Comments on the Comments of a Post

My my my, Ewik, one of my favorite bloggers, seemed to have stirred a hornet's nest with his post on the transaction of some trannie tricks in a coffeshop.  Actually, it was Rudeboy's equally provoking commentary that added (a LOT of) fuel to the fire.  I'll try to avoid the fray in Ewik's comments section and chip in my thoughts on this post instead.

1.  A coffeeshop is commonly deemed as a public place where people of a certain social class congregate for whatever dealings they might have.  The situation gets even more interesting as the cafe is situated within a mall, an even more public place to begin with.  However, the cafe, and even the mall itself, is a business run by individuals, who, by virtue of ownership, is entitled to run their business as deemed fit.  It is not an issue of alienation leading to the marginalization of a certain sector of society.  Nor is it even about proper etiquette and decorum.  It's not even all about snootiness and the inherent tension between social classes.  It's all about how the owners want to have business conducted within their premises as to their own personal set of standards.

If one cannot stomach the standards of the establishment, the he or she is very much free to bring the business somewhere else.  The one of the wonders of capitalism is that one is given a plenitude of alternatives to chose from.

2.  Mass media is a powerful tool as per dissemination of information.  No one can refute that.  However, it is also important to point out that the very nature of the information itself undergoes several processes of filtration:  from the writer/reporter, to the higher bosses of the company, down to the market, intended or otherwise, of the medium.  The end result is that the information received is already processed in such a way that it is still the truth, but not necessarily the entire truth. 

Caveat emptor, so to speak.  And I rejoin, reality is always best perceived experientially, rather than being dependent on vicarious accounts.

3.  I get the Janina San Miguel analogy of Dabo.  But let me challenge that by refuting it as a false analogy.  Dabo's comparison posits on the property that colonial mentality is the underlying reason why it is acceptable to Filipinos for foreigners who are not native-English speakers to communicate in English that is grammatically erroneous and/or is spoken with an unfamiliar accent.  Dabo then transfers this property of colonial mentality to the situation of Ms. San Miguel in the Bb. Pilipinas pageant held a few years ago. He implies that there is an occurrence of double-standard because while it is all right for foreigners to mangle the English language, a fellow Filipino is not allowed to do so.

However, it is not colonial mentality that was the issue with Ms. San Miguel.  Rather, it was her inability to articulate her ideas in English, the language she insisted on using.  Paolo Bediones, the host of the show, encouraged her to switch to Filipino in order to express herself more clearly.  Instead, she insisted to speak in English, hence the debacle witnessed in nationwide TV.  It was her choice of language, and not the double standard of colonial mentality that was clearly involved in the criticism directed at her.  Therefore, since the original posit does not hold true for the case of Jenina San Miguel, the whole analogy that Dabo uses falls apart.

Okay, I think that's enough brain-farting for now.

The last point just gave me a major headache wahahahaha