Opinion
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2017
A5
Waging war on all fronts WHEN billionaire businessman Donald J. Trump took on the CEO job of United States of America Corp, little did he know he was going to encounter headwinds after setting sail only less than a month ago. His ship of state, the USS America, is floundering and heading into dangerous waters. It’s not the fault of his crew whom he picked mostly on the basis of their tax returns in the corporate world. Yet, he cannot yell “you’re fired!” The shoe is now on the other foot. His bosses, the people , are showing their dissatisfaction with the man they hired. They know where the buck stops—at Trump’s desk. He only has himself to blame. His inexperience at this kind of job and his reckless, controversial policies are sinking him deeper into a quagmire. Trump, from all indications, is waging a war on several fronts. On the domestic front with foreign and global implications, Trump stopped the US refugee program and put on notice that the US will not be granting visas to those from seven majority Muslim countries—Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Iran. Radical Islam has spawned a worldwide fear after Islamist terrorists struck in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Nice and US cities. Fear of Islam though should not be the lynchpin of US foreign policy. A Washington state federal judge ruled that Trump’s temporary ban of travelers from Muslim majority countries is unconstitutional. Trump has challenged the court ruling as he says the ban is a lawful order to protect the security of the state. Airlines in Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, despite the Trump ban, resumed boarding passengers with valid US visas following three days of confusion at international airports when passengers were not allowed to check in while those already on board were offloaded at the tarmac. Trump also called the proposal of Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to swap refugees held in the Pacific
Islands for refugees from Muslim countries as “a dumb deal.” How many more enemies will Trump make in his no-Muslims-inAmerica policy? Filipino-Americans in the US have joined the widening protests against Trump’s ban despite the administration clarifying that Filipinos and other foreign nationals with green cards or US residents are exempted. The latest to draw Trump’s ire is Iran for test-firing long-range missiles even after the Obama administration inked a compromise peace agreement with Tehran. Russia, which was accused of hacking the November presidential US elections to favor Trump into winning over Hillary Clinton, did not escape Trump’s notice. His ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said the US will maintain its economic sanctions against Russia for annexing Crimea where the strategic naval base of Sevastopol in Ukraine which gives the Russian navy access to the Mediterranean Sea. Vladimir Putin’s playbook also calls for the massing of Russian troops along its border with Ukraine where two million ethnic Russians live. Displaying his confrontational propensity, Trump is pushing to build a wall along the US-Mexico border to make good on his campaign promise of keeping illegal aliens and drug traffickers from entering and eroding American values and institutions. While Trump’s “America first” campaign slogan found traction with US voters, the widespread protests would seem to show a change of heart among those who voted for him. Constitutionalists and human rights groups are leading the worldwide protests. American diplomats expressed opposition
to the President’s suspension of the refugee program and discriminatory visa requirements as unlawful and an act that would draw antiAmerican sentiment. In Asia and the Pacific, the Trump administration is fanning the flames of war as it warns China against military buildup that would impede the flow of commercial cargo from plying vital international sea lanes in the South China Sea. But there are dissonant voices within the Trump Cabinet itself. While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned China against further aggressive moves, Defense Secretary James Mattis said there will be no dramatic moves by the US in the South China Sea. US allies are confused at this conflicting statements on the US stance. Mattis, however, reaffirmed its support for treaty ally Japan in its territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Island being claimed by China. “China has shredded the trust of countries in Southeast Asia,” said Mattis who’s on an official trip around Asia. Former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, in an opinion piece in Time magazine, expressed concern the world could be preparing for war. War clouds are gathering in the horizon arising from China’s aggressive moves to claim nearly all of the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear saber-rattling and Russia’s territorial grab of Crimea from Ukraine. Last week, the worst fighting since 2015 flared up anew between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels along the east Ukrainian border. Exchange of heavy mortar barrage and gunfire between the two sides took a toll of 33 lives. The Crimean crisis, the simmering South China Sea territorial dispute and the unresolved civil strife in Syria which sent refugees fleeing across Europe are only some of the failures of Ban Ki Moon as UN Secretary General tasked to deal with global crises.
The best picture for what America needs right now By Virginia Postrel “HIDDEN Figures” pulled off a surprise victory at the Screen Actors Guild awards, making it the most serious challenger to Oscar favorite “La La Land” for best picture. An enjoyable if overpraised musical, “La La Land” is the sort of Hollywood tale Academy voters love. But “Hidden Figures,” a drama about three black women working as NASA mathematicians in the early days of the space race, has an edge of its own. It’s a movie for anxious times, offering patriotic balm for the fractured body politic and even throwing in a tale of career resilience in the face of automation. Cultures are held together by the stories they tell about themselves, and America is struggling to find a new national story, one that can acknowledge past injustices without becoming defined by them. The old all-ornothing morality tale of Good America has too often been superseded by an all-or-nothing morality tale of Evil America, which proclaims that every apparently positive accomplishment disguises a sadistic reality. American industry despoiled the earth, the great universities were built on slave labor, the land itself was stolen. “Just occurred to me that Trump praised a slave owner in his black history month remarks,” Salon political writer Simon Maloy tweeted on Wednesday. That’s the current line on Thomas Jefferson. Good thing Trump didn’t also mention George Washington. Neither morality tale is true and neither is sustainable. American history has its blemishes and horrors. But self-hatred can’t provide the basis for a viable culture, and demanding it only feeds resentment and division. “Hidden Figures” offers an alternative. “The idea that black women had been recruited to work as mathematicians at the NASA installation in the South during the days of segregation defies our expectations and challenges much of what we think we know about American history. It’s a great story, and that alone makes it worth telling,” writes Margot Lee Shetterly in the book on which the movie is based. The women are the heroines, of course, but the country that recognized their
talents—and that united behind the astronauts they supported—is equally honored. The book and the movie take patriotism for granted. Like her protagonists, Shetterly is a welleducated black woman, the daughter of a NASA research scientist and a Hampton University English professor. Her goal as an author wasn’t to replace or subvert the American story but to enlarge it. “What I wanted was for them to have the grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved,” she writes, “the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as a part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.” History is neither a comedy nor a tragedy. It is an open-ended epic. And epics are complex —just as America’s western expansion or the Pacific War was complex. That’s why readers can still argue over the merits of Achilles versus Hector or whether Milton’s Satan is the hero or villain of “Paradise Lost.” What exactly are we to make of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, or William Tecumseh Sherman? For understandable commercial reasons, however, Hollywood, likes its dramas clearcut. And “Hidden Figures,” which has grossed more than $100 million domestically since opening Christmas Day, is definitely a commercial film. The transition from book to screen inevitably brought changes: compressing time, changing ages, and creating vivid but fictional incidents. To heighten the drama, the movie unfortunately also adds white villains who didn’t exist in real life, even as composites, and grossly distorts what working at NASA was like for its heroines. In the movie, the male colleagues of Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) are sullen segregationists who never converse with her and won’t even drink from the same coffee pot. They’re also much older and stuffier than their real-life counterparts, who were,
Shetterly writes, “an opinionated, high-energy bunch, and best of all, as far as Katherine was concerned, they were all as smart as whips.” The admiration was mutual: Katherine’s confidence and the bright flame of her mind were irresistible to the guys in the Flight Research Division. There was nothing they liked more than brains, and they could see that Katherine Goble had them in abundance. As much as anything, they responded to her exuberance for the work. They loved their jobs, and they saw their own absorption reflected back at them in Katherine’s questions and her interest that went so far beyond just running the numbers. Working at NASA gave bright black women a blessedly meritocratic respite from the daily indignities of everyday life in pre-Civil Rights Act Virginia. Indeed, Shetterly notes that one reason they found the facility’s segregated cafeteria and restrooms so offensive was that they felt equal in the office. Eventually, the institutional culture wouldn’t sustain the state-mandated segregation. “Driven by the pragmatic sensibility of the engineers,” she writes, “management had naturally tacked toward a policy of benign neglect with respect to the bathroom signs and lunchrooms.” The truth, in other words, is more inspiring than the movie. But the movie is a start. For all its distortions, it presents a story of women defined not by their victimhood but by their merits. And the big stuff is true: Katherine Johnson really did develop math to calculate John Glenn’s reentry and the astronaut really did say, “Get the girl to check the numbers.” Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) really did have a NASA mentor who encouraged her to study engineering—a Polish-American Catholic, though, not a Holocaust refugee—and did get “special permission” to take a night class in the white high school. Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer) really did learn Fortran and reinvent her career at age 50. And by the end of the movie, they all receive the recognition they deserve—including the film itself. Their ingenuity and triumph enlarge the American epic. Bloomberg
Helping...
by which alone we can make decisions that do not arise from the embarrassment of those who are shamed, nor the submission of From A4 those threatened and bullied but that rational consensus that is Villegas, Bacani, Cruz et al., why does the government not synonymous with legitimacy! question the premises of the Church’s position, articulate the moral principles from which its draws its conclusions and enunciate the rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph constitutional premises on which it relies? When this happens rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph the whole nation can then be engaged in that fruitful exchange rannie_aquino@outlook.com
The folly... From A4 *** There is yet another contract that government will soon lose in the international arbitration courts—the much-criticized North Rail contract which was launched during the Arroyo administration. As of this writing, I do not know how much we will have to pay the Chinese state-owned company which was left holding a document to construct a rail system between Manila and Pampanga—but never proceeded. The tragedy consists not only in monies or fines that we have to pay, but more because of the economic opportunities laid to waste by these unfinished projects. Clark is not viable as an international airport because there are no commuter trains to ferry passengers quickly enough to it. Mass housing plans are in limbo, so the metropolis remains as congested as ever.
In the case of the Laguna Lake dredging project, designed to alleviate the flooding that occurs with every downpour in the metropolis, weeping is what we all do each time the heavens open and send us tons of rain. All these damages, all these aggravations, because government is so fatally attracted to the folly of long legal battles, instead of reasonable settlements and rational decision-making. *** Now comes DENR Secretary Gina Lopez-Roy’s decision to cancel 21 mining permits already awarded by her predecessors, legally, to some very big corporations, many of which have tie-ups with foreign companies. Asked to reveal the results of the audit she claims her department laboriously worked upon since her appointment to the position, she refuses, saying “it’s too complicated.” And then she generalizes by saying it’s because mining “causes suffering.”
Oppressed migrants DISTURBING events happened in the last week of January. Two Filipinas, both household service workers in Kuwait, suffered tragic deaths. One of them, Jakatia Pawa, a 32-yearold mother of two, was hanged on Jan. 25 for allegedly killing her employer’s 22-year-old daughter in May 2007. She was convicted to death by hanging in 2010. The other one—Amy Capulong Santiago—was reported to have been beaten to death by her Kuwaiti employer. Records of the Police Directorate General of Criminal Evidence in Kuwait showed that Santiago’s body bore old and fresh bruises. Contusions on various parts of her body showed that the beatings went on for a certain period of time. The fates suffered by these two Filipino household workers in Kuwait represent only the tip of the mountain of agonies and oppression that Filipino household service workers suffer in the Middle East, especially Kuwait. According to accounts from Pawa’s family, mainly from her brother, Air Force Colonel Angaris Pawa, her employers went on a vacation in Iran in May 2007. When they returned, Pawa’s female employer caught her 22-year-old daughter sleeping with her boyfriend in her bedroom. The daughter was allegedly betrothed to someone else. Her sleeping with another man while not yet married would bring shame to her family apart from being contrary to Islam laws. Out of rage, the girl’s mother allegedly stabbed her own daughter to death but pinned the blame on Jakatia Pawa. Pawa consistently professed her innocence throughout the trial and until her death. Her claim of innocence was supported by the fact that the murder weapon did not bear her fingerprints; there were no blood stains on the dress she was wearing on that day; and she had no motive to kill the daughter of her employers whom she had served for five years. Several other events of late showed the sorry plight of Filipino overseas workers in Kuwait. Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III was reported fuming mad because in his recent visit to the Philippine Embassy in Kuwait, he was not told that there were some 100 runaway Filipino workers living in the Philippine government-run halfway house. He learned about it only after he had left, prompting him to recall Labor Attaché Angelita Narvaes to face administrative charges. Bello said The Labor Narvaes misled him about the death of department must Amy Santiago and concealed from rid its ranks of him that there were consular officers runaway Filipino workers who were who have no waiting to talk to him. Then, too, last week, genuine concern for 32 repatriated Filipino workers arrived in their fellow citizens Manila from Kuwait. in foreign lands. All of them were domestic helpers who escaped from their employers because of maltreatment and abuse. One of them said she was sold by her employer to another Arab who physically abused her. Another said she too was sold to another Kuwaiti who had three sons. She recounted that one of the sons tried to rape her, forcing her to run away. The way Filipino workers are treated in Kuwait and other Arab countries speaks volumes about their people’s lack of respect for Filipinos. I saw with my own eyes how a Kuwaiti male, the third secretary of the Embassy of Kuwait, spoke and behaved with much rudeness and disrespect toward a female member of the House of Representatives. She filed a complaint at the Department of Foreign Affairs against a former Kuwait Ambassador for causing millions of pesos worth of damage to her house, which he had rented. I thought to myself, if a Filipino congresswoman can be treated in this manner at the very premises of the Foreign Affairs Office by a Kuwaiti national, we can just imagine how Kuwaitis treat Filipino workers in their home territory. Truth is, Kuwait and other countries in the Middle East need our labor force more than we need the wages they pay. The proposed move to ban Filipino household workers from going to Kuwait and other countries in the Middle East should thus be implemented soon. The Duterte administration, after all, is working to create as many jobs as possible to keep Filipinos workers from leaving. Then, too, an information and education drive must be launched to open the eyes of Filipinos to the unimaginable horror stories suffered by our Filipino overseas workers. It may be a dream. But if we do more to help the poor members of our society to stay home and do productive work here in their own homeland, we will earn the respect of nations that treat our overseas workers like dirt. In the meantime, the Department of Labor must study how many overseas Filipinos need help in various jurisdictions. It must rid its ranks of consular officers who have no genuine concern for their fellow citizens in foreign lands. Email: ritalindaj@gmail.com Visit: www.jimenolaw.com.ph
Naturally, the mining firms insist on their rights under the Constitution which guarantees due process. They will go to court. Again, this looks like another “A, basta!” decision. Media and a lot of people cheer the secretary’s decision against “bad, bad mining” which causes environmental destruction. “A basta, parepareho silang lahat.” The same people who “hate” mineral extraction will soon cook their meals on stainless steel pots and pans, mindless of the fact that these are made from extracted metals, principally iron and nickel. After dinner, the more religious (why do these environmentalists always swear by the good Creator?) will fondle their “blessed by the Santo Papa, mismo” rosaries forgetting that the chain that keeps the mysteries together in their rosary beads are made of metal extracted earlier from the bowels of the earth, and that the crucifixes they kiss and adore are made of metal likewise (perhaps verdadero argento for the elitist matronas?). Folly.