12.03.09 kulturnatib

Crocodile

Last week, while following the recent Maguindanao massacre over the internet, one picture that accompanied a Yahoo news story with the tagline, “Philippine massacre suspect calls charges 'baseless',” caught my attention.

This was a Reuters photograph of two NBI agents escorting alleged mastermind and massacre leader Andal Ampatuan Jr., upon his arrival at the Villamor air base after his surrender, according to him, his family and supporters or arrest, according to the government.

This is a standard 'firing-squad' photo where the main personages in a news story are neatly arranged or close cropped in a single line with the most important of them closest to, if not in the very middle.

This is the least interesting of photos in the grab bag of photojournalism save for its most utilitarian aspect which is to put a human face or human faces on an event that as far as this event goes can only be generously called truly inhuman.

As far as the face presented in the photo, it is a nondescript one. A young, even childish face, plump as only an overweight government official can be with an added burden of being a leader – though perhaps of a junior rank -- of a non-government organization of armed personnel in a territory where guns are a dialect unto themselves.

Yet, it is not the face that captures my attention, rich as it may be as a subject for physiognomical study. What does is what the face is wearing on its head.

It is a head gear. A head band, with a design that can easily be called 'ethnic' in the geometric style and with colors that this label sticks to almost reflexively.

Immediately upon noticing this, questions jockeyed with each other in my head. Here, some of them in no particular order: Is the headgear design typical of his 'tribal' affiliation? Is this even a typical headgear of this 'tribe' or of the region? Does this headgear denote something? Authority? Rank? A particular connotation when dealing with non-tribal personages or non-ceremonial events? Etc.

I needed a closer look. Or, even a look at other pictures – a related gallery that now typically accompanies internet news stories -- that might shed a clarificatory light on this particular picture and these questions.

I did both with the first act providing a detail that pulled the rug from under my earlier questions, though not as completely as to make them irrelevant, and made the second a mere perfunctory, even simply voyeuristic act.

In the middle of the headgear (or the way it was worn put this right smack in the middle of the forehead) was something that immediately jumped out. Or, maybe that should be, snapped out. Not only because it was of a highly contrasting color (mostly white against overwhelmingly red), design (organic against geometric) and context (global against tribal).

It was a crocodile. The proprietary trademark for the global clothing giant Lacoste and, for a while, IZOD as well. I could not repress a smile, which just as well could have been a smirk.

While Lacoste's crocodile for all its pedigree and ubiquity has nothing to do with the political symbolism of the crocodile especially as applied to Philippine politics, Ampatuan's is nothing else but that very symbol. And worse. But, how appropriate.