I was being snglguy yesterday, that is, rummaging for junks in my closets and cabinets. But instead of finding still functional batteries and serviceable records, all I’ve got was stack and stack of papers and dysfunctional toys left high-and-dry by the kids long after they became operative—like robots arms that use to carry either swords or mallets or toy cars without wheels. I had to burn them down.

But my junk hunt wasn’t for naught after all for within those piles of obsolete office documents (some from the Department of Health where my wife is working and some from the World Bank-funded agency where I use to hunt for bread and butter) I’ve got hold of this piece of yellow paper with a poem scribbled on it, one that I had written so long ago; so far into the past in fact that were it not for the very familiar penmanship, I would not have recognized it as my own work. The poem goes like this:

Let Me See Those Red Lanterns

There, let me see those red lanterns

That illuminates these dungeons underneath,

Where I could only surmise the truth

That is breathing upon my sullen neck

Where perdition is almost certain and unveiled,

Unequalled in its malice, without reassurances,

That I tried to peddle in the past,

Without aim for profit nor gain,

Nor garnishing or ornamentation whatsoever,

In order to stupefy my unknowing disposition.

Let me see those red lanterns,

Soft as the moon in its flight,

Where even nocturnal longing could not taint or stain,

The rhythm of my pulse,

Bellowing and heaving in my chest—this gasping wound,

Into a staccato like pounded condiment,

And bleed the wholeness of my enmity.

When these waters run dry,

Let me see those red lanterns.

(more…)

It’s the sort of things that Mexican soap opera are made of and as cheesy as they may seem, the travails of former COMELEC Commissioner Virgilio Garcilliano has just become more interesting and juicy as watermelon now that a recent twist has unfolded before us—one that might just give the telling blow on his own fate and that of his superiors and other minions.

Some say that there’s no perfect crime. And in this case, there’s no perfect alibi. When he came out of hiding some months ago, Garcilliano was cool as the morning breeze as he answered every question thrown at him with so much flair and elegance; and that despite his jumbled reputation, his interrogators were not able to cough out anything from him. Everything seems to have been ironed out so perfectly well that while Garcilliano maintained that Monalisa smile on his face (leaving us wondering what secrets lay behind that mysterious smile), the senators and congressmen were writhing in utter disgust and frustration.

But now….but now the tide could soon tipped over towards the legislators’ favor as a senator and a number of congressmen are hell-bent on cornering Garcilliano with charges of perjury and falsification of public document, after the Central Bank deemed his passport to be inauthentic. It turns out that some kinks were left unironed and some hole had escape rigorous attention.

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The news on the radio yesterday afternoon were blasting again, about Malacañang harking once more ‘bout the inanity of every soul that turns against it. I listened more closely and wondered if there’s something tumultuous happening again in Manila, like military men marching into a chapel not merely to pray. The news anchors on the radio were out-of-breath and so animated that you’d thought ABS-CBN and GMA would pre-empt the afternoon cartoon shows once again, as if they know something tumultuous would be happening even before the public knew about it, or for one, even before Malacañang hears about yet another threat to the status quo. Like media is more intelligent than government intelligence wallowing in audit-exempt intelligence funds amounting to billions of pesos of taxpayers’ money.

Maybe, its time to admit that we can’t really blame President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for being media-paranoid for even I myself is amazed somehow at how uncanny these media agencies could get at times, having that extraordinary foresight in getting the news even before things actually become news. Do you know what I mean? But then, it wouldn’t be astonishing to half-expect these giant media stations to have insider knowledge about almost every out-of the-blue movement of military forces. In my mind, if I have to put myself into the shoes of those military men who would stage the anti-government move, I would of course use media to the hilt, by informing one or two of their newsmen, to be there when it happens. That way, media could amplify the effectiveness of the unrest, if ever it earns any success at all. Similarly, if I put myself into the shoes of “some” media persons, I would find myself in steep competition for that proverbial career-changing scoop, and most probably (although I am not saying that I might actually do it—it depends), I’d make myself gamely available to these adventurous military men, having my cellphone number or numbers in their phone books (maybe a number to a different cellphone or SIM card), and when every time I received that call, an invitation to be there when it all happens, I would partly feel that it’s my duty to bring the news to the public, as it happens blow by blow, and partly I would feel perhaps that in the dog-eat-dog world of media, the fastest to the news survives while those who are slow to the gun on salacious scoops wither. I’d rather survive than wither.

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An era seemed to have ended lately, a strong Filipino tradition passing away. The days of street protests and rallies, as we know it may soon find its last breath, if it hasn’t yet already. And because of this, there might just be no more future versions of People Power, that phenomenon of human movement that has made Filipinos proud and revered all over the world.

There is this somewhat archaic special law created in 1985 that the present administration had been resurrecting in order to suppress any nascent seed of mass protest called B.P. 880 and ironically it is titled “AN ACT ENSURING THE FREE EXERCISE BY THE PEOPLE OF THEIR RIGHT PEACEABLY TO ASSEMBLE AND PETITION THE GOVERNMENT FOR OTHER PURPOSES”. Like rummaging its hands into grandma’s old and ageing wooden chest, police authorities suddenly found itself acting like Gestapo holdovers and feel no guilt about it at all. Even Erap Estrada had not resorted to this despite his cowboy and macho persona. When he was President, former soldier Fidel V. Ramos had not reach this point of high-handedness, when we could have expected him to be so stern for being a former general that has seen enough blood in order to paint Pasig River red all over.

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The Batasan 5 (lawmakers Satur Ocampo, Joel Virador, Liza Maza, Rafael Mariano, and Teodoro Casino) —or the circumstances that led to the coining of the now much-mentioned alphanumeric phrase—should be one for the books. If it’d be in the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not catalogue of strange and fantastic occurrences, then it might as well be and it would not be much of a surprised to me. For one, the incident of five well-known legislators being encamped (And in apparent captivity) inside the Batasan Pambansa building for a number of days now is such a highly irregular episode in our political life that I would have expected every sane Filipino—especially so those of strong legal minds—to howl loudly in protest and disgust. A former Supreme Court Justice did just that about a couple of days ago but it is not exactly what I meant by a palpable gripe, a sort of a public outcry. What I must have heard from those who are supposed to complain to every appalling act of the administration were more of whining than protesting. Don’t you think that most of the opposition now have already been cowed and bullied effectively by the strings of high-profile arrests made by the authorities and shutting down of media outfits? Have they lost their fire? It looked that way to me for how come the Batasan 5 incident persist unto this time and nobody seems to be complaining loudly except the hapless legislators themselves now cuddling in temporary beds (and temporary lives), with their faces tinged and harassed by tremendous fear or worry? Nobody seems to appear on the stage of public debate and become the Mark Anthony to these five Caesars, harking “Friends, Romans and countrymen. What fault have these five brethrens of mine have committed that they are now denied of decent sleep?”

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Almost surely, like the old adage declares, smoke always goes up, climbing through the air that it grasp or to every spaces that it can take hold of (Of course, it goes down at some point; according to a song by that famous German rock group Scorpion). Therefore, man (human beings) tend to be like smoke for it seeks to climb towards higher realms, and this seems to be a natural trait that is hard to refute.

I was tending to my youngest child yesterday afternoon—one year old daughter Evette Darwisa—and it came to me as a kind of realization (a result of introspection) that toddlers are very enthusiastic climbers that whenever I put Evette on the floor, to walk by herself, she would always seem to find some chair, a table and or the stairway, and climb. I could not help surmise that perhaps, when we were little we must have also tended to reach out for higher platforms and climb as eagerly. My three older boys were also like Evette when they were little toddlers. I remember this because of the countless times that I have chased them towards the stairway and make some reprimand, warning them that they might fall. Evette is a fast-grower of some sort because at a very early toddler stage (one year and seven months) she is such a voracious climber, keener than all her older brothers, that she would even pull some chair to enable her to climb the dining table, using the chair as a stepping stone. This reminds me of course of that famous scientific test where it was once famously deduced that an ape has the intelligence of a small child. It was determined thru that experiment that an ape has that amount of aptitude as to process the need of a stepping board in order to climb a higher ground. I feel a little queasy here rationalizing my child’s climbing tenacity by being reminded of an ape. But it helps to point that out.

When I was a little child of about six or seven, far beyond the toddler age, I could remember that I did a lot of climbing myself. The cabinet of my Uncle Sammy is still heavily etched in my mind as I used to climb it like a spider or a lizard (it depends on how you see in your mind’s eye a gangly child struggling against a 12-foot furniture) along with the paperbooks that I have sighted there, the empty bottles of perfume, empty Gerber containers, that particular dusty artificial flower that had coiled wire for its stems, and even the color of the paint of the concerned cabinet—glazy red on the outside (presumably varnished) and marine blue inside.

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