Dishonest love is the darkness deeply rooted in the outrage over the promotional video of Tourism’s troubled new slogan.
Dishonest love fuels everyone’s raving anger spasms over the two-minute-long tepid — as in like a senior Tourism student’s thesis project — though still dreamy love video featuring the country’s popular travel sights completely ruined by footage of four tourist sites found in other countries.
Lies then shape the promo video in a clear case of, “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream,” as one of the most-Taylor-Swift-sounding lyrics goes.
By the way, there’s nothing frivolous about referencing Ms. Swift and the tourism fiasco.
“Love” is the cheeky theme of the latest slogan and there’s no other 21st-century personality other than pop superstar Ms. Swift and her hugely influential songs of doomed love and heartaches (or at least that’s what my daughters tell me since I’m not a “Swiftie”) to access notions of nervy postmodernist love.
Anyway, information is scanty about who in the ad agency DDB Philippines or its contractor sneaked into the lies.
What we only know is that the video, exposed by a blogger and subsequently fact-checked by an international news agency, brought Tourism bureaucrats frequent migraine flashes.
Still, as things stand, the besotted affair insinuates its makers’ cynical feelings about their task of commanding foreigners and Filipinos alike to love the country.
In the case of their cynical feelings, it’s starkly summed up whenever one hears Ms. Swift singing: “And the saddest fear/Comes creepin’ in/That you never loved me/Or her/Or anyone/Or anything.”
Despite that, we can still be charitably human enough to say the video makers were probably at their wit’s end chasing a tight deadline, prompting the commission of unforgivable fakery and lies. This, even as they insinuated their low opinion of their Tourism overseers’ critical faculties. For their risk, they lost all, profuse apologies failing to assuage.
Meanwhile, the reviled video excited something else entirely — a wave of confessionals about loving the Philippines.
As the fiasco unfolded, many well-meaning Filipinos, both here and abroad, confessed, “It’s difficult to love the Philippines.”
The prophylactic sentiments, if anything, showed Filipinos aren’t zombies when they junked en masse the conformist injunction that to profess love for country, as one media analyst observed, is “to stand by it and close one’s eyes to whatever is wrong.”
Still, despite the confessionals many somehow still heard Ms. Swift’s singing, “This love is difficult, but it’s real/Don’t be afraid, we’ll make it out of this mess.”
Though some were thoroughly distressed that the Swiftian lyrics, “I screamed for whatever it’s worth/‘I love you,’ ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” became an anthem.
Locals are markedly depressed and distressed. But we can only speculate what the internationally publicized humiliation does to the foreign tourist in perpetual search of a painless second adolescence.
But I wouldn’t place too much stock on their feelings. The foreign tourist can just as well sing — not a Taylor Swift song this time — but the late sultry Tina Turner’s iconic rock ballad, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”
Turner’s ballad jettisoned other love songs fixating on enduring relationships and instead diabolically proscribes that purely sexual chemistry is pretty too. Carnality also informs love. Now doesn’t that hidden dimension color also many a foreign tourist’s pleasure-seeking short jaunt here?
Still, another tributary flows from the love slogan. The cheeky slogan also marks and entices the modern Filipino migrant.
Modern Filipino migration is germane to the love campaign because a good part of the flow of tourists coming here is made up of Filipino migrants — our tourist who is not a tourist — returning home for a vacation.
In milking and profiting from the Filipino migrants’ or OFWs’ homesickness, the love campaign’s advisable jingle might as well be Ms. Swift’s lyric, “Please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh
I could recognize anywhere.”