As we celebrate our 113th year of nationhood, Nationalism is undergoing a resurgence. Everybody’s proud to be Pinoy. You know because everybody’s shirt says so. And you know because – in a nation where soccer is a virtual non-entity – everybody’s raving about our national football team.
The Azkals are virtually everywhere these days: in street corners, at homes, in offices, in classrooms, at parties; an omnipresent topic for every occasion. In fact we, along with the media – both traditional and social – have been (1) talking about the Azkals ad nauseum since last December, (2) essentially going crazy over wins that aren’t exactly happening in the World Cup, and (3) thoroughly informed about Phil Younghusband’s relationship status.
That being said, I’m still not totally convinced that they’re overrated – not from a football standpoint, but from a culture standpoint. I have a nagging feeling that they mean something, about our state as a people, about what we mean exactly by the phrase “Pinoy Pride”, and consequently, about what it really means to be “Filipino”.
“Pinoy Pride” is Philippine Nationalism rebranded. As a pop culture phenomenon, it began infiltrating the zeitgeist at the start of the 21st century. The fashion/art collective known as “Team Manila” was at the forefront of this new movement, using images of Jose Rizal, jeepneys and the Philippine map in their modern “hip” designs. In and of themselves, their creations were more derivative of popular western trends in typography and graphic design than they were revolutionary. What made them “original”, though, was their intent, which was to allegedly “subvert” fashion traditions by using iconic Filipino images as their subjects. Suddenly, nationalism can be used as a platform for subversion. While this initially meant that Joey Mead posing nude except for the Philippine flag painted over her body was suddenly a viable “creative” idea, it eventually led to the popification of nationalism. It was now cool to celebrate your being Filipino. Soon enough, Pinoy pride began seeping into our everyday lives – from the shirts we and our President wore, to the pop songs we and our parents were having LSS over.
For years, though, this was more of an abstract trend, associated mostly to inanimate objects and the various ways one can apply the three-stars-and-a-sun concept to any given fabric. Pinoy Pride was a shirt that was on sale at a tiangge, an angle for some mid-level rock band to use for its next hit, and a quaint image of the Manila Bay sunset.
In 2010, Pinoy Pride finally had a face. Better yet, it had faces – handsome faces with ripped bodies to boot. The Azkals finally gave a long burgeoning movement its poster boys. Oddly enough, The Azkals are now the subject of many shirts as well – and yes, Team Manila designed many of them.
The larger the hype grew, the harder it was to ignore the elephant in the room: the irony that our National Team is dominated by players who aren’t 100% Pinoys.
This is nothing new. Our basketball program has been fielding Fil-Foreigners to international competition for more than a decade now. Ironically, in our country where basketball has become our unofficial national sport, our national basketball teams were never as celebrated as the Azkals. But Asi Taulava and Erik Menk were never treated like rock stars because they were expected to win something; meanwhile, Phil Younghusband and Neil Etheridge have become golden gods overnight because they weren’t expected to win at all. While our unfair expectations may very well dictate the difference between “half-breed” and “patriot”, this isn’t simply a case of double standards. What we have, rather, is a winner-starved culture.
We invoke Pinoy Pride for every Youtube sensation, every one-time designer for an Oscar nominee, and every obscure animator for a Pixar film. We do this in a world where the English don’t even feel like bragging about Radiohead and many French people don’t even know Tony Parker exists. The common wisdom here is that we jump at any opportunity to feel proud of our nationality because we rarely get to have anything to be proud of, yet when fringe American comedian Adam Carolla infamously pointed this out in a podcast rant about Manny Pacquiao: “Get your shit together Philippines. Jesus Christ. I mean, again, it's fine to be proud of your countrymen. But that's it? That's all you got?”, we were all up in arms. This is because, deep down, our answer to that rhetorical question was “yes”.
We didn’t really have a problem with what Adam Carolla said, or what Teri Hatcher’s character in “Desperate Housewives” said, or what Claire Danes said years ago when people still heard of her – we had a problem with them saying it. Pinoy Pride is like the irrational defensiveness one would feel for a father who’s jobless and a drunkard: I can call him a loser all I want but if some neighbor said the same thing, chests are going to be stabbed.
The Pinoy who is clamoring to have something to be proud of and the Pinoy who claims that we have nothing to be proud of both miss the point entirely. Pinoy Pride is the purest of all nationalistic feelings. It is neither bound within nor contingent upon any single rationale; it exists because of its sheer desire to exist. The English are proud of their manners, the French their general snottiness, and the Americans for copyrighting democracy. We have…Manny Pacquiao.
But Carolla is wrong: he’s not all we’ve got. We also have replacement singers for forgotten 80s bands. We have mildly successful national athletes who can’t possibly find their way around any Philippine city if their life depended on it. We have disaster-stricken people who smile at cameras. We have fishballs. We consecrate everything around us and everything about us with pride; that is to say, everything that is us.
And…what is us? Who are we?
Our search for pride is really a search for an identity, which, in our scattered-island nation founded by colonizers, has been a continuous construction (initiated by colonizers). In the midst of this ongoing identity crisis, we have collectively embraced every bit of our detached, unrelated selves – our Spanish habits, our American ideals, our Chinese fatalism, our Malay looks, our tribal instincts, our jologs tendencies – and have subconsciously acknowledged this potent, if pastiche amalgam as our identity. We don’t have one big thing to be proud of because we don’t have one big thing. Singularity is simply un-Filipino.
There is nothing ironic about Pinoys rooting for a national football team made up of Eurasians and natives, just as there is nothing ironic about nationalistic shirts bearing western-influenced designs. Mongrelism is as Pinoy as buko pie.
The Azkals are virtually everywhere these days: in street corners, at homes, in offices, in classrooms, at parties; an omnipresent topic for every occasion. In fact we, along with the media – both traditional and social – have been (1) talking about the Azkals ad nauseum since last December, (2) essentially going crazy over wins that aren’t exactly happening in the World Cup, and (3) thoroughly informed about Phil Younghusband’s relationship status.
That being said, I’m still not totally convinced that they’re overrated – not from a football standpoint, but from a culture standpoint. I have a nagging feeling that they mean something, about our state as a people, about what we mean exactly by the phrase “Pinoy Pride”, and consequently, about what it really means to be “Filipino”.
“Pinoy Pride” is Philippine Nationalism rebranded. As a pop culture phenomenon, it began infiltrating the zeitgeist at the start of the 21st century. The fashion/art collective known as “Team Manila” was at the forefront of this new movement, using images of Jose Rizal, jeepneys and the Philippine map in their modern “hip” designs. In and of themselves, their creations were more derivative of popular western trends in typography and graphic design than they were revolutionary. What made them “original”, though, was their intent, which was to allegedly “subvert” fashion traditions by using iconic Filipino images as their subjects. Suddenly, nationalism can be used as a platform for subversion. While this initially meant that Joey Mead posing nude except for the Philippine flag painted over her body was suddenly a viable “creative” idea, it eventually led to the popification of nationalism. It was now cool to celebrate your being Filipino. Soon enough, Pinoy pride began seeping into our everyday lives – from the shirts we and our President wore, to the pop songs we and our parents were having LSS over.
For years, though, this was more of an abstract trend, associated mostly to inanimate objects and the various ways one can apply the three-stars-and-a-sun concept to any given fabric. Pinoy Pride was a shirt that was on sale at a tiangge, an angle for some mid-level rock band to use for its next hit, and a quaint image of the Manila Bay sunset.
In 2010, Pinoy Pride finally had a face. Better yet, it had faces – handsome faces with ripped bodies to boot. The Azkals finally gave a long burgeoning movement its poster boys. Oddly enough, The Azkals are now the subject of many shirts as well – and yes, Team Manila designed many of them.
The larger the hype grew, the harder it was to ignore the elephant in the room: the irony that our National Team is dominated by players who aren’t 100% Pinoys.
This is nothing new. Our basketball program has been fielding Fil-Foreigners to international competition for more than a decade now. Ironically, in our country where basketball has become our unofficial national sport, our national basketball teams were never as celebrated as the Azkals. But Asi Taulava and Erik Menk were never treated like rock stars because they were expected to win something; meanwhile, Phil Younghusband and Neil Etheridge have become golden gods overnight because they weren’t expected to win at all. While our unfair expectations may very well dictate the difference between “half-breed” and “patriot”, this isn’t simply a case of double standards. What we have, rather, is a winner-starved culture.
We invoke Pinoy Pride for every Youtube sensation, every one-time designer for an Oscar nominee, and every obscure animator for a Pixar film. We do this in a world where the English don’t even feel like bragging about Radiohead and many French people don’t even know Tony Parker exists. The common wisdom here is that we jump at any opportunity to feel proud of our nationality because we rarely get to have anything to be proud of, yet when fringe American comedian Adam Carolla infamously pointed this out in a podcast rant about Manny Pacquiao: “Get your shit together Philippines. Jesus Christ. I mean, again, it's fine to be proud of your countrymen. But that's it? That's all you got?”, we were all up in arms. This is because, deep down, our answer to that rhetorical question was “yes”.
We didn’t really have a problem with what Adam Carolla said, or what Teri Hatcher’s character in “Desperate Housewives” said, or what Claire Danes said years ago when people still heard of her – we had a problem with them saying it. Pinoy Pride is like the irrational defensiveness one would feel for a father who’s jobless and a drunkard: I can call him a loser all I want but if some neighbor said the same thing, chests are going to be stabbed.
The Pinoy who is clamoring to have something to be proud of and the Pinoy who claims that we have nothing to be proud of both miss the point entirely. Pinoy Pride is the purest of all nationalistic feelings. It is neither bound within nor contingent upon any single rationale; it exists because of its sheer desire to exist. The English are proud of their manners, the French their general snottiness, and the Americans for copyrighting democracy. We have…Manny Pacquiao.
But Carolla is wrong: he’s not all we’ve got. We also have replacement singers for forgotten 80s bands. We have mildly successful national athletes who can’t possibly find their way around any Philippine city if their life depended on it. We have disaster-stricken people who smile at cameras. We have fishballs. We consecrate everything around us and everything about us with pride; that is to say, everything that is us.
And…what is us? Who are we?
Our search for pride is really a search for an identity, which, in our scattered-island nation founded by colonizers, has been a continuous construction (initiated by colonizers). In the midst of this ongoing identity crisis, we have collectively embraced every bit of our detached, unrelated selves – our Spanish habits, our American ideals, our Chinese fatalism, our Malay looks, our tribal instincts, our jologs tendencies – and have subconsciously acknowledged this potent, if pastiche amalgam as our identity. We don’t have one big thing to be proud of because we don’t have one big thing. Singularity is simply un-Filipino.
There is nothing ironic about Pinoys rooting for a national football team made up of Eurasians and natives, just as there is nothing ironic about nationalistic shirts bearing western-influenced designs. Mongrelism is as Pinoy as buko pie.
("starbucks" photo from paulding.blogspot.com)
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