Seven months ago, the eminent attourney Abe Margallo published his seminal piece Imagine a world without Filipinos in which he quotes the words of a certain Abdullah Al-Maghlooth which he lauds as “another adulation that certainly should again make us Filipinos proud of ourselves”:

We have to remember that we are very much dependent on the Filipinos around us. We could die a slow death if they chose to leave us.

So today in a burst of that usual brilliant insight that my fans have come to expect of me, I pose yet another one of those simple child-like questions that, in its quintessence as a follow-through on other related questions I’ve asked before, escapes the capacities for insightful response from the Vulcan minds of our resident “experts”:

Will there be a fundamental change in the course of World History — or the nature of global politics and economics — if the Philippines were to be swallowed up by the sea tomorrow?

The question though elegant in its simplicity is by no means original as it traces its roots to a piece I wrote a while back that focused specifically on the imagined importance of Pinoy labour in the world economy. In it I assert…

The bottom line is that we should not be too cocky about our presumed place in the economic scheme of things. If cheap Filipino labour suddenly disappears from the face of the earth, advanced nations will, in the same way, manage to find SOLUTIONS to overcome such a setback and certainly will be able to explore alternative sources. They may struggle FOR A WHILE but, hey, I can have faith in civilisations that’ve survived the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, rebuilt from innumerable wars, pulled themselves together after being nuked, re-invented themselves after being flooded by Asian automobiles and electronics, and keep their noses up DESPITE their politicians.

… because quite simply put:

Like Arab oil, Brazilian rubber, and sub-Saharan diamonds, the only real thing that gives value to cheap Pinoy labour are the vast capital base, industrial might, and immense purchasing power of the advanced world that CREATE EMPLOYMENT for the rest of the labour-added-value world (of which our society happens to be a sizeable subset of — to the tune of 90 million).

Even more sobering is that the very things we cringe about are so trivial in the scheme of things when approached from a more real perspective. The latest of such cringes manifests itself in the matter of this perceived snub of the Philippine President by U.S. President Barack Obama that’s been tossed around in such value-crushing volumes all over the Philippine Media (including this blog site). The real perspective it seems is a lot simpler, making this latest cringe less worthy of the attention it gets:

[...] look at President Obama’s snub of GMA now. It has nothing to do at all with the human rights violation of her government nor of all the corruption being heaped against her or her husband by the licentious press and blogsphere. America is quite comfortable with aligning herself with the most corrupt and the most duplicitous character in this whole wide world as long as it will promote American interest in that part of the world.

The Philippines is no longer of any strategic importance to the U.S. and does not hold the allure for U.S. consumer markets and offshore companies. It does not serve anymore of the imperatives for U.S. interest.

All this is just all too consistent with the underlying (or maybe more appropriately, over-arching) mother question of it all that, as I observed earlier, has so far elicited no more than an embarrassed silence…

What does “the Filipino” stand for?

… a question that echoes my clarification of the earlier ’swallow up’ question to UP n grad:

UPn, actually i meant swallowed up without a trace — not even the concept of “the Philippines” remains (i.e. there is nothing to “reconstruct”). And given this scenario, I’ll put it a bit more bluntly:

Will ‘the Philippines’ be missed?

Funny (and I digress a bit here) that the above clarification, while going a bit of a way to crystallising the essence of the rhetoric behind these questions apparently just flies over the head of our man Dean:

If the Philippines were swallowed up by the sea tomorrow that would imply a sea level rise at least to the peak of Mount Apo, roughly 11,000 feet elevation above the present oceans surrounding Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao.

Such a catastrophic event would surely drown all the major capitals of the world, except Macchu Picchu and Lhasa in Tibet, maybe. But New York Paris London Shanghai Tokyo, Canton, Seoul, Mumbai, Karachi, Melbourne, Sydney, Quetta, would all be drowned, by the enforced laws of Physics, “if the Philippines were swallowed up by the seas tomorrow”

And check this one out for good measure:

With a mind that can conjure up a question that contemplates the drowning of 90 million Filipino men, women and children, as the seas swallow up the Philippine Archipelago–and suggest such a tragedy would be a matter of no great consequence or fundamental change to the political and economic history of the world!

That’s right. Trust the venerable Dean Jorge Bocobo to lend us his usual “expert” take on things. Aren’t we all glad such esteemed personalities hang around here to tell us these things? :D

And we wonder why the spirit of not just the Law but the very Constitution of our “country” succumbs to the perversions created by those who are “experts” at navigating the technicalities of how these concepts are articulated in black-and-white…

So as we presume to struggle to find our place as a people in the overall scheme of human civilisation, and meaning in our continued existence as a sovereign state, it comes across as a bit ironic that we shy away from the simple questions whose answers (if we can come up with them) would have served as the cornerstones of that quest to find said place and meaning.

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