天空の戦士

I found out about the "Great Book Blockade of 2009" from Kaoko's and Rowena's blogs:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/manila/1dispatch6.html

Great. Just great. If these people in the Philippine Customs do not realize that they're acting like monumental stupidiots, I can already foresee what will happen to our country:

1. Our economy has become highly dependent on BPOs because we're the only Asian nation that can read, write and speak English fluently. With the Great Book Blockade, they just effectively killed our chances of sustaining our cash cow.
   
   
2. Being in the academe, I know how difficult it is to make students READ. I don't read textbooks and instructional manuals myself (the boring stuff), having learned to read and write by going through classics and contemporary literature. I learned from the authors' various writing styles.  Can you imagine how happy I was when graphic novel versions of our beloved classics, i.e. The Picture of Dorian Gray, suddenly appeared in Fully Booked and Power Books?  It's not really for me, but I had thought about how our generation of visually empowered teenagers might appreciate classics in this form.  Because graphic novels are basically comic books, however, one doesn't have to be a genius to guess how our insanely corrupt Customs Officials will react to their existence. (Stupidity and corruption are a bad combination.)

I'm not exactly a huge fan of the Twilight series, but since these books get the kids to read, I am eternally grateful to Stephanie Meyer. And J.K. Rowling. And heck, even erotica writer Anne Rice.

I thought our officials could not stoop any lower, but they never cease to amaze me. Apparently, there are no depths that our officials will not sink to. They even pride themselves in the fact that they just broke a U.N. treaty -- the Florence Agreement of 1952 that encouraged the free-flow of books among countries -- which they justified by saying that only books used in book publishing were not to be taxed. Oh, vey! I wonder what a book used in book publishing is.

That's what you get for reading too many textbooks and relying on rote memory. You fail to grasp the most important part of literacy: COMPREHENSION.