Ouch, Oh! Ouch, So!

It was in one of the 3rd grade classes at my school where I first saw this line dancing type of a performance. The children butted out their derriére on a body position bent forward, grinding the protruding buttocks into a form eight, or the infinity motion. The double circular motion must be the reason why the music is titled “Ocho, Ocho!” Admittedly, it looked cute on the third graders. However, when the six graders did the same during the Christmas pageant, I noticed a couple of raised eyebrows, and endless self-conscious giggles from the boys and girls.

When I heard advertised over the radio that Bayani Agbayani of the “Ocho Ocho” fame, and the Sex Bomb “Spageti (sic)” girls were fundraising for the Northern Marianas College in yesterday’s outdoor performance at Hopwood Junior High, I decided to see for myself what the craze is all about. After all, if the Guardians of Academé deemed the music and the dance routines appropriate family entertainment, one can ignore the seemingly elitist charge that there is a “dumbing down” of the island’s culture by appealing to prurient interests through the exploitation of female pulchritude. Of course, this exploitation goes on all the time. One look at our Saipan Beach Road magazine and one can see why there is such a charge. An internet site even claims that Saipan at the street level, is the easily-available-sex capital of the western Pacific. But that’s neither here nor there. Half of my 6th grade class already indicated they were attending the event. I was not about to be dubbed as one who is unfashionably behind the times.

Now, to the stage. The routine is not as notorious as the Brazilian Lambada. Nor is it as exotic as the tabletop Gypsy tap and stump, castanet-clicking gyrations of Ravel’s ‘Bolero.’ It was without the finesse of our budding danseusee properly tutu’ed and pointe shoe’d pirouetting the aesthetics of the Giselle, the Nutcracker and Swan Lake. But the Hopwood on-green performance claimed some measure of redeeming value. They elicited community laughter, wholesome fun and widespread body movement participation. Maybe, we could use the dance routines and the snappy music to entice our diabetes prone population to do their daily exercises and undulations. I am still at a loss though how the image of ascending and descending spaghetti can titillate the imagination of the young.

Regarding spaghetti, we commemorate today the founding of the landmass that would later be called the “Americas.” The Italian navigator Columbus would prove to the Latin West that sailing westward does not end at the edge of the earth. Columbus in his time ushered the flowering of maritime technology, enticing Europe to literally assault the rest of the world, and creating various fronts of brave new worlds. Too bad we have reduced this festive occasion into its ethnic component of Italian pride rather than the celebration of the human spirit on its quest to go beyond borders and horizons where no man nor woman have gone before. October’s Humanities month should help us be reminded of that!

The founding of the Americas was after all at the juncture of one of humanity’s paradigm shifts, popularly labeled as the Renaissance. In it, humanity discovered the power of the individual to pursue the common good and cultivate civic virtues. Pretensions at democratic governance radically changed ever since. The almost 30-year old NMI experience, within the 217-year old United States constitutional government journey, so ably chronicled by the Willens and Siemer tandem, cries out even in its youth for radical reexamination and reinvention. For the economic, political and cultural issues attendant to the creation of the NMI-US Covenant and the CNMI Constitution have since been reduced to pithy insignificance by new awareness and new realities unaccounted for at its onset. Paramount among these is the sense of a new earth where humanity is not perceived as an intrusion but as an integral component to a single living organism called the planet Earth.

To be sure, the common mindset still considers it a good business practice to process the greatest possible amount of natural resources, produce perishable consumer goods, and junk the refuse into our blighted Puerto Ricos where the remains are at best, useless, and at worst, toxic. Obviously, there is a need to develop reciprocal economic relationships with other life-forms in the environment other than just the requirements of business-labeled, corporation-sanctioned homo dollares sapiens! The time has come for our legal systems to acknowledge that not only must there be equal protection under the law for all of the human species in the global community, regardless of where the law of supply and demand leads one to labor, but that we must now extend legal status that is sacred and inviolable to all species in the Earth habitat. This is beyond eco-tourism. This is facing a brave new world with an awakened human soul and an enlivened human spirit.

Mainstream United States periodically convulses with war. It has been and will continue to be for a long while. It is too obsessed with its struggle to locate the existing but fast diminishing supply of oil to feed its greedy corporate structures to notice the shift in consciousness that is fast occurring in its environs. The CNMI, blessed with the powers of wind, sun, rain and ocean currents, has the luxury of visualizing a future from the tranquil setting of paradise, unencumbered by the trappings of corrosive imperial power from continental US eastern seaboard, and the shrouding smog power from the western continental shores. In our inimitable mixture of oriental and occidental thought patterns and traditions, we must now PLAN an alternative future. We hold together the skill of navigating into outer space, and the tranquility of sailing through the rough terrain of inner space, even plumbing the depth of the Marianas Trench. Do we dare embark on this brave new world? To anticipate bravely the unknown future is the Great Work of our time. Not to do so is to invite the communal sigh of the Great Ouch. Ouch, so! Ouch, so!

Tonight, Willens and Siemer are featured guests of the Council for the Humanities lecture series at Rey Lounge, Aqua Resort, starting 6pm. The distinguished couple will share their findings on NMI references among the ten presidential libraries since the United Nations entrusted the care of these islands to the United States Government. This is grist to our continuing activity of self-definition. We might even ask what happened in ’88 (Ocho Ocho)? Expect the presentation and discussion to last until 9pm.

The free, loose, unfettered and self-determined may retire after the lecture to watch another ‘Otso-Otso’ version performed at another lounge on island, this one fronting the Grand Hotel. My wife quietly reminded me that should I feel inclined to join this crowd, I would need to be prepared to dance to the tune of “Ouch, Oh! Ouch, Oh!” when I got home. May have to pass up this exploration of the island’s soft underbelly this time around.

Meanwhile, not so fast on “Goodbye, Columbus.” Instead, let us appropriate the navigator’s sense of adventure over the uncharted, the wonder over the unknown, and the awe over the mystery that is at the center of human existence. And if that is what ascending and descending spaghetti means, then I say, let it be.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.