Deconstructing Rodriguez

“THAT’S VERY politics.”
I remember the ungrammatical rant of the once-and-forever-future mayor of Mexico fondly monikered “Tigas” over a phone patch on dwRW appending political motives to the allegations of graft exposed by his then vice mayor.
And I remember once writing on that subject too in the defunct Pampanga News circa 2006 thus:
Politically motivated: the omnibus catch phrase that has become a convenient and uniform, albeit foolhardy, escape clause officials haled to the Ombudsman or the courts on charges of graft and corruption.
Politically motivated, in thus mintage, makes a mockery of reason, if not a negation of logic. For it seeks to compensate with trivialized emotions what it sorely lacks in intellectual discourse, opting for high drama over cold reason.
So rather than reasoned arguments to disprove the charges against them, the accused resort to all means of (ir)rationalizations that comprise the body of Material Fallacies of Reasoning any student of my day learned in Philosophy 101…
No, City of San Fernando Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez has not been haled to the Ombudsman or to any court. Not yet, anyway.
No, neither graft nor corruption has ever been alleged against Rodriguez. Not yet, anyway.
But already, Rodriguez is going the way of Mayor Tigas and other politicos in dire strait, with him in effect invoking political motivation for crying out loud “Demolition!” This in the face of media exposés – principally, if not solely Punto’s – on the continuing operation of his city’s open dumpsite in Barangay Lara, putting the lie to Rodriguez’s obstinate claim that he had ordered its closure soon as he sat as mayor.
“A bit too early as it is still far from 2013.” So was Rodriguez quoted by Sun-Star Pampanga as having said “in a jest” of the “attacks by some sectors, including some members of media.”
“The demolition job is there. Palagi naman iyan sa politika. Iyung mga kaibigan natin na nagiging instrumento ng mga ganyang demolition, eh ngitian pa rin natin. Mga kaibigan yan (That’s a constant in politics. We will still smile to our friends who are being used as demolition instruments. They remain our friends). So was again Rodriguez quoted as having said that with laughter.
It was no laughing matter, not even put-on smiles, though when Rodriguez castigated once-editor-now-columnist-for-five-newspapers Ashley Manabat in a call on his office.
“Bala yu galang e da kayu alben Bong keng TV? Nanu sasabyan yung e na ku puedeng tagal gobernador uling maina na ku? (You thought I did not watch you and Bong on TV? So why were you and Bong saying on TV that I could not run for governor?)” So Manabat related to me his encounter with Rodriguez.
“I told the mayor henceforth I would report that he is stronger than a carabao but his very grave mien bordering on controlled rage, did not relax a bit.” So Manabat told me.
Laughing on the outside. Raging on the inside. And Rodriguez could have raged all the more when his allegations of the “demolition job” put out on him exploded in his very face.
So we ran photographs of a fully operating Barangay Lara dumpsite – unsegregated garbage by the truckful dumped right there with scavengers themselves doing the messy, stinking recovery of whatever can still be used or sold.
No dumpsite but a “residual waste storage” so Rodriguez responded, averring that “San Fernando has the most proper practice of disposing residual waste because we already have a structure. We are just waiting for our partner firm to collect enough residual waste that can be transformed into energy or electricity.”
(In a subsequent story, bannered in our Feb. 11-12 issue, a self-conflicted Rodriguez blamed that “partner firm,” Spectrum Blue Steel Corp. for the delay of the biosphere facility which should have operated last year. “Properly reprimanded” Rodriguez said of the firm).
Woe unto Rodriguez though, there is the Most Rev. Pablo Virgilio David, auxiliary bishop of San Fernando, to admonish him: “Don’t deny the dumpsite.”
The pictures Punto published clearly showed that “it is a dumpsite,” Among Ambo said in an interview. And there is no such thing as “residual waste storage” in Republic Act 9003 or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2001, the prelate hastened to add. So what was Rodriguez saying?
Now, will Rodriguez simply shrug off – as he was reported to have done with our exposés here – these pronouncements of the highly respected Among Ambo as “early demolition job by critics of his administration”?
If I may, there is no demolition job on Rodriguez. Rather he is in the process of being deconstructed. Not by anyone other than himself.
Anyone who has read Punto these past few days, moreso anyone who has passed by that stretch of the FVR Megadike in Barangay Lara, is witness to the lie in Rodriguez’s claims of a non-existent dumpsite there.
As an environmentalist said: If it looks like a dumpsite with all those heaps of mixed garbage, if it is infested with flies, rats and scavengers alike like a dumpsite, if it stinks like a dumpsite, then, by God!, it cannot be a residual waste storage – whatever that means, it can only be a dumpsite.
By attempting to reconstruct an illegal open dumpsite into the euphemistic “residual waste storage,” Rodriguez has only succeeded in deconstructing himself as a living monument to good governance, and – Yes! – in unwittingly demolishing that farce of performance governance system (PGS) in things environmental.
The cascading effects to the people of the chainsaw massacre of the trees along MacArthur Highway, the city’s industrial wastes devastating the fishing industry in Macabebe, and the open dumpsite of Lara serving as indubitable testaments to PGS failure.
Or maybe, just maybe, the City of San Fernando experience morphed a new – and fitter – meaning to the PGS – perpetual garbage site.

Romancing suicide

“…SUICIDE IS painless
It brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.”
The song from M*A*S*H – that ‘60s smashing TV-series-turned-movie-hit set in the Korean War, for those not old enough to remember – first came to mind upon hearing of former Secretary Angelo Reyes taking his own life.
A silent prayer, requiescat in pace, for the Lord to shine his perpetual light upon him, but even before ending with Amen, some shuddering set in when I realized what I had been just reading, Bushido: The Soul of Japan originally published in 1905, opened to Chapter XII titled “The Institutions of Suicide and Redress.”
Bu-shi-do, literally translating to military-knight-ways, is the code of honor of the samurai. Part of that code is the ritual of seppuku, more popularly known as hara-kiri meaning self-immolation by disembowelment. The ritual – performed before spectators in elaborate ceremonies – culminated in the samurai plunging the tanto, a short sword, into his abdomen and moving it from left to right in a slicing motion.
Why in the abdomen? An old anatomical belief put the seat of the very soul and the font of all affections in that particular part of the human body.
In effect, the samurai – in slicing his belly – is saying: “I will open the seat of my soul and show you how it fares with it. See for yourself whether it is polluted or clean.”
Clearly, from there, seppuku is all a matter of honor. A point taken by the 17th century English physician and poet Sir Samuel Garth in his poem of six cantos The Dispensary thus:
“When honour’s lost, ’tis a relief to die;
Death’s but a sure retreat from infamy.”
(Yes, there is universality in ritual suicide to salvage one’s honor. The ancient Romans with their morte prima di disonore finding fulfillment in Cato and Brutus and now appropriated by most military units, most manifest in the slogan “Death Before Dishonor” popularized in the tattoo of a coiling scroll wrapped around a dagger.)
So I read Bushido… author Inazo Nitobe, himself descended from the samurai class, thus: “Death involving a question of honour, was accepted in Bushido as a key to the solution of many complex problems, so that to an ambitious samurai a natural departure from life seemed a rather tame affair and a consummation not devoutly to be wished for.”
By seppuku, “warriors could expiate their crimes, apologize for errors, escape from disgrace, redeem their friends, or proved their sincerity.”
Furthered Nitobe of seppuku, “…it was a refinement of self-destruction, and none could perform it without the utmost coolness of temper and composure of demeanor, and for these reasons it was particularly befitting the profession of bushi.”
A matter of honor. So Secretary Angelo Reyes did his own self-immolation, preferring the modern gun over the ancient sword: piercing the heart rather than spilling the guts, the former now universally recognized as the seat of affection, of the purity of love. Some messages Reyes wanted to send there?
A matter of honor. Was it but a couple days before Reyes did the ultimate act that Senator Antonio Trillanes, himself a former military man, a coup pal of the Magdalos at that glared and blared at his former superior: “You have no reputation to protect”?
“No honor” in Trillanes there, “attacking and then taking refuge behind the now much-abused parliamentary immunity of lawmakers,” Reyes himself retorted in a statement: “All I am asking is for Senator Trillanes to fight in a level playing field instead of confederating with a lynch-mob to subject me and my family to a trial by publicity. For when a man imputes malice and calumny against another man, he must make himself answerable for his accusations.”
Honor – however little is left of it – Reyes salvaged by going the way of the samurai.
Honor – whatever little remains of it – the parliamentary immunity-shielded Trillanes now is in dire need of salvaging.
“The game of life is hard to play
I'm gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
so this is all I have to say.
'Cause suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.
The only way to win is cheat
And lay it down before I'm beat
and to another give my seat
for that's the only painless feat.
'Cause suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please.”
Yeah.

The Denial King

FOR ALL his much bruited about unbending principles and unshakeable commitment, Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez of the City of San Fernando limply goes on-denial in matters environmental. So it appears.
At the height of the massacre of trees along MacArthur Highway, environmentalist Cecille Yumul reminded Rodriguez of a previous public pronouncement that he stood against the cutting of trees.
Rodriguez denied having said that unconditionally, rationalizing – like the astute lawyer that he is – that there was no move to cut the trees at the time he said it. Furthering that he could not stand against a “national policy” which he meant to be the widening of the MacArthur Highway necessitating the cutting of trees.
Rodriguez unblinking in saying all these, notwithstanding the signing of the so-called “Covenant for the Trees” he himself as city mayor convened right along MacArthur Highway itself, in front of the New Era University campus sometime in his second term. That is if ageing memory still serves right.
A couple of weeks back, Macabebe Mayor Annette Flores-Balgan fingered the City of San Fernando as the source of toxic wastes devastating her town’s fishing industry.
Rodriguez instantly denied it, passing the blame to Angeles City that moved Mayor Ed Pamintuan to remind his kumpare that Angeles – unlike San Fernando – had no industrial plants from where toxic wastes could have flowed out into the rivers and choked the fish in Macabebe.
Still denied later by Rodriguez is Balgan having communicated with him, in any way.
Only this Wednesday, bannered in Sun-Star Pampanga is Rodriguez denying the existence of an open dumpsite in his city. (Pamintuan made the same denial, but his is a different story). This, despite an order dated January 17, 2011 signed by Environment Management Bureau-3 Director Lormelyn Claudio recommending the “execution of closure orders” on open dumpsites in 16 areas in Pampanga including the cities of San Fernando and Angeles for gross violation of Republic Act 9003 or the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2001.
The order explicit in saying “…the LGUs failed to truly demonstrate their will to close the existing open and controlled dumpsites…”
Rodriguez defiant in saying, as reported in Sun-Star Pampanga: “I have already closed all open dumpsites here since I assumed office.”
Which immediately ran counter to the affirmation of the Most Rev. Pablo Virgilio S. David, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of San Fernando, that “dumpsites are everywhere” in the province.
Dared the bishop: “My group can give you a guided tour where the dump sites of Pampanga are. Every LGU has one.”
I pray most fervently that Among Ambo spared Rodriguez from his curse on the degraders of the environment that he once cast on those polluting Sapang Balen Creek.
By saying he has “already closed all open dumpsites” in San Fernando since he assumed office, Rodriguez could only be lying.
Much as I wanted to give Rodriguez the benefit of the doubt on the long existence and continuing operation of the city dumpsite in Barangay Lara by the eastern lateral portion of the FVR Megadike systems, I simply could not.
Rodriguez passes by that dumpsite on his way to his resthouse in Barangay Maliwalu, Bacolor. On a number of occasions I was overtaken by Rodriguez’s convoy of black Starex van and white Nissan Patrol along that same stretch of the megadike above the dumpsite.
Practically, I take the megadike daily, whether for my early morning ride on my mountain bike or in going to my second home in Xevera-Bacolor. Never was there a time that I did not come across garbage trucks from San Fernando’s barangays going in with their loads and out empty of the city dump.
Just to prove a point, yesterday I went down the dump and took photographs. These are splashed on our front page today.
Indeed, the photographs affirm: By saying he has “already closed all open dumpsites” in San Fernando since he assumed office, Rodriguez is not only denying. He is patently lying.