misinformation, in many ways, is the least of our worries.

The fact that these Bush-ites would rather piss and moan about stem cells than the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi men, women and children means one simple thing: that they are heartless racists. The only logical explanation for the resolution of this cognitive dissonance is that Iraqi lives simply don’t count as being human.

No, really: go confront one and ask them if Jesus would go and bomb little Iraqi kids. For people whose mantra is “What Would Jesus Do?”, this hypocrisy is staggering. (See, that’s the worst part: they still think that they, and their President, are blessed by God, that they’re compassionate, freedom-loving people, that they’re following Jesus’s example. I must have missed the part in the New Testament where Jesus straps on an AK-47 and blows some Iraqi kid’s head to bits. Which epistle was that now?)

You’re probably thinking: doesn’t this just smack of the kind of intellectual snobbery supposed to be dished out by the liberal elite? Whatever — but remember: it was anti-intellectualism that led Bush to be elected.

You’re also probably thinking: isn’t this just stooping down to their level? That I demean myself by participating in hateful name-calling? Whatever — but remember: they hate you already.

This brings me to my point: right now, I cannot build bridges with these people. Plans are being made to create a “culture of life” (i.e., to ban abortion) as we speak, just as Falluja, where Satan lives**, is being bombed all to hell — laid to waste by a Christian god.

I do not see the hope for any “constructive dialogue” for people who think that unwed mothers can’t become teachers, for people that think they would go to hell if they vote for Kerry, for people who think that it is somehow acceptable to kill people because their god is different from theirs. They obviously cannot be reached. They are obviously beyond any reasoning. Keep me away from them. I’ll bite my tongue if I have to, but if they get me started…

A vote for Bush was a vote for empire, racism, homophobia, misogyny and hatred. Really — you’ll feel a little better just admitting that. And then, perhaps, you can begin to move on.

*DISCLAIMER (and I write this in capital letters): as should be clear, I would never advocate physical violence in any form, and I would be the first person to run away from a fight.

**In case this part wasn’t clear, scroll to the bottom of the article and read the quotation from a Lieutenant-Colonel Gareth Brandl, the commander of the 1st battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment:

But the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we’re going to destroy him.

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Or islands of blue in a red sea?

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