benign0's blog

I read with bemusement the catty exchange between Jim Paredes and Gringo Honasan that was immortalised on Twitter.com last Friday, the 25th February. Imagine two senior citizens of the Republic -- both household names and key figures in a "revolution" touted as one that defines Filipinos' place in history at that -- engaged in a tiff of the sort that would draw cheers and hoots the way a mud wrestling match would. Hold that thought and draw a hard association between that and this "spirit" of Edsa that we are supposed to re-visit , and there you have what the whole exercise was really all about.

Not being in Manila at the height of the festivities marking the 25th Anniversary of the Edsa "People Power" "revolution", I was relegated to some semblance of keeping tabs on events in real time via a live feed courtesy of Google set to display content with the keyword "edsa". The feed normally captures news reports as they come through the wire. Unfortunately it also captures "tweets" made on the popular "social media" website Twitter.com . So literally every second, some kind of update from someone somewhere in the world with something to say with "edsa" in it scrolls in.

Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. in a recent statement made crack that the Philippines " should have been a Singapore " by now if the Edsa "People Power" "revolution" of 1986 had "not prospered". This is of course debatable and an easy assertion to make since it is by all intents and purposes unknowable and unprovable anyway.

I was a teenager in 1986 when the first Edsa "Revolution" erupted. The sound of this "eruption" for me was the murmer of a crowd queueing at a fishball stand or playing pusoy dos with their pals on a sidewalk while smoking Marlboro "Blue Seals". An anticlimactic account, yes, but the thing about the first Edsa "revolution" was that it came together spontaneously as ordinary people milled rather than massed into Edsa as what was to become the seminal event emerged from the collective stand . Indeed, back then the stand was clear, the phenomenon was emergent , and the sponteneity was very evident. That phenomenal nature underpinned by such clarity cannot be replicated -- specially if the attempt is engineered by people with top-down agendas (as what's happened since). For the first Edsa revolution was, at its most fundamental, a bottom-up movement.

Why not bury former President Ferdinand E. Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani (Filipino Heroes' Cemetery)? That is the question that came to light recently in the wake of the burial there of former Secretary and retired General Angelo Reyes, who was in the middle of being implicated in a big-time corruption scandal at the time of his death on the 8th of February this year. Marcos's son, Senator Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr today "reiterated his call for the burial of his father, the late former President Ferdinand Marcos, in the Libingan ng mga Bayani". Television personality Karen Davila was quoted by ANC 24/7 as having quoted Bongbong saying that "if Angelo Reyes was buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, my late father should also be buried there".

What do (1) the disastrous ascent to power of Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III, (2) the crystallisation of trial-by-media into the backbone of Philippine criminal justice, and (3) an over-reliance on noise-making and stunts to instigate change movements all have in common? Answer: people power . The idea that spectacular and noisy mass movements -- in all their chaotic and unstructured glory -- can result in a deep structural change of the sort that yields enduring value started in the Philippines with the transpiring of the 1986 Edsa "Revolution".

American photojournalist Kim Komenich is out looking for the subjects of the iconic photographs he took of the Edsa People Power "Revolution" of 1986. He even won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography for his trouble. Poor guy, though. He has no idea what a big joke Filipino-style street "revolutions" had since become -- a testament to Da Pinoy's renowned talent for perverting otherwise noble endeavors .

Don't look now, but Akbayan party list representative Walden Bello has the distinction of being the first bozo to make that all-too-familiar but tired old call for "people power" a.k.a. Ocho-Ocho "Revolution" of the post-Arroyo era. According to Bello, the ten justices who ruled Aquino's pet "Truth Commission" project unconstitutional need to be "taught a lesson"...

I don't really give a rat's arse who is "unconstitutional" nor who is the Righteous One or the Evil One in this whole small-minded drama being spun around this whole "Truth Commission" failure-to-launch fiasco. What I do see is an amusing contest of wits, political acumen, and foresight . So far, the party leading the race as far as this set of contest criteria is concerned is quite clear. Former President, now House Representative, Gloria Arroyo has remained consistent to the winning form she's exhibited over the last ten years -- that of a tenacious and savvy politician; a stark contrast to the bumbling comedy-of-errors that is the Second Aquino Admiistration.

The bid for amnesty of mutiny plotters Antonio Trillanes and Danilo Lim now hinges on the politics that surround their case -- the childish whims of an adolescent President and the brownie-points-sniffing people's "representatives" in Congress. Isn't this ironic? These are the very sorts of Pinoy-style politics upon which Trillanes and Lim justified the banditry they exhibited in the Peninsula and Oakwood.

At no other time have we seen such an immense opportunity to rally behind sensible principles -- and ones that are being championed by the highest official of the land. Let's all do the right thing! Rally behind what is right, not what is traditional .

Check out the latest Yellow Army image making the rounds (you can click on the image at right to enlarge it). Nicely done I might say. But still it doesn't count it out from my list of things that make you go "hmmmm..." .

Noynoy seems to be going about consolidating power the classical Machiavellian way — eliminating all his enemies. Problem is he is too limp-dicked to do it in the same way real tyrants did and too bratty to do it through the system.