Monday, May 24, 2010

The Lea Salonga Love-Hate Club

"YouTube is a big fat flamebait." (Desabelle, 2010)

That pretty much sums up what it is. I used to think MySoju would be better off if it allowed comments at the bottom of each video, but after seeing how ugly and bigoted some people's thoughts can be, I realized a clean video page provides the best viewing experience possible. [I mean, if WoWoWee accepted feedback re: each episode, what a nightmare that'd be.] My irritation - and building obsession - with this perfectly innocent video provider stems from some of the comments I've seen on Lea Salonga's videos. Some have made me want to bash my fist into something, and all have got me thinking - which is pretty difficult for me to do at the moment, considering I haven't been keeping my brain in shape these past two months.

For the first time since University, I found myself wanting to become a lawyer, to develop my logical processing (which seems dormant at present) so I could use it to defend the Philippines from YouTube idiots like BERNARDO712.


We 'met' after watching this video of an under-20 Lea Salonga auditioning for the role of Kim in Miss Saigon. Imagine a replies page half-filled with comments branching from the general SICK idea that 'All Filipinas are prostitutes'; that was the status of the crime scene when I wandered into it. Majority of the remaining comments were replies to BERNARDO712's statement, most going for the pathos route instead of the logos route Our Boy obviously wanted to pursue. I tried arguing with him, but I doubt he understood my point. He's too narrow-minded for that level of thinking.


In this video, I met firsttenor76 - who I really like. I don't actually have a beef with him; I'm only writing about him because he got me thinking about the international community's perception of us Filipinos. He's a Filipino singer based in the United States, and in that page, he commented that the 'proud to be filipino' shout-outs were excessive - he was right in that. He says:

There is something self-promoting, obnoxious and extremely arrogant about being so proud that people have to post their race at all!!! It's just stupid. There's only one race, the human race. Stop with the bashing and self-promoting. There is such a thing as being TOO proud.


I tried to make him see why that was happening - you know, our nature of latching all our hopes and dreams on specific figureheads like Pacman, and now, Noynoy - but I don't think we really understood each other. And I think that's because he's in the States, where it would be embarrassing to hear your fellowmen say they're proud of their race all the time. Whereas I'm Philippines-bred, and I've gotten used to traffic coming to a full halt whenever there's a Pacquiao game on. We're both proud to be Pinoy; we both know our countrymen can go rave-overboard sometimes. But we still have different views on this one simple issue.

This whole issue makes me wonder what foreigners think of us. I seriously hope the general perception isn't anywhere near BERNARDO712's skewed paradigm.

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