Point Blank
Let me practice my right to be obnoxious. Let me carefully and pretentiously construct my sentences in highfalutin English. Indulge me, please—let me be annoying and papansin. Apparently, that’s what PolSci people do, and I heard that’s what it takes to get through to my colleague, Rafa Noel.
Otherwise, he won’t care. “My default attitude when it comes to arguments can be summed up in one word: indifference,” he says in his column.
And so it seems that the PolSci majors have hit quite a major nerve—you know, so as to cause Rafa to lift his “argumentative finger” in an incredibly spiteful tirade. And we have no one but the gadflies to blame. Why do you these pests insist on infesting our peaceful hill, anyway? Their sound and fury is all just senseless sedition. Can’t we all just get along, go on our own ways, and live our own lives?
Walang basagan ng trip, as Rafa says.
As a fellow philosophy major, though, it’s quite puzzling for me as to why Rafa is still even taking up the degree. If he despises Socrates so much, his loathing for all the other philosophers cannot be much less. I’m sure he must know how philosophical inquiry moves in a creative and novel way, how it disturbs the mind’s usual, monotonous droning. His antagonism towards unfamiliar ideas or new modes of thinking is, at the very least, intriguing.
Of course, this attitude will not do him any favors (unless he’s enjoying the 15 minutes of Internet fame), but neither will this be of any benefit to the people who do care about the issues Rafa scoffs at—those people victimized by his militant indifference.
I count myself as part of this group. For more than a year, I have been managing The GUIDON’s Inquiry section, seeing my work here as my own contribution to the community. Inquiry’s readership is painfully low, and the thanklessness of the job can sometimes be extremely discouraging, but I’d like to think what keeps me going are the sincere motivations that made me join The GUIDON in the first place.
Having said that, I think it’s easy to understand why I felt every bit as insulted by Rafa’s piece just as much as any other PolSci major. Even though Rafa zeroed in on them, he could have just as easily used “PolSci majors” as an umbrella term for the people who thought it was right to have an opinion about relevant school issues and to express it accordingly.
Forgive me—I just didn’t know that giving a damn now means being pretentious. We might as well just have the university president remove PolSci from the curriculum, since its primary purpose is apparently just to arm the obnoxious with intellectual pizzazz. Or how about ripping off the Inquiry section from the pages of the school paper? That way, we would have no more reason to hire pretentious writers with Socratic tendencies.
At this point, Rafa might argue that we simply didn’t get the point of his column. After all, he eventually proclaimed his “appreciation” for the gadflies, and for the function that they serve in the school.
However, it’s not too hard to read between the lines. What he’s merely saying is that the gadflies do have a right to say what they want to say—but not, never, too loudly. He’s saying that the PolSci majors can remain just as critical and vigilant as Socrates was, but only as long as they don’t get in the way of, what, progress?
“What worries me though is that all this talk will lead nowhere,” he says towards the end of his column, failing to see that, perhaps, that’s exactly what we need: action nourished by discourse and debate. Because really, how much progress have we made when it was the other way around, when the gadflies hadn’t yet come out of their hiding places around four years ago and only candidates yapped every election season? Student politics then was stuck in a rut, animated in a comic way by the pointless politics of Partido Agila and Partido Ignacio and their curious affinity for motherhood statements. Now that was walking without real talking.
Sound and fury signifying nothing—that’s probably one of the most overused of Shakespeare’s lines. It’s also a lazy cliché. The phrase seems to have gained so much currency due in no small part to the comfortable bubble it offers to whoever’s too scared to make sense of the noise.
But this whole gadfly business? It’s never really been about those who get ticked off by the noise so easily, or those who just thoughtlessly drive discourse away. It’s about those who awaken because of the noise—those who dare listen, and, with just a little bit of effort and sincerity, hear the sound and fury signifying conviction.
