Legend has it that God (and/or Bathala) created man out of clay, baking the prototypes in his oven just because he could. Not yet having the hang of his omnipotence, Bathala fucked up and burnt the first man, hence the African race. He fucked up again, probably drunk on fermented rice wine, being primarily a rice god, and created the Caucasians when the he took man out too early. Also the Chinese, when he messed up again before finally creating the perfect man, the brown man. And so it goes.
And if you believe that, then you were probably foaming at the mouth when Chinese columnist Chip Tsao played the racist card and called us a nation of servants. [UPDATE: HK Magazine has taken down the offending article. You may view it here. Thanks to joyfulchicken for the tip.]
And right then and there, all the trolls and armchair nationalists, who never even took ROTC, rose to the defense of Inang Bayan and tried to spam the guy with racist comments of their own.
Never mind that the whole maid-with-an-advanced-degree was already an old Hong Kong joke back in 1997. And true. Never mind that the part about our maids in Hong Kong being made to practice hailing Chairman Mao is something we do in each of our host countries.
We *were* panicking about the Chinese patrol ship in our part of the Spratlys and Malacanang even admitted to considering asking our allies for help.
Never mind that if push comes to shove, the might of our Armed Forces will back off from the Abu Sayyaf on the say-so of some guy from the International Red Cross. We can’t even manage less than a thousand guys with guns, and we have the internet tough guy balls to say things like “YOU should be hanged, just like your chinese friends, the BABYKILLERS!!!!” to the People’s Republic of China.
Never mind that we say pretty much the same things about ourselves. If someone else says it, we get so pumped up with fake patriotism that we’ll go online and trade high-fives with our friends for being the exact same asshole that we perceived our attacker to be.
If being someone’s maid, or nurse, or caretaker, or phone monkey isn’t anything to be ashamed of, then don’t take every opportunity to defend it against anyone who you think says that it is. You bought the fucking ticket, or work visa or whatever, now take the ride.
Get real, Philippines. Not everyone is out to get us, and those that are… Well, they’re the ones that don’t joke about it. They just buy up our islands under dummy corporations, or influence our government for concessions or whatever.
It’s a joke, guys. One of the better ones, even. It reads like a proper British comedy sketch, and it’s actually pretty funny. Funnier than our Wowowee jokes, at any rate. And as Mikonawa points out, if you read closely, you’ll see that he wasn’t even poking fun at us, but at his fellow Chinese for “getting their panties in a bunch about the Spratlys.”
There is an anecdote told about Rizal: After dinner, his Spanish classmates supposedly left their banana peels on his plate for him to eat (being a monkey.) And you know what he did? He didn’t go all apeshit and leave anonymous notes about how the Spanish are fucktards or whatever. He calmly said that his classmates must be the monkeys since while he still had his banana peels, they must have already eaten theirs. Also, he beat them at fencing.
And that is how you respond to satire. With rapier wit and panache (and sometimes, an actual rapier.)
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