Every Filipino book lover out there should read the column by Manolo Quezon III, published today at the Philippine Daily Inquirer, citing an article by Robert Hemley, the director of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, who’s in the Philippines on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Here are some excerpts which basically talk about the issue, but I encourage you to read the whole column to understand its context:
According to Hemley, the situation developed this way. Stephenie Meyer’s novel “Twilight” apparently did so well in the bookstores that the number of copies being imported attracted the attention of a Customs official. Examiner Rene Agulan decreed that duties be paid. It seems that the importer of the book reacted in a manner familiar to most book lovers in the country: to eliminate the hassle, the importer complied with the Customs levy on the title.
Hemley says surrendering to the authorities was a mistake because the Philippines, back in 1952, became a signatory to the Florence Agreement, a United Nations treaty that mandates the tax-free importation of books in order to facilitate the free flow of “educational, scientific, and cultural materials.” The importer’s submission to the whims of Customs whetted the Bureau’s appetite; they put a squeeze on all book importations by air. The result? For two months virtually no imported books entered the country.
Yet another reason to hate Twilight? Yes. But the problem is so much larger than a mere teen fad gone wrong. If there’s any reason for the Philippines and its citizens to become the world’s laughing stock, it is not our domestic helpers, or our diploma mills, or our attempts at ousting a rotting President; it is this, the corruption that is eating up the very cores of our bureaucracy.
Tariff on books? Seriously? How stupid can our officials get, really? Clearly they are bent on turning everyone into mindless zombies in order to get away with their wrongdoings. They would even go the extra mile of interpreting the rules to their favor, even to the point of repealing a 50-year collective understanding under an international agreement and bending the rules of grammar itself!
Seriously. My stomach’s turning upside down simply reading how these selfish customs bureacrats even have the guts to consider levying book importation. I get all that tax measures bullcrap but come on! It’s not as if you can consider books an even commodity with t-shirts, or, say, gadgets and perfumes. Is this government even aware of the concept of cultural capital?!
I remember a National Bookstore ad campaign quoting Jerry Seinfeld saying, “A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.” With this recent move by the customs department, our nation, who, by the way, ranks very low in Math and Science comprehension among Asian nations, and who’s got little to nil cultural capital, is definitely going to the dogs.
That is obviously one for the books.
