No, Jason, they're very beautiful, but they are not women.

It’s been a few weeks, I guess, since I last posted a blog. My laptop is currently broken, so that explains part of it, but that only happened recently. The bigger reason is something I find to be true whenever I travel: that the longer you’re out, the less important it becomes to chronicle your adventures. There’s two basic reasons for me to write and take pictures; the first is for the benefit of others who might enjoy reading about my exploits. The second, more dubious motive is for posterity, an attempt to capture the significance of each moment so that I (or others) might remember or relive it later.

When you travel for any period of time, at least in my experience, initially everything is incredible and new—the vividness of the colors at sunset, the pungent, conflicting aromas of a fish market, the joy of communicating something, anything, in a new language—and it seems appropriate to try to capture it all. As time goes on, if you’re receptive, your experiences don’t become any less amazing, but the pressing need to write it all down begins to take a backseat to the pressing need to live in the very moment you find yourself.

Still, since I don’t want to completely abandon a) the two people who read this blog or b) my sad, dejected future self who might want something to read should (god forbid) my life become boring at any point, I’ll try my best to keep on keeping on. Just know that lack of frequency in my posts probably means more adventure for me, so that’s cool, right?

My uncle and I traveled to Cebu for a few days, because my auntie had to go there for training and so we accompanied her. Cebu is a beautiful city with beautiful women and a vibrant nightlife. People often say it’s like Manila only cleaner and less chaotic, and in my short stay there, that seemed to be true. Of course, it’s the downtown that’s cleaner and less chaotic—a few jeepney rides took us through squatter areas and other seedy parts of town that remind you that Cebu suffers from all of the same social problems as other large urban areas in the third world. In fact, even on one of the main drags downtown, within a few hundred meters of one of the bourgeois paradise malls, I saw what may have been one of the saddest things in my life: a 12-year-old teaching a 9-year-old how to huff paint. As we passed, I saw the splotch of yellow solvent at the bottom of a plastic bag, inflated with the air from this child’s lungs, and what troubled me most was the thought that on some street corner, there was a man selling these plastic bags with paint just to make a few pesos to survive, or to feed his own fix.

Another thing that troubled me is the large amount of white people in the city. I realize that might sound a little racist, and that's probably because I am a little racist, but these aren't your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, mildly irritating white people. Most of them are middle-aged, overweight, unattractive white men who are here to either take advantage of their relative wealth in order to pick up impoverished Filipinas who see greasy Uncle love-handles as a ticket out of the slums, or they're here to just buy sex and/or companionship/domestic servitude outright. Seeing these disgusting fuckers really makes my blood boil; I'm not a violent man, but when I see one of these sexual predators I just want to walk up to their table, spit in his face and then punch him and walk away.

And then, there's times when I see one of these guys sitting at a table in the mall across from a 12-year-old Filipina, and I want to believe that they're there with the girl's mother, but there's only two sets of food in front of them, and as I watch them for a few minutes, no one else joins. I want to believe that maybe he's an uncle, or somehow otherwise connected to the family, and that little girl is really safe and happy, but in the back of my mind there's the lingering suspicion that nope, this is exactly what the fuck it looks like, and this guy is a sick fucker who's getting away with the unthinkable because of a favorable exchange rate.

But seriously though, Cebu is a pretty nice city, and the troubling things are really a small percentage of the city as a whole. Another thing that piqued my curiosity was the scattered presence of anarchist insignia scrawled on the walls of the city. I’m sure there is in Manila as well, but I haven’t been to those neighborhoods yet. The prospect of living in Cebu then becomes attractive, because it provides the opportunity to see if the graffiti is simply the youthful expression of undirected rebellion, or if there’s any serious organization and action going on behind the imagery. I know of a few direct action-oriented groups in Manila, but I’m not sure about what there is in Cebu.

It’s really interesting to see suggestions of Anarchism here, because the third world in general, and the Philippines in particular, is ripe for the sort of autonomy and revolution propagated by anarchist discourse, and yet, since the various social movements of the 60s and early 70s, Anarchism has become largely the refuge of disaffected middle-class youth in the industrialized world. I’m not suggesting that there’s no value in the action and social consciousness of these middle-class groups, but personally, I think unless the movement can reintegrate itself into the poor working-class, as it had at the height of the labor movements of the early 20^th century, the prospect of a meaningful revolution anywhere is doubtful.

As I mentioned above, there are a number of factors that make the Philippines a prime location for the spread of anarchist ideas; Anarchism, after all, lies at the heart of many individuals’ personal convictions, though they may not call it by the same name, and this is especially true in the Philippines. One of these ideas is small, autonomous communities. Even in the cities, almost each street is a ‘barangay’ or neighborhood with some sort of neighborhood council that meets to discuss and resolve community issues. As you get further from the cities, the autonomy of these small communities becomes greater, and you find that in many rural areas, far from police stations and government buildings, these local neighborhood councils govern essentially everything, and rely very much on a consensus approach to resolving issues. It just makes sense that if you live in a village of 80, it’s a lot harder to implement policies that only 51% of the population supports.

Another condition here that makes Anarchism more viable is the absolute corruption of government, and particularly the consciousness of this corruption. In fact, I’d venture to say you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who believed in the fidelity of the government. That’s not to say there aren’t many, many conservatives who support the government, but even these conservatives are keenly aware (and sometimes moreso) of the vast scope of dubious deeds committed by those in the service of the government.

Squatting is a popular form of direct-action in anarchist communities the world over, as it subverts the authority of governments whose power is deemed illegitimate and it serves in some way to redress the gross inequality of wealth produced by capitalism, taking from the rich properties left abandoned and placing them in the hands of the poor (or at least, in some Western countries, the bored). In the Philippines, squatting is a no-brainer, but the people here engage in occupations not in the name of political statement but in the name of survival. It’s just common sense that if there’s a building or a plot of land, and nobody’s using it, and there are some people who could use a place to stay, well, they’re probably gonna make themselves at home. Even one of my conservative uncles thought it sounded perfectly reasonable, and seemed like a good idea, when I told him about squatter’s rights laws in the Netherlands. (Tell a conservative in the U.S. about squatter’s rights and see what reaction you get.)

There are also masses of people here, especially in urban centers, who work in shitty conditions similar to those in the West before the gains of organized labor. There are indeed sweatshops, and there is most certainly a dire need for organizers and agitators with the militant, direct-action focus of anarchist unions of the past.

A million people showed up in the streets to nonviolently overthrow the Marcos dictatorship in the 80s (even though Marcos enjoyed the support of the Reagan administration, by the way). Those million people, and more, are still here and ready to make shit happen, but the transition to “democracy” has to some degree brought a false sense of agency and progress to the people of the Philippines, though a variety of indicators suggest the opposite.

Touristy highlights of the Cebu trip? We went to the Basilica Santo Niño, which is a big, old, Catholic church, and I’ve had more than my fill of big, old, Catholic churches, having lived a year in Spain. We visited the adjacent museum, however, and it was fascinating to see all sorts of literary relics from the era of Spanish colonization. They had a variety of documents from as early as the 1530s, written in beautiful script, undoubtedly with a quill pen, in Spanish. Some had handwriting that was barely legible to my modern eyes, but what I could read, I could understand, though it was written in a quaint sort of bible-Spanish. They even had a Visayan-Spanish dictionary, with Visayan words and their definitions in Spanish, dated in the 1830s. I wanted a replica, but the lady at the museum was pretty sure there was nowhere in the world I could find a Visayan-Spanish dictionary for purchase.

We also took a trip out the part of the city famous for its guitar makers. As it turns out, they should be famous for their guitar maker, since there was only one shop (Alegre Guitars) that actually had instruments of any quality. That one shop was pretty cool, I have to admit, because I’ve never seen a guitar being made before, and they had guitars in various states of construction, including a room with all the different woods they use and the different cross-bracings they use for different sonic resonance. Once in the showroom, however, I was a bit disappointed. Most of the instruments (they had both classical and dreadnoughts, ukuleles and even an upright bass) were of very good quality, but not excellent quality, especially considering their hefty price tags. By hefty, I mean the equivalent of $300 American for the cheapest one. That might not sound like much for a hand-made guitar, but if I’m going to buy a hand-made guitar, it’s going to be because it’s amazing, which these weren’t. The surrounding “makers” were merely shops with no place to see any of the process, selling cheap, Tijuana-style guitars where the twelfth fret didn’t even produce the same note as the open string. And they still wanted inflated tourist prices. Wack.

At night we went out and saw a lot of live music, from acoustic jazz, to 70s and 80s rock, and then finally a place in what seemed to be where the college crowd hung out that had two bands—one playing 90s rock with a lot of Oasis, and the other playing recent R&B hits with a lot of Ne-Yo and the like, so I was quite pleased. All of the bands were excellent, and everyone’s been telling me that the best singers and musicians in the country tend to come from Cebu.

I spent my last day in Cebu in bed with Swine Flu, or some ailment likely brought on by the constant transition from the sweltering heat of the tropical sun (which I don’t mind so much) to the frigid air of air-conditioned taxis and shopping malls (I was with my family, I don’t pick the destinations). I’m in Manila now, and have been for about a week and a half. More on that later.