State of disbelief
"IN SAN FERNANDO, we have committed leadership. There is no question about it. Graft and corruption is not an issue here. It is business friendly and many investors have told (sic) that napakalinis mag-negosyo dito sa San Fernando. That's one side of it. The other side is that Mayor Oca has provided investors and stakeholders as well as the people of San Fernando a continuation of what he has already started and will become part of his legacy like education, flood control, peace and order and even the environment.”
So goes the paean of car-dealing magnate Levy P. Laus in his own paper, Sun-Star Pampanga, to Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez. Maybe some mutuality manifesting there as “Levy” was the most mentioned name, gloriously at that, in Rodriguez’s state of the city address last Monday.
Committed leadership. Business-friendly. Graft and corruption as non-issue. Concededly, there is no question about these. Where Rodriguez is concerned. Maybe, even in education as legacy, given the integrated school system the Rodriguez administration instituted and the number of school buildings it constructed.
But flood control, peace and order and the environment?
Reality may have been glossed over there. Some deep rose-colored shades Laus could have worn while lavishing his laudation on Rodriguez. Comes to mind here is Laus’ famous mantra as Clark Freeport top honcho, “The future of Clark is so bright you have to wear sunglasses to see it.” In Rodriguez, updated and paraphrased thus: The performance of Mayor Oca is so bright you have to wear blinders to appreciate it.
Laus himself was witness to the roiling sea that became of the Jose Abad Santos Avenue at the onslaught of Typhoon Falcon last June, his very fiefdom of Car-World, BMW, CLTV-36, dwRW radio, Ford, Chevrolet and Car-Mix reduced to virtual isolated islands. Yes, Car-World even had to improvise a puny wooden bridge to get to it. Uproariously funny, given the bourgeois classiness of everything and anything that has to do with Laus.
To talk of flood control as Rodriguez’s legacy at this point is to find gospel truth in the lie of Sun-Star Pampanga’s banner story two days prior to the deluge: “Oca: No major flooding in city.”
To talk of the environment as Rodriguez’s legacy at this point is: a) to immunize oneself from the stench of the garbage choking the San Fernando River; b) to blind oneself to the mountains of plastic at the sorry dilapidated excuse of a material recovery facility at the Lara dumpsite and the waste-to-energy Biosphere plant lying more in waste than in wait there; and c) to find comfort in the heat of the sun and be refreshed with carbon oxide emissions where verdant, lush trees used to abound along the stretch of MacArthur Highway from Sindalan to Maimpis.
To talk of peace and order as Rodriguez’s legacy at this point is to totally disbelieve, to damn as utter lie the cold statistics of the police files: Of the 132 index crimes reported in the third district of Pampanga from January to April this year, 116 were committed in the City of San Fernando.
Crimes in the city and the district – murder, homicide, rape, carjacking, robbery and theft – occur at a very alarming average rate of one every two hours.
Don’t look now, but from Most Business-Friendly City, San Fernando is fast turning out to be Most Crime-Friendly City. World class. Yeah.
So we wrote in an editorial just this April. So we incurred the ire of Rodriguez then. As surely as we will get more than our fair share of his rotten “kamatis” now. Maybe, Laus’ too.
Still, there is no denying some suspension of belief most manifest in Laus’ take of Rodriguez’s SOCA.
Indeed, how can we even think peace in the city when only last Friday evening, less than three days before Rodriguez delivered his oh-so-glorious SOCA, the son of former Board Member Ferdinand Labung was divested of his Toyota Hi-Lux pick-up truck (ZDA-575) in front of the San Fernandino Hospital along MacArthur Highway in Barangay Dolores.
Lucky Ferdinand Vergara Labung lived up to his name and emerged from the incident unscathed after the carjackers released him at the FVR megadike.
On the very day of Rodriguez’s SOCA, a worker at the Tambunting Pawnshop in the Bulaon Resettlement site reported the busted vault of the firm, the jewellery and other pawned valuables there, amounting to P3,345,560.00. per inventory, missing.
The work of the acetylene gang, police said of the heist.
Thanks to the sleuthing of ace police character, er, reporter Jess Malabanan, we came to know of these crime incidents which any other reporter’s call or visit to the police precinct would not have yielded.
Come to think of it, Malabanan’s crime stories in the Central Luzon Daily are a negation of the gratuitous stories on Rodriguez in Sun-Star Pampanga. This makes a very interesting study on the dynamics of the local dailies. But that is another story.
For now let us wallow in a state of suspended belief over the real state of the capital city as told by the multi-awarded, multi-titled, world-class Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez.
Believe, ye doubting Thomases.
So goes the paean of car-dealing magnate Levy P. Laus in his own paper, Sun-Star Pampanga, to Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez. Maybe some mutuality manifesting there as “Levy” was the most mentioned name, gloriously at that, in Rodriguez’s state of the city address last Monday.
Committed leadership. Business-friendly. Graft and corruption as non-issue. Concededly, there is no question about these. Where Rodriguez is concerned. Maybe, even in education as legacy, given the integrated school system the Rodriguez administration instituted and the number of school buildings it constructed.
But flood control, peace and order and the environment?
Reality may have been glossed over there. Some deep rose-colored shades Laus could have worn while lavishing his laudation on Rodriguez. Comes to mind here is Laus’ famous mantra as Clark Freeport top honcho, “The future of Clark is so bright you have to wear sunglasses to see it.” In Rodriguez, updated and paraphrased thus: The performance of Mayor Oca is so bright you have to wear blinders to appreciate it.
Laus himself was witness to the roiling sea that became of the Jose Abad Santos Avenue at the onslaught of Typhoon Falcon last June, his very fiefdom of Car-World, BMW, CLTV-36, dwRW radio, Ford, Chevrolet and Car-Mix reduced to virtual isolated islands. Yes, Car-World even had to improvise a puny wooden bridge to get to it. Uproariously funny, given the bourgeois classiness of everything and anything that has to do with Laus.
To talk of flood control as Rodriguez’s legacy at this point is to find gospel truth in the lie of Sun-Star Pampanga’s banner story two days prior to the deluge: “Oca: No major flooding in city.”
To talk of the environment as Rodriguez’s legacy at this point is: a) to immunize oneself from the stench of the garbage choking the San Fernando River; b) to blind oneself to the mountains of plastic at the sorry dilapidated excuse of a material recovery facility at the Lara dumpsite and the waste-to-energy Biosphere plant lying more in waste than in wait there; and c) to find comfort in the heat of the sun and be refreshed with carbon oxide emissions where verdant, lush trees used to abound along the stretch of MacArthur Highway from Sindalan to Maimpis.
To talk of peace and order as Rodriguez’s legacy at this point is to totally disbelieve, to damn as utter lie the cold statistics of the police files: Of the 132 index crimes reported in the third district of Pampanga from January to April this year, 116 were committed in the City of San Fernando.
Crimes in the city and the district – murder, homicide, rape, carjacking, robbery and theft – occur at a very alarming average rate of one every two hours.
Don’t look now, but from Most Business-Friendly City, San Fernando is fast turning out to be Most Crime-Friendly City. World class. Yeah.
So we wrote in an editorial just this April. So we incurred the ire of Rodriguez then. As surely as we will get more than our fair share of his rotten “kamatis” now. Maybe, Laus’ too.
Still, there is no denying some suspension of belief most manifest in Laus’ take of Rodriguez’s SOCA.
Indeed, how can we even think peace in the city when only last Friday evening, less than three days before Rodriguez delivered his oh-so-glorious SOCA, the son of former Board Member Ferdinand Labung was divested of his Toyota Hi-Lux pick-up truck (ZDA-575) in front of the San Fernandino Hospital along MacArthur Highway in Barangay Dolores.
Lucky Ferdinand Vergara Labung lived up to his name and emerged from the incident unscathed after the carjackers released him at the FVR megadike.
On the very day of Rodriguez’s SOCA, a worker at the Tambunting Pawnshop in the Bulaon Resettlement site reported the busted vault of the firm, the jewellery and other pawned valuables there, amounting to P3,345,560.00. per inventory, missing.
The work of the acetylene gang, police said of the heist.
Thanks to the sleuthing of ace police character, er, reporter Jess Malabanan, we came to know of these crime incidents which any other reporter’s call or visit to the police precinct would not have yielded.
Come to think of it, Malabanan’s crime stories in the Central Luzon Daily are a negation of the gratuitous stories on Rodriguez in Sun-Star Pampanga. This makes a very interesting study on the dynamics of the local dailies. But that is another story.
For now let us wallow in a state of suspended belief over the real state of the capital city as told by the multi-awarded, multi-titled, world-class Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez.
Believe, ye doubting Thomases.
posted by A.Caesar Z. Lacson at 1:58 PM
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