State-Society-Culture Dynamics

Go ahead. Scream “Superstition!” at the top of your lungs. I think that spectacular celestial events such as the total solar eclipse tomorrow (Asians will be in the night side of the planet when it happens, and therefore will not be seeing it) are reminders to us. “Calls for attention”, if you will. “Signals”, “beeps”, “alarms”...”warnings”? Celestial semioticists (astrologers for you who prefer it straight) don’t call them “signs” for nothing. Before anything else, here are the facts. The exact moment of the eclipse will be at 6:31 pm, Universal Planetary Time (Greenwich, UK), and Americans (the US) will see or feel the darkening of the sun as early as 10 am. The geographic details have been worked out and is being discussed all over the Net. I’ll try to download and post here the graphs and the GIF (copyrighted Sinclair 2000) of the path of the eclicpse by Strickling (posted at Wikipedia). Back to the “signs” now. On a purely observational level, they are noti...

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balangiga_massacre. Retrieved August 3, 2017 You think President Duterte is a ruthless killer of drug users, and a political dictator. Well, we can continue to debate this, and I think that for some time in the future, we will. But one very good thing for this President is that he is a Filipino, a nationalist who unlike the Filipino of Bulosan and Ileto, is a remembering Filipino. His SONA of 2017 included a request for the Americans to return the bells of Balanginga, attended by a retelling of the American massacre of Filipinos in Balangiga, Samar, an initiative that left me momentarily stunned at the deep sentiments of this man who is proving to be a maverick President. When this President remembers, he remembers “historically”, in the sense of a sociological fact, not merely “personally”, much in the sense of C. Wright Mills concept of social issue as against mere personal trouble. It is in this light that I...