Oy, have you heard? Gates of Hell daw ang Manila.

The Gates of Hell way back when. (Photo from
John Ward on Flickr)

In 2006, we defended his book and the movie on which it was based from attempts at censorship by powers-that-be. That his novel said some unorthodox things about Christ's earthly life was no reason to stop it from being shown here, we charged. The censors body ended up giving The Da Vinci Code's screen adaptation an R-18 rating, enraging a 12-year-old me who had to wait to get a copy of the film from alternative sources.

Seven years on, Dan Brown finds himself at the receiving end of the flak. "The gates of hell," he apparently calls the capital city in his latest work, Inferno. Sure, this is a work of fiction, and sure, Brown's description of Manila just as well applies to many other countries' capitals, but apparently he deserves all seven levels after tarnishing our pride.

We don't need to reach too far into the past to know this isn't the first time someone besmirched the Philippines' good name—8list.ph has come up with a running tally of past offenses that reaches as far back as the Beatles' costly snubbing of the First Lady. What is it with our culture that makes us turn vitriolic at the slightest mention of our faults?

Certainly it can't be the fact that the accusations aren't true. In Inferno it's the traffic jams, the pollution, and the prostitution that catches the character's attention. Anyone spewing fire on Twitter over the comments would be disingenuous to say that none of it is true. Last year, a brief, if heavy, episode of rain stranded me in España for six hours. Commuters waiting at any of the bus and jeepney stops along Commonwealth Avenue can tell you about the concrete barriers meant to separate public utility vehicles from the rest of traffic—they've turned a grisly black from all the exhaust. And of the prostitution, Brown's character knows whereof she speaks. Be it Malate, Quezon Avenue past sundown, or the recently concluded Balikatan exercises between our Armed Forces and the United States', we Filipinos know how to prostitute.

Indeed, we Filipinos are prone to complain about everything. The Philippine Internet bandwagon specializes in mob beatings of everyone and everything from "sottocopying" Senators to Coke-Zero Senators-to-be. It's fashionable to point out just how hopeless the line at the MRT is; even just as de rigueur is the art of sounding like a DOTC undersecretary while spewing forth self-assured litanies on how the system can be improved. We're practical masters in the art of pointing out our flaws, in the public pastime of complaining about our lives. This is democracy, baby! Free speech is what peaceful revolutions are made of.

When it comes to hearing the truth from other people, however, we don't do very well. It's one thing to hear a fellow Pinoy bemoan the putas that stick their hand out at every passing car on Quezon Avenue at night. It's a totally different—and very objectionable—thing to read the three words "horrifying sex trade "written on print about Manila. (Had Brown said that Manila's sex trade isn't that bad, would we have had a different reaction?)

It isn't very different from barangay gossip. It's fine to pass around unconfirmed details about that family two doors up the street that's having domestic difficulties. Go ahead and text all your neighbors about how clearly you could hear their doors being slammed and their plates being smashed last night. But to say it in public, and especially within the family's earshot, is asking for trouble.

Maybe what we're really saying, then, is not, "STFU Dan Brown, you don't know what you're talking about," because anyone who's spent two days in Manila will know that he does. Maybe what we really mean is, "Hey, shut up and let us deal with our own problems, OK?" Maybe the traffic on EDSA, the suffocating smoke in Cubao, and the flashing red lights of Malate weigh us down so much already that it just makes us angry to hear it from someone else—from America, of all places, the country that we've made such a standard for progress.