RETROSPECTIVE ON POLITICAL PROPAGANDA

For good or bad, propaganda essentially aims to short-circuit
rational thought among its targets to favor the proponent's goal

Propaganda did not start as something undesirable or downright evil. In fact, it had its origins in what many of us would consider the holiest of causes. Over four centuries ago, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV was confronted with a twin-horned problem--heathens were fiercely resisting Christianity in the new lands that the papacy wanted to evangelize, and where the faith had already made a beachhead, heretics were attacking its very genuineness and patrimony. 

                        IMAGE CREDITS: STEEMIT.COM (TOP), SLIDESERVE.COM (BOTTOM)      

                                

Alarmed, the 68-year-old pope, once a fiery and outspoken doctor of laws but now afflicted by a dreadful bladder stone barely two years into the papacy (he died of the illness a year later), decided to form a special task force. He called it the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or “the Congregation for propagating the faith,” and gave it the task of putting more teeth to the worldwide missionary activities of the Roman Catholic Church.

That congregation’s successes and failures are today firmly etched both in the world’s religious geography and in the inscrutable, sometimes shockingly irrational ways that people on both sides of the great religious divide view that world. That, of course, is a fascinating subject crying for an intelligent discussion, but at this time, we will limit ourselves to how the then entirely new word “propaganda” crept into the language, first into Latin and later into English, and how its practice evolved into a deadlier hydra than the twin-horned devil it was originally meant to vanquish.

Today, as most of us know, the word “propaganda” has become a noun that means “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” In plain and simple English, it is a one-sided form or persuasion seeking to make people decide and act without thinking. This blight on the logical thought process becomes virulent when serious clashes in religious, political, and ideological beliefs become inevitable. And what makes the once pious word and activity even more unchristian and linguistically anomalous is that it is waged as fanatically by the really bad guys as by the presumably good guys on our side.

The essential problem with propaganda, of course, is its single-minded goal of short-circuiting rational thought. As practiced in  Philippine election campaigns in recent memory, for instance, it is excessively bigoted in agitating our emotions, in exploiting our insecurities and ignorance, in taking advantage of the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of the language, and in bending the rules of logic whenever convenient or expedient. Propaganda can delude both the ignorant and intelligent alike, and the even greater danger is that even astute people could become its victims and crazed believers, as we are witnessing right now.

To fortify our defenses against political propaganda, we have to do two crucial things ourselves: (1) get to know at least the most basic tricks used by political propagandists to subvert rational thinking, and (2) cultivate an open and objective mind to counter their deceptions and sleights of the mind.

A practical first step for this propaganda-defusing process is to critically scrutinize those aspiring for the top national positions. For our own and this country’s sake, and no matter what the poll surveys and the TV or radio commercials say, we must cut the candidates or their proponents down to size. We must for decision-making purposes think of them simply as applicants for a specific job, or consider them as nothing more than branded products on the supermarket shelf.

By looking at a candidate as just another job applicant, we can greatly loosen the grip of his or her propaganda on our senses. That will allow us to dispassionately go over his or her application and résumé and make a reasonably sound judgment on the following basics: (1) communication and writing skills, (2) quality of mind and self-appraisal, and (3) qualifications and job-related work experience. Anybody who skips this elementary procedure for hiring entry-level stock clerks and senior corporate executives alike is obviously an incompetent, irresponsible fool who deserves to be fired outright. And yet, as we can all see, skipping this very basic process is what many propagandists of national candidates would like the Filipino electorate to do.

It would be even more instructive to treat the candidates simply as products on a supermarket shelf or public market stall. We can then proceed to mercilessly strip them of their elaborate branding and packaging to see the intrinsic worth of the actual product inside. It would shock many people to know that the cost of the packaging of certain shampoos in glitzy sachets can run to as much as 85 percent of their total selling price. How much more profound their shock would be to find that some highly touted candidates, when stripped of their glitzy imaging and positioning, are not trustworthy enough and have less probative value for the national positions they are seeking than the paper their faces and names are printed on.

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This essay first appeared in Jose A. Carillo’s “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times on March 29, 2004. The author is once again presenting the essay in retrospective to help contextualize the intense propaganda buildup today to destabilize the current government and start another round of changes in the country’s charter to benefit particular political interests.

ESSAY BY JOSE A. CARILLO RETROSPECTIVE: THE BATTLE FOR OUR MINDS

Media-abetted distortion of the Philippine electoral process

By Jose A. Carillo

Once upon a time in our fledgling democracy, people who sought elective office assiduously cultivated a public life of honor, dignity, and excellence. The measures of social and political acceptance were intelligence, integrity, and achievement. The political firmament of the pre-Independence era thus filled up with such illustrious names as Quezon, Osmeña, Recto, Tañada, Roxas, and Laurel. They became larger-than-life presences because of their personal magnetism, eloquence, and deep understanding of the imperatives of politics and governance. But then that was the time when radio in our country was still an adolescent as a mass communication medium. That was the time when broadcast television was still an infant even in America, which had transplanted democracy on the largely unprepared Philippine soil at the turn of the 20th century. That was the time when the print media still held sway as the public information medium. The mechanisms of the democratic electoral process could still grow without getting badly distorted by media-induced manipulation.

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When the Filipinos discovered TV and radio broadcasting, however, a monkey wrench was thrown on the country’s electoral process. They discovered that broadcast media appearance and noise could very well substitute for the assiduously cultivated public life. They discovered the politics of convenience, the politics of media-induced gloss and popularity. From then on, no one who wanted to enter politics needed to learn the art of politics and governance. All one had to do was to expose oneself on broadcast media, preferably television. The kind of exposure really didn’t matter—decent, indecent, whatever—so long as it was sustained exposure. Clowning or outright buffoonery or somersaults on TV was perfect. Reading the news or prattling on TV and radio with half-baked opinions was just fine. Anchoring talk shows or quiz shows was just great. And yes, doing 30-second TV or radio endorsements for any product that needs heavy advertising was even much better! Pitch multivitamins, rum, brandy, anything—and voila! one can be sure to be rated highly by the statistical pollsters and run for election. The greater the broadcast exposure, the higher the level of public office one could aspire for. So why bother learning the art of management, leadership, and governance? After all, the simple media-exposure formula had wonderfully sent entertainers of all stripes to Congress as well as to provincial capitols and city halls—film actors, clowns, sit-com talents, martial-arts performers, talk-show hosts, and newsreaders. At one time, the same formula even sent one of their kind to the highest post in the gift of the land!

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There may be some exceptions to the rule, but look at what Philippine democracy has produced for us: politicians without political platform or ideology, elective officials who do little on top of preparing themselves for the next elections, individuals who have no true constituency or principle to stand for and fight for. Repudiating the marketing axiom so clearly enunciated by Al Ries and Jack Trout in their book, Positioning—that anyone or anything that must battle for our mind must clearly “position” or define itself in the marketplace—these people have not even taken the trouble to position themselves. They stand for nothing. They belong to a political party largely for convenience. Only a paltry few have shown a gift for leadership and governance, fewer still those with a clear vision of their role as public servants. Many have just capitalized on their media-induced popularity to attract moneyed backers or well-financed politicians who were unsure of their grip of the public mind. Some, in fact, have evidently become touts or politicians for hire.

The sad thing is that the Philippine mass media have actually abetted this state of affairs. They have allowed not only politicians but their very own broadcast or editorial personnel to ruthlessly exploit the power of media to advance their political interests. (Of course, it is entirely possible, too, that the media owners were the ones exploiting their former wards all along for their own vested interests.) We thus see the embarrassing spectacle of  (1) TV newscasts whose newsreaders are also the commercial endorsers of products advertised on these newscasts, (2) broadcast personalities already in high public office still shamelessly extracting media exposure for themselves by keeping their old broadcast programs (as if nothing has changed in their professional lives), and (3) officials in high elective office callously acting as commercial product endorsers on all forms of media to perpetually keep themselves in the public eye.

When will this cult of media-abetted popularity end? I am afraid it will not—unless the Filipinos realize that the quality of their governance will only be as good as the quality of the people they put into public office, and unless they recognize the harm that this reign of entertainers in politics is doing to them and act in concert to end it. Until then, to expect any real progress in this country will remain an altogether ridiculous notion. (2003, 2009)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 15, 2003 issue © 2003 and 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

APPOSITIVES AS OPEN SECRET TO MORE ENGAGING WRITING

They can make your writing more engaging, more informative, and more readable

A common problem with bad writing is that it’s often so general and lacking in texture and depth. The people, places, or things used as subjects seem to exist only in two-dimensional space, as in a crude cartoon movie, with the actions described all seeming to crowd themselves in a very brief timeframe. There are hardly any telling details to give meat and substance to the bare-boned prose, so the writing is dry, bland, and uninviting to read.

An efficient way of giving vitality to such writing is to use appositives and appositive phrases. 

An appositive is simply a noun or pronoun that often comes directly after another word in a sentence, putting that word in better context by explaining it or by giving more information about it. On the other hand, an appositive phrase consists of an appositive and all of its modifiers. 

Both are powerful tools that allow you to identify or explain the nouns or pronouns you are using without having to come up with a new sentence or string of sentences to provide more information. This makes your buildup of ideas smoother as it frees the writing from digressions or asides that may just impede its natural flow.

The appositives used in the sentences that follow are indicated in italics: 

“My office assistant Joanna took the day off yesterday.” 

“Her husband, the jealous type, took her on an extended out-of-town trip.” 

“They rode on my friend’s car, a battered 2015 SUV, to a hillside farm in Batangas.” 

Note that appositives may also come before the noun or pronoun they refer to; what’s important is not to detach them from the noun or pronoun they modify.

And here are two sentences modified by appositive phrases: 

“Mayon Volcano, a major Philippine tourist attraction because of its majestic near-perfect cone, is found in Albay, a southeastern province in Luzon about 500 kilometers from Manila by bus.” 

“Adventurers with only a few hundred pesos between them, the two provincial girls took the bus to Manila.” 

In the first sentence, two appositive phrases are at work: “a major Philippine tourist attraction because of its majestic near-perfect cone” modifying the “Mayon Volcano," and “a southeastern province in Luzon about 500 kilometers from Manila by bus” modifying “Albay.” 

In the second sentence, coming ahead of the subject “two provincial girls,” is the modifying appositive phrase “adventurers with only a few hundred pesos between them.”

It should now be clear that an appositive or appositive phrase may either be essential or non-essential to a sentence. An essential or restrictive appositive narrows the meaning of the word it modifies; it is a must to maintain the meaning of the sentence. Usually a single word or two that’s closely related to the preceding word, it doesn’t require commas to set it off from the rest of the sentence, as in the following example:

“The extremely popular Philippine president Ramon Magsaysay died in a tragic plane crash in the early 50s.” 

(Without “Ramon Magsaysay” as appositive, it will take some research to figure out who that president was.)

On the other hand, a non-essential or non-restrictive appositive isn’t absolutely necessary to the meaning of a sentence; it may even be omitted without altering its basic meaning. Depending on its position in the sentence, it must be set off from the rest of the sentence by one or two commas), as in the following example:

“Alicia’s sister, a Philippine-born doctor, worked as a senior anesthesiologist in a large hospital in the U.S. Midwest.” 

(Even without the appositive “a Philippine-born doctor,” the interested reader still could find out who that doctor was.)

Non-essential appositive phrases have the same optional role in sentences like this one: 

“December, usually the coldest month in tropical Philippines, is becoming more popular than June as the wedding month of choice.” 

We can take out the appositive phrase “usually the coldest month in tropical Philippines” and still get a clear idea what month it is that more and more Filipinos are getting married.

This essay, 2147th of the series, appears in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the April 20, 2023 digital edition of The Manila Times, ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

MASTERING THE USAGE OF THE INDEFINITE PRONOUNS

Grappling with the Grammar of the Indefinite Pronouns
By Jose A. Carillo

I can’t help but wince—sometimes even groan audibly—when an impressive speaker ruins a perfectly fluent speech in English with a hesitant, obviously uncomfortable delivery of a sentence like “Everybody must give his share to this noble undertaking.” Such stumbles show a less than full grasp of the grammar of the indefinite pronouns, which as we are taught early in English should always agree with the number of their antecedent nouns as well as with their gender.

This subject-verb disagreement problem frequently arises when an indefinite pronoun is used as doer or receiver of the action in a sentence with no specific antecedent noun. It’s easy to figure out if an indefinite pronoun is singular or plural, of course, but there’s often no way of knowing beforehand what gender to use for its possessive form. Consider the indefinite pronouns “all” and “somebody” in this sentence, for instance: “All of us [is, are] agreed that this mission must be accomplished, but somebody who has [his, her] personal interests foremost in [his, her] mind must inhibit [himself, herself] from joining it.”

That the verb “are” for the pronoun “all” is clear, of course, but whether to use “his” or “her” as the possessive of the pronoun “somebody,” and whether to use “himself” or “herself” as its reflexive pronoun, are very thorny choices indeed! This ambiguity has given rise to certain conventions—some self-evident and some rather arbitrary—to make sure that the grammar of the indefinite pronouns remains beyond reproach.

Before discussing these conventions, though, we need to review the indefinite pronouns to be doubly sure which are notionally singular, plural, or which can be either singular or plural depending on how they are used.

The definitely singular indefinite pronouns: “another,” “anybody,” “anyone,” “anything,” “each,” “either,” “everybody,” “everyone,” “everything,” “little,” “much,” “neither,” “nobody,” “no one,” “nothing,” “one,” “other,” “somebody,” “someone,” and “something.” Except for three, they take singular possessive pronouns and singular reflexive pronouns; the only problem is that their gender is indeterminate. (The exceptions are “little,” “much,” and “other,” which can be used in more limited ways: “Little is done by people who only talk.” “Much is accomplished through hard work.” “Other than him, who is to blame?”)

The definitely plural indefinite pronouns: “both,” “few,” “many,” “others,” and “several.” All five are no-brainers as to their number: they are plural through and through. Each can take the plural possessive pronoun “their” and the reflexive “themselves,” and we don’t even have to think about gender at all when using them.

The indefinite pronouns that are either singular or plural: “all,” “any,” “more,” “most,” “none,” and “some.” They are singular or plural depending on what they refer to. Singular: “All of that book is pure, unmitigated thrash.” Plural: “The singers are at the studio; all are rehearsing their songs.”

We still have the recurrent dilemma of what gender to use for the singular indefinite possessives. The default usage, of course, is the possessive pronoun “his” when no information is available about the antecedent noun’s gender: “Everybody must give his share to this noble undertaking.” Only in one instance, when the statement refers to a known all-female group, is this default ignored: “Everybody in this women’s league must give her share to this noble undertaking.”

Users of the indefinite possessive have come up with two more options to avoid the male bias in using “him” as default. The first option is to use “his or her,” as in “Everybody must give his or her share to this undertaking.” However, this becomes very awkward with repeated use, so that many writers and speakers take the much better option of reconstructing the entire sentence, using a plural antecedent indefinite pronoun instead to do away with the need to establish gender: “All must give their share to this noble undertaking.”

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This essay first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in the Education Section of the March 9, 2017 issue (print edition only) of The Manila Times, © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

DEALING WITH THE ENGLISH COMPARATIVES BETTER

Avoid stumbling when using the English comparatives

Who hasn’t stumbled grammatically when comparing things in English, like saying “Less professors than expected have applied to teach in that college of law” or “The public is now showing fewer tolerance for the arrogance of that public official”? Usually, the speaker becomes conscious of the embarrassing error only a few seconds later, but the damage to his or her self-esteem is irreparable. For there’s really no way to justify why those simple comparatives weren’t said correctly off the cuff, the first as “Fewer professors than expected have applied to teach in that college of law,” and the second as “The public is now showing less tolerance for the arrogance of that public official.”

Sizing up and comparing things is one of humankind’s strongest instincts, so it’s really no surprise that every language evolves a well-defined grammar for comparatives. As we all should know by now, English does this in either of two ways:
 

(a) by adding the suffix “-er” to the positive form of an adjective (or adverb), as in “deeper” for “deep,” or

(b) by putting the modifiers “more” or “less” ahead of a polysyllabic adjective derived from a foreign language, as in “more expensive” and “less appetizing.”

To complete the comparative form, English places the subordinating conjunction “than” between the two elements being compared: “The condominium units here are more expensive than those situated in the commercial district.” “This restaurant’s cooking is more (less) appetizing than that of the restaurant in front.” In these comparative constructions, the first element is a clause that expresses the difference (as in “the condominium units here are more expensive”), and the second element is introduced by the subordinating conjunction “than” (“than those situated in the commercial district”).

Always keep in mind though that in two-clause sentences, the following two-part subordinating conjunctions are used instead of “than”:

(a) “as/not as…as,” as in “Our Davao apartelles are as (not as) big as our Tagaytay apartelles”; 

(b) “not so/not as…as,” as in “Her second starring role is not so (not as) sensual as her first”; 

(c) “the same…as,” as in “The weight of his luggage was the same as that in his previous flight”; and (d) “less/more…than,” as in “Their wedding reception cost more (less) than they anticipated.”

Most English speakers quickly get adept at using these comparative forms, but as stated in the outset, the choice between using the comparatives “fewer” and “less” does presents some conceptual difficulty. It requires clearly knowing beforehand whether the noun to be modified by them is countable or noncountable.

Something is countable, of course, when we can figure out without difficulty how many of it there are; we then use “number” as an indefinite measure for it, as in “the number of houses” and the “a number of guests.” On the other hand, something is noncountable if it’s in bulk form and counting its constituent units would be insufferably difficult or impossible; we then use “amount” as a measure for it, as in “the amount of water” and “a great amount of exertion.”

For plural count nouns, or things that use “number” as measure, the comparative “fewer” is used, as in “There are fewer viewers of her provocative blogs now than last week.” However, for singular mass nouns or things that use “amount” as measure,  the comparative “less” is used, as in “Our truck fleet consumed less diesel fuel this week than last week.” We should also take note that when a plural count noun is thought of as an aggregate, “amount” is more appropriate than “number” as a measure for it, as in “You can ship to us any amount of Hawaiian pineapples you can produce.”

With this, we should be better off from now on in avoiding stumbles when using the English comparatives

This essay first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in the Education Section of  the March 16, 2017 issue (print edition only) of The Manila Times, © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

THE BROADCAST MEDIA AS THE FILIPINOS’ WORST LANGUAGE TEACHER

Our Worst Language Teacher
By Jose A. Carillo

We don’t have to look far to see why Filipinos are having a serious problem learning their Filipino and their English. Taglish, the popular pidgin of Filipino, English, and Spanish, has been the language of choice of the major TV and radio networks for several years now. With this choice, and without meaning to, the Philippine broadcast media have become the most influential but the worst language teachers of the Filipino people. Through their indiscriminate use of Taglish, they have actually been promoting a language that runs roughshod over the form, grammar, and pronunciation of both Filipino and English. They not only hamper and negate the efforts of Filipino-language or English-language teachers in the country, but also undo the progress of even the most capable learners. The major broadcast networks have, in fact, unwittingly made Taglish the default language of the Filipino, there to be heard and seen even without the asking. It should really be no surprise why many language teachers cannot even get their own Filipino and English grammars and pronunciation right, much less teach their pupils and students good Filipino and English.

        IMAGE CREDIT: DWIZ DIGITAL*

It is a terribly lopsided language war in favor of Taglish. When we wake up in the morning, even if we didn’t want to listen, what do we hear from the leading TV and radio networks? Not music to inspire, nor instruction to learn a new thing or two, nor entertainment to start the day right. Instead we get bad news, shallow opinion, and malicious gossip, merrily delivered in Taglish—a Taglish that is getting looser, more audacious, and more pedestrian as the networks fiercely wage their audience-ratings war. Daily we are treated to a sordid spectacle of talk show hosts trying to outshine one another in their off-the-cuff Taglish, flexing the morning news whichever way they wish, and further adding to the Babel by coaxing viewers or listeners to chip in with their own uninformed opinions. 

And this penchant to get uninformed opinion goes to ludicrous extremes: in one network, a gaudily dressed female correspondent chatters nonstop in particularly crude Taglish, runs wild along city streets, clambers up jeepneys, and sashays into wet markets, thrusting microphone onto the mouths of unwitting respondents and forcing them to blurt nonsense on-camera. But not to be outdone, one network features a regular gossip portion hosted by two gays who use pure swardspeak—a breezy, outlandish Taglish—to smear and skewer unnamed movie and TV personalities, government officials, and anybody who takes their fancy. These are, of course, only for the morning wakeuppers. More atrocious Taglish are to come in the TV networks’ noontime variety shows and evening sitcoms.

No amount of formal Filipino and English teaching or linguistic engineering can counter this relentless onslaught on the Filipino’s ears, eyes, tongue, and psyche. Taglish, a language that requires little intellection, offers the line of least resistance to the people. It is all too pat and easy; you can get away with bad thinking and bad grammar and still look intelligent. So why choose the harder road to learning the formal structures and grammar of good Filipino and good English? But give five to ten more years of this Taglish pummeling, and we probably will have a whole new generation of Filipinos totally incapable of speaking and writing in correct Filipino and correct English.

Can we do something about the situation? 

Two countries similarly confronted by the growth of pidgin in their society are fighting it with the language gatekeeping approach. To protect Icelandic from the inroads of English, the government of Iceland has created the Icelandic Language Institute to “immunize” Icelandic from English by coining new native words for English ones. The Singapore government has launched a “Speak Good English Movement” to curb Singlish, its own Pidgin of English, Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin. In a country like the Philippines, however, admirable bureaucratic efforts like these will probably take too long to take off and get things done. The Taglish problem probably needs a more frontal approach.

The general public and the government can take the first crucial step by impressing on the major TV and networks that their role is not simply to mirror society with all its quirks, foibles, and predispositions and to take undue advantage of these in their programming. It also has the obligation to provide their audiences with enough shows and role models for what is good and desirable for the country and its people. They must be made keenly aware that their “mirroring society” model, along with the much-vaunted media freedoms, cannot forever justify the unbridled use of Taglish and “infotainment,” which is often a simplistic, misleading mix of news and uninformed opinion masquerading as public service. In short, the broadcast media, as a social institution strongly imbued with public interest, should serve not only their mercantile interests but the public interest as well—like using good Filipino and good English instead of Taglish for starters.

This essay first appeared in Jose A. Carillo's "English Plain and Simple" column in The Manila Times and subsequently formed Chapter 14 of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Way To Learn Today's Global Language, ©2004 by Jose A.Carillo, ©2008 and Third Updated Edition ©2023 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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*PAGGAMIT NG TAGLISH NA SALITA, TINUTULAN NG KWF 
by DWIZ 882     September 3, 2022

Tutol ang Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF) sa paggamit ng publiko ng Taglish o yung pinagsamang Tagalog at English. Ayon kay Arthur Casanova, Chairman ng KWF, ibang lebel na ang paggamit ng TagLish dahil nasisira nito ang istruktura ng dalawang wika. Nilinaw naman ni Casanova na hindi niya sinasabing huwag gumamit ng English, pero gusto lamang niyang bigyang-diin ang pagpapahalaga sa Wikang Pambansa.

RETROSPECTIVE TO AN ESSAY WRITTEN IN THE EARLY 2000s

Tales of perdition and destruction
BY JOSE A. CARILLO

Our country’s politically disturbing situation today has impelled me to hark back to this cautionary essay that I wrote in the early 2000s bewailing our tendency as a people “to consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but terribly bad decisions that make life so miserable for many of us.”

IN THE engineering discipline there’s this thing they call the strength of materials, or the ability of substances to withstand stress and strain. The maximum stress a material can sustain and still be able to return to its original form is called the elastic limit, and engineers designing structures—bridges and buildings, for instance—savagely subject them to forces beyond their ultimate strengths. For safety’s sake, they have models of the structures “tested to destruction.”

The closest popular expression of this that I can think of is the English idiomatic expression “the last straw that broke the camel’s back.” The allusion is, of course, not only to the danger of overloading beasts of burden but also to the perils of blind, unconditional trust in the capacity of things and people to perform beyond their natural, God-given limits. The folly of such behavior is captured chillingly in this haunting English lullaby familiar to most of us:

Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop
When the wind blows the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall
Down will come baby, cradle, and all.

       IMAGE CREDITS: (LEFT) FLORENCE MARY ANDERSON, PINTEREST.COM,       (RIGHT) PINTEREST.COM)

That humorous English poet-mathematical logician Lewis Carroll (1832-1868) also captured this logic of destruction in the following rhyme about the fallen Humpty Dumpty’s fate in his parable Alice in Wonderland:

All the King’s horses and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Literature and history are, in fact, replete with accounts of tragedies resulting from a failure to recognize the limits to the strength of materials. For instance, in the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by the American playwright-novelist Thornton Wilder ((1897-1975), five apparently morally faultless people on religious pilgrimage plunge to their death when a suspension bridge over a deep canyon snaps. Afterwards, a cleric investigates if there was anything bad or evil the victims had done in their lives for them to deserve such apparently senseless deaths.

Little attention was given to the state of the bridging materials and to their possible deterioration over time, nor to the possibility that the victims might have been, say, excessively overweight, that they may have clustered too close to one another at a weak spot, or that they might have gone into such religious frenzies—as in the Mardi Gras or our very own Ati-Atihan—for the bridge to snap in sympathetic vibration. Any of these circumstances might have been “the last straw that broke the camel’s back,” so to speak.

A parallel incident with similar religious overtones happened in Naga City in the Philippines way back in September of 1972. Right after a fluvial procession in honor of the Bicol Region’s religious patroness, Our Lady of Peñafrancia, had passed underneath an old wooden bridge over the Bicol River, the bridge collapsed. Several dozen devotees and onlookers, most of them boys and girls, were crushed to death or drowned.

To my knowledge, no religious investigation was done to connect their tragic fate to possible moral or reprehensible misdeeds in their life, as was done by the cleric who investigated “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” tragedy. However, just a few hours after the Bicol River bridge collapsed, I personally went to the scene and this was what I saw—the wooden rafters and railings were severely rotted, split, or cracked after years of exposure to sun, wind, rain, and termites. To my mind, there was no way the badly decayed wood could have held the weight of those hundreds of people jostling one another in religious frenzy on the bridge or hanging from its rafters. The faith of the devotees was incredibly strong, but the materials of the bridge simply had become so weak for carry their mortal weight.

In shipping as well, even the “battleship quality” steel of the ocean liner RMS Titanic fractured and broke that fateful night on April 14, 1912 when the ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, killing over 1,500 passengers aboard. The ship’s hull, although made of what was touted as the best plain carbon ship-plate material available during the time, was damaged by the iceberg, and the rivet heads in the areas of contact simply popped off because of the tremendous forces created by the collision. This caused several seams in the hull to open up, flooding the ship’s watertight compartments. Because of their ductility, the rivets normally should have deformed first before failing, but according to some strength of materials analysts who examined materials from the wreckage many years later, they must have become so brittle in below-freezing water temperature. Their safety factor was thus breached and they failed.

           IMAGE CREDIT: ELITEREADERS.COM

As in these tales of perdition and destruction, the danger to all of us inthe Philippes is that we have been so mercilessly conditioned by our contemporary culture, religion, and media to believe that everything is possible. We hardly put any safety factor in our personal, social, and political affairs. We thrive and even revel in blind faith and wishful thinking. We observe no minimum nor maximum measures, no standards, no limits to anything—be it a dream, a plan, a product, a support system, a mode of conveyance, an advocacy, or a vote or aspiration to an elective post. In sum, we don’t think logically and rationally. We consign ourselves to the patently inferior choices and deceivingly attractive but bad decisions that ultimately make life so miserable for many of us.

This essay subsequently appeared as Chapter 151 in my book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.