So the joke goes we spent three centuries in cloistered convent, and less than retirement age in Hollywood.
And yet look at how we turned out as a people: the most Spanish-hating (we finally got rid of Español, the college subject in 1987) American-loving non-Caucasian race in the whole world.
Even if you just spoke ten words of English—just two or so more than Erap did—you could already be understood anywhere in these 7,100 islands that make up our archipelago.
For good and for bad, we have a totally Westernized culture that has permeated through the last ten generations, at least. You will not find too many of our youth in seminary or nunneries—but you won’t have to look too far to find countless of them with body piercings.
In my parents’ generation, who lived through the second world war and have vague recollections of “peace taym” just before that, their indoctrination into Americana was courtesy of “Victory Joe”—the triumphant American G.I. soldier who taught young Filipinos how to speak, read and write in English under the spreading mango tree, with an M1-Garand rifle slung over his shoulder.
For the rest of us, Americanization came by way of rock-and-roll music ushered in by Elvis Presley and the Beatles (who are actually British), Marlboro cigarette and Wrigley’s chewing gum (again, British).
But without “Victory Joe” running around the countryside anymore after the late 40s, what was the medium of perpetration for this happy decadent cultural influence?
Why, RADIO, of course!
It was the American Henry Herman, Sr. who set up the first AM radio station in Manila. KZKZ was a 50-watt transmitter that could throw a decent radio signal as far as Bulacan, already a marvelous feat for the day.
After KZKZ was destroyed during the war, it was the Americans still that put up the first AM broadcasting network to take its place after the Liberation in 1947.
KZAM also had a 50-watt transmitter no bigger than KZKZ had. But this time American engineers had come up with a better solution to extending the reach of radio by using “repeater antennas” or relay transceivers.
As the name’s coinage implies, transceivers both received and transmitted the radio signal, so that a dozen or so of these devices spread over a good interval could blanket a wide area, eliminating dead spots—which is what a true network is.
The best part is, the production staff from the Office of War Information, then by the United States Information Service (USIS), media arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), only had to work in the central studio in Manila.
So throughout the later half of the 1900s, American-inspired radio gaga continually pumped Western values into our gathering consciousness.
This kind of culturalization infrastructure remained intact through all the years when Camp John Hay was being run by the Americans from the 50s all the way even past 1991 when the RP-US Military Bases Agreement was abrogated.
Many will recall the “Voice of America” (VOA) which broadcast programs like “Back to the Bible” in the 60s and 70s heard all over Baguio in my boyhood years.
But because the Philippine government could not allocate a commercial radio frequency to VOA (some constitutional issue behind this), initially VOA just produced content. And THEN Philippine public radio (Department, later Ministry of Public Information) could take care of broadcasting it. So we heard “Back to the Bible” episodes then on public radio DZEQ, intro’d by Linda Jularbal.
Some postulated that President Marcos (the father) didn’t want to encourage too much contemporary cultural freedom—because it led to independent thinking, that led to anti-Establishment criticism, which culminated in anti-government dissent, that was anathema to autocratic martial law rule.
This is why from 1972 until 1980, even importation of foreign films and music was tightly regulated. Of course, Malacañan p-r people would deftly spin this around and called it the golden age of Original Pilipino Music (OPM), which all radio stations were required to play three quarters of every broadcast hour.
Maybe it did local music and filmistry some good, maybe it didn’t. But if we go by how Pinoy entertainment art—especially film and cinematography never managed to transcend the concept barrier beyond the love triangle (or so-called “love teams”) and women yelling at each other and slapping each other’s faces, I’d say the isolation probably did more harm than good by stagnating the art.
As always, the wily Americans found a loophole. Only “terrestrial” radio frequency signals were allocated by the NTC.
If you direct your transmission upward to broadcast satellites orbiting above, and bounced it back down to earth using very short amplitude waves—shortwave signals—technically you’re not stepping on any State-owned and controlled bandwidth.
So VOA retooled its transmitters to carry only shortwave signals—which had one disadvantage, however. Few Filipinos owned transistor radios that could receive shortwave signals. Even fewer understood what shortwave frequencies are for, often associating them only with annoying Chinese broadcasts no one could understand.
Fortunately, cable television and home satellite receivers came in vogue in the early 90s and, especially, TV’s equivalent of the shortwave signal: VHF (very high frequency) and UHF (ultra-high frequency) signal carriers.
These all still relied on signals travelling through a network of relay repeaters, which began from the main retransmitter at the VOA lot on the southern edge of Camp John Hay (which had since been dismantled) relaying the signal to the main distribution relay station on Mount Santo Tomas and to Wallace Point in San Fernando, La Union.
I remember putting up my own 30-foot antenna in my backyard (don’t be too impressed, it’s just a tall pole supported by 3 guywires) on the top end of which I mounted a rotatable VHF-UHF antenna array that I bought from my friend Conrad of Uptown Electronics in front of SLU—for less than P1,000.
Then I could get Far East Network Philippines (FEN-Phil) which, back in the day, everybody just called the “Camp John Hay TV Channel.”
It was glorious redemption from having nothing to watch but boring garbage on RPN 9, GMA 7, IBC 13 and PTV-4—the only four TV channels you could watch during the “golden age” with their heavily government-censored content (mostly the women-emoting-yelling-crying-slapping-soap-opera stuff)
Instead, we were able to follow the saga of the LA Lakers versus Boston Celtics (this was in the pre-Michael Jordan era) NBA rivalry and witness the dawn of the 24/7 cable news with the birth of CNN.
It was paradoxical that on August 21, 1983, when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated, many Filipinos didn’t even know about it for hours, some even well into the next day.
But those of us who had FEN-Philippines, within minutes from the gunshot itself, were already watching ABC’s Ken Kashiwahara illustrating with a dummy how the bullet’s downward trajectory into Ninoy’s nape suggested he was gunned down by a gunman standing on the stairwell and not by fallguy Rolando Galman standing on the ground.
Western media propagates some degree of cultural decadence, I grant you that. But for the most part, it has also “cracked the shell” of the martial law-imposed Philippine isolation, eventually leading to the spread of the “freedom bug” that is really what brought about the democratic space we now enjoy—and take for granted.
So stop sounding like the “rise and fall of ABS-CBN” is the whole story of cultural democratization in contemporary Philippine society.
If you ask me, foisting a man wearing a pink wig as the role model for Filipino children to follow is more decadent influence than we never ever saw on FEN.
And what of Willie’s “cry-on-cue-with-your-most-horrible-sob-story” before a nationwide audience for cash formula—ugh! don’t get me started.*
