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.