These Are So Gay

I got this link from Band of Thebes, but felt compelled to post about it myself when the bloggers kicked off their list of "The 10 Gayest Pinoy Commercials of the Decade (2000-2009)" by saying, "These commercials are so gay, and we salute them." Is there, could there be a comparable list of American commercials? Sometimes I recognize the cultural deprivation that comes from not watching TV, but not enough to get satellite.

Some of these commercials lean rather too hard on the gay-man-as-sissy trope, but with good humor. As Harvey Fierstein declared in The Celluloid Closet, "I like the sissy ... my view has always been, visibility at any cost. I'd rather have negative than nothing. And also because I am a sissy." And once again, I'm surprised at the visibility of gay people in supposedly conservative Asia (or hell, an archipelago off Asia, whatever). The Bakla Review also has sidebar polls for what its readers consider the best gay Filipino movie of 2009, with 22 choices and a check box for "others". I suppose at least that many independent gay films are made in the US each year, but wow. The Philippines are so gay, and I salute them.

Incidentally, the noodle commercial embedded above works a motif I've seen in several comedy sketches on Korean TV: a couple eat their way toward the middle of one noodle until their lips almost touch, while the live audience shrieks in mixed delight and horror -- only in the Korean routines, the couple are heterosexual, a man and a woman who've been influenced / corrupted by American customs, probably while visiting or studying in the US. Now, that's cultural conservatism, but nowadays even South Koreans are seeing gay commercials on TV.

More Freedom, Whether You Want It Or Not

There was one more bit I wanted to quote from James Traub's The Freedom Agenda, and rather than insert it into a post that was already too long, I thought I'd give it a post of its own:

And so, having taken the islands, it was our duty to "impart to [the Filipino people], if it be possible by contact and sympathy, and example, the drill and habit of law and obedience which we long ago got out of the strenuous processes of English history." As England did for us, so we would do for the Philippines.

The quotation is from Woodrow Wilson, writing in 1902. I'm not sure Traub's summary accurately restates Wilson's assumptions, though Wilson does seem to come perilously close to it.

Traub is assuming an analogy that breaks down under the lightest scrutiny: England was to the United States as the United States was to the Philippines. A better analogy would be: England was to the American Indians as the United States is to the Philippines. The settler-colonists who broke away from England in 1776 were the English; they brought English history and law with them.

The English did not bring "the drill and habit of law and obedience" to the Indians; they drove them from their land, killing them off as convenient. The Americans treated the Filipinos somewhat differently, killing off a few hundred thousand of them in a brief period and then organizing what could probably be called a puppet government of collaborators under American governance, with (as Traub put it) "a strict control over the franchise." (See my earlier post for more details.)

Maybe I shouldn't assume that Traub actually believed what he wrote there; maybe he was just paraphrasing Wilson's position as he understood it. Given the attitudes he exhibits in the rest of his book and his slapdash approach to history, though, I think he agreed with Wilson, or with what he thought Wilson was saying.