[AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this article back June 23, 2018. It was a commentary on two issues in the news (1) protest against Desperate Housewives for insulting Filipino doctors and (2) the decision of Philippine Daily Inquirer to remove Pol Medina's cartoon strip Pugad Baboy after it poked fun of a conservative order of nuns. This is a critique against ultra-nationalists and excessive political correctness.]
The offending moment came when Susan Mayer, played by Teri Hatcher, throws a fit at her gynecologist and questions his credentials because he suggests she is going through the early stages of menopause. "Can I check those diplomas," she says, "because I want to make sure they're not from some med school in the Philippines."
To be fair, the scriptwriter did not even name any particular medical school, and the show itself did not air on Philippine television. It was watched by a predominantly American audience. But US-resident Filipinos sent taped copies of the episode to relatives back home in the Philippines.
Filipino doctors were livid. They demanded an apology from the show's producer and threatened to sue ABC, the network that airs the sitcom. Some even urged the Philippine government lodge a formal protest with the US State Department.
Seriously? Serve a note verbale on a foreign government over the irreverence of a situational comedy (that's what "sitcom" means) show? Cause an international diplomatic row over a punchline?
Absolutely, said some ultra-nationalist docs. The stakes are too high to just let this thing slip by: Filipino pride and dignity, the integrity of the Philippine medical curriculum, the reputation and professional credibility of thousands of local doctors. These things are priceless. Nobody who takes vicious license in mocking them can be allowed to get away with it.
The show's producer was more than eager to apologize. In fact, the whole cast was so eager they wrote a whole episode just for that purpose. The problem with too profuse an apology is that it turns into sarcasm, and that's exactly what happened. It is a comedy, what would you expect?
Forget about suing ABC. What is vexation under Philippine law is satire in Hollywood's creative community. I do feel sorry for our Philippine doctors but picking a fight with a skunk is never a good idea.
For their sake, I hope none of the cast of Desperate Housewives ends up on an operating table with one of the doctors they offended holding the scalel. It could prove too difficult to heed Socrates' charge on them to "first do no harm."
Filipinos have heard of figurative speech, of course. In many ways, the satirical tradition is ingrained in the culture. An ambition aimed too high is a long shot or "suntok sa buwan" (punching at the moon). Say anything a Filipino aspires for and he'll be quick to claim the prophecy--"magdilang anghel ka sana" (may you speak as an angel). Filipinos speak in metaphors all the time. So a few quiet days after the offense will eventually diffuse the sting of that ill-conceived ethnic joke.
But something else is worrisome. It is possible we are joining the rest of the world in embracing a new onion-skinned school of thought called political correctness. The idea is to avoid offending anybody with language that is too sharp or too frank. You don't have to lie necessarily, just be considerately vague
Political correctness is gaining traction in many free societies today. You better learn the ways of it fast, or you can lose your job as a cartoonist or satirist.
Some examples: you cannot call people squatters anymore--they are "informal settlers." They don't live in makeshift shanties in slum areas, they have "sub-standard housing in the economically-depressed zones." No one is an idle bum anymore these days. He's not unemployed, he's just an "inactive member of the reserve work force" because he wasn't fired from his last job--he was "retrenched." The boss didn't find him goofing on the job, he just "failed to make the threshhold of productivity evaluation." The company is not mismanaged or bankrupt, it was just "addressing a liquidity issue" so, of course, the company did not terminate half the people on payroll, it just "downsized its operations."
Unless you learn to talk this way, prospects of promotion--oops, that is exclusionary-- prospects of "upward mobility in the corporate ladder" become pretty dim. Even in something as harmless as a cartoon strip, you simply cannot call nuns hypocrites--they are conservatives. Apparently, even calling them cloistered is offensive now--the term was still good as of 1968 when Julie Andrews portrayed the playful governess Maria after discovering that she wasn't built for the cloistered discipline of the nunnery in The Sound of Music. No--today's nuns are not cloistered isolationists, they are "holding the line against the unregulated onward march of crass modernism." They don't obstruct social development, they "fiscalize" nor do they foist close-mindedness--they "strengthen faith-based ethics and behavior."
So you cannot call them antagonists of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transexual (LGBT) community or enemies of Reproductive Health (today's 5-syllable politically correct lexicon for sex). They are "gender-proper pro-lifers." If the Inquirer's Pol Medina only knew all of this, he'd still have his Pugad Baboy cartoon strip.
But sometimes, linguistic contortionism like this can also backfire. The Taiwanese didn't fall in love with the Philippines government's characterization of shooting an unarmed Taiwanese fisherman as an "unintended killing." What does that make of the dead fisherman--an accidental cadaver?
This thinking that if you change the description of the condition, you somehow change the condition itself has resulted in retrogression, not progress. The government used to look heroic running the National Disaster Coordinating Committee--because you can see them actually succeeding in rescuing victims of calamity. Now they just look goofy as the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management and Coordinating Council--because you can see them utterly failing to reduce the severity of every calamity. Or even to finish pronouncing their full office title before the next typhoon arrives.
In many ways, the candor of irreverent cartoon strips like Pugad Baboy--indeed there are many other Filipino cartoons of lesser luster but no lesser relevance--was a refreshing antithesis to this plague of the Language of Man-Pleasers. Many years from now, sociologists and anthropologists will not be studying the language found in lawyers' briefs, letters to the editor or government memos--but the rich colloquialisms in cartoons as the more accurate portrait of the language of that period.
But right now, those who call a spade a spade--and not a "personal earthmoving appliance"--must suffer the chagrin of these linguistic illusionists who say "handicapable" instead of handicapped or cripple (what's wrong with cripple? It has no negative connotation in any dictionary, it is even the word used in the bible); the immaturity or inability of some to adjust to a good roast as a "violation of the human right to dignity" and the timidity to take a stand for freedom of expression as "responsiveness to due process."
It is useless to argue with anyone about freedom's value because the other person is obviously unaware that he is using the very freedom you are promoting to try to prove you wrong. You might just end up suing each other. There is only one thing even more useless than arguing about values and that is litigating it.
NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
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