blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

A still from "Amigo" by John Sayles The late William Henry "Scotty" Scott, esteemed American historian and lay minister of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines wrote in "Ilocano Responses to American Aggression 1900-1901" that a few years after the Philippines was finally recognized as independent, the nationalist trend of the 1950s led the Department of Education in 1951 to interview the few surviving veterans of the Filipino War against American Imperialism a.k.a "Philippine-American War" and the then present generation of Filipinos about the war. So thorough was the American colonial education system and its historical cleansing of that period in history that Filipinos knew more of the revolt against "backward" Spain and friar abuses than the American atrocities of the anti-imperialist war. This historical amnesia poisons US-Philippine relations to this day. No amount of dancing to the beat of "Papaya" by former US ...

I have finished my treat of DVD for review movies. "Australia" is billed as a tribute to the "golden age" of movies. The opening credits however reminded me of Indiana Jones. Nonetheless the Baz Luhrmann film has proven the wags wrong. The film is no Outback Waterworld! Anyway the film lives up to its Aussieness. There are a lot of Australian private jokes in the movie and only blokes and sheilas who have lived long enough in Oz can get the punchline. Example 1: all newbies to Oz are enthralled to see hopping kangaroos. The ooooohs and ahhhs I have heard in Billabong sanctuary years before. But then something typically Aussie happens to the roo. Guess!?!? (Clue: When I first landed in Australia when I was an overseas student there, the first roo I saw in Oz was a roadkill.) Example 2: Also when Nicole Kidman's aristocratic character goes down the gangplank and into the wharf, she tries to check into a "hotel", where in Oz a hotel is a pub. She walks r...

I first saw the Indiana Jones movies as a high school student. Seeing Harrison Ford in the Indy movies was a refreshing change from his Han Solo character of the then Star Wars trilogy. Of course the formula was similar. As the www.ihatestarwars.com once had it in 1999 (when the prequels came out,one by one), Indiana Jones is nothing but Han Solo battling Nazis. (BTW, the ihatestarwars site has been off the web) Indiana Jones was a "tenured professor of archaeology". The prof had a PhD and can have all that adventures in exotic digs. That would attract UP Diliman campus brats (our parents were academics with PhDs) to consider having a career in academe. But in reality academe is a tad more boring. UP has an archaeological studies programme and I haven't known its director Victor Paz wearing a fedora! Of course the original three movies 20 years ago were more fun. We were "cold war kids who were hard to kill" as Billy Joel sang about and the "Lost Ark...

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , the French Jesuit preist, palaeontologist and evolutionist who is remembered in science for correctly interpreting the evolutionary significance of Peking Man is the subject of a science biography by Amir Aczel entitled " The Jesuit and the Skull ". While Teilhard's science credentials are impeccable, he is best remembered in his attempt to integrate Catholic belief and science in a mystical way. For doing this,Teilhard was not allowed to publish any of his works when he was alive. The Jesuits and the Vatican ordered the embargo. The Teilhard science bio is one of the recent books that have been published looking at the relationship of science and faith. Many of these books were written by Jesuits, the most notable are those by Guy Consolmagno SJ. While Aczel (a non Jesuit and a Scientist) tried to deal with the same subject and tried to capture the two sides of Teilhard's life,he so fails miserably. Aczel unlike Consolmagno did not have ...