Counter-revolution

Zona Libre/Bong Z. Lacson

Counter-revolution

TO GUANGZHOU I came, and wept for Mao Zedong.
The Great Leap Forward did indeed happen in the capital of Guangdong province. But in a fashion that is thoroughly inconceivable at the time of the Chairman: its realization, the very antithesis of Mao’s ideological dogma.
Okay, for those out of the Red axis of Marx-Lenin-Mao mindset, the Great Leap Forward was the People’s Republic of China’s Second Five-Year Plan covering the period 1958-1963. Its principal aim was to modernize the Chinese economy by 1988 to the level of good old US of A, with industry as priority target.
The Great Leap Forward is forever etched in memory by the 600,000 backyard furnaces in communes all around the country producing steel, from melted ore as well as just about any finished iron material the people could lay their hands on. Initially, the plan was successful, with the annual steel production reaching 11 million tons.
Low technology – the slow rise from the backyard stage, coupled with high ideology – the requisite of discerning the thoughts and precepts of Mao in communal teach-ins at certain periods of the day, spelled doom for the Great Leap Forward. At the same time, the over-emphasis on technology at the expense of agricultural production resulted to famine. Hence, the derisive Great Leap Backward.
Leaped forward, nay, soared skyward Guangzhou has, being the industrial capital of the PROC. (No thanks to Mao, all thanks to Deng Xiaoping who instituted a market economy in China, one Chinese storekeeper told me.)
At the 106th Session of the China Import and Export Fair, better known as the Canton Fair, the massive exhibition hall – think of two parallel SM City Pampanga doubled in width, a few hundred meters longer, and three storeys high here – was a maze of large and small machineries in all aspects of endeavor, from construction to production; lighting and electronics, transportation and communications. And that was only for the first phase of the three-phased fair held for three weekends.
A Maoist dream of China drawing in peoples from all the world to learn from its praxis of socialism found manifest in the Canton Fair drawing in all nationalities to its exhibition halls: Africans preferring the heavy equipment displays; Middle Easterners, the pumps and water processors; Italians, the lighting fixtures; Germans and Americans, the automobiles; Indians, the electronics.
All came though not in search of the socialist ideal but in response to the call of the produce of a liberal market economy, the socialist’s very nightmare. How Mao’s heart must have been broken by this blasphemy to his faith!
And how warped has been my socialist brain, thinking of Guangzhou – of the whole of China – in terms of the baggy drab grey or green uniform of the population, of bicycles clogging all the streets!
Yeah, another initiative of the Chairman – the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – finding realization today. Again, in the very contradiction of its Maoist thesis.
The proletariat as both subject and object of the Chinese cultural renaissance cleansed of all liberal bourgeois elements was the expressed aim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966.
All art, all cultural expressions that did not serve the proletariat was deemed decadent and had to be destroyed. With Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, at the cultural revolution’s vanguard, the worst excesses were committed including the proclamation of The Red Detachment of Women as the very acme of Chinese theater, and the burning of Chinese classics, sparing not even Confucius in the process. It was only after Mao’s death in 1976 that the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution effectively ended.
A revolution of culture I saw in Guangzhou as well as in Shenzhen – of Western values and lifestyles liberating the people from their socialist past, with compulsive consumption fanning the revolutionary fervor.
The very symbols of liberal bourgeois ideals – Benzes of all classes, BMWs and Porsches, Audis and Volvos, Rovers and Alfa Romeos, yes, even the iconic American Cadillac make the most ubiquitous presence on Guangzhou and Shenzhen’s wide avenues, any time of the day and night.
Ah, how Jiang Qing would have shrieked to death – not hers but theirs – at the sight of ladies in micro-mini skirts and abbreviated cut-offs, as well as exposed navels and posterior dimples, ramping along the walking streets of Shang Xia Jiu and Beijing!
There now is the counter-revolution: decadence its natural outcome. Just as damnation is the wage of disbelief.
Ah, other than that one in Utrecht, I may just be the only remaining communist in the world.

Ormoc in the Next Frontier

COPYCAT, SECOND rate and trying hard of CamSur’s defining sports-recreational activity we could not care less, warmly welcoming news of a wakeboarding facility to be set up at the Sacobia, er, New Frontier.
Yeah, effusive was our praise to the Clark Development Corp. and the Philippine Tourism Authority for pump priming economic activities at what was once Clark’s bucolic sub-zone with the sport du jour that is drawing enthusiasts worldwide.
Yes, think of the hordes of European, American, Japanese wakeboarders – not to mention the legions of South Koreans – planing in through the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport and in less than 15 minutes flat – already in their boardshorts ready to take on the water. CamSur – all of an hour or so from the nearest international airport – could only weep.
Yes, think of serene Sacobia Lake hosting a multitude of nationalities, in a multitude of events spawning from wakeboarding.
Indeed, a most brilliant idea this wakeboarding project at Sacobia was. Or so we thought. And thought so wrongly.
No, it was not at the Sacobia Lake – as we presumed – that the wakeboarding facility would be built. It was somewhere upland.
So we learned from Oscar Dizon, Aeta tribal chief of Sitio San Martin, Bamban. Tarlac in the banner story of this paper Thursday headlined
Wakeboarding project endangers Aetas’reforestation area in Sacobia.
Striking terror right to our green core were Dizon’s fears that the wakeboarding project would encroach into four hectares of the Aetas reforestation project contracted with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
A body of water is essential, a sine qua non, to wakeboarding. That was precisely the basis of our presumption of Sacobia Lake as the site of this CDC-PTA project.
Upland Sacobia, what body of water exists but for the small creeks and rivulets usually fed only by the rains.
It is sound to assume now that PTA or whoever is its blessed contractor will have to dig a water body in its allotted 20-hectare area – the Aetas’ four hectares not excluded, if Dizon’s fears were correct. And this is where our worst fears lie. Sacobia serves as a watershed. As such, it has to be protected, preserved, and massively reforested. Not the least disturbed.
Any idiot would know that digging upland requires much more than simple slash-and-burn but the cutting and uprooting of vegetation, in the case of Sacobia, the reforested cover.
After the clearing, follows the damming that would store the water – pumped from underground, we presume – that would make the lake, the very arena for the sport.
There comes the damning. Stored water upland poses a clear and ever present danger to the lowlands, a break in the dams damns the lowland communities to sure death and destruction.
Shuddering is the thought of the Ormoc Tragedy transplanted to Sacobia.
For those who have either forgotten or simply refuse to remember, the Ormoc flash floods were recorded as “the most devastating and deadliest tragedy that struck the Philippines in modern history.”
News archives read: “In the morning of November 5, 1991, water from a heavy rainfall brought about by Typhoon Uring roared down from the surrounding hills carrying logs and uprooted trees, and engulfed Isla Verde and much of Ormoc City killing about 8,000 people.”
Prior to the disaster, loggers operating illegally stripped the mountains surrounding the affected settlement of their lush forest cover. Some tree stumps and other debris mixed with the soil and formed some makeshift dams that initially stored the rainwaters upland. With the continuing rain, the dams broke loose, bringing down death and destruction upon Ormoc.
Not simply a worst possible scenario at Sacobia. But a most probable one. And we shall know who to damn when, not if, it comes.

The temptation of Oscar Rodriguez

NO DEVILS but men of the cloth – albeit one in a state of suspended functionality – and pillars of moral uprightness in the community are the tempters of Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez.
The Rev. Fr. Resty Lumanlan, SVD, was first: “Mayor Oca is the true meaning of leadership...a transformative mayor that will make wonders for Pampanga as governor.”
Always with his lips where his heart is, the good father, executive director of the multi-sectoral governance council (MSGC) that helped the City of San Fernando reached the institutionalized – and highest – stage of the highly acclaimed public governance system, made the endorsement on February 5 this year at the multi-sectoral assembly in the city.
Among Resty deviated from his assigned talk on the MSGC, and, “inspired by the Holy Spirit” as he called it, did not merely endorse but anointed Mayor Oca governor.
“Let go City of San Fernando, Mayor Oca to Pampanga.” So was Among Resty’s clarion call for the mayor, and his constituents.
Businessman Rene Romero immediately followed suit, taking along with him a clear majority if not all of the Pampanga Chamber of Commerce and Industry: “Mayor Oca should have been a governor long time ago...He will be even be more effective (than as mayor) because being governor is easier.” In what terms, magnate Rene did not have to say. It was all there for all to see: the brilliance of governance in the city vis-a-vis the abject maladministration of the province, for one.
Not too far behind – all of two days after the Lumanlan anointment – Gov. Eddie T. Panlilio expressed his wish for Mayor Oca to seek the governorship.
Well, not so much for the good of the province as for his own good – Panlilio that is: "Yes, definitely. I wish Mayor Oca runs (for governor) so that I will have a light heart to go back to the priestly ministry."
Of course, that was before God called Panlilio to run for the presidency. And before – with but 0.4 percent in the survey of presidentiables – Panlilio made the supreme sacrifice of giving way to Sen. Noynoy Aquino.( No, Panlilio did not say if God called him to give up his presidential fancy.)
For the record – lest Panlilio makes a denial again – his endorsement of Mayor Oca was made at the sidelines of the induction ceremony of the members of the Philippine Institute of Civil Engineers, Pampanga Chapter where the mayor was also present.
Panlilio even promised – in a media interview at the event – that he “would go to lengths of endorsing Mayor Oca to his supporters.”
My caution on citing incidentals here is due to an endorsement Panlilio made late last year of Rodriguez which – two weeks after publication – he vehemently denied.
The temptations for Mayor Oca to partake of the not-so-forbidden fruit of the governorship for a time dissipated, but only to re-emerge much stronger in the wake of the Noynoy Aquino phenomenon.
No less than Aquino’s own innermost circle proffered the governorship for the mayor’s own taking.
Yet another temptation comes Mayor Oca’s way today – Oct. 15 – when civic groups and former supporters of Panlilio gather at the Heroes Hall to launch the “Mayor Oca Para King Pampanga” Movement.
Today’s activity is a culmination of frenzied texting these past few weeks all around Pampanga with but a single message: Convince mayor Oca to run for governor.
“There is a fear that the scenario in the 2007 elections would be repeated. Right now, our group is looking for a candidate to field,” a former Panlilio supporter was quoted as saying. He meant the twin evils of quarry plunder and jueteng contending for the governorship, hence the need for a moral alternative.
Mayor Oca – he said – has become a “consensus choice” as their candidate for governor, disappointed as they are with the lackluster leadership of Panlilio.
As Panlilio has become a heavy baggage too “difficult to carry to victory” in the 2010 race, so they turned their sight on the “much better and more politically mature Oscar Rodriguez.”
Temptations. Gloriously enticing. Will Mayor Oca yield?
Who was it who said the greatest way to banish temptations is to yield to them?

Race of unreason

E MU tatasan ing kamulalan da reng Kapampangan. (Do not underestimate the gullibility of the Kapampangan).
So shouted an espresso mate at Starbucks, SM City Pampanga, soon as he saw me enter the place Friday afternoon. He threw back at me what has become some sort of (in)famous words I first said in cable TV talk shows.
Yeah? What made you say so? I asked him soon after ordering my caffeine fix for the day and getting a seat at his table.
Just look at these. He spread before me copies of Punto!, Central Luzon Daily and Sun-Star Pampanga -- all showing photos of Sen. Lito Lapid mobbed by the barangay folk of Arayat town and the fourth district where he distributed relief goods last September 30.
So? What has that got to do with what I said?
You, demented or an amnesiac?
Now, don’t you insult me…
Okay, did you not yourself write not too long ago in your column that E mu tatasan ing kamulalan da reng Kapampangan was taken in the context of Lapid – if I remember it to the word now – getting elected governor for three straight terms by landslides of votes despite his own admission of being uneducated – or did you say unschooled? – and in spite of the cases of graft and corruption filed against him resulting to his suspension from office by the Ombudsman, plus the obvious increase in his wealth and possessions while the provincial income from quarry operations as rapidly decreased?
Okay, that’s not exactly what I wrote but it hewed closely to it. So what?
It appears – based on the messages impacted by the photos of Lapid touched, embraced and hailed by the typhoon victims in those places he went to – his comeback to the Capitol next year is already a foregone conclusion.
You’re already defining the outcome of the 2010 Pampanga gubernatorial race seven months before the elections? What are you, a prophet?
No, I am no prophet. Yes, I am seeing the election results. Based on your own conclusion: E mu tatasan ing kamulalan da reng Kapampangan.
But the issues against Lapid have not even been officially raised, much less thoroughly articulated upon. For instance, his miserable loss to Jejomar Binay in the Makati mayoralty contest in 2007. That is a big dent in Lapid’s perceived invincibility.
Hogwash! That is Makati, this is Pampanga.
The people of Makati are not as gullible as the Kapampangan?
No, not as gullible but supremely intelligent. No comparison there.
Right. So the mere fact that Lapid abandoned his domicile in Pampanga in favor of Makati to run for mayor, but is now coming back after being trounced by Binay would work against him when he faces the Kapampangan electorate. Iniwan ang Kapampangan, ngayon binabalikan matapos maging talunan? On the contrary, this will work in Lapid’s favor. The people are happy, no, they are rejoicing at the return of Lapid. A most auspicious start is this disaster from storm Ondoy. Lapid cut his image as a savior – no little thanks to you, his publicist then – and impacted it in the Kapampangan psyche from the stunts he produced at the time of the Pinatubo disaster. The people of Pampanga mired in disaster again are in sore need of a savior – presto, there’s Lapid coming down to their midst. And they cannot be any happier.
Okay, what about the quarry plunder?
What quarry plunder?
Gov. Ed Panlilio managed to collect P413 million in quarry revenues in only two years. Lapid and son brought only P155 million in their 12 years of maladministration. How would you explain that before the people?
Why explain when there’s no need to?
What do you mean?
All it takes for people to disbelieve all those things being said about the Lapids’ alleged plunder of the Capitol coffers is to see Lapid. A touch from Lapid, nay, a mere smile from him is more than enough for these people to fling themselves at his very feet as though he were an infallible god.
Where has reason gone for these Kapampangans?
What reason do you still look for? You yourself said it: E mu tatasan ing kamulalan da reng Kapampangan.

Scenes from a disaster

October 1, 1995. 8 A.M. Stampeding elephants were coming again. Their thump was even fiercer than before. A second wave of lahar was avalanching.
“Dios co, Dios co po…” someone exclaimed not so much in prayer as in horror. The sounds heard four hours past became a nightmarish vision: parents and children flailing arms, shouting for help on their roofs being carried away like paper boats by cascading lahar, people stretching out their hands in their last struggle before being pulled under by violent currents to suffer death by quicksand, an entire neighborhood in fast forward mode toward muddy, sudden oblivion. That was the tragedy that was Cabalantian, a day and 14 years ago today, when again we are coping with another disaster of that magnitude.
Earlier on, there was the aftermath of the Mount Pinatubo eruptions, dubbed the worst disaster of the 20th century.
June 15, 1991. 2 PM. Steaming lahar mudflows from the volcano estimated at the speed of 25 kilometers per hour rampaged through the Abacan River destroying in rapid succession the Friendship Bridge that led to Clark Air Base, the Hensonville spillway and the Abacan Bridge where busy MacArthur Highway traversed.
A truck and a car fell with the Abacan Bridge into the swirling pyroclastic materials that also gobbled a number of houses and buildings along the banks, including remnants of the Angeles City General Hospital.
Mudflows also overtopped the banks of the Sapang Balen Creek, a tributary of Abacan, and spread steadily into the city proper.
The very heart of the city – all around the market in San Nicolas and in the business district of Sto. Rosario – was inundated with steaming mud…
…In nearby Porac, swollen with steaming volcanic debris, Mancatian River swallowed its eponymous bridge that connected the town to Angeles City.
The gurgling hot mud packed an incredible force… the massive slabs of the bridge pushed by the current two kilometers downstream.
Mudflows spilled over the banks of Mancatian and swamped a number of barangays, with Mitla and Manibaug-Pasig most severely affected…
…August 21, 1991, monsoon rains triggered major lahar flows that breached the banks of the Sacobia River and engulfed Sitio Burak in Calumpang, Mabalacat.
It took but four hours from midday to completely bury the village under tons of volcanic debris that flowed from all directions. Houses, animals, vehicles and even some people who were caught unaware of the moving deadly fluid mass were buried in its wake…
…In the same month of August a year after, strong lahar flows revisited Mabalacat – coming through the Sacobia River, demolishing the Bamban Bridge that linked Pampanga and Tarlac, breaking through the nearby Hizon Piggery Farm that let loose a thousand pigs straight into the waiting arms of starving lahar victims, and ultimately burying the now appropriately named Barangay Tabun…
…With the spirit of People Power invoked, thousands of Angelenos came down Abacan River with assorted implements as shovels, hoes, picks and rakes – a great number with nothing but their bare hands – to sandbag the riverbanks in a bid to prevent scouring by lahar. Bamboo stakes were used as a crude armoring to the stacks of sandbags.
Just as the determined corps of constructors were about to congratulate themselves for a job well done, a warning sounded. Lahar roared. In one fell swoop, lasting no more than ten minutes, not a trace of their day’s work was left…
…Damned in a wasteland of buried homes and broken dreams, doomed in a landscape of death and desolation…So was the Kapampangan devastated by the Mount Pinatubo eruptions. The above accounts from the book Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit.Buried homes and broken dreams in a landscape of death and desolation. So are the areas in Metro Manila scourged by tropical storm Ondoy.
As we Kapampangans triumphed over the tragedy of Pinatubo, so shall they too over Ondoy.
The Filipino is resilient. The Filipino can.

The politics of disaster

“NO POLITICS here. We should be one in helping our distressed neighbors.”
So stressed Office of External Affairs Sec. Ed Pamintuan at the opening of the fund-raising telethon for the Typhoon Ondoy victims last Sunday. The announced candidate for Angeles City mayor next year taking care in trying to rid of any political hue an enterprise for charity. All too careful for EdPam there, what with the Jaycees’ Avelaine Nepomuceno, niece of re-electionist Mayor Blueboy Nepomuceno, by his side.
Only the proverbial marines, EdPam could have convinced there. Notwithstanding the sincerity of his intent. For disasters hereabouts have become the realm of politics too, awarding victory to him who coordinates, manages, and spins around them well, and spelling calamity to him who will not. And we mean here something much deeper than the all-too-obvious politics of the relief bag bearing the name of just about any one in politics, has-beens and wannabes included.
EdPam should be the first to know of the political disaster the Mount Pinatubo eruptions caused Mayor Antonio Abad Santos.
Nowhere to be seen when heaven rained fire and brimstone on Angeles City, rumors quickly spread of Abad Santos having fled the city to save himself, leaving the suffering city folk to fend for themselves. The poor Mayor Bubusuk never recovered from there, losing miserably to Pamintuan in 1992.
At the winning end, there was Lito Lapid making good use of his movie stunts in Pinatubo disaster scenes – literally immersing himself in lahar, riding helicopters and jumping onto rooftops to rescue stranded residents – to capture the Pampanga governorship not once, not twice, but thrice, each time by a landslide of votes.
The late Porac Mayor Roy David earned the moniker “Lahar Fighter” for his initiatives to make the expanse of Mancatian passable even at the height of the lahar rampages – through his truck-mounted metal contraption euphemized as the “London Bridge” (as in the song, “falling down, falling down”), the lined-up, sandbag-filled container vans serving as bridges, the sugarcane trucks providing piggy-back rides to smaller vehicles – and was undefeated mayor for three full terms.
It was the lahar rampages too that catapulted Junior Canlas to the mayorship of Bacolor. The rarely seen sickly Mayor Gem Balingit made a contrast to the energetic, then vice mayor Junior – in his signature muddied shorts and slippers – always on the scene of every lahar flow.
No politics, in this disaster caused by Typhoon Ondoy, eh, EdPam?
Why, not a few observers, this bloke not excluded, are seeing the confluence of the divine and the political in this latest calamity that hit the country.
Heavenly signs, the all too superstitiously religious – or is religiously superstitious more apt? – even claim, foreboding the divine choice for Philippine president come 2010.
Why, it’s Gilbert Cojuangco Teodoro, who else?
So where’s Noynoy Aquino, all these two days of le deluge? In the person of his sister Kris manning ABS-CBN’s own telethon? May as well have the wife of James Yap run for president herself than play surrogate to her brother.
So where’s Manny Villar? Ah, doing the usual disaster route of relief distribution.
It was only Teodoro that was there, everywhere, on top of the situation, whether presiding over the crisis meeting of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, fielding questions from the international press, checking on actual rescue operations, or moving around the disaster areas.
More than a coming out party, Typhoon Ondoy is a baptism of fire for Gibo. And acquit himself well as a crisis manager, he did with flying colors. Yeah, Gibo fits best the man-profile for president that this country in-crisis needs.
All it takes is one more disaster to visit this nation, and Gibo shall bury under its debris all the presidential pretenders.