Passion For Reason : Mao, John Lennon and Che
Posted 02:27am (Mla time) Feb 18, 2005
By Raul Pangalangan
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 18, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
"MAO Tse Tung is the new Hello Kitty." I saw a law student wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Chairman Mao, and told him, wow, am I so happy that students still remember the Great Helmsman. And thus his nonchalant reply about a veritable icon, so wonderfully irreverent, so unthinkable during my student days.
That was a time when Mao was venerated, his words meditated upon like biblical passages. When he was quoted in campus propaganda, his words would be typed in bold font. Before computers were invented, that meant typing the same text twice over; overdo it and you risk ripping a hole in your Gestetner stencil paper (my students today must imagine the mimeo machine the way I think of Gutenberg's movable press).
It was the reign of the "grim and determined." I remember asking an older student activist if they liked John Lennon's "Imagine" (or for that matter, Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer," or Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind"). Surely Marx would have given his imprimatur
to the anguished anthems of the counter-culture. But no, the older student said something like: "Hindi siya angkop sa ating mala-piyudal at mala-kolonyal na situwasyon."
I wanted to say, "Right on," but he might label me part of a right-wing conspiracy. Surely he could not have objected to the lines: "Imagine no possessions...no need for greed or hunger, Imagine all the people sharing all the world." But he might have recoiled at the words: "Imagine there's no countries ... nothing to kill or die for...Imagine all the people living life in peace." Where would that leave the armed struggle for national liberation?
How I wished I could have shown him later biographies of Jiang Jing, the ultra-left Mrs. Mao, who was said to have a fondness in private for flowery dresses and boy-meets-girl movies but in public required her one billion subjects to wear the drab regulation tunic and watch only revolutionary operas of machine gun-toting cadres.
In contrast, while Mao's standing has declined, there is renewed interest in Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born doctor who joined hands with Fidel Castro, a law student at the University of Havana, in exporting revolution to other parts of Latin America (he was killed in a military encounter in Bolivia at the age of 39). Bookstores show new biographies and commentaries, and an Internet search yields a forthcoming movie "Diarios de moticicleta" (Motorcycle Diaries), about his famous journey upon his graduation from medical school through Latin America, supposedly a radicalizing moment in his life.
Why the new historic high for Che almost 40 years after his death? Allow me to venture an outsider's explanation. The Che revival, or at least the biographical revival of a dreamy Che, shows a romantic turn in our political life. After all, only Che is quoted speaking of such things as "love": "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. .... Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealize this love of the people, the most sacred cause, and make it one and indivisible."
It heralds the decline of the old type of Leftism that searched for a single universal theory that can explain everything, much like Marxism or Maoism purported to provide all the answers, from physics to politics, from the political to the personal-and furnished the commissars to make sure you got it. Today their true believers remind me of the father in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," who explained how all words have their root in Greek, including the Japanese word "kimono"!
It shows rather an inward turning, at seeing history in its more human scale. In that sense, the older reformers were anti-Marcos or anti-American, but were not anti-Establishment. Their aim was to seize state power, not transform it. They aimed to change the world, not themselves.
In contrast, the nonchalance of today's students, the Mao-is-the-new-Hello-Kitty attitude, is most welcome. They are not trapped into package-deal orthodoxies of whatever ideology. They are freed from the corresponding demand for total allegiance, and George W. Bush's attitude "either you're with us, or you're against us." They live out what John Reed, author of "Ten Days that Shook the World," said in his movie biography (and here I paraphrase): "If you ask us to give our selves to the revolution, first we must nourish the self that will be given." They realize that for them truly to humanize the world, first they must themselves be fully human. They are more attuned to the mystical Lennon who said: "Life is what happens while we're busy making other plans."
It shows the romanticism that is the legacy of people power. Therein lies its strength and its weakness. People power triumphs because it isn't "scientifically" programmed or programmable, and is at its most powerful when it is spontaneous and honest, when it is peopled by those moved by Che's "great feeling of love." It is most dangerous when it is conjured, engineered and manipulated by shadowy elites, engaged in what Recto called "political ventriloquism."
As a true "Lennonist," I close with his words: "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will live as one."
* * *
Comments to raul.pangalangan@up.edu.ph
