Defining fear

THE mayor of Capas, Tarlac lives up to his name: Catacutan, fearsome in the Kapampangan language.
At a meeting of the Metro Clark Advisory Council Thursday last week, Rey Catacutan scared the living daylights out of a poor madame whose only “fault” was being with the University of the Philippines system.
Dr. Juliet Mallari, director of UP Clark Extension, was following up the request for a permanent site for the UP Clark campus with CDC President Levy P. Laus. In a soft. lilting voice and reasoned presentation, she premised the request on the “best education” her school can offer, especially to poor but deserving students of Central Luzon: given that UP students are iskolar ng bayan.
UP as purveyor of the “best education” apparently did not sit well with Catacutan: “Angeles University Foundation from where I graduated gives the best education, not UP,” he shouted.
Then Catacutan threw the gauntlet at the hapless madame with a harangue of what he perceived as UP miseducation: student militancy gone berserk, most recently highlighted when activists protesting political killings in the country pelted Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Hermogenes Esperon Jr. with eggs and mud as he stepped out of a forum in UP Diliman.
Esperon made light of the incident, saying: “Maybe they were disappointed because I did not launch a coup d’etat” in reference to the Thailand military putsch that unseated Thaksin.
Catacutan appeared inappeasable. More hurt than Esperon himself, he let loose extreme anger over the injurious insult on the general whom he claimed to be his kababayan.
“Kung kautak ko lang si General Esperon, nirat-rat ko na ang mga iyan.” Murder, if not in Catacutan’s heart, was most certainly carried in his staccatoed words.
An eerie – if not embarrassed – silence permeated the conference hall: never have I seen President Laus looked so stunned, Mayor Boking Morales looked up the ceiling, Mayor Tarzan Lazatin leaned on his chair and covered his eyes with his hand, Mayor Pastor Guiao searched for his cellphone, the rest looked every which way but Catacutan’s direction.
The short eternity was cracked finally by the nervously silly jokes of former (?) UP professors Romy Dyoco, vice president of the Clark International Airport Corp., and Frankie Villanueva, president of the Clark Investors and Locators Association.
It is to Esperon’s credit – and to the activists’ luck – that the general is not utak-pulbura as Catacutan. Else, Kent State University in the ‘60s or Columbine High of recent times would have had a bloodier redux at UP.
Catacutan has now gone one over the Judaic eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth ratio of retaliation: His is a-burst-of- bullets-for-every-egg.
Himself a negation of his own argument: Catacutan as the best product of the best education that only AUF – no, not UP – can offer. Weep, Chancellor Emmanuel Y. Angeles. Apung Barbara must be turning in her grave.