Lola Dading and Bin Laden

In a twist of genius, Bin Laden released an audio PA addressed to the Arab world on the eve of Pres. Obama’s much-hyped speech in Egypt. He’s basically cautioning his flock, okey, you can have your boy-crush on Obama but let’s not be naïve here, he’s wearing the same suit as his predecessor. The man, he’s pretty old school - an audio message in this day and age? This is one for the books.

In the early 80s, at the peak of the petro-dollar boom, OFWs in the Middleast would send dozens of taped messages to their loved ones back home. That was all the rage.

Fast track to the early 90s - this became a private joke between me and an HS classmate who migrated to Canada. For a while, we exchanged correspondence with intense frequency and one time, he asked if his letters bored me to tears so he would just send cassette tapes of his message instead. “Just imagine I am in Saudi instead of Ontario,” he advised.

Then nasty, we would poke lame fun at Black hip-hop stalwarts with their blinding bling-bling, just copying Pinoy Saudi-fashion. Back then, understatement was a foreign idea. I remember a neighbor who had huge, and I mean huge, gold rings in practically all his fingers, so huge, it could choke you to death. And an attention-grabbing necklace that could whip the life out of the wearer by its sheer weight.

And the raging street humor at that time was “Lupig ka han ak Lolo” where the famous Johnny Pusong and his friends would play an uproarious game of upraise as to whose Lolo was more smartass.

And in a slight variation, I say “lupig ka han ak Lola.” Lola Dading, my paternal grandmother, was a woman who embodied her own sovereignty. She smoked and revved up with the boys. One summer when I was in Grade 2 or 3, she pulled me to her side, “there’s something I want to show you” as if it was King Arthur’s Holy Grail or some mystical power she was about to bequeath.

To her glee and my disappointment, she made me listen to her own recordings of my baby-talk when I was barely 2 years old. She purportedly preserved that for her son, who was away in India to study so he won’t feel so alienated not witnessing some firsts of his first-born. I wonder where those tapes are. Maybe me and Bin Laden could swap.

The latest Bin Laden tape may be a stroke of genius but the man has nothing on my Lola.

He Ain't heavy, he's my brother

Feminist thoughts exhale claims of woman being The Other, resonating what Edward Said theorized about Orientalism.

Last Saturday, I was trapped in a reverse experience.

Over dinner at my cousin’s place, we had the chance to meet our neighbor’s British fiancée, an exceptionally nice chap. Just a brief note: His family name is Stalker. Wow, that’s my occupation! How majestic it would be to carry a name that somehow depicted a certain truth about yourself. How’s Dyndyn Slacker or Dyndyn Lazy?

Anyway, maybe because we don’t encounter a lot of Westerners, we make a circus out of it. In some skewed sense, they are The Others. Well at least, last Saturday.

How did we behave? We fussed in a patronizing kind of way. Forgetting our manners, we used our language as a formidable code, ready to pounce on the hapless foreigner and laughed heartily at our own zaniness. We acted as if we were not awe-struck but we ogled and hung on to every word spewing from his mouth. Worse, we didn’t even pretend to be shy about it. The poor guy could hear our staged whispers – What did he say? What is he saying? Did he actually say that?

And the liberties we have taken – shamelessly asking a gracious stranger whom you just met for about 5 minutes if he has a brother, a cousin, a friend from work, anyone eager to meet a Filipina.

Long live the Queen! The Brit exemplified the best humor any person in his situation might have lost. Or is he used to this scenario? He certainly knew how to play along. If I were in his shoes, I would have probably behaved badly – cuss then clam up or break a few glasses, then freezing silence.

Even I could not save him from myself. Trying to be friendly, I asked him which part of England his people came from. Then he gave me a rather detailed geography of the UK and I only caught the last part – he lived 20 minutes between Liverpool and Manchester. To which I quipped “lucky bastard,” then we shared a chuckle like old beer buddies. Don’t ask me what I was thinking or what I meant by that remark. It was just the first thing that came to my head.

Minutes later, I realized that he assumed that I knew what he was talking about – England’s map, among other things. These foreigners perhaps readily assume that we know their country’s culture and history because, hell, they are fascinating people. Besides, what better to learn about history and culture but from them?

But how do most of them imagine us, Orientals?

As far as misconceptions go about Orientals, that horse-faced woman (O Yahweh, forgive me for telling the truth) O’Reilly loves to talk to by the name of Ann Coulter is without match. Trumpeting the view of the Christian Right, this author/columnist ruthlessly declared “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity’. For more of her idiotic comments, try Google. This I have to say, a grim and determined right-winger like her is funnier than all of those leftist demagogues combined.

Of course, she was referring to Arabs, the Orientals in E. Said’s head because according to her “not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims”.

Well, Ms. Coulter with your Christian right fundamentalism, suck this: The Muslims are not “others”. They, too, are our brothers.