Politics

The first national automated elections is three months away and with impeccable timing, problems have come gushing in with the force of class VI whitewater rapids. For the first time, those of us who have envisioned our country finally catching up with the rest of the modern world sit down and wonder. Wait a doggone minute. Was there a thorough proposal, a comprehensive study or at least a drinking session among government entities to discuss the applicability of automated polls in the Philippines?

We’re almost done debating (or throwing sticks) over the issue of hacking election results. The most recent issue is signal jamming. Yes, those misfits in power, or any kind of misfit for that matter can jam electronic signals just as well as they can ram concentrated, MSG-flavored lies down our throats. Globe Telecom says, “Aw shucks. No worries. We’ll take care of that.” Yippee! So full automation will push through? Sure, that is if Globe can stretch its arms and declare, “Let there be light.”

My baby’s nanny comes from a province where there is no electricity and no modern wonders. She came to the city and experienced for the first time the magic of electric hand driers, the delight of car doors and the power of toilet pumps. She has yet to explore phantasmagorical electronic thingamajigs like computers and her town has yet to discover the incandescent bulb.

Seeing how far behind we are, only Merlin the magician can whip up full automation in this decade.

*Photo by Maureen CC license

You can easily find out who spends the most on presidential ad campaigns. Have some toddlers watch T.V. all day and the owner of the jingle they start singing at the end of the day is your best bet. I have a kid who sings Manny Villar’s jingle with so much energy you’d think she was a walking ad commissioned by Villar.

It’s scary really. I work at home where the T.V. is on for fifteen hours a day so I know for a fact that Villar’s ad recurs with the same level of frequency as untreated bad breath. At first, you squirm at the cheesiness but listen to it long enough and you start to imbibe the kind of desperation that might just push you to darken the circle beside Villar’s name come election day. This is hypnosis at its best and proof that candidates in the Philippines don’t need to speak candy-coated trash to be convincing. They just need to know how to swim.

“Have you ever gone swimming in a sea of trash?” Villar asks. No, none of the other candidates have or those that have may have died of leptospirosis. Only he has ever done that, evaded bacterial infection and gone on to become a top presidential bet we should all vote for because he bears the scars of poverty. Villar knows one must woo the poor to win in the next elections, hence that excellent swimmer’s form. All the candidates know this but not everyone can look good in a sea of trash.

I don’t know if I’d like to take swimming lessons from Villar. I get bothered by the thought of voting for someone who has no qualms about spending millions to appear one with the poor.

*I saw the photo on top a couple of days ago in the news and I found a copy in Facebook. I don’t know who made the photo but I must say that it gave me quite a good laugh. Thanks to whoever is the artist.

There is a monument for press freedom in Cagayan de Oro with names of fallen journalists on one side. There are empty spaces around the names that are already there. My father-in-law thinks the structure is a horrible idea. Nobody wants to have his name there, even if it means having a name etched on a plate of gold and making strangers remember who you are after the worms have had their fill, and yet the empty spaces are a reminder that more gold plates may be ordered soon.

It’s been more than a week since the recent Maguindanao massacre and the official headcount is 52 dead people, 27 of who are members of the print and broadcast media. Yesterday’s news revealed that some of the female victims were raped before being gunned down. Gruesome descriptions of the dead bodies include shots through the genitals and slashed breasts. For this brutal desecration and felling of the agents of truth, our country has earned the reputation of being the worst country for journalists. We are believed to be worse than Iraq or Afghanistan.

The primary suspect, Mayor Andal Ampatuan, Jr. is already under police custody and has been slapped with 25 counts of murder. If he really did it, I wonder how he could have thought he would get away with it. Whatever possessed him or whoever did it to murder 52 people in broad daylight in the open.

Even if they get to the bottom of this, nothing will erase this horrific smear on our beleaguered country’s collective memory.

*Photo by Dark Knight Detective

Politicians who kiss babies (or drive them in sidecars), use the elderly as props and demonstrate the leakiness of their childhood residences leave a bad taste in my mouth. Clearly, even poverty itself is being exploited. Because majority of our people can comprehend little else than daily bread, the bid to demonstrate who can relate the most to the underfed has replaced substantive speeches and debates.

Since most of the candidates parade shamelessly in borrowed rags, I thought I would have to skip voting yet again rather than risk vomiting on those shiny new million peso counting machines. Recently though, the sidecar driver caught my attention and might just change my mind.

After spending an inordinate amount of cash that defies my ability to count on infomercials, shedding pounds of perfumed sweat driving two scrawny kids in a sidecar and soiling expensive soles on a wet market, Mar Roxas has declared his intention to withdraw from the presidential race in favor of Noynoy Aquino.

He doesn’t care that he is more qualified. He doesn’t care that Korina Sanchez will lose the chance to be first lady. If purging our country of thieves in high places means stepping down for a more popular, less experienced man, Roxas is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice even if it means having wasted campaign money and a weeping Korina.

It’s obvious. No one would have thought of pushing a reluctant Aquino into the forefront if Cory, his mother, had not died and if an emaciated nation had not been thrown into remembering the moving rhetoric of his martyred father. If not for the turn of events, Roxas would still have had a shot driving those kids all the way to the presidential living room. But I suppose Roxas is right. He does not matter. This country does.

I know what I do not want. I do not want a president who had a 2001 net worth of P67 million that ballooned like a gangrened foot to a 2008 net worth of P144 million. I do not want a presidential son who was worth P5 million in 2002 and is now worth more than P99 million. I do not want public officials with unexplained wealth even if they technically cannot be called thieves yet. No one wants even just the suspicion of thievery hanging in the air, not the hungry, not the silenced, not the oppressed. Getting what we want may mean shoving the reigns of leadership into the hands of a lesser but more honest man. Noynoy will not dare shame the ghosts of his parents or he’ll asphyxiate to death in a sea of yellow ribbons.

The question is whether Noynoy will step up and do justice to Mar’s sacrifice. We’ll find out in a day or two. It will take several years though to find out if we’ve been had by yet another unraveling circus side show.

You know you’ve grown old if you can listen to the president’s State of the Nation Address without fidgeting, yawning or thinking that there are worse things than death. You know you are older still if you can sit through the entire SONA and end up criticizing every line and facial twitch.

I discovered I’m not very old. I managed to sit through only a few snippets, those parts where she turned the other cheek and still managed to send acidic spittle via satellite towards her critics. It was like watching an ugly parade of emoticons on the president’s sleeves. Wouldn’t it be horrible to be remembered for that speech?

Then there was the usual display of colorful feathers. I suppose running a country takes more than just average gray matter and she must have done a good job making sure that those esoteric economic figures behave. I know I would not have done a better job. But sadly, the noodle eaters of Tondo cannot relate to the numbers that denote her success because they can only comprehend the presence or absence of food, their only measurement of a politician’s success.

This is why the new batch of presidential aspirants have made it a point to stress that they grew up in the slums feeding pigs, that they can give pedicab rides to the sons of vendors and that they can relate, with matching tearful looks, to the plight of the poor.

I crave for root beer. I have to wait six more months though before I can have my first taste of it in years. No, I did not move to Antarctica nor do I live in an underdeveloped country, although our congressmen seem bent on proving that we are incapable idiots living in one.

We have root beer here but restaurants and fast food chains don’t seem to serve them anymore. Canned root beer is available in some stores but the remaining months of my pregnancy and the months after that must be devoted to keeping my sugar levels low to ensure that my child doesn’t suffer from developmental difficulties.

I can barely keep my discipline. I remember when I was growing up in Baguio. There were self-service stores that allowed us to mix all the soft drink brands in our cups. When it came to root beer though, I always drank it solo. It was like a sacred drink of sorts and I was its priestess.

What made me suddenly remember root beer?

I read somewhere on the net (or did someone tell me the story) that he (the storyteller) was barred from entering an establishment because he was carrying a can of root beer. The establishment pointed out that he could not enter because the can had the word “beer” on it. Well, I thought only congressmen were semantically challenged.

If root beer is an alcoholic drink, I must have become an alcoholic at the tender age of 8. Apparently though, I seem to be undergoing a withdrawal period of sorts. My symptoms include irritability, insanity and impatience over Con-Ass.

I can only drool at that fridge in Watson’s.

*Photo from Free Stock Photos

This week there will be no brilliant displays of sarcastic wit. I woke up in the morning of August 18 to the sound of the radio blaring. The usually high-strung radio host of Bombo Radyo was screaming a couple of decibels louder. While I struggled to convince myself that the morning was my friend, I heard him mention a jumble of words that contained Kauswagan, MILF and gunshots. My blood turned cold and ran out of me. Did he mean Kauswagan that was right beside the barangay where I lived in?

After an hour or so of excruciating anxiety, I gathered that he meant another Kauswagan, one that was two hours away in Lanao del Norte, a province next to ours. I could almost touch my sense of relief but it would be short lived. A mere two hours away was a place where people were dying. If the MILF who had surrendered after the incident were telling the truth, they were apparently ordered to kill anyone and everyone in sight including children. I suspect that the kind of anxiety and grief that drove people insane would be with me forever.

When I lived in faraway Baguio and Cebu, there had already been similar reports from various provinces and regions in Mindanao. It was not odd that I felt detached. Miles of land and water separated me from the horrors and reality of a decades old liberation war. Now that I am really a neighbor to the conflict, the feeling has changed. For the first time I understood what it was to really grieve for the men, women and children who had died at gunpoint and to fear for my family’s life. A two year old child was chopped to death in a field by retreating rebels. If that had been my toddler, I would have volunteered to die.

Our city was in red alert for a day or two but people walked the streets like it was a normal sunny day. For Kagayanons, it really was a normal day. They had gotten used to this. It has happened many times before. The people of Cagayan de Oro are also certain that the city, by the power of Vice Mayor Emano or some other worldly protection, will never taste the bitterness of violence. They say I’d be a fool to worry. I hope they’re right.

I don’t remember a lot of news stories from the past. What I do remember though were the men and women of the media— the dead ones to be exact. Even before I found out the shocking truth that fairy tales, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are really adult inventions designed to trick kids into believing that life is beautiful and that there are no inane politicians that plague our country, I was already made aware of stories of journalists who disappeared into the night and appeared the following morning in ditches with bullet holes in their heads. Unfortunately, some journalists continue to suffer the same gruesome fate today. It seems the current invertebrates in power still have dirty secrets to keep so the guardians of truth must be silenced.

This is probably why despite my obvious inability to tell the difference between algebra and gibberish, I would have chosen Engineering over Mass Communications if they were the only two courses left in college. Obviously, I am not a brave soul and I do not want to suffer the same slow, painful prelude to death that I suppose many journalists have had to endure.

My own cowardice however only serves to heighten my admiration for the people of print and broadcast media. It is not just their courage that I find amazing. It is also the fact that many of those employed by provincial newspapers and radio stations continue to risk their necks and limbs for a pittance. Why on earth would they want to court danger when they can’t even afford to buy a bulletproof vest or insurance? Their outright disregard for their safety could only mean that they have such deep passion for the truth that, rather than bury the truth, they would have themselves buried instead.

Apparently though, the dawn of the ratings war in radio and television has changed the face of journalism forever. It is no longer just about accuracy and integrity. It is also about who has the whitest smile, the best pose and the most impressive overemphatic articulation. I thought I would never see the day when journalists would pose in front of cameras displaying false gravity and atrocious fashion.

I suppose though that sensationalizing the exterior of journalists and their news shows would have been bearable considering that different stations and channels do report the same events so the only real way to draw viewers and advertisers would be to parade like peacocks. What is thoroughly unacceptable though is when the news too gets painted. With due respect to the men and women of the media, they do continue to report the facts. The many different angles in which they do so however have shaped exaggerated public opinions.

Case in point: I once admired a radio broadcaster for his fiery attacks on a corrupt government official who had been reaping the benefits of construction job contracts. The broadcaster was so good at spewing fire, brimstone and spittle that within a few years, he had turned a great number of people to his side. People believed in him so much that he got himself elected to a government position from where he continued to throw stones at his political target.

After a few more months of aggressive monologues on air, the broadcaster began receiving death threats. His car got shot at a couple of times and the service vehicle of his station got torched. He hasn’t been heard on air ever since. For a moment I thought he had finally gone belly up and his loyal supporters would finally have to don black shirts bearing his face, take to the streets and irritate stalled motorists in the name of justice. Rumor has it though that the broadcaster turned politician had to resign from his job as a broadcaster because it was found out that he had been the one sending himself death threats. Apparently, he was also the one who stuck bullets on his own car and burned his station’s vehicle.

I don’t know if all the rumors are true but if they are, that would make me feel like shit. He reminds me of Spiderman’s Jonah Jameson, nearly turning an entire city against the Crocodileman in city hall, but the similarity ends there. Jonah never went hunting for spiderwebs to lie on and claim victim status. Isn’t it a pity that a former guardian of truth is now as diseased as his political adversary?

First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am not entirely sold out to industrialization. I still believe that the Philippines’ major key to global competitiveness is our major strength— agriculture. The only reason why our country has been working overtime sending love signals to foreign investors is because a former president once believed that we needed a facelift so we could look like other industrial nations and compete with them in the global arena where the losers go home with the ultimate consolation prize— the chance to become first class toxic waste dumping sites.

Aside from that president who MAY have had noble intentions, some other government officials offer their legs wide open to investors because of the scent or stench of green paper bearing the faces of noble people who are now dead and cannot protest that their images are being used for global pimping.

It would be wrong though to completely shun industrialization. No country can survive without some measure of industrialization. I know I can’t survive without it. I don’t have a green thumb because the color is concentrated in some other area in my body and animals freak out at the mere sight of me. That means I cannot survive planting camote and raising hogs. The only work I can do is the kind performed in an industrial office.

This year, thousands of workers like me were given the chance to get decent industrial jobs when Korean company Hanjin Heavy Industries began construction on the $2 billion shipyard in Tagoloan and Villanueva. The complex would have covered 441.8 hectares of land and would have been the 4^th biggest shipyard in the world. It would have offered 40,000-45,000 jobs and would have contributed P4.6 billion every year in salaries and wages alone.

Why am I using “would have”? Make a guess. I dare you.

This piece of news should’ve sent skilled workers and office bound souls singing Hallelujah and jumping like jumping beans. Just last week though, there have been reports that the construction machines have grown silent. There is even some speculation that Korean travel bags and suitcases are well on their way to Korea with their owners. This is where the story gets nasty and murky. This is where the plot thickens and becomes the stuff telenovelas are made of.

It seems that the project has been indefinitely shelved. Depending on which horse’s mouth you are listening to, the nominees for the reasons behind the project cancellation are: Hanjin’s lack of environmental and building permits, NPC billing problems, lack of PEZA permit, landownership issues, the mauling of a Hanjin employee and resident relocation problems. Hanjin director Myung Goo Kwan summarizes everything by simply citing “negative publicity” and “numerous adversities”. Those phrases are alternatively spelled “politics” and “bureaucracy”.

Those of us who have been living in this corner of the world know better. We know that public statements are often sugar coated, glazed or caramelized! Statements that are made public are just the tip of a ship-sinking iceberg and that deeper, darker, smellier secrets lie below clean-looking water.

Being the promising scoundrel that I am, my underworld minions who populate dark dens at night have brought me bits and pieces of the hidden bottom of the iceberg. Since I cannot afford to be sued for libel, I cannot reveal the speculative stories surrounding the Hanjin fiasco. Let’s just say that the media and the politicians are not mentioning everything they know about missing cash, substandard relocation sites, red-faced locals barking up the wrong tree, conversations under government tables and an an enraged madam who took to spanking her dogs for letting go of a bone in pursuit of a bigger phantom bone (see Aesop’s fables).

As of this article’s writing, some PETS (acronym for petty sycophants) are under investigation. Officials from high above are also said to be in a mad scramble looking for ways to kiss Korean feet, or some other body parts, without appearing to do so and without appearing to insult Korean principles. If the officials fail at fawning, the people of Misamis Oriental will be left with nothing but a gaping hole in time and space where 45,000 workers should’ve been working for food on their tables.

I’m on the edge of my seat. I wonder if the next episode will be “Return of the Investors” or “Penitent Pets”.

*Photo credit: GearX

I was taken aback by one of Pol Medina’s old, frighteningly accurate comic strips. Two of his generously endowed kids were remarking on the progress of neighboring Asian nations. They suggested that the Philippines could also do with a little less democracy if we truly wanted to progress. One of Medina’s alter ego’s, the principled Mang Dagul, tells them to shut up because they obviously are too young to remember how the lack of democracy felt during the martial law era.

I suppose dictatorship will only truly work if our leaders are as saintly, principled and, uh, celibate (?) as Pope John Paul II. Any less than the former pope would make misused democracy better any time. In any case, I don’t think overflowing democracy is our problem. It’s the lack of every citizen’s exercise of the law. Yes, we have laws covering nearly everything from pissing on public walls (where politicians’ campaign posters just happen to grin out from in happy reception of the common man’s processed liquids) to swatting the activist flies that buzz incessantly over the morally challenged congressmen and cabinet secretaries. Despite our flawed but existing laws, people continue to urinate in the open, steal from taxes and kill the opinionated with impunity.

I say we don’t need to kill democracy. We just need a modern Vlad the Impaler. Vlad was a Romanian ruler who was popular for — well, impaling. Enemies and transgressors of the law were stuck on poles and left for death to claim in slow motion. Vlad also excelled in skinning, burning, scalping and disembowelment. Many non-Romanians interpret this as a sign of extreme cruelty which has led many to inaccurately pin on him the origins of the fictional Dracula. Many Romanians however see him as a nationalist who only wanted to impose the just rule of law. One story recounts that Vlad’s people were so obedient to the law that when Vlad left a golden cup in the middle of the street overnight, no one dared pick it up.

Our country has had some strong leaders. There’s Duterte of Davao and Fernando of the MMDA. Break the law and you’ll either be spray painted or dead, figuratively or literally. As expected, the criticisms leveled against the two have been plentiful and harsh. I guess some people simply think of them as modern impalers. For certain they may have merited some of the rotten tomatoes thrown at them. But that is the beauty of democracy. We can complain all we want about the limited few strict officials and not expect to get a lashing or a slow death while impaled on the pink fences of the MMDA. That is, as long as we follow the law.