on their feet

WHO SAYS INCARCERATION is a drudge? Not the dancing prisoners of Cebu who recently went out in the open with their terpsichorean skills and caught the world's eyes.

Beyond the crowd-pleasing choreography, my opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (August 14, 2007 issue) zooms in:

Rhythm and reason

Postcard-perfect beaches, sweet mangoes, online dating and porn sites, guitars, and singers. These may have placed Cebu in the international map, but certainly nothing more sensational and unprecedented as the upbeat video of its dancing prisoners.

Such a welcome, if not well-choreographed, respite from recurrent headlines about the arrhythmic showdown between Cebu’s governor and the city mayor. It may not shake the viewers of YouTube and the media across the borders, but a Gwen-Tom tango might yet clinched for Cebu the international renown as an island of happy feet.

Or else, locked in their long-drawn-out hostility as if they were each other’s zombie, they’d become prisoners forever of their mutual disgrace.

Digression aside, one can shake off the straitjacket of downbeat expectations. Or so proved the eurhythmic inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) now reportedly rehearsing to the tune of “Electric Dreams” for another crack at global spotlight.

A good turn, of course, deserves another. And so what more uplifting flight of fancy than the CPDRC jailbirds adding one more feather in their caps—pardon the pun—as a contingent for next year’s Sinulog mardi gras. Though this scenario looks like a security nightmare, wouldn’t that be a hoot for tourism to drum up international interest once again?

Beyond the hoopla, however, the recent popularity of the prisoners is a good time as any to look at their dance as a twinkle-toed prelude to deliverance. The very notion of rehabilitation, after all, presupposes the propitious idea of the incarcerated finally breaking out to a new and brighter day after facing the music of their transgressions or their outcast state. It’s about turning over a new leaf, yes.

No less spectacular than the stunts of Cirque du Soleil, certainly, would be the grace of a convict or the accused up on his feet for a whistle-worthy personal transformation.

Prison, despite its deprivations and utter desolation, can also pave the way for a wider inner world. Regarding the epiphany of empowerment, the book “Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela” abounds with passages in which the political prisoners formed a “university” inside the Robben Island prison, where Mandela and his friends shared and primed themselves up with books by Tolstoy, etc. Read how they dance around embitterment as they found decency even in their cold-hearted jailers.

Then again, outside the walls of prison also looms a dead end. Where finding a new path and bending the back of an old and dark past can be as painstaking as limbo rock. Or, the dance of death. That’s what the ill-starred spirit of one ex-convict found out after he was gunned down by two masked men Sunday night in Barangay Tisa. (Police, according to the report, are still determining if the incident was the handiwork of vigilantes.)

How ready are we as a community to give reformed sinners a second chance?

If only making a new life were as tidy as learning a new dance step. “Without an effective support group and rehabilitation program in the community,” explains non-government organization (NGO) official, “offenders still run the risk of getting involved in crimes again.”

Civilization could be judged by the way it treated its prisoners, stated Winston Churchill. But it’s a sorry judgment on us when our society, with the orchestration of its prejudice and discrimination—out of the lack of imagination and faith—can only compel those seeking a new footing into our fold to dance, awkwardly and hapless ever after, alone.

eros and psyche: for my wife-lover-best friend, arlaine

To celebrate the birthday (August 10th)of Arlaine J. Obenieta, here's a montage of Cupid and Psyche culled from various era of art to the tune of one of my favorite songs: Sting's "My One and Only Love."

to erase the stain of badness from their badges

IF THERE'S SOMEBODY in dire need to possess congeniality to inspire our confidence, it's none other than the police.

Here's a reprint of my recent opinion column in the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu (July 31, 2007):

Too true to be good

Perhaps we can love our law enforcers truly only if we’d have the hearts of their mothers.

Papa may preach, but “God sees us through our mothers' eyes,” as one philosopher once surmised. The milk of human kindness. Nothing else is more essential than this when cops are no less vulnerable than crybabies. Then again, those inclined to be cynical—as the police badge become something to weep for—would see nothing but crocodile tears.

Through rose-colored glasses, however, is the way Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 Director Silverio Alarcio Jr. looks at the men and women under his wings. True to a poet’s vision of hope as something with feathers, Alarcio is reportedly in cloud nine, “happy to see an improvement in the PNP’s image” and “elated that the business sector has a better outlook on the organization.” Yes, despite the negative approval rating.

When one’s scraping the bottom, even morsels are manna enough. And so a -36 evaluation on the PNP’s sincerity in stamping out corruption can only be an improvement from its 2005 rating of -54.

Look who’s endowed with maternal instincts, and the top gun in Central Visayas would rather behold the future as fibers of glass stained with sunlight and rainbow. “In the next survey,” he says, “we will hopefully get a positive rating.”

That’s the story, that’s the glory of love mothers can hum along: “You've got to give a little, take a little, and let your poor heart break a little.”
With such forecast worthy of a painter’s canvas, Alarcio and the rest of the rank and file had better reckon a reality check from Marc Chagall: “My mother's love for me was so great I have worked hard to justify it.”

By “being sincere on the job and in eradicating corrupt activities within the organization,” Alarcio is bullish about continuing their “transformation efforts.”

Which, if that would turn fantasy to fact, would be no less fabulous than Ovid’s tales of transformation wherein love is all it takes for a metamorphosis: a person or lesser deity becomes a stone, a flower, a tree, or a star.

An epic task of the imagination, what Alarcio is up to.

And, hopefully, Senior Insp. George Ylanan, the chief of Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Bureau (CIIB), and policewoman Jerybel Lerio can believe endings of legends and fairy tales do come true.

Meanwhile, not even their mothers’ lullabies are enough to shush both Ylanan and Lerio after lawyer Alex Tolentino deems police integrity no better than bugaboo to scare children into slumber.

Beware of the monster called “Mamlantiray.” That’s someone who plant evidence on suspects, thus begins Tolentino’s tale after he, in defense of two drug suspects, allegedly badmouthed Lerio. “The credibility of our office is at stake here,” cried Ylanan, who could have been more emphatic if he muttered: “Mother, mother, I am sick…”

it takes eight to tag

MY PILLOW MAY be too hard for your head, but you can call me anything but a wet blanket. So it's as good as tickle when I got tagged by Isolde Amante.

Here are the rules for “8 facts”:

• In the 8 facts about [name], you share 8 things that your readers don’t know about you. At the end, you tag 8 other bloggers to keep the fun going. Each blogger must post these rules first.

• Each blogger starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

• At the end of the post, a blogger needs to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
So, take it or leave it:

Fact 1: My original birth certificate carried a mythic name--Hector--but my mother said I was sickly and blamed it all on that name. And so when I was baptized a month later, she took her cue from the daredevil portrait of an archangel in our altar. I have never been hospitalized ever since, thank God and my guardian namesake. Then again, the protracted state of non-existence about a certain Michael Obenieta in the files of the national census was like a sick joke. It was only last year, 38 years after birth, that I set the record at the NSO straight and became legit.

Fact 2: I sold newspapers during my elementary days because I envied my best friend and classmate--the late Gerry Almin--whose pockets were always full from his earnings as a newsboy. Of course, I read the papers first before I hawked them out in the streets, shouting again and again short of Eureka: "Bulletin, Journal, Express..."

Fact 3: As a reader, I'm obsessed about closures and continuities, and so I can't and won't read a book without first reading the last page. As a writer, I find the article "the" too imposing if not taking itself too seriously, thus I advertently avoid beginning my sentences with such as much as I can.

Fact 4: I have a life-long crush on Nora Aunor since I gawked at her way back in the 70s in the anthology "Makulay na Daigdig ni Nora" and the Sunday variety show "Superstar." My love affair with the movies started from my fondness for her films, the best of which have become hallmarks in Philippine cinema. From her humble beginnings, she amazes me with her larger-than-life gifts no less than her iconic persona, nothing short of phenomenal in Filipino culture, as well as her survivor's spunk. And I've been getting the hang of my friends' jokes since I cross my Noranian heart.

Fact 5: When going to funeral parlors, I always have the urge to take a peek at the faces under the coffin glass and often wonders if they're not yawning or rolling their eyeballs while we're not looking.

Fact 6: Among my fantasies, nothing's more recurrent than singing like Sting, James Brown, Andrea Bocelli, Michael Crawford, Jamie Cullum, and Yoyoy Villame. Poor me, reality check started early: I was eight when my mother, nudged by our neighbor next door, accompanied me to an audition for an amateur singing contest sponsored by Darigold (a brand of milk now extinct). Among the wannabes, my name was called first and I just stood there in the middle, petrified by the first guitar strain of "Bato sa Buhangin," my mouth gaping wide as I groped for the lyrics and wondered how my tongue turned into stone.

Fact 7: My dream jobs: film reviewer (I'd give an arm if I could write like Pauline Kael, Noel Vera, and Richard Corliss), carpenter (God knows I'd only end up hammering my head on the nail, but it's nothing short of miraculous that I actually earned my first 35 dollars here in America after five-hours toil as a carpenter's assistant, ha ha!), gardener (because I don't have a green thumb and the secret life of flowers and weeds fascinates me), librarian (because it's erotic to be privy to all that body of knowledge), lighthouse keeper (ah, solitude and the horizon), psychiatrist (because what's cooler than getting paid by those who are not sane enough to presume that I knew better?) and police detective (because nothing's more life-affirming than the hunt and the cloak-and-dagger thrill of it all.) Talking of the last dream job, I actually took year's worth of Criminology in college and dropped after realizing that my instructors were teaching me no more than how to scratch my head and have a big tummy.

Fact 8: Preemptive measures suits me perfect, as when a lady agreed to go out on a dinner date with me and before we could eat, I proposed marriage to her even before I formally made it known that I'm courting her. To prove that I was not joking, I later asked the lounge singer to dedicate the Beatles' "I Will" for her, and I had to go to the toilet when the singer started mentioning her name in the prelude. Lest she had the urge to slap me, I stayed in the toilet throughout the duration of the song. What's next? Well, she has been my wife and the mother of our two children. But up to now, she's still convinced there was potion in her plate.

Enough said. Gotta move on, and pass the tagged ball to these 8 bloggers: John Biton, Jeremiah Bondoc, Januar Yap, Niza Mariñas, Marlen Limpag, Lorenzo Niñal, Cathy Perez and Noel Villaflor.

faith, reason, and the power of imagination

The gospel according to Sir Salman Rushdie

magnified madness

A SECURITY GUARD is dependable as long as he stays alert where he is supposed to be, vigilant at any given time but at a safe distance . Something's iffy, however, when notions of security come masked in the face of paranoia. About the anti-terrorism law recently passed in the Philippines, here's a reprint of my column in the op-ed pages of Sun.Star Cebu (July 24, 2007):





Me, You, and Everyone We Know: A Peep Show

NOT unless you’re an exhibitionist or an attention-starved KSP, nothing is more self-annihilating than anonymity.

But for some of us who find a corner of sky by basking in the devil-may-care bliss of being unremarkable, it’s a monstrosity when the freedom of our privacy is going the way of the dinosaur. It’s cold comfort, indeed, when the sanctuary of confidentiality stops where the Human Security Act ((HSA), the anti-terrorism law, begins.

Who cares if minding your personal affairs is nothing more than a hill of beans?

In the eyes of the government, it may heave up like what Rufa Mae Quinto hides under her tank top.

If I sound suspicious in the face of President Arroyo’s assurance that the HSA or Republic Act 9372, it could be due to my allergy to legalese. Swallowing the law’s nuances, I confess, renders me fit for a Heimlich maneuver. Go wring my neck, but why do I feel choked about this well-meaning edict?

If there were many who’d rather grow genitals on their foreheads than bow down to HSA, it’s because there’s a lot to raise eyebrows for in the law’s provision “to secure the state and protect our people from terrorism.”

According to detractors of the law, all it takes is mere suspicion for law enforcers to subject the accused like a nude offering to the lions: preventive detention, warrantless arrest, house arrest, prohibition from the use of cell phones, computers and any other means of communication even when granted bail, surveillance and wiretapping, and examination, sequestration and freezing of bank deposits and other assets. Geez!

When the enforcement of the law jerks away the presumption of innocence like a used condom, suspicion renders it smooth to spawn more wariness. Or a sense of doom.

HSA is supposed to show how the government loves us enough to spare us from terrorists and the obscenity of their hate. But who was it again who thought, “Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters?”

Isn’t suspicion a mental picture seen through an imaginary keyhole? It is, one writer remarked, “the courageous side of weakness.”

Look whose pants are down when the law started limbering up last Friday. The enforcers might as well be no more than fumblers at sixes and sevens with virginity. Or so reveals Police Regional Office (PRO) 7 Director Silverio Alarcio Jr. “Even some lawyers do not know some of the provisions so how much more our policemen on the ground?” Alarcio minced no words, stressing the need for education “everybody, every sector…as far as that Human Security Act is concerned.”

Far more preferable, indeed, is candor compared to the bravado of paranoia. Which engorges itself like a voyeur’s drool-greasy gratification out of cocking an eye at unsuspecting people.

Behavioral science explains “voyeurs generally have a history of insecurity and fear of rejection.” If that’s merely psychobabble worthy of the government’s roll of eyeballs, the incumbent administration is hardly exuding a post-coital glow after the majority spurned the advances of its senatorial slate last elections. The president’s popularity rating, in fact, has been no higher than the moan of a woman pretending orgasm.

Excuse me, but how comforting to heed the call of the toilet bowl. As I grunt and groan, I hope there’s no camera secretly seeking a terrorist splashing and swimming below my waist.

to see is to believe

Grand design and other tell-tale signs for those dazed and lost in the midst of the Creator's signatures.

proofs raised to the power of five

Because the lack of faith is a result of attention deficit, here are arguments for waking up. Amen, after all, is also a four-letter word.

for a while there: postscript to a phenomenon

SO IT WAS TOLD: In the ancient times, Celtic druids who lived in what is now called Scotland were handy with wands.

Called a "man with the wisdom of the woods," a druid deemed the trees in the forest as magical and sacred: The cedar is the womb of energy, life-giving. An ash tree is useful for healing. The strong elm tree can enrich the power of a spell. A burning birch bark is a potent love potion.

Nowadays, the druid might as well be in the realms of the dead in the wake of trees massacred to make paper.

But when paper are transfigured with the existence of text, reincarnated in the shades of bookstores and libraries, I believe the druids are waving their wands again. So that the stardust of insight and enchantment, revelation and transformation will be upon us. And the world will be breezy again, brighter with the reverb of green, green, green.


* * *

"It's really the wand that chooses the wizard, of course." So explains Mr. Ollivander, the moon-eyed manufacturer and merchandiser of wands along Diagon Alley in J.K. Rowling's phenomenal series.

Of all Rowling's characters, Ollivander (played by John Hurt in the movies) is the one who intrigued me the most. To begin with, his first name has never been revealed, as far as I can remember. Never mind if he is renowned as the best wandmaker in the enchanted part of Britain.

No one, it seems, has bothered to ask his first name though his popularity has preceded him for never forgetting every wand he has ever sold, greeting people by rattling off the specifications of their magical sticks.

Come to think of it, there would be no Hogwarts school of wizardry and witchcraft, no epic battle between Harry Potter and Voldemort without Ollivander's wands.

I've been fascinated, too, of the fantastic effort it possibly took for him to secure the core materials to make those wands: the heartstring of a dragon, the feather of a phoenix, the tail hair of the unicorn. Wow!

He obviously had so much power in his hands, and yet he remained at the background--like God--throughout the seven-book series. Yes, he was called upon to perform the "weighing of the wands" at the Triwizard Tournament, but always he just faded out and away from the thick of things .

Truth to tell, I wished there was more of him in those books, the way Zeus often made his presence felt in mythology.

Because I wanted so much to honor how he loomed large in my imagination, I chose to name my eldest child after him and an archangel.

Wish my son Gabriel Ollivan will discover, too, how the wand of words can spring a forest of possibilities.

***

Writers rock the world. And if my children would deem me nutty in the future--if books would become extinct, God forbid--for daring such a declaration, I will tell them this bit of history when reading hooked children and adults alike:

"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final volume of J.K. Rowling's all-conquering fantasy series, sold a mountainous 8.3 million copies in its first 24 hours on sale in the United States, according to Scholastic Inc.

No other book, not even any of the six previous Potters, has been so desired, so quickly. Deathly Hallows averaged more than 300,000 copies in sales per hour — more than 5,000 a minute. The $34.99 book, even allowing for discounts, generated far more revenue than the opening weekend of the latest Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which came out July 10.

"The excitement, anticipation, and just plain hysteria that came over the entire country this weekend was a bit like the Beatles' first visit to the U.S.," Scholastic president Lisa Holton said.

That news, of course, would be enough a last laugh of, if not a lullabye for, a druid.

a woman writes about a boy and the wonder of it all, to begin with

Once upon a time, a global phenomenon was born: an orphaned boy with a lightning scar on his forehead. Along came a revolution of reading. Just when the digital age seemed to usher in a universe of alliteracy, the magic of the written word suddenly held sway, casting its spell the world over. It's been ten years now. It's about time the woman who bewitched us all with the enchantment of her imagination takes a long last bow. Long live, J.K. Rowling!

when my eyes sing yes

IF THERE'S ONE saving grace about American cities, it's the bounty of its public libraries.

Here in the Kansan city of Topeka, for instance, the amenities of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Libary (featuring the convenience of malling with its luxuriant spaces and state-of-the-art architecture) abound not only with every bookworm's capacity to borrow as much reading fare as one can hoard but also the availability of DVDs to bring home. Oh, the wide-eyed buffet for the soul!

Here are the films I've long wished to see which recently got me--thanks to my insomnia--on a viewing binge:


ETERNITY AND A DAY. I rank this Theo Angelopoulos masterpiece among the films I’m most intimate with, which I can watch in tireless rapture again and again, like the rest of my personal favorites: Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, Milos Forman’s Amadeus, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Patrice Leconte’s Man On The Train, Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas, Zhang Yimou’s Hero.

Winner of the grand prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, Eternity and A Day revolves around the last moments of a dying Greek writer who embarks on a dreamy voyage to relive an idyll with his long-dead wife at their seaside retreat. His reveries, detouring into the times of an ancient Greek poet who buys forgotten words to construct an epic, segues seamlessly into the travails of an eight-year old boy, a refugee whose future weaves into Alexander's own search for meaning and fulfillment into the past.


THE COLOR OF PARADISE. Living up to its title is a miracle made palpable in the hands of Majid Majidi who made waves in world cinema with his enchanting Children of Heaven. In this lovely and lush tale—a testimony to the natural world’s majesty—Majidi explores a universe of the senses refracted from the perspective of a blind Iranian boy grappling with his father’s lost of innocence.

Aside from its heightened evocation of textures out of the boy's world, pure bliss are the painterly simplicity and spectacle of the countryside and its unerring natural rhythm: little hands intuiting through a garden, the burbling of the brook, the dialogue of woodpeckers, the orchestra of birdsongs and insects and the breeze. Best Film winner at the 21st Montreal Film Festival, among others.



NIGHTS OF CABIRIA. Chaplinesque with her panache for hilarity and heartbreak, Giulietta Masina won Best Actress at Cannes as the title character in one of Federico Fellini's most haunting films, a valentine for a prostitute’s child-like but stubborn search for faith, love, and a hopeful place under the red light.

Winner of the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, this stirring cinematic piece comes in the heels of Fellini’s international breakthrough with La Strada (another collaboration with leading lady/wife Giulietta Masina). Rambling and leisurely paced, Nights of Cabiria is suffused with sunlight despite its dark undertones. Whatever they say of the human spirit, Masina’s Cabiria walks the talk in that tough but tender unraveling at the film’s fireworks-worthy end.



THE EEL. A psychodrama of regret, sexual repression as well as healing, Shohei Imamura’s film is engaging as he deftly tracks the journey of an anti-hero—a cuckold who murdered his wife he caught in an illicit act—en route to redemption.

From the violence of its opening act to the comic but poignant interlude of an impending relationship between two troubled people, Imamura’s vision gracefully weaves a spell of surreal vignettes—a neighbor who expects visitors from outer space, a mother who fancies herself a ballroom diva, etc—into a catharsis that charms and earns its insistence to keep the human spirit above the stormy depths of the heart. Winner of the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival.




THE SEVENTH SEAL. No film buff worth his larger-than-life craving for the classic can miss Ingmar Bergman's 1956 film that has survived its fair share of parodies for the heft and unabashed exploration of its subject matter: man’s search for God in the face of cynicism and destruction.

Wearing its lyrical and allegorical conceit on its sleeve, Bergman zooms in on the anguish of a knight returning from the Crusades and facing an apocalyptic scenario straight from the Book of Genesis. He plays chess with Death, to begin with. He encounters a troupe of actors and a flock of flagellants as he casts a shadow of his long face through the film’s somber tone and its philosophical perorations.

Through it all, brave-hearted is Bergman’s homage to the power of imagery that abounds here on top of the miracle of humor sprinkled through an otherwise stark visual meditation. Delicious is that scene where a philandering performer, outsmarting the cuckold who wanted to kill him and climbing a tree to avoid the beasts in the forest, looked down at Death literally sawing off the trunk of his perch!


THE SWEET HEREAFTER. The heart of another is a dark forest, Conrad once wrote. So concurs Atom Egoyan as he adapts for the screen Russell Bank’s celebrated novel about a tragedy in a small town and how the parents’ process of healing dovetails into a man’s search for truth and wholeness, both as a lawyer and as a father.

With its cocktail of themes (treachery, loss, and transcendence), Egoyan unerringly eschews cliché and cheap emotions as he constructs the tectonic shifts of the narrative like a puzzle, like layers of ice in the film’s arctic landscape. Or metaphoric reverb in the Pied Piper story which Egoyan used as a subtext in the story. Deeper secrets are revealed, no less devastating than the circumstances of the accident even as the lawyer dredges up odds and ends of his troubled past. How to pick up the pieces of broken lives? Egoyan is emphatic with the restraint of his clarifications no less complex than prisms, which also informs the luminous portrayal from an ensemble lead by Ian Holm and Sarah Polley.


THE DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS. What has otherworldly bliss got to do with the mundane lives and loves of two women—a drifter who opens her rucksack along with her heart to strangers and a searcher who wears her suspicions on her sleeve?

The debut film of Erick Zonca offers a quilt from shreds of desire to be alive, rendered stark with the peripheral reality of a comatose girl in whose home both Isa (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie (Natasha Régnier) stakes a sense of refuge after forging an unlikely friendship in a sewing factory.
While tragedy rips the seams of their shared intimacy in the end, the film celebrates the brief history of soul mates as well as the tenacity of possibilities for miracles, no matter if woven like a patchwork, out of the most fragile of human relationships. Such is the stuff of epiphanies, as delicate as the finely textured performances of Bouchez and Régnier who shared the prize for Best Actress at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

BELLE DE JOUR. Regarding filmmaker Luis Bunuel, the critic Roger Ebert probes: “He was deeply cynical about human nature, but with amusement, not scorn. He was fascinated by the way in which deep emotional programming may be more important than free will in leading us to our decisions. Many of his films involve situations in which the characters seem free to act, but are not.”

One of the few films about eroticism that really gets it down pat--It’s more in the mind, not in the genitals, stupid!—Belle de Jour stars the incandescent Catherine Deneuve as Severine, a woman whose life is at once picture-perfect and empty. Leading a double life (a prostitute by day and a doctor’s housewife by night), Severine revels in repressed desire to be humiliated and used sexually. She escapes into waking dreams where she enjoys being whipped, soiled with mud, and bound to trees. Not recommended for feminists, definitely.

(Next in my viewing list: The Rose Tattoo, Sweetie, La Dolce Vita, Mamma Roma, The Circle, and The Magdalene Sisters)

en route to rhapsody

How to become larger than one's self? Here's the gospel according to Rumi's poetry.

aren't we there yet?

CAN'T TEACH old dogs new tricks, so it's said. Same thing, ho-hum, holds ever true for one of the Philippine's most doggone institution: the Commission on Elections (Comelec).

Hereunder is a reprint of my latest opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (July 18, 2007):




Infernal affairs

One doesn't have to be bad to go to hell. Doing good, like coming to terms with your right to be a registered voter, would be enough for a soul-scorching ordeal.

Nope, the gospel of Matthews had it mixed up when he bid you and me to "enter through the narrow gate." Where heaven doesn't wait at the end of the queue, the portal of the local office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) is neither wide nor broad, but it still "leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it."

Horror happens not only when the cold crawls up one's spine, but also when one's head shakes. Or pivots a la Linda Blair when one's eyeballs dilate at this jolly dreadful dispatch: “The first day of registration for the synchronized barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections in Oct. 29 saw an impatient and rowdy crowd jeering at Cebu City Commission on Elections (Comelec) personnel for the delay."

Mayhem ran loose, so the report goes. Registration process "took seven hours to finish for some…Priority numbers were distributed late in the morning, but not everyone lining up received one." Were they waiting for Godot?

Come along with an exorcist, quick. Brace yourself for the slow burn of boredom, if not the creepy probability of a demonic possession when elbowing your way through the Comelec throng. Restless, they might as well be smoking out of their ears and spewing sulfur at the Comelec personnel who must have been cowering at their wit's end as if confronted by a lynch mob.

“Dalawang bagay lang ang mahalaga sa mundo," the cuckolded clock-repair guy in Ishmael Bernal's classic Ikaw ay Akin waxes philosophic. “Paghahanap at paghihintay."

But searching for systematic process and waiting for deliverance proved for those who went to Comelec no less harrowing than waiting in line for the gas chamber. Literally so, if we reckon how many had to endure inhaling a whiff of lethal wind breaking from the bowels, let alone Comelec's miasma of mismanagement.

Digging up the dead does seem less dire than getting a grip on the poll body's rot—from its putrid process of registration to its worm's pace of counting the votes, no thanks to its failure to latch on to modernization and to computerize the election process.

Pray tell, what unspeakable wrongs have we, especially those voter-wannabes, done in our previous lives to deserve a purgatory via Comelec? Everything awful about it has been aired out ad nauseam, and yet it continues to roil up the throat like regurgitated vomit.

How, then, do you solve a problem like lining up at the Comelec?

Lest you'd resort to shouting fire or strapping yourself with a bogus bomb—God forbid, just because you want badly for the crowd to scamper out of your way—consider whiling away your time with these few options:

* Bring a copy of Proust's La Recherche Du Temps Perdu so that you'd hit two birds with one stone by savoring how to take things slow and remember things past as well as impressing people that you're an intellectual who knows cursing is more elegant in French.

* Lug along your videoke component and earn money by charging people for a chance to warble their ulcers out instead of jarring the air with jeers for Comelec's ears long deaf to the broken record called change.

* Lead the praying of the rosary, but concentrate on the sorrowful mysteries. These, heaven knows, are what unravel in Comelec any given day. It's in the direst circumstance, after all, that one can stretch one's capacity for being holy sort of foolhardy.

affirmative alternative

In the end, faith is the only way to find the light.

beyond grief, in the light of the living

IN THE END, death is going to be democratic while sweeping all of us off our feet.

Coming to grips with mortality has been no sweat with the recent news about a dear friend's tragic end. Devastated, utterly am. But death, ironically, also breeds and spurs an avenging appetite to live fully, aflame with beauty and meaning in the light of her loveliness, warmth, creative fire and courage to stake a place under her own sun.

Thus William Blakes waxes immortal: Ah, sunflower, weary of time,/ Who countest the steps of the sun;/ Seeking after that sweet golden clime/ Where the traveller's journey is done..." In that spirit, hereunder is a reprint of my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu (July 10, 2007):

To live

Never say die, and the Beatles goes loud and lives on.

An assassin’s bullets and the ravages of cancer have long doomed John Lennon and George Harrison, true. But as long as you crank up the volume, there’s no stopping them from crooning and cuing us to nod with a head-bang against the world and its every blight: “…and I say it’s all right.”

Some songs, like Here Comes the Sun, are sure-fire weapons for fine-tuning one’s inner weather.

To play or sing it now here in America, however, entails a streak of dark humor. As the temperature goes over the top with a swathe of heat waves, wildfires have gone on a rampage across the West— California, Nevada, South Dakota, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon—scorching the woods along the way.

No holds barred, too, are those burning President Bush’s effigy after he sent American troops to the inferno in Iraq and made ashes out of more than 3,500 lives so far. With many Americans in the mood to haul him out of his hot seat and kick him all the way to Baghdad, yes, it would be a holiday for its horde of suicide bombers.

The heat is on, indeed, for the party of the pessimists with all its sound and fury:
The silent spread of global warming. The blood-curdling screams in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia. The chorus of last breath from hunger, AIDS and other sickness in Africa’s heart of darkness.

It’s an endless night, if not the end of the world, for many people on Earth where the sun always rises for rotten politics and puss-drenched policies. Along come the vile and violent always, like refrains in a song.

“And I say it’s all right,” insists the Beatles. Never mind if the primetime news and tabloids conspire for Pollyanna to turn a deaf ear to the sun-lit lilt of songs. Or the orchestra of God’s allusions at the end of Job’s lamentations.

Don’t fret, avers the Death Clock, “the Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away.” Might as well stick one’s tongue out at the Grim Reaper who will have the last laugh anyway. And so welcome to When-Will-You-Die.com, the online quiz “that tells you when your will die!” After answering the quiz and a consumer survey, one will receive “a death percentage score and a cleverly worded response.” Or, log in at TheHeavenOrHellQuiz.com, “a website dedicated to helping you answer Life's tough questions… whether or not you are going to Heaven or Hell.”


Tongue-in-cheek, indeed, does this dot-com generation makes mincemeat and thumbs down at Death. Or tweaks its nose. As if it suffices enough to pinch away the pain, or flick off the festering despair.

“People living deeply have no fear of death,” wrote Anais Nin whose words my friend Ana Escalante-Neri used to wade through.

Living deeply was how Ana, a scuba diver, lovingly stretched the limit of her own available light against the dark she alone can fathom, whether through her immersion in poetry and photography. Or through the rainbow of her roles as mother, lover, wife, daughter, sister, friend, teacher, and self-confessed “barefoot traveler.”

As a student, Ana once played the guitar in a band. If she opted not to pursue playing music, it could be one of the choices she knew was worth taking. Something along the line of what she wrote in one her columns in Sun.Star Weekend Magazine: “I’ve learned to discern which freedom I can take and which I have to let go. But I will take what I can take.”

In life, indeed, she had the courage of a firefly, fragile while defying the dark night. May she bask under the sun of God’s mercy and rest at last in peace. And for us who mourn our loss, may we have the grace and grit to hope, despite our grief and after all our questions, “it’s all right.”