Stainless: 2. Stainless

This serves as the introduction to this series of posts, which I should have posted before I posted "Perspective" yesterday. Perhaps my thoughts on this post were less well-formed than the ones from my first post. Not a problem; this is something that can be edited in post-production.

Before I go into today's topic, I would like to expound a little bit on the notion that Filipino commuters trade 2D maps of their commutes for easier-to-remember linear sequences of landmarks. This is interesting because to some extent, they lose track of and forget the 2D map (or indeed never learn it in the first place). The shortcut "maps" they have in their head only make sense for as long as there are jeepneys, buses, and tricycles on Manila's thoroughfares. But guess which people are required to know the 2D maps? The conductors and drivers of the public utility vehicles. If you commanded a tricycle driver, "Sanggumay Street", or to a jeepney driver, "Sa Tomas Morato lang", those commands would not make sense if either driver had no idea where those places were.

So in effect, there is a sort of "cartographic priesthood" made up of the public utility vehicle drivers and owners that know all the roads, and the "cartographic laity", the rest of us who have only memorized landmarks. This, in turn, is interesting, because it helps explain why jeepney drivers have so much clout when it comes to making the /pamasahe/ or the jeepney fare closely follow trends in the price of gas. Think about it. If jeeps have to pay more for gas without raising the fares, some will go out of business. There will be fewer jeeps, and fewer people will be able to go around, simply because they don't have the whole map, just the landmarks, and the jeepneys do.

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Many things in the Philippines, it seems, are made of stainless steel--jeepneys, tricycles, furniture, so on and so forth. As soon as I had that idea in my head, I decided that this series of posts should be named "Stainless". But of course, naming something Stainless requires the word "stainless" to do double duty--it must describe something literal or mundane about a set of concepts, and, by some clever (or otherwise) turn of phrase or reinterpretation, it must also describe something deeper about the same set of concepts. That reinterpretation dawned on me while I was riding a jeepney from Lawton to St. Luke's Medical Center, and the jeepney crossed Pasig River on a bridge made to look like stainless steel. (Perhaps it was really stainless steel, but that is not likely; more likely it was painted that color to shimmer in the hot sun.)

It was the juxtaposition of something clean and glimmering and something so notoriously dirty and noxious that clicked in my head. I've never seen an upstanding Filipino person who did not endeavor to clean up, to make something presentable, be it the facade of their house, the floor, their own appearance. So why is it that, when you walk busy streets and wait for jeepneys and buses at busy intersections, you come upon so much trash and dingy walls, walls plastered with political ads and simple block text ads that promise to help you "lipat bahay" (moving house) or the services of a "tubero" (plumber) if you call or text some number? Why is the air so dirty that the sky is gray or brown rather than blue? How could a nation of clean people (here I only mean to make a generalization to achieve contrast) let monstrosities like Smokey Mountain and Pasig River happen?

I hit upon the answer when I realized that I have been removed from this place for so long that I am not seeing Metro Manila with Filipino eyes anymore; I am seeing them with American (Guamanian?) eyes. I thought back to when I had a full Filipino mindset, when I was a lot younger. The place seemed... cleaner. When I was assigned to draw in school, and it was time to color in the sky, I reached for the blue crayon. I visited my aunts' house near Bamboo Organ Church, and while it was dingy and dirty--in other words, the way it is now--I didn't seem to mind. (If there was anyting I minded when I was a child, it was the smell. Since the sense of smell creates the strongest memories, I am somewhat surprised that I don't smell it whenever I visit nowadays.)

Of course, it could be that this memory of a cleaner Manila is the result of any one of a number of more mundane causes: perhaps being a child I was simply not equipped to pay attention to the dirt around me; perhaps my mother and the housekeepers we hired did such a good job of keeping my house clean that I came to assume that everywhere else is just as clean; and perhaps--and this view is what I think most people, Filipinos or otherwise, hold--perhaps it really was cleaner back then. (This last is a manifestation of the frame of mind that the past is better than the present.)

But perhaps the disconnect is caused by a special feature of Filipino perspective: Filipinos maybe--just maybe--look past the very dirt they combat. When they see Luneta, they visualize a Luneta they want to visit, free of candy wrappers on the ground, the monuments newly-painted and not stained with years of soot and car smoke, the air fresh, clean, and breathable. What's more, this visualization may in fact be borne of that same Filipino desire to be clean that moves them to sweep with brooms and scrub floors with coconut shell halves. In short, their perspective is that of a "stainless" Manila.

In this way it seems like the complete reverse of what I learned was the Japanese perspective. When Japanese people look at a place, they /expect/ it to be the ideal way it is supposed to be, and are usually disappointed when the reality does not match the ideal. Filipinos look at the mirror from the other side--they see the reality and visualize the ideal, and when possible, try to make the two match. (Of course, the Japanese "disappointment" can and does move them to do the same thing, match the reality to the ideal. It is an example of two opposite causes having the same effect.)

Now this "stainless" view is fine and perhaps even positive in the individual case, but in the group-political case it may have negative effects. Filipino politics has a timbre that rivals any Filipino soap opera; it seems so difficult to build a consensus on any sort of policy, as most any political move is construed to benefit the author or sponsor in some way. A "stainless" perspective makes environmental mistakes like Pasig River possible, because in a slow-moving bureaucracy, why fix something that doesn't /look/ broken (or in this case, dirty)?

This is why I like the explanation of the "stainless" perspective--it explains the seeming disconnect between the Filipino propensity to be clean and the larger ongoing problem with cleanliness in Manila. It relates to this series of posts because I can see this last visit to the Philippines as an opportunity to relearn this "stainless" perspective and to apply its positive lessons to my life.

This thought process was borne in me by my rejection of the "the past is better than the present" mindset. I'm mainly a "the future is better than the present" person, and this offers the hope that if Filipinos recognize that they have this "stainless" perspective, they can overcome the political barriers that keep them from becoming a more environmentally conscious country, a country that actually is stainless.

Thoughts?

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Iyaz feat. Charice Pempengco, "Pyramid".