TWO NEWSPAPERS, TWO HEADLINES, TWO DAYS APART

Here are two recent headlines from the two major Filipino newspapers, the type of headlines that would never, ever be seen in Canada:

"Limbo does not exist"

"Campaign death toll hits 22"

The first headline refers to a statement released by the Vatican that the higher-ups in the Catholic hierarchy have decided, after much internal deliberation, that there is no 'limbo', no place where the dead souls of children not yet baptized go to rest for all eternity. This was front page, above-the-fold, bold-black news here in the Philippines.

The second headline details the deaths of twenty-two officials running for public office during this hectic, maddening election season in the Philippines. That's right -- public officials, and the unfortunate bystanders caught in the way -- are routinely killed during election season. Shot. Stabbed. Bludgeoned. Blown up. Boom. Democracy at work. Pass the cheque.

Why would these headlines not be seen back home?

Religion and politics at work, essentially.

Canada is a religious country, yes. Well, not really. Perhaps. There are many Christians, many Muslims, many Jews, but we don't wear our faiths on our sleeves, and we certainly don't splash it on the front page of our daily newspapers. We keep it private, for the most part. Most Canadians couldn't tell you the particular faith of their elected leaders, and most Canadians couldn't particularly care, either.

Here, they do care, because almost everybody is a Christian, and most of those Christians are Catholic. (Not everybody, I guess. There is a substantial Muslim minority, mostly in the southern islands of the Philippines, and a small minority of that minority are the terrorists who are blowing things up left and right and trying to establish their own, separate country -- much like the Muslims in the southernmost part of Thailand. The Muslims here in Baguio are usually the merchants, staking out their corners on Session Road, selling the used clothes, jewelry, and assorted, bewildering knicknacks. Their children are also, usually, the beggar children.) In this Catholic country, if you are not religious, well, you're strange. Weird. A little odd. Everybody assumes you are, so they don't even ask. It's common for taxi drivers and teachers and the average folk to end a conversation saying 'god bless'. Almost every taxi, for that matter (and jeepney, too -- the half-bus, half jeep that serves as cheap public transport) is adorned with tiny crosses, miniature Jesuses, plastic replications of Mother Mary. E-mails end with 'God be with you'. Such an overt display of religiosity struck me, initially, as somewhat unsettling. Now I see it for what it is: the natural display of their innermost beliefs. Even now, as I type these words, the music here at the Internet cafe alternates between hard-core rap and Christian pop. There's no contradiction.

Which is why newspapers can get away with -- and, indeed, must-- proclaim major changes to the Christian doctrine up-front and big as life. When last year's film of Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code was released here, you would not, fucking, believe the controversy it caused. Its' rating as R-13 was front page news in all the papers. You would have thought Jesus himself was coming back to diss the flick. But so it goes. Religion is life here, and they treat it as seriously as life.

However, this is the Philippines, which means that it's poor, and massively overpopulated, a land where both divorce and abortion are illegal, and a country that was recently voted by foreign businessmen as the most corrupt in all of Asia, which means, ipso fact, that politics is a dirty, dirty business. I mean, shit, they have, on tape, the current president, Gloria Arroyo, fixing the last freakin' election, telling the chief election officer to make sure that she wins by at least a million votes. Due to the legality of the conversation's recording, however, not much can be done.

It starts from the top, and the sleaze slithers down. If I've learned anything from living first in Cambodia and now living here, it's that in poor countries politics is where the money is. Period. End of sentence. Full stop. Practically the only way to make any money is to become a politician, and once you are there, you want to stay there, forever and forever, the power and the glory, amen. President Arroyo was adamant about changing the presidency into a parliament system this year. Why? A president can serve only one five-year term; a prime minister can serve indefinitely. Big shock, her wanting a change.

So if you run for office here, you are upsetting the elite, the incumbents, and when you upset the incumbents, you could get killed. Not 'killed' as in you lose a shitload of votes; 'killed' as in shot in the head as you walk through your door. Out of all the countries in the world last year, which one was the most dangerous for foreign journalists, the place where more reporters were killed than anywhere else? Iraq? Afghanistan? Uh-uh. The Philippines.

Both of these -- the one about religion, the one about politics -- remind me of the vast gap that exists between where I'm from and where I am. This is a big, wide world, one where religion can hold sway and where public office remains a dirty, deadly business.

And at the root is poverty. Living without hot water. Generations of people living in shit and squalor. When all you have is shit and squalor, you look to the Lord. When all you have is shit and squalor, you will do anything, try anything, kill anything, to make your way up.

And stay there.

Two newspapers. Two headlines. Two days apart. The country in a nutshell.

All that's left to do is read between the lines.

Which is the work of a lifetime.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

So a troubled young man walks onto the campus of his university and kills thirty-two people. And an American Peace Corps volunteer named Julia Campbell is found dead in Ifugao province in the Philippines, not far from where I am, actually, and she was most likely raped, and killed, and left in the wilderness to die alone. And so we look at these events and we suck in our breath and look up to the sky, blue as it is, and try to understand why the world is the way that it is: brutal, unforgiving, merciless. And as we look at that sky we see the clouds, white and full, and the sun, bright and strong, and somehow the pieces don't fit; the ideas don't mesh; the emotions don't level out into something palatable and clear. If we are religious we thank the Lord above for granting us the mercy of His compassion, and if we are not we wonder what the fuck is going on. I mean, seriously. What, is going, on? (Something that the hundred-plus people killed in Iraq yesterday due to sectarian violence wonder daily.)

It all comes down to violence, and the sickness of violence, and the way that blood and brains and bruises make us wince and gasp. Something that makes us wretch and gag is not something intended to endure, let alone to advocate. It is not a sight to see, this violence. It is not something you put on a postcard and drop in the box, or boot up online, complete with vivid reds and deepest blues. We don't have blackened faces and torn-apart limbs as Polaroid mementos. All because pain hurts, physically and mentally, and we do not like to remember the things that make us hurt, and so we push them away, shut the door, chuck the key, fire up Idol. We don't celebrate that which wounds. We like to think that the goodness inside of us overwhelms the badness that has been so obviously manifested in recent times.

And yet by denying the violence we reduce it to an aberration, an anomaly, and if there's anything that history has taught us it is that violence has been, is, and will always be leaking out from our mouths and our fists. Until somebody sees our point.

I saw a play in Japan years ago about a student who comes into class and wipes out his comrades, and the message of his violence was clear: "You're not listening to me." That is what all violence is saying: You're not listening to me. We swear and we fight and kill and we maim because somebody is not hearing what we want to say, what lurks within us but refuses to come out.

We maim to communicate. The same way that we love and we console and caress and we stroke. You can't have one without the other. They come from within us, these touches and punches. We relish the one and abhor the other. And yet each reminds us of what we are capable of, and what we want others to understand about us. The nicest people I have met in the world have been Japanese and Cambodians, and yet these very same people, in the not-so-distant past, have committed perhaps the worst atrocities of the twentieth-century, on themselves and each other.

How do we explain it?

Somebody tell me. God, Buddha, Mohammed, motherfucking Dr.Phil -- tell me, please, why?

That's what it boils down to.

Why?

When the madness descends, we ask 'why', but we never ask 'why' when we are good to each other, kind to each other, helpful and considerate to friends and strangers alike. We take the angels of our better natures for granted. We do countless, endless mundane polite gestures of goodwill on an hourly, daily basis, and we give them, and we accept them, with nary a second thought. And yet violence has us questioning who we are and what we should be doing.

Maybe that's a good thing.

Maybe when violence becomes commonplace, ordinary and, yes, boring, that means we've reached a kind of tipping point. If we were to step back, step out, imagine ourselves as alien speices viewing the whole of humanity as a school project assigned for some intergalactic sociology workshop, perhaps a clearer picture would come into focus, a more sharper portrait of what us as humans actually are.

"Humans on the planet earth have raped, pillaged and murdered each other for countless millenia," such an alien scholar might write, "and yet each time an act of violence occurs in their otherwise civilized societies, humanity, on mass, reacts as if something unusual has happened. Numerous countries throughout this planet face war on a daily basis -- Iraq and Sudan being the most famous contemporary examples, where thousands are slaughtered on a yearly basis -- and yet when a few dozen are killed in one particular place these humans tend to question the very nature of their essential beings. Humans thus tend to be eternal optimists. Despite the historical and modern actualizations of violence that dominate their societies, they still have the capacity for shock and outrage at the actions of their fellow man. They still want to believe that they are more than what they are. They have yet to accept the history of violence and the inevitability of violence. They expect something different, and are surprised, horrified and traumatized when they receive more of the same."

Growing up means we accept the world as it is. There are bills to pay, jobs to go to, assholes to endure. Nobody gets out alive. But a part of us, despite our maturity, despite our knowledge of the past, despite the reality of our present, refuses to accept violence. Emotionally, spiritually, intellectually: we don't want it. We hate it. It forces the puke up inside of our throats, and we have to swallow the bile and feel it slide back down our throats and wait until it arises again, a week or a month or a year from now. We don't want to grow up, in other words.

I hope we never do.

TEN AFTER TEN, ALL THE TIME, OR HOW YOU, TOO, CAN WEAR THE TITANIC ON YOUR WRIST

As Socrates once said: "Sometimes the sublime subtleties of life need to be pointed out to us by twelve year old Korean students."

Maybe it was Descartes, not Socrates. Might have been Mao, actually.

In any event, it was my twelve year old Korean student who pointed out to me the other day that in almost every single watch ad you will see, the hands of the watch are invariably pointed to ten after ten.

I was trying to teach him something, but he turned the tables on me. There was an ad in Time magazine for a watch that cost, get ready, cue the music, $250, 000. What was so special about this watch? Why, it had pieces salvaged from the actual Titanic embedded into its structure.

That's right. You, too, can own a timepiece that has tiny metal fragments of the doomed cruiseship melted straight into its core, all for the reasonable price of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. American.

So I was trying to tell him that this was somewhat unreasonable, not to mention downright freaking odd.

Who would buy such a watch?

Is it good for picking up chicks?

You're sitting at the bar, sipping your gin and tonic, and up walks this blonde, and you say hi, and you point to your watch, and you say: "See this? Dropped a cool two hundred and fifty grand on it. See this metal? From the Titanic. Not bad, eh?"

At what point do national tragedies become fair game and prime fodder for our own captilistic, cannibalistic instincts? What's the statue of limitation on death? Because a lot of people died on the Titanic, and they're still dead, and it's somewhat creepy to be wielding the weapon of their destruction on your wrist.

What's next?

In ten, twenty years, are you going to meet some girl in a club, buy her a drink, sit her down at a table, at which point she'll open her mouth and say: "See that tongue ring? It's made from debris found at the World Trade Center?"

Sound impossible?

Not to me.

The Titanic tragedy was once the biggest, most tragic story of the century. And now you can put pieces of the boat in your watch for the price of a decent sports car.

But my student wasn't that interested.

"Ten-ten," he said. "My teacher in Korea told me that all watches in advertisements are set at ten-ten."

"Really?" I said.

I went home.

I checked.

Riffled through all the old Times and Newsweeks lying around.

And you know what?

The little bugger was right.

Next time you seen an ad for a watch, on a billboard, online, in a magazine, check out the hands. They will be at or near ten after ten.

It's like some little secret of the universe that has been unknown to me for years has finally been revealed.

Not only are there watches with pieces of the Titanic in them that sell for a quarter of a million bucks, but there are also ads for these little clocks that will always be set to ten after ten!

I feel like Jim Carrey in The Number 23, seeing strange patterns and shapes where none had existed before.

The moral of the story?

Always listen to twelve year olds. Korean or otherwise. They know what's cool in life. They know what's important. They've been to the places and listened for the sounds that we've long forgotten how to hear.