social criticisms
by vicente-ignacio de veyra iii

 
Vol. 1, No. 4
September 29, 2004

A Quiet and Dangerous Game
 

I've seen great golfers and golf teachers talk on TV and I must say I have nothing but great admiration for their lot and the sport as a sport, especially for the men and women who've played those entertaining historic games on the sports cable channels.

However, there is something that Karl Marx taught everybody, and I mean everybody, and I don't mean the virtue of a social security system. This lesson proclaims that in everything is politics, or conversely, that there's politics in everything. And so golf as a political presence must likewise be read as having a symbolic value within our polity. It is by this prompting that I must say golf as such, a necessary symbol, deserves a second serious look beyond the analyses of ESPN. Never mind that it used to mean "game off limits to females", since anyway today there are more female golf athletes representing Asia in the major circuit than there are males. Rosales and Delasin are familiar Filipino names in the LPGA. A Filipino has yet to get a PGA championship.

Ria Quiazon,
another Pinoy LPGA hopeful.
 

And never mind that in the subcultural rock music society golf is frowned upon as a Republican game, nearly throwing eggs at Hootie and the Blowfish and only forgiving the elderly Neil Young.

I'd like to encourage an independent assessment of the game's context today, in the Philippine setting, an assessment ideally non-partisan so to speak. And though I know there's been some opposition to golf in many countries including non-tropical ones like France and Japan and the Scandinavia, yet I'd be content to have a look at how golf may represent a semiotic something in the Philippine body politic.

First, one of the basic complaints against the golfing sport derives from environmental activism, having to do with water supply usage for the hectares of must-be-green-grass. And although this has always been promptly countered by many an articulate golf course owner with a reference to a well or mini-reservoir built by the course club for course use, still the water table supply must be spread democratically, and so on and so forth, and that's not even mentioning yet the "organic" dye that goes into the Strontium 80-laden grass not meant for cows, and going into the soil composition and the atmosphere. Oh, I must stop.

I must stop. For I'd much rather take beef with the implication of land usage for golfing purposes. It is certainly an implication that completes itself vis a vis the contradictory policies of Philippine governance.

We are a country running a land reform policy, for one, and a human settlements department in government tasked to address the squatters and migration of the homeless problematic. And here we are flaunting the idea that wide tracts of land, as long as their owners don't declare them as agricultural land, can either delay these properties' usefulness for some future industrial leasing or otherwise use now for the golfing elite minority's pleasure. Some will say that by this picture alone golf becomes a symbol of contradiction. But I say, we must not stop there; we must move on, to conjecture upon the anatomy of that contradiction as perhaps a product of Hypocrisy. In the Marcos era, much government talk was disseminated against the presence of idle lands, a campaign of course which turned a blind eye to Marcos' KBL Party members' own teeming tracts of idle property. Hypocrisy in this country does not merely find symbolic amplification in sports. No. For it is the sport.

Farm estates in the United States are owned by private individuals instead of Hacienda Luisita-style "corporate" systems, and maybe because hypocrisy is not a tradition in American agriculture. On the other hand, we've heard about the many problems posed against Philippine land reform, or Japanese land reform for that matter. For example, one claim has it that national agricultural objectives have not been achieved hand in hand with the Philippine land reform plan. The contending argument, on the other hand, goes that agricultural output was never the program's objective in the first place, the umbrella objective being political instead of economic or philosophical. For surely, if the program were moved by an economic thrust, then we'd have a problem with the alleged reality that many farmers are not necessarily guaranteed of a better life, which is a euphemism for the dread of the opposite. Unless perhaps the farmer converts his land to more profitable industrial leasing, in which case the land reform program as it is would have to be deemed as having lost its purpose. Or does it really lose its redistributionary objective, either way? Others argue that land reform as a philosophical direction must be consistent and extend itself to promote the philosophy in factories, for after all many families have had several of its generations serving under some same factory, or an ad agency's janitorial division for that matter. Should the land reform philosophy extend families stock options in this area of society?

But this is not a piece aiming to instigate a resurgence of debates on the land reform program and philosophy, lest I be mistaken for sounding apologias for the landed. This is rather, and I hope you'd believe me, a light examination and/or rumination on the enveloping philosophy of our republic itself in regards to land ownership and its responsibilities, reformed land or not.

An individual who owns a thousand hectares of farmland must subdivide it to tenants who have the option -- helped by tax money -- to buy the little pieces so they can have their own little grape plantations. Well and good. But an individual who owns a thousand hectares of land not used for the production of pectin-rich vegetables may actually exploit his area as he pleases, and I am reminded of Lucio Tan's long-idle hectares in Quezon City beside homeless squatters.

Agricultural farms up for land division. Golf courses. Agricultural production programs. Idle lands. Put two and two together and you have a picture of contradictions, perhaps deriving from a hypocritical lying elite culture, perhaps merely from a country's non-philosopher-kingship devoid of an integral wisdom that may serve as soul for the never-ending pornography of naked slogans. This non-philosophy has churned up a religion of corruption, and its gods play golf.

"George Bush's philosophy is to fight enemies with the disciplining force of guns and America's bully weapons of mass destruction. Having mentioned our people's capacity to display their anger only towards their own kind, I say it would be easy for us to use the same approach towards our lower classes."

However, I would like to say that perhaps the Filipino habit of throwing in the towel in the boxing arena dictated by heavyweights might someday swerve to more proactive attitudes of Davidian defiance.

Let me start with the "moderate" form of such a defiance. I could, for example, beyond wallowing in disgust, propose a sublimating potential for the golf sport in the tropical setting. I have in mind, for instance, a possible "progressive" value for golf as a social item, one that will address instead of ignore its Philippine setting wherein a democracy is struggling to empower itself over a long-established plutocracy. I could start with the proposition that perhaps a new millionaire can be created by my suggestion that standards for golf course bunkers can be upgraded to include trees, ponds to contain edible fish, grass areas be less than the rock and weed or even fruit grove or corn areas. I'm talking about what modern parlance might dub as "extreme golf". Unacceptable, perhaps, to the traditionally conservative crowd that make up golf country clubs, but then there's always in industry companies like Virgin or Pixar or Sari-Sari Store that might not mind venturing into earth-friendlier and necessarily people-friendlier redesigns of things we've come to accept like fearful loyal subjects to a fearless royal class.

After all, the world has changed. And if we are to learn anything from this new phase -- in the same manner that we've learned that centrist governments tame while fooling a people and that it's rightist governments that actually promote a contesting communist insurgency --, it is that the latest world order demands a rehash of our concepts of a promiseland for everyone, lest we wake up one day to find all our neighbors acting as terrorists with clubs shouting defiance towards our golf clubs.

But wait. Given our tame general populace's outlook which has long learned courage to fight only the little neighborly fights among themselves, the above grim picture is pretty unlikely. And golf courses will continue to blossom, agricultural tracts converted under our noses to industrial estates or resorts, and the hypocrisy will give way to a new utopia. Or should I say myopia?

And the masses that will suffer will never know what hurt them, and they will continue to murder themselves with petty bickerings, unable to protest against those beyond their education's comprehension. Even as many say we've always had a socialist tendency as a people, always expecting government to take care of us and blaming government for our ills, yet our magnificent elite continue to flaunt a self-centeredness that recognizes the reality that the tamed "socialism" of our people has been amply uneducated by our educational policy, unable therefore to find the art of war. But this is risky. How long will our children be safe from the surprises of sudden terrorism? Might we already have sown the seeds of such a subculture? Are we continuing to farm such a field of seeds? When wealthy Chinese-Filipinos display their privileged delight in a golf course, will a small-minded waiter who has had the all-too-common racist impression that Chinoys are an anti-labor Kuomintang lot, will he plant the ire of a neo-Nazi in his spirit? Would his racism be checked by Chinoys' better presence in Rotary Club medical missions, say, for free breast cancer checkups on municipal grounds?

Golf. It's a game off limits to Filipinos. And by Filipinos I mean to include the general landed gentry, as well as the homeless and squatters and the communists. As well as the political opportunists. As well as the ordinary men and women of the village or town or city who drink the communal water, slosh in the global-rain puddles, try to understand the word freedom in an ever-decreasing ground space for their fenced-out habitation.

Game off limits to Filipinos. That's what we're playing. And there are still 18 holes to play before trophy day, in case we reach it in this Philippine open.

One could say the above all amounts to inciting to rebellion instead of simple semiotics and free political analysis, but I believe we all must address such issues as this regarding an exclusive sport, for it somehow represents the latest glaring conflict of philosophies between today's two candidates for president in the virtual mother country of the global tradewinds, the USA. George Bush's philosophy is to fight enemies with the disciplining force of guns and America's bully weapons of mass destruction. Having mentioned our people's capacity to display their anger only towards their own kind, I say it would be easy for us to use the same approach towards our lower classes. John Kerry's philosophy, in the meantime, calls for a defeat of the things that sow the seeds of terrorism and such trees as Saddam Hussein. Kerry doesn't believe toppling expansionist trees will be enough, for given the rich soil for seeds, many like trees will always be ready to replace toppled ones. Given our elite that has learned -- from the Spaniards, the early American invaders, the Japanese, and the Marcos movement -- to test the limits of the average Filipino's patience, Kerry's order would be easier said than done in our geopolitical reality.

Captured Abu Sayyaf members

It behooves us, then, to play on with this game of g-o-l-f, which will eventually gloriously bring us to wherever it will when it does. Glorious, because beyond the lip service of doomsayers like me.

Ok, then, what's your handicap?  [RM]