Txt

When I invited him to join our grade school batch email group, Oca replied with an SMS/text: "What's your political inclination now? left, right or center?"

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Geez! We haven't seen each other since grade school, and I really have no clear idea what Oca had been since nineteen kopong-kopong, but he seemed to have a fairly good information of what I had grown old to be, thus, his politically spiked question.

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Indeed, as a child, I was the rebel without a clue. I was in 4th grade when I first spewed out the "makibaka" chant, awestruck by my elder brother's extra-curricular activiSt-ies. Back then, I would always secretly read the various issues of the UP Collegian, mimeographed leaflets and manifestos my elder brother brought home. He was my roommate, and in many instances when he thought I was asleep, I would catch him murmurring in subdued baritone the lines of Ka Amado Hernandez' "Kung Tuyo na ang Luha Mo Aking Bayan".

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The confused child that I was, condemned by my own father to follow the footsteps of my kuya aktibista, well, have grown old. And perhaps, still confused.

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Who was it, in effect, who said: "an idealist as a teenager, a radical in his twenties, a socialist in his thirties, a capitalist in his forties, a spiritual-ist in retirement", to describe someone whose youthful idealism will lead him just the same to the norms of midlife and old age? Well, the description doesn't EXACTLY fit me, if one is strict with numbers. Maybe not.

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I'm no capitalist, and am not looking forward to retirement either -- as I could still sell my labour, physical and mental labour, to the highest bidder in this dog-eat-dog arena called "free market" -- even as I have lost some teeth and gained much gray hair.

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"Curious lang", Oca said of his probing question.

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Prplxd s I ws amd my mall-shppng dat pm, I snt Oca dis SMS/txt as my rply:

"Not left, not right, not center. Man must always be above."

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And am not even sure if the phrase made sense.

Me and Mrs. G

:reprint of july 31 blog:

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Seems everybody is waiting for the eventual collapse of the GMA presidency. Pollsters tallied more than two-thirds of the people want her out? Not sure. But clearly, everyone has one or two things to say about GMA. About her half-smile/half-smirk. About her half-truths and wholesale lies. About her presidential height... er, heart, or half of it.

Now, this is about my one and a half times encounter with the lady president during the last half of the 1992 electoral campaign, when she first ran for the senate, as a half-LDP/half-LP candidate. Remember, before the '92 campaign, GMA was Trade Undersecretary for the Aquino Administration and was originally drafted by the Liberal Party (LP) for its senatorial slate. LP was then headed by the party's standard-bearer Jovy Salonga.

I rooted for Salonga and the LP in '92. In the heat of the campaign, by some twist of fate, I had the chance to go on board a daily radio program on DZME. It was my first and only experience as a broadcaster, and with the help of more seasoned radio dudes, I modulated my voice in a way they think I should, but most of the time I think I should not. I went on air as "Totoy Borloloy," and to a particular listener, I was 'boses-binata', I wasn't boses-announcer. Ugh!

The blocktime morning program was financed principally by a supporter of another candidate of another party, and yet my colleagues and I were somehow able to insert, subtly or otherwise, Salonga and LP in the name-recall business, also known as "elections".

We guested for interview various candidates such as would-be senator GMA, and personalities in the likes of the late Luis Taruc. The latter provided the program with what would become its most unforgettable episode, when the ageing revolutionary stupefied another guest, a senatorial candidate who thought and acted like an emperor. The former Huk, predictably, rocked the airwaves by mocking at the "emperor's new clothes".

No. The "emperor" wasn't GMA. But looking back, I wish we paired her with Ka Luis.

I remember GMA guested alone in our show and spoke so brilliantly, although she didn't finish the alloted interview time, politely begging off for another appointment. We were then already halfway the segment, maybe half-past ten, or half-before eleven, when I dished out a half-baked half-question/half-statement: "Ah... ah... yun pong kontrobersiya sa DTI tungkol po doon sa garment-quota... blah blah blah." I obviously couldn't formulate the question correctly. I guess I really didn't know where I wanted to lead the question to.

Poker-face and with that aire of intellectual superiority, GMA was just staring straight into my eyes as I was stuttering with the question, er, statement. My partner-host then butted in and seized at the "gist" of what I was trying to say, but a mile off-target from what indeed I was trying to ask. 'Twas good enough though to prevent the on-the-spot collapse of this trying-hard, first-timer of a broadcaster's three-month career.

Weeks later, I met GMA in person for the second time -- in a Cavite whistle stop en-route to fellow candidate Ramon Revilla Sr.'s birthday party cum political rally. On stage, she spoke so little, and danced, figuratively more little, with better(?)-half Mike. So amused, I was in the audience and thought I caught her eyes again. Her eyes didn't speak.

GMA spoke on 1992 radio much unlike the way she now speaks on 2005 TV. Her "I Am Sorry" monologue made me recall the frustrated broadcaster who miserably failed his radio apprenticeship, unsure of what he wanted to say, or ask. Her presscon appearance late this week made me wonder if, with all her PR and pa-pogi blitz, she was sure what she really wanted us, the people, to understand -- or, half-understand.

Uhm... she should have just stared into the cam and said nothing.

Didn't GMA say she intends to finish her term, up to 2010? But if the pollsters are to be believed, she's already halfway the "term" more than half the people had given her -- and they're bidding her GOODBYE.

Highway Figure 8

:reprint of july 06 blog:

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Twas luck that I caught the Live8 concert telecast of ABC5. Paul McCartney may have waxed prophetic by singing, for his finale in the Live8 concert, "The Long and Winding Road" -- the cyclical road, the Figure 8 route, where one ends up to where one has already been at any one point in the highway. That is, if one takes the cynical side of activism.


For decades now, radicals among us have screamed their lungs out and defaced walls to drive home a most reasonable point: debts breed poverty that breeds more debts that breed death (either from extreme hunger or extreme violence). No one listens!


Was it an American UN diplomat who said that aid, in forms of loans or grants is one sure way for a developed country to manipulate/control/subjugate third world countries and bleed them dry? Apparently, he who appointed this diplomat refused to listen.


Must it take rockers to rock the palace and for one moment make the kings listen and the bankers put down their balance sheets? But alas, the kings and bankers are entertained -- the music soothes their brains through their headsets. Their hearts remain hardrock with the high-decibel noise.


But pray, activists never give up any fight. Who knows, the long and winding road might really lead to the door of debt cancellation, and poverty might yet enter history. Or, McCartney's finale would simply remain a hit... yesterday.


Ah, Lennon... wish you were still around. In your own write, poor peoples' debts be written off.


"Writing off". The phrase brings to mind one experience I had a few years back in an Asean country, when one morning, I faced an all-Western panel of interviewers that included one obnoxious American lady who asked me: "How good a writer are you?" I tried to smile but I knew what came out on my face was a bit of a smirk. In a rather Pinoy-esque low key voice, as my right hand twirling a bic ballpen through my fingers, I replied: "I don't write when I have nothing to say. I guess, that's how good a writer I am."


Of course, I quoted Mao, but I was sure she hasn't heard of that maxim before. Had she played her arrogance to the hilt, she would have deduced that I always have nothing to say, ergo, I don't write. And with all malaise, she could have spilt it out in my face.


The interview quickly turned into a discussion on how things should be done in that aid agency/NGO/aid-driven Asian country. About grants. About debts. I even quoted Che Guevarra, who resented the fact that the Soviets loaned Cuba millions of dollars for the latter's development projects. Che lamented that the millions should have been given to their Latino comrades as grant. No more, no less.


Before long, I knew I had blown the big interview, and had lost the chance to tear up those "white-is-right" aid agency executives to pieces... in writing at that! Had I gotten the consultancy, this non-writer would have penned an evaluation report that is critical of this aid/loans-device of western imperialism and manipulation of third world countries.


But we all know that in all history, or in the history of usury, radicals are the first to be written off. But debts? Almost never.