I am greatly tempted to write and take a stand on the Pacquiao controversy of some one week ago but cannot help worrying that I might in the process rub people the wrong way.
Worrying, and I guess, ultimately desisting from going on with it, clearly, without, as they say, mincing my words.
Anyhow, to take a shortcut.
Better yet to ramble with only the vaguest semblance of destination.
My own two cents’ worth is that there is a problem here with at present zero prospect of getting resolved.
To wit, the clash between a side that perceives itself as liberated and enlightened, whose objective is political correctness, and who are so quick to the draw one cannot help having the impression they are committed to vigilance.
I think Pacquiao has a better chance of knocking out Mayweather in a return match, or Marquez in a fifth fight than surviving a debate with anyone from this circle, say, television host Boy Abunda or expatriate writer Ben Realuyo or university professor Neil Garcia or any of the more articulate netizens, gay or not, who were outraged by his masahol pa sa hanep clip.
At any rate, there have been responses that signify the Pacman is not alone, one coming from a man of the cloth.
Who will go pretty much the same way in a debate, oral or written, with the politically correct side. Or, again, so I think.
Not for nothing have more than one Pacquiao castigator shooed the boxing hero — to go back to the ‘dark ages’ where, it’s understood he belongs. He and, by implication, other priests and pastors of his, fundamentalist ilk.
This branding of one side of the agon as ignorant, as relics from the dark ages, may boomerang because it smacks, be it so faintly, of hubris.
Anyway, an aside. Galileo’s struggle with the Church may safely be regarded as the great watershed that marks the passage from the ‘dark ages’ to the age of enlightenment.
Long story short, Galileo was right and the Church wrong: the earth does move and, indeed, is not the center of the universe!
We punctuate that with an exclamation point because it was a scientific triumph. But we may wonder if perhaps the Church felt bad, in no mood to rejoice, because man, made in the image of God, and given the privilege of giving every item in creation its name, was no longer at the center of the universe, arrogant fool, and the earth was not still but in perpetual motion —just say that when there’s an earthquake!
Aside number two.
I remember from UP Diliman in the mid Sixties, where and when the two French intellectual stars Sartre and Camus were read avidly, this faint memory. Coming across a debate between the two, the subject of which I absolutely can’t recall, maybe because it was political and didn’t interest me. What interested me was the account given of how the agon went. It seemed Sartre’s dialectical brilliance prevailed.
I felt bad, being the Camus fan that I was. But there was also the observation that consoled. His, Camus’s moral urgency weighed in well.
And here I claim (somewhat weirdly) that I have come full square circle.
The Pacquiao tempest of a hiccup is the reproductive health bill all over again — again, in the sense that the Church assumes the position of holding the fort, so to speak, for morality in a ticklish subject just waiting to be exacerbated.
Who are you, Camus, to decide what’s moral for us? (Very imperfectly recalled but I think that’s what Sartre essentially said.)
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