It seems that this whole Valentine’s Day Invasion (by the way, wrongly labelled by moi considering that it actually happened on the 13th) initiated a sort-of coming to terms with the reality of the burgis-ness of the small minority of Filipinos who read content off and inhabit that subset of the Pinoy blogosphere that I have come to be familiar with. Notable is Rom’s three-part exposition — or more appropriately soul-searching — on the subject of the jologs-and-”us” ending with her piece Not the Enemy which collectively inspired my own Enclavement.

Now Stuart-Santiago’s OMGWTFIDONTWANTTODIE, while in the context of Alex Maximo’s own reflections on the topic accepting that such a line between “us” and “them” exists, undertakes a tepid attempt to reconcile her burgis-ness and her regard for the jologs:

we are them. they are us. ang sakit ng kalingkingan ay sakit ng buong katawan. being burgis but concerned for the masa shouldn’t, doesn’t have to, be so hard. some tibaks have gotten the hang of it and do a pretty good job at balancing things

Indeed, “that clear line drawn between the jologs and the burgis” is very real, which is where my slight begging to differ here comes from. Being concerned for the jologs is hard, when you consider that most of us “burgis” grew up under circumstances in which being unconcerned was just too easy. So ingrained is this line in the psyche of the Pinoy burgis that in a very primal fight-or-flight situation it remains clear to most; so much so that …

[...] even some of the kindest people I know who were in the Fair that night drew the line between themselves and the jologs.

… as observed by Maximo.

As far as the circumstances surrounding the Valentine’s Day Invasion is concerned, where the line was drawn was clear: it was between the U.P.’s students/faculty and the “outsiders”. In general though, I’d argue that for most, the line exists between those who studied in private schools and those who studied in public schools — something that is real, as a matter of fact, within the U.P. itself. Indeed, within the U.P. the student body is also polarised between the U.P.-qualified jologs and the U.P. qualified burgis. In an institution in which the only criteria for inclusion (in most cases, that is) is academic and intellectual prowess, this is not surprising.

As evident, even here in FV, the level of intellectual and academic achievement does not distinguish the jolog from the true burgis, as evident in the way the whole Obama itinerary is now being pitched as the dramatic “snub” and a “slap” against our venerable Republic in the way that appeals to our jolog sensibilities, and in much the same way as Filipino movies abound with scenes of face-slapping, catfights, and campily-scripted shouting matches set in the Dorian-styled mansions that come straight out of the jolog imaginations of the industry’s set designers. [Addendum: Rom apparently beat me to the punch on this one here.]

To be fair, many have asserted that because of their presumed access to better-quality primary and secondary private education the burgis enjoy an advantage over the rest in a competition for a slot in the U.P. (progressively skewing the demographic towards the burgis as a result). The competition is particularly tough for slots within its Diliman campus, and specifically cutthroat for the handful of quota courses that are perceived to be tickets to lucrative careers in multinational corporations. One gets a bit of the sense of the Darwinian way by which unit upon unit of social advantage is built up — at some point collectively resulting in the emergence of the burgis “species”. It highlights the utter futility of socialism of which the U.P. was intended to be an educational bastion.

Hmmmm. Because I ducked out for a quick coffee in the middle of writing this piece, I now find myself struggling to make a point after writing all of the above. So I’ll take the easy way out and make it all about what deep inside is my favourite topic — me.

I was born, bred, and educated at one of the epicentres of Filipino burgis-dom and, as such, I was more acutely spared from having to struggle with this whole drawing-the-line-between-the-jologs-and-the-burgis dilemma than most. For me and the people I grew up with, it was crystal clear even at an early age. As a male teenager in mid 1980’s Quezon City, my world was quite small and simple. There was only Makati and Greenhills for hanging out, there was only the Ateneo and La Salle (okay, Xavier School and the Collegio de San Agustin as well) to study in, and there were only girls from Maryknoll, St Scholastica Manila, and Assumption to party with. When I finished high-shool, I applied to only two universities: the Ateneo de Manila and U.P. Diliman (banishment to a U.P. campus other than Diliman was unthinkable for most of us as well).

That inbred attitude changed of course within weeks of setting foot in the U.P. as a freshman. I grew a perspective over my stint as a U.P. student. But that’s a whole other story we can explore later.

But as a high-school student, that’s what I was — not because I was a pre-meditated snob, nor was it because my family is exceptionally wealthy — but because this was just simply the world I happened to have grown up in. In class, regional accents were the subject of ridicule, English was spoken only with a well-cultivated American (or at the very least, a “blue-chip private-school”) accent, and the noontime program Eat Bulaga was closely monitored to ensure that none of the music we played on our boomboxes had yet found awareness among the jologs. I was well into my early 20’s when I met for the very first time a person with a Bisaya accent who was in a career that did not involve manual labour (it did not even occur to me to think of the non-Manila students in U.P. as possibly being children of such people).

And here we see how the concept of ‘jolog’ (the word did not exist at the time) was far broader in my teenage circles than the way it’s so far been painted in the recent articles I cite. But in the usual way that true lateral thinkers add to the collective intelligence of humanity, I shall change the very nature of this line we draw between “us” and the jologs.

So now on to The Punchline:

When I mentioned that I grew a “perspective” during my stint as a U.P. Diliman student, I realised that this perspective was more of a mere result of the experience of getting my arse kicked in Calculus and Physics by a bunch of true scholars from some obscure (for me, at the time) city in Mindanao. That perspective was progressively subject to and chiseled away by cumulative reality checks, progressively replaced as I came to observe and experience how our politicians, bureaucrats, and our esteemed order of traditional “experts” — bristling with their academic “credentials” and textbook intellectual “prowess” gained from rote-learning — turn the Philippines into a flaccid joke and the “debate” around this joke into a single massive circular argument that comes full circle every couple of years or so.

To me [nod first to Obi Wan Kenobi in the venerable film Star Wars] it is these fools, and the fools who follow them and analyse their posturings in value-crushing volumes that are the true jologs.

============
Join us on Facebook!

Fatal error: Call to undefined function p75HasVideo() in /homepages/39/d169067170/htdocs/voices/wp-content/themes/NewFV/single-default.php on line 57