Bread of peace

"LET THEM eat cake!”
The royal insolence of the infamous Marie Antoinette – in reaction to reports that her subjects had no bread – leaps to mind with the news that the biggest flour millers in the country will sell cheap pan de sal in the slums of Metro Manila to help the poor cope with the rice shortage.
No rice? Let them eat “tasty” bread, instead.
Recollections of the queen consort of Louis XVI and the tragic finis to the ancien regime get intense with con tempora news of riots and unrest feared to erupt with the tight supply of rice here.
The sans-culottes storming the Bastille launched the French Revolution: Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI losing their heads, literally, at the guillotine. The sans-rice mob storming Malacanang to launch a new Philippine revolution?
Palace factotums , understandably, are quick to quash any talk of food riots. Especially in the aftermath of the collapse of the Haiti government caused by its abject failure to address mass riotings triggered by a food crisis.
The Malacanang spin doctors are not so historically dumb after all as to fail to consider parallel political events that transpired in 1986 in that impoverished Caribbean nation and the Philippines.
Revolted by the culture of corruption that pervaded the government of President Jean Claude “Bebe Doc” Duvalier and the ostentatious extravagance of his wife Michele Bennett Pasquet amid the grinding poverty that made their country the poorest in all of the Western Hemisphere, Haitians took to streets – starting with raids on food distribution warehouses – and succeeded in putting a definitive end in the first week of February 1986 to the Duvalier dynasty that started with Francoise “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957.
Of course it was also in February 1986 – on the third week – that the corrupt conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos was ousted from power.
A not-so-trivial-pursuit: Among Michele Duvalier’s prized and priciest possessions were diamonds, mink coats, and shoes; for Imelda Marcos, it was diamonds and shoes.
So much for parallel destinies there.
“We as a people and a nation would never allow riots and unrest because we believe in our laws and government institutions that are working for our own benefit, particularly in solving the rice problem and other pressing global issues.” So said the deputy presidential spokesperson, Anthony Golez.
So how dare this senior economist of the International Grains Council Darren Cooper to say that it was because “the President’s job is on the line” that she ordered a bigger rice importation.
With bread alone, and at the low price of P1.71 por piraso as promised by the Philippine Association of Flour Millers and the Chamber of Philippine Flour Millers, all specters of hungry mobs rioting immediately vanish into thin air.
For one, with its leavening quality, bread – sans palaman – but with water alone is more filling than rice. Not to say cheaper too.
Historically, and this goes much farther back in time than Marie Antoinette, bread, along with entertainment, has been proven as a pacifying instrument.
Panem et circenses – bread and circuses – the ancient Romans prescribed them to fill the hungriest, and calm the angriest, of mobs. Then as now, still the most efficacious of means to placate even the most restive of the populace.
So, how about having Piolo Pascual as pan de sal boy and Angel Locsin peddling pan Americano, or, better yet Katrina Halili serving “tasty” bread. Ah, instant satiation there. What rice shortage?