That’s not ours: A quick reminder that pandesal and basketball is our culture, not apple pie and baseball, or Kimchi and Starcraft

By: Micah Andres

I blame America for all of this anxiety and depression we feel. Their dominance of popular culture has engrained itself into our collective psyche, forcing us to live life through their eyes. I think it’s no stretch of the imagination if I say that most of you reading this come from the middle-class and up.


(And before you cry “elitist!” or “putangina kang burgis ka!”, you cannot, and should not, deny that social stratification based on economic background affects not only the kind of rearing that you have, but also the culture that you swim through. The problem with us Filipinos is, pikon-talo tayo. When you hear the words “middle class” or “upper class” or “lower class”, we immediately attach positive or negative connotations to it, when really it’s being used as an adjective. In the economic scale, you don’t rank in the upper class. Deal with it. It’s not a bad thing. Neither is it a good thing. It’s just, a thing.)

Anyway, going back to my original point, the West has convinced us that their life, their culture, is the norm. Any deviation from it is the philosophical Other, that strange, alien culture that is just beyond the reach of their understanding.

Fortunately for us, I think that the 20-somethings of our nation are lucky enough that, while being exposed to western culture and media as children through HBO and Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, we still had a rich treasure trove of local culture to simmer in. Sure we watched Bill Nye the Science Guy, but we balanced that with Sineskwela. Sesame Street? We had Batibot. Friends? Gimik, bitches. And I’m not talking about the shitty, social climbing, badly written, badly shot, sorry excuse of a remake that you’re seeing on TV5 now. No, I’m talking about the ORIGINAL Gimik, with Judy Ann Santos and Rico Yan. Don’t even try to deny it asshole, you watched that show with your sister and you liked it as much as she did. Stop lying.

With the passing of Dolphy, I can’t help but be reminded that, hey, we have some pretty good pop culture. Yet, it seems that nowadays, people don’t want to believe that. It feels as if most of what’s on TV is just an imitation of western shows parading itself as “Filipino” when all it’s really doing is replacing the language and not contributing anything to the definition of Filipino culture.

Using western culture to propagate our own isn’t a bad thing in itself. It becomes bad, however, when you try to replace elements of it rather than amalgamating it with what is truly ours.

Everything now feels like a parody of the West. Unfortunately, it’s only a parody if you INTEND it to be a parody. “Ang Dating Doon” was/is a smart, hilarious sketch because it knows that it is taking elements of one show (Ang Dating Daan) and amalgamating it so as to portray their message (though personally I don’t think there are any hidden political messages there, I just think they’re being funny).

I’m sure you’ve noticed the decline of Filipino action movies in the past decade. Remember when we were kids, in between commercials for Dakak Beach Resort and Dragon Katol, they’d show trailers for action movies on ABSCBN or RPN9? There is a reason why they were ridiculous, and I think it’s because we were copying what we saw from Hollywood, then exaggerating it.

To a certain extent, our pop culture now is so engrossed with the foreign that it seems to forget what it really is. And yes, there is a difference with what we’re doing now, and what we’ve done in the past. In the past, we amalgamated the foreign and integrated it into ourselves. Now, we don’t even bother with that, we just flat out replace ourselves. Your contact lenses may be blue, but you’re still brown.

Nationalists will most definitely disagree (and hate me, then again a few of them already do) when I say that Spanish, Chinese, Indian, Malay, and a bunch of other cultures ARE an integral part of what it is to be Filipino. And yes, even America had a hand in shaping who we are. Somewhere down the line, we seem to have forgotten that we are a melting pot of a whole lot of cultures.