Black Superman grounded

SO CAN you still fly?
It was a query right off the bat – off the paint to be more apt – given the mastery of human aeronautics displayed in some sporting past by the one dubbed “The Black Superman.”
Yeah, before Michael Jordan earned his wings and went on to become His Airness, Billy Ray Bates was already soaring across both ends of the hardcourt. First in the National Basketball Association with the Portland Trailblazers, then – after being shot down there for substance abuse – in the Philippine Basketball Association, leading the Crispa Redmanizers to their second grandslam in 1983.
I was a Crispa-natic, but of course, in keeping with my ideological bent toward the slippered masa in the bleachers as against the perfumed set of Toyota exclusively in the ringside and the lower box.
And Billy Ray Bates – BRB – made one good plebeian hero too, having been born and raised in a sharecropper’s shack in the backwaters of Mississippi, rising on sheer talent to the top of the world. Crispa’s natural base support easily embracing him as its own.
Legendary was BRB as a Crispa Redmanizer, as good in offense – easily scoring in the 40’s and 50’s in any given night, as in defense – matching up against taller imports, blocking shots.
Indeed, there was more than sheer braggadocio in Bates’ declaration at that time: “The only way I can be stopped is to handcuff my right arm to my leg.”
It was in his spectacular dunks – back-to-the-basket, alley-oops, tomahawk, and what-have-you, his high vertical leap and prolonged “air time” that really made him the league’s top draw, and arguably, the best import in PBA history. For the record, his career scoring average of 46 points per game has remained the highest of any PBA player, both import and local.
As legendary was BRB as a bacchanal, his nightly wining and womanizing providing daily fodder to the sports pages in both broadsheets and tabloids. A lingering urban legend has it: Bates partying night-‘til-dawn with a slew of ladies and scoring 50 points in a game later in the day.
Yeah, something there that could only be in the realm of the superhuman.
So can you still fly?
I asked a seated Bates at the Air Force City covered court Saturday at the launch of AirAsia Jam, a basketball clinic spearheaded by the world’s best low cost carrier and the Philippine Patriots, inaugural champions of the ASEAN Basketball League.
It was a question as stupid as it turned, Bates getting up to limp to center court to do some practice shots. The Black Superman’s ankle turned his Achilles heel, ending all prospects of any future flight.
Bates, notwithstanding his recent induction into the PBA Hall of Fame, is clearly of a generation long past, noting the anemic applause his introduction merited among the Air Force City crowd. (This prompted me to suggest to the organizers to show some video clips of Bates’ games, prior to the clinic, for the kids to better appreciate his lessons.)
So what’s still there for Superman who has long hung his cape?
“I am happy the Philippine Patriots took me in as skills coach. Part of my job is to impart to the team what I know about the game, about basketball essentials, evaluate them and help the team get better.”
A larger part, says a team insider, is for Bates to “bridge” with the Patriots’ imports. Meaning: “With his experience in the local basketball scene, Bates will help facilitate the transition, on the emotional, psychological and cultural levels of our imports, to blend well not only with the team but with the community.”
Bates was more straightforward: “I will make the imports avoid all my mistakes…help them be well-rounded persons.”
So the excesses of the past are all well…past behind him now?
“It’s been 15 years since I’d seen a bar. With God’s help, I am leading a good life now.”
“God” is a recurring constant in all conversations with Bates last Saturday, on court – how God led him to the right path; at the media conference – on the permanence of God’s love amid the impermanence of fame and fortune; at the brunch table of Hotel Stotsenberg – Bates bowing his head in thanksgiving prayer before partaking of his pasta.
Any special wish to God in the wake of his comeback to the Philippines?
“Just five seconds for me to be able to fly again.”
Amid the raised eyebrows of the incredulous: “There is nothing impossible with God.”
So the Black Superman goes grounded, well-grounded now. In God.

Che vive!

COMANDANTE STAR on a black beret capping a frowning, pensive handsome face; left eyebrow slightly raised; black, long hair waving in the breeze.
Beyond the image of Che Guevara pop cultured in millions of T-shirts, posters and decals around the globe, what do the young and not-so-young know about the man already long dead – executed on October 9, 1967 – even before they were born?
Essentially , nothing.
So what fascinates them to wear that icon, in virtual veneration of the man they don’t even know?
Irreligious blind faith?
The aura of enchantment around that image of Che known in the whole of Latin America as El guerrillero heroico is – to Paco Ignacio Tabio Jr., author of the definitive Guevara: tambien conocido como el Che (Guevara: also known as Che) – wrought by “the manifestation of a transparency and supernatural honesty.”
There, arguably, lies the Guevara mystique.
The photograph was taken by Albert Korda for the Cuban newspaper Revolucion at the public funeral of the 81 fatalities in the explosion of La Coubre, a French ship laden with Belgian arms at the Havana harbour on March 4, 1960. Unpublished, the photo remained in the newspaper morgue. In 1968, the Italian publisher Giacomo Feltinelli, researching on the life of Che, found the photo in Korda’s house, took it back to Italy and made a poster from it. The rest, as clichéd, is history. The irony not lost in the capitalist success rising out of a communist “artifact.”
The Che brief may well read: Argentine by birth, doctor of medicine by education; adventurer and motorcycle enthusiast, poet, photographer, writer; by revolution defined and deified.
The essence of Che may well be in his word: “The only passion that guides me is for the truth…I look at everything from this point of view.”
By his truth he lived. By his truth he was executed. Life and death make a universality that finds relevance to and resonance in the world to this day.
An unshakeable belief in the people that makes the core value of the true revolutionary: “There is no effort made towards the people that is not repaid with the people’s trust.”
A damnation of the vacuous vanity of self-ordained champions of the masses: “The people’s heroes cannot be separated from the people, cannot be elevated onto a pedestal, into something alien to the lives of that people.”
The masses eke an existence out of hovels, even as they look up to their heroes luxuriating in their high-walled mansions. So un-Che, so unheroic, so undemocratic, so prevalent. And so very Filipino.
Che holds the purity of the democratic ideal before its corruption by the politics of patronage: “How easy it is to govern when one follows a system of consulting the will of the people and one holds as the only norm all the actions which contribute to the well-being of the people.”
Compare with the Filipino norm of governance: Off with the people, buy the people, fool the people.
Thus, the first call of the revolution: “People – forward with the Revolution! Workers – to the struggle! Peasants – organize!”
Romanticism – damned by Mao as a bourgeois diversion to be expunged from the Chinese Revolution, and for that matter, from all revolutions – finds a refining, humanist aspect in Che’s own: “If it were said of us that we’re almost romantics, that we are incorrigible idealists, that we think the impossible: then, a thousand and one times, we have to answer that yes, we are.”
The Latino attributes of intense passion, sentimentalism, and romanticism do not diminish any, but in fact even enhance, nay, inflame revolutionary zeal. Che makes the perfect argument: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
(In college, barely versed in Che’s life and works, I wrote an essay on Che titled The Romantic Revolutionary. Modesty be damned, I got a flat 1 on that. More importantly, bragging rights for having already grasped Che’s essence even then. Though my enchantment with Che started in high school, in – of all places – the seminary.)
Che takes the humanist facet of the revolution further: “Revolutions, accelerated radical social changes, are made of circumstances; not always, almost never, or perhaps never can science predict their mature form in all its detail. They are made of passions, of man’s fight for social vindication, and never perfect.”
Yet another taboo in the revolutionary movement – adventurism – was taken to the positive plane by Che: “Many will call me an adventurer, and I am, but of a different type: of those who put their lives on the line to demonstrate their truths. “
So Che demonstrated his truth with his death, something the romantic adventurer in him put thus: “Wherever death may surprise us, it is most welcome. Our funeral dirge will be the staccato sound of machineguns and the cries of battle and victory.”
Some object lessons there for the RAM. The Magdalo, the YOU and what-have-you in the Philippine military wanting a coup.
Che’s thesis on revolutionary praxis makes one of the most succinct on the subject: “And it must be said quite sincerely that in a true revolution, to which everything is given, from which no material returns are expected, the task of revolutionary vanguard is both magnificent and anxious…In these conditions, a great dose of humanity is needed, a sense of justice and truth, if we are not to fall in the trap of extreme dogmatism, of cold scholasticism, of isolation from the masses. Everyday we have to fight so that love for humanity can be transformed into concrete deeds, into acts that set an example, that mobilize.”
There lie lessons in revolutions Che had fought, had seen and in those he did not see: the Stalinist dogmatism that pervaded the Soviet Union and its satellites, the excesses of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao’s cult of personality, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields.
Before his fatal failure in Bolivia, Che bombed out in the Congo in the 1965 attempt to start the conflagration of the African continent that to him represented “one of, if not the most, important battlefields against every form of exploitation that exists in the world.”
“We cannot liberate by ourselves a country that does not wish to fight,” Che conceded defeat six months after. A pointed lesson that it is as hard to start as to stop revolution from without. Lessons for Che himself in Bolivia, for the USA in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Lessons still unheeded today in Iraq, in Chechnya, and again, in Afghanistan.
Hasta la victoria siempre – ever onward to victory – usually captions the Che icon. It was the exhortation that closed Che’s letter to Fidel Castro before he left for the Congo. It has become the rallying cry for revolutionaries around the world.
But Che had a more stirring call for revolutionary solidarity: “If you can tremble with indignation every time an injustice is committed in the world, we are comrades.”
Hasta siempre, Comandante Che Guevara!

Cultural barbarians

ON TUESDAY, the Clark Development Corp., per its press release, “distributed 3,000 relief goods” – bags or packs of relief goods, I presume – “to typhoon victims in the towns of Sasmuan, Guagua, Candaba, and San Luis.”
Supervised by CDC President-CEO Felipe Antonio Remollo, “along with other executives and 20 CDC volunteer employees from the Association of Concerned CDC Employees, Association of CDC Supervisory Personnel, and Association of CDC Executives,” the press release continued, “the relief operations are not only the CDC’s response ‘to the dire conditions wrought by Typhoon Quiel’ but also the state-owned corporation’s new Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program that is geared to help address the various concerns that affect local communities.”
“Clark CARES was launched last week amidst preparations for Typhoon Quiel. It was first broached when CDC committed P10 million to a project that will address the 440 classroom backlog in the 1st District of Pampanga.” So was Remollo quoted as saying. CARES there standing for Community Assistance, Relief and Emergency Services.
“This is a project inspired by President Aquino where there is a need to come out and reach out to the needy sectors, especially those that are being displaced by recent typhoons,” Remollo stressed. So said the press release.
Well and good, most admirable even, for the CDC incorporating to its core values the good neighbor policy, aye, the friend in need virtue.
Now, were the CDC as caring – and sharing – when it comes to culture…That’s going way ahead of the story though.
Last September 20, a CDC press release headlined “CDC renews contract with ‘Nayong Pilipino’ in Clark” found its way in Sun-Star Pampanga, to wit:
CLARK FREEPORT – Clark Development Corporation (CDC) President Felipe Antonio B. Remollo has signed the renewal of contract of the Nayong Pilipino Foundation (NPF).
With the signing of the contract renewal, Nayong Pilipino will become
more vibrant and attractive to tourists and guests in the coming months.
Remollo bared that Nayong Pilipino will feature regular cultural shows, construction of a palaruang pambata facility, shuttle service, and a vibrant calendar of monthly events to attract more tourists.
The CDC president was also informed by the NPF that new programs will be introduced soon involving research and development on orchids and the golden tilapia, floral jewellery, and hybridizing of unique varieties of orchids, among others…
Everything about the NPF done there. The press release though ranting on to Remollo’s CDC priorities, thus:
More sports tourism events such as baseball, football, frisbee, paintball, and marathon will be slated.
“There are on-going talks with a number of organizers for Clark to become the venue for a number of meetings and conventions,” Remollo added.
Remollo pushed for the setting up of directional road signs and electronic billboards that will provide information to commuters, guests, and local and foreign tourists.
So what’s wrong there? Everything. It just did not happen. Remollo has not signed any contract with Nayong Pilipino.
“We had very encouraging talks with the CDC at first, which turned very discouraging soon after,” well-placed sources in the NPF told me.
They claimed that Remollo was “not only discouraging but even disparaging the presence of Nayong Pilipino in Clark.”
“Imagine, the CDC President saying to our faces: ‘Culture does not pay’ and ‘There is no profitability in culture’. It’s something you don’t expect from anyone even remotely educated,” the sources lamented.
It appears now that the CDC would want to increase their rental to P3 million per year. Too stiff a price, at this time, given the situation the theme park is in.
(This becomes all too personal to me. The CDC for the past number of years already subsidizing the hot air balloon festival by as much as P3.5 million free of any auditing and liquidation requirements while imposing P3 million rental on the prime promoter of Filipino culture. It just ain’t right.)
“We cannot charge a higher entrance fee as most of those who come to Nayong Pilipino are students on field trip, then there is the maintenance and operating costs that include the allowances we pay for our cultural dancers, among others.” So the NPF sources said.
This, even as they took exception to Remollo’s alleged claim of culture being unprofitable.
The NPF, they said, has a marketing arm in Manila solely dedicated to Clark.
“Ninety percent of the 300,000 patrons who come to Nayong Pilipino every year come from Manila. They just don’t stay at Nayong Pilipino the whole time they are in Clark. They usually go to the other places of interest in the freeport like Paradise Ranch and the Clark Museum, eat in the various restaurants and shop at the duty free shops. There’s profit for Clark there.”
The greater, indeed the greatest, profit culture brings in is of course intangible. Like psychic income to Clark.
It is the re-acquaintance with one’s own national identity, the very enrichment of the Filipino soul. For isn’t culture the very seat of a nation’s soul?
So has Clark fallen into the hands of barbarians?

The place to be

EVERYTHING’S RIGHT in Mabalacat.
In the current of water-logged events swirling around a large part of Pampanga, Mabalacat makes the perfect place to be. For simply being flood-free, the town occupying the premium spot on the elevated plain called “Upper Pampanga” never inundated by floods from the heaviest of downpours.
Hence, last Monday’s invitation of Mayor Marino “Boking” Morales over station dwGV-FM for the perennially flood-stricken folk of the fourth district – the province’s catch basin – to consider relocation to his town made a most sound proposition.
Assuming even greater urgency with Gov. Lilia “Nanay Baby” Pineda saying: “It’s getting worse each year and we can’t go on like this. We must treat this problem in the way the government did during the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.”
No diaspora – scattering of a people, but an exodus – flight from want and despair, is a move to Mabalacat. It is something like the Canaan to the Hebrews struggling their way through the desert from their slavery in Egypt.
The municipality – figuratively now – drips with milk and honey, that is in the fruits of development accruing from its first-class status.
Then there is the Clark Freeport Zone, some three-fifths of its land area belonging to Mabalacat, thereby giving the town the lion’s share not only in a percentage of the gross income earned from the locators and investors but also in the number of workers.
With the greatest of conviction and without any fear of contradiction – to plagiarize its mayor – Mabalacat offers the widest opportunity for employment, as a consequence to Clark.
With a land area already double that of Angeles City and further increased to the current 14,660.98 hectares as a result of Special Patent 3628, dated June 02, 2003, whereby some lands which were previously demarcated as part of the built-up area of Clark Air Base were reverted to the town, Mabalacat possesses truly premium real estate, be it for commercial, light-industrial and residential purposes.
Which puts the substance to Mabalacat’s billing as the “Next Makati North of Manila.” No matter its minting by the Asian Institute of Management-educated Mayor Boking.
Location. Location. Location. No other town or city in Pampanga is as much blessed as Mabalacat in topography, in geography.
“Gateway to North Philippines, Regional Center of Central Luzon and Champion of Good Urban Governance by 2015 and to use this vision as a platform to become a Global Gateway by 2020 and Habitat of Human Excellence by 2030.”
So the City of San Fernando prides itself to be and yet to become.
With due respect, and undue apology, methinks Mabalacat has the rightful claim to the “gateway” tag, at least.
For one, Mabalacat serves as the nexus of the North Luzon Expressway and the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway which is being stretched further north to Pangasinan and La Union.
And two, the Clark Airport, otherwise known as Diosdado Macapagal International Airport, by necessity the emerging premier international gateway of the country, is sited in Mabalacat.
Where Mabalacat is a gateway then, the City of San Fernando is merely a crossroad. So I be damned by Mayor Oscar Rodriguez now!
Mabalacat is, for all intents and purposes, already a city. The final approval of House Bill 2509/4736 – which Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., chairman of the Committee on Local Government, himself said is a foregone conclusion – serves as a formal capping ceremony, so to speak.
But still, an official Mabalacat City makes yet another affirmation to its being not only the place, but the polis to be.
Everything’s right in Mabalacat, yeah. With Mayor Boking.

Making sense of floods

SO WHAT’S government to do?
PAGASA, short for and better known than its kilometric official nomenclature of Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, announces a low pressure area is entering the Philippine area of responsibility.
PAGASA, in its next bulletin, announces the LPA has developed into a tropical storm packing maximum winds of such-and-such per kilometre at the center and moving at a pace of such-and-such kilometres per hour.
PAGASA, in succeeding bulletins, issues storm warnings, better known as typhoon signals, to help the people in the affected communities take precautionary measures to prevent damage to life and property.
PAGASA has long drilled – from the time of the inimitable weatherman Amado Pineda – into the public consciousness:
Typhoon Signal No. 1 - A tropical storm is existing. Be alert. Classes are suspended for pre-school and primary levels. Winds of 30-60 kph. may be expected within 36 hours.
Typhoon Signal No. 2 - A tropical storm is approaching. Stay indoors. Classes are suspended at the pre-school, primary and elementary levels. Winds of 60-100 kph. may be expected within 24 hours.
Typhoon Signal No. 3 – The tropical storm is dangerous to the locality. Everybody is advised to stay home. Classes in all levels are automatically suspended. Winds of 100-185 kph. maybe expected within 18 hours.
Typhoon Signal No. 4 - Very strong winds of more than 185 kph. maybe expected within 12 hours. God have mercy on us!
Forewarned is forearmed. A truism that has become so trite that it has lost its urgency, and its believability where PAGASA is concerned. What with the predictive performance of the warning agency setting some sordid record of sorts in utter failure. Aye, in saying one thing, with the exact opposite happening.
Thus, PAGASA forecasts heavy rains, and the sun shines through days on end.
Thus, PAGASA forecasts bright, cloudless days, and torrential rains fall thereafter.
So what’s the flooded folk to do?
Total evacuation.
So PAGASA recommended of the areas earlier whipped by the battering winds and inundated by the rampaging rains of Typhoon Pedring.
“Saturated na ang lupa kaya di kayang i-absorb pa ang volume ng tubig na ibabagsak ni Quiel. Pagsama-sama pa ang high tide at nagre-release ng tubig ang dam kaya talagang mas tataas pa ang baha.” So explained weather forecaster Aldczar Aurelio.
“People will die if they will not heed the local authorities.” So warned – direly -- PAGASA OIC Undersecretary Graciano Yumul.
So how many heeded PAGASA’s warnings?
So how many people have died since Typhoon Pedring? Over 50?
So how many more have been driven by floods spawned by Typhoon Quiel to their rooftops and to earthen dikes? By the thousands in the towns of Hagonoy and Calumpit in Bulacan, and in San Simon and Masantol in Pampanga alone.
“Water had never reached even ankle deep here. It was the first time that floods this high hit our area.” Not a few of those stranded were heard to say. Justifying their defiance to government’s call for evacuation.
“There is always a first time we can talk about, and then there is also a “one-time” one cannot anymore speak of.” So smirked Col. Greg Catapang, commander of the 703rd Brigade of the 7th Battalion of the Philippine Army, undertaking rescue missions in the flooded areas. He referred to the fatalities of Typhoon Ondoy, feeling exasperated over the stubbornness of a number of flooded folk to move to safer grounds.
“If we forcibly evacuate these people, some quarters will find cause, no matter how unjust, to cry ‘human rights violations’ or ‘military harassment’,” Catapang says.
So what’s government to do?
Be stupid, at least in the case of one Pampanga mayor.
A parish priest had texted to friends at Typhoon Pedring’s exit that floodwaters were lapping at the second floor of his convento, the highest building in the coastal barangay.
At the onset of Typhoon Quiel, his text messages were pleas for prayers and rescue of his parishioners.
A professor of an Angeles City university in another barangay in the coastal town texted SOS to his dean, his house having been flooded to the rafters.
Apprised of these cries for help during a hastily called emergency meeting on the flood situation in the province last Saturday, what had the mayor to say?
“We have no problem in our town.” At least, none that could not be solved by packages of relief goods that he asked Gov. Lilia “Nanay Baby” Pineda to provide him.
Yeah, looking at the mayor in his Lacoste shirt and pricey leather loafers made it hard to see any problem in his town. It was like listening to Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned.
It was relief goods too – “500 packages po” – that I overheard a barangay chairman of another flooded town asking from the governor, with his mayor making like a matron just out of Fanny Serrano’s parlor by his side.
When the governor asked how many families were affected by the flooding in his area, the village chief said about 5,000 to which the mayor heartrendingly affirmed.
Five hundred packages of relief goods for 5,000 hungry families. It is the stuff that could ignite a war.
Really as stupid as it gets. Relief goods. In many a mayor’s or a barangay chair’s eye, the single solution to any calamity hereabouts, typhoons, floods, fires.
With rescue, relocation, resettlement, rehabilitation absolutely beyond their acutely myopic vision.
With government officials like theirs, what’s the flooded folk to do?
Stay on their rooftops. They maybe in dire need of water and food, but at the least they have greater sense, and sanity, there.
And while at this, try to make sense of President Aquino’s ubiquitous absence during these diluvian days. He has come back from Tokyo ain’t he?
Maybe he needed first to reconnect with nephew Joshua’s Angry Birds vid game. And get his own sense of what’s happening around him.
Uh-oh, I spoke too soon…
After lunch, Sunday. On live TV there’s the President flanked by his defense secretary and executive secretary presiding over a meeting of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
Less presidential, more procedural. That was how the chief executive came to me.
That is yet another calamity. So I had to do what I had to do. Powered off the telly.

Top billing

TARZAN, THE congressman, is on a roll of late. No, not in the house of cards but in the House of laws, filing one bill after another. Bills far from the parochial, bills impacting on the national.
There is House Bill No. 5287 that seeks to establish a Stem Cell Center of the Philippines to “spearhead the research and development of stem cell technology, and also serve as storage area for stem cell technology that it will develop.”
Cong Tarzan took cognizance of the “vast potential of stem cell technology in curing fatal cancers and heart ailments” with his bill.
“The benefits of stem cell are overwhelming to be just simply ignored by the government because many Filipinos are suffering from different diseases that could be cured by this medical breakthrough.” So said the solon in his explanatory note to HB 5287, invoking that it is “in line with the state’s policy to protect and uphold people’s right to life and health” pursuant to Article 13, Section 12 of the Constitution declaring that “the government shall undertake appropriate health, manpower development, and research, responsive to the country’s health needs and problems.”
“In accordance with the provisions of the Charter, research on stem cell technology should be pursued as it can save thousands, if not millions, of Filipinos who are affected by diseases which can be cured by this modern technology,” Cong Tarzan said, noting that “many countries have started tapping stem cell’s potential in health and medical research, especially to find solutions to diseases such as cancer, heart attacks and other cardiovascular anomalies, Parkinson’s and different birth defects.”
Then there is House Bill No. 5285 mandating for senior citizens free annual physical examinations including cardiac stress, endoscopy, ultrasound on kidneys, ureter and bladder, pulmonary function tests – all the necessary laboratory tests.
The bill seeks to amend Republic Act 7432 or the Senior Citizens Act of 2003 “to further advance the welfare of the elderly and maximize their contribution to nation-building.”
RA 7432 was amended in 2009 to include free medical and dental services, diagnostic and laboratory fees such as, but not limited to, x-rays, computerized tomography scans and blood tests in all government facilities.
“As way of caring for our elderly all the more, this bill seeks to amend the aforementioned provision and include free and mandatory annual physical examination for all senior citizens, including vital laboratory examinations,” explained Cong Tarzan.
Speaking like a true Constitutionalist anew, he cited Article 13, Section 11 stating that the State shall adopt an integrated and comprehensive approach to health development which shall endeavor to make essential goods, health and other social services available to all the people at affordable cost. This, with the needs of the under-privileged, sick, elderly, disabled, women, and children as priorities.
And for added measure, Article 15, Section 4, which provides that the family has the duty to care for its elderly members but the State may also do so through just programs of social security.
HB 5285, Cong Tarzan says, gives due recognition and respect to our elders who, during their prime, contributed greatly to the country’s growth and development.
We cannot help but think biblical here, specifically of the Fourth Commandment: Honor thy father and thy mother. That which promises blessing for those who do so, and damnation to those who don’t.
As much as the elders, the infirm and the dead deserve honor too.
“Almost every day, we hear of complaints in the media against hospitals and other medical institutions that detain patients or even cadavers of deceased patients due to unpaid medical bills,” said Cong Tarzan.
Then there are too funeral parlors and morgues that hold hostage cadavers for the relatives to ransom as it where, only after getting enough alms to pay for the burial services.
House Bill 5286 seeks to write finis to all these hostaging, providing more teeth and wider scope to RA 9439 or the Patient Detention Act, specifically to cover indigent patients who are not capable of giving promissory note which according to law should be accompanied by mortgage or guarantee.
Cong Tarzan proposes that the Government Service Insurance System, Social Security System), PhilHealth and the Department of Social Welfare and Development come up with special programs to help their members who cannot afford to pay medical or funeral bills.
Also, the amendment to expand RA 9439’s scope to funeral parlors and other institutions that “engage in such inhuman practice” of detaining cadavers.
“This measure is to ensure that rights of all individuals, living or otherwise, are protected,” the lawmaker said.
Violators “shall be punished by a fine of not less than P200,000 or imprisonment of two years, or both such fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the proper court. “
And then, there is House Bill 4405 – too long in coming but nearly here -- mandating the transformation of the Pampanga Agricultural College into the Diosdado Macapagal Agriculture and Science State University (DMASSU – some colonial arrogance inhering there), having been approved on third and final reading.
As provided for in HB 4405, DMASSU “will provide advanced education, higher technological, professional instruction and training in the fields of agriculture, arts and sciences, teacher education, industrial technology and engineering, information technology, business management and accountancy, non-traditional courses and other relevant fields of study.”
As well, DMASSU “will undertake research, extension services and production activities while providing progressive leadership in its areas of specialization.”
Indeed, “a major victory for quality education” Cong Tarzan accomplished there.
And then there is consolidated House Bill 2509/4736 mandating cityhood for Mabalacat already nearing approval, so Senator Ferdinand Marcos Jr., committee on local governments chair, himself is said to have declared.
Cong Tarzan, but of course, stands as the legitimate father of a Mabalacat City, having sown the very seed, incubated and nurtured the embryo which is soon a-borning.
Yes, Tarzan, the congressman, is on a roll. A steamroll towards sure re-election, not a few political leaders believe.
Much interesting to see how Vice Gov. Yeng Guiao, a master strategist, will deal with this.

They are different, the rich, the very rich

THE GREATEST gift on his 66th birthday. Not only to him but moreso, to all Fernandinos.
Thus City of San Fernando Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez hailed the donation of a two-hectare lot for a permanent campus of the City College which currently squats at the Pampanga High School.
It was not just any two-hectare lot but a highly-valued one, being part and parcel of prime landholdings of the Escaler, Lazatin and Panlilio families abutting the North Luzon Expressway, and adjacent to the Home Depot.
In his profuse thanks to Pampanga’s buenas familias for their charity, Rodriguez turned teary-eyed in reminiscence of the hard times of his youth when, accompanied by his father, he literally knocked on the doors of rich men in search – in vain – of a benefactor to put him through school.
The City College, Rodriguez said, is one surety that poor but deserving young Fernandinos will not have to go through that same arduous pass in the struggle for knowledge, in the quest to be productive members, if not leaders, of society.
Hence the significance, aye, the magnanimity of the donation of the Escaler, Lazatin, and Panlilio families to securing the future of the people of the City of San Fernando.
“A sense of duty long inhered in our families.” So remarked City Councilor Jimmy Lazatin, a scion of the donors and chair of the sangguniang panlungsod’s committee on education.
“With a permanent site comes now the impetus for the infrastructure and the facilities of the college to the fullest possible extent as a center of learning, as a font of professionalism,” Lazatin enthused, committing himself to that task.
The current school-year lists some 600 enrollees at the City College taking up baccalaureate degrees in Information Technology, Education and Business Administration.
Yet another beneficence coming from the Escaler, Lazatin and Panlilio families cited by Rodriguez at his birthday banquet was the donation of 50 streetlights to the city by the San Fernando Electric Light and Power Company Inc.
Part of Sfelapco’s corporate social responsibility program, the sodium-type, combination 250-150 watts lights were meant to contribute to the city government’s efforts to make San Fernando brighter, even shinier, if only in keeping with its image as a beacon of good governance.
“Bright streetlights help deter street crimes, and contribute greatly to road safety for both motorists and pedestrians,” remarked Lazatin, getting to the pragmatic side of the donation.
A two-hectare prime lot for a birthday cake. With 50 streetlights for icing. Indeed what greater gift can a public servant still ask for?
In living, albeit fading, memory, I can’t think of anyone – corporate, family or individual – ever donating at this scale to the City of San Fernando. No matter the enormity of their wealth. Which leads me to dredge my mindset about the rich.
Los ricos son diferentes. Contemporaneous with my pre-school caton lessons from mi tia abuela Senora Carmen was that take from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “…the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
Not only from you and me, but the rich are even different from each other. This realization a-dawning with my conscientization during the days of disquiet and nights of rage of the Marcos regime.
So, of the predatory, exploitative rich we sang: “Tamad na burgis na ayaw gumawa, sa pawis ng masa ay nagpapasasa.” Their hapless victims then: the underpaid, un-unionized, overworked laborers, now morphing to contractualized labor, and the promise of liberation stands still.
The idle rich, we sneered at as the sick symptoms of a decadent society, in the mold of the grande soirees of Marie Antoinette, of hedonistic pursuits, of the sheer satiation of the senses.
Even as any consideration of the rich outside their exploitative and idle nature was denounced as “reactionary” or antithetical, I had by then already recognized the working and the committed among the rich. The conscionable rich, we called them as they – dictated by their conscience, if not out of some inherent goodness – shared labor and profits with their workers, upheld dignity in the factories, took on social responsibilities not only for their workers’ families but also for their communities.
Then, on yet another plane of stratification among the rich: the old and the nouveau.
Of the old rich, some endearment for their Old World charm and sense of class, if not some royal touch, for their bearing and gravitas.
Of the nouveau riche, only disparagement for their sense of crass, for their affectation and ostentation, bloviated ego and shameless pride.
The old rich’s “social” utterly demeaned in the nouveau riche’s sosyal.
Aye, where the old rich are steeped in urbanidad, of the nouveau riche mi tia abuela could have only exclaimed: Que barbaridad!
Indeed, the rich are different even from each other. This the Escaler, Lazatin and Panlilio families proved with their altruism. This the other rich – self-proclaimed leaders of local business, self-aggrandizing traders – displayed with their pretensions and posturing.
So, for all their high-profile presence in the tri-media, have you ever heard of these honor-seeking aggrupations donating even just a single desk in a public school?

An Augustine, but not yet

MORE PILGRIMAGE than coverage.
That – to me – was the media conference at the Sta. Monica Parish Church in Minalin town Wednesday last week. This as a sort of a preparation to the church’s declaration by the National Museum as a national cultural treasure, which was accomplished last Saturday.
Completed in the mid-1700s by the Augustinians the church has remained relatively intact, having withstood devastating earthquakes, typhoons and floods, and the Mount Pinatubo eruptions that swamped it with lahar.
No ostentatious ornateness but architectural splendor defines the façade – an outdoor retablo in concrete, where niched between Corinthian columns the images – as old as the church too – of Saints Peter and Paul, Francis of Assisi, and Catherine of Alexandria, with the top of the triangular pediment holding the image of St. Monica. Twin hexagonal four-story bell towers buttress the façade.
At the churchyard are the only four capillas posas still extant in the whole Philippines. Small chapels in red bricks, these served as holding areas for catechumens prior to their baptism inside the church in the early days of colonization…There ended objective coverage.
Aye, being edifices of faith, churches are not simply viewed. Churches are objects of contemplation, and, but of course, centers of worship, loci of adoration. More than the sense of wonder it evokes, the Sta. Monica Parish Church invokes deep stirrings of the soul…There commenced my personal pilgrimage. With St. Augustine, whose presence is embossed throughout the church named after his mother.
Crowning the window above the pasbul mayor, the main door of the church, is an escudo of an eagle – the symbol of St. John the Evangelist whose gospel was St. Augustine’s favorite.
“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.” So I remembered St. Augustine saying in Tractatus in Ioannis Evangelium. There entered I the realm of faith.
At the vestibule, above the baptistery, is the heart of Sta. Monica carved on the adobe keystone – the image of a spade pierced by an arrow. Significant of the sufferings and sacrifices of the mother for the conversion of her sinful son.
“But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, ‘Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.’” Thus, St. Augustine in Confessions.
Taking center spot in the iconography at the main altar is a painting of the Nuestra Senora de La Consolacion y Correa. Beholding the image dredged memories of my dearly departed maternal grandmother.
May 4, the feast day of St. Monica, Apu Rita took five-year-old me to this same church for Mass. As was her wont whenever we went to any church, she told me anecdotes about all the saints present at the altar.
Her take of La Consolacion – from memory now – St. Monica prayed nightly to God, through the intercession of the Virgin Mother, to change the sinful ways of her son Augustine. One night, as St. Monica wept, the Virgin appeared to her and as a token of compassion took off a black cloth cincture from her waist and gave it to St. Monica. It was that cincture that finally effected the transformation of Augustine. From then on, members of his eponymous monastic order have worn a black band across the waist as a pledge of devotion to La Consolacion.
In remembering Apu Rita, I heard St. Augustine saying: “What is faith save to believe what you do not see?”
Unschooled, unemployed, unfettered from the material world, Apu Rita totally devoted her whole life between home and “her one, true, Mother Church.” Again, hearing here anew St. Augustine, and St. Cyprian too, declaring: “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.”
Lest this be misconstrued as Roman Catholic conceit, the most recent Catholic Catechism interpretation of “Outside the Church there is no salvation” is that "all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body." Everything universal, nothing parochial in the expanse of the Church here.
The visit to the St. Monica Parish Church coming a day after the local media’s commemoration of the 21st month of the Ampatuan massacre, I was moved to pray for the repose of the souls of the victims and that justice be done. And then remembered St. Augustine saying in De Civitate Dei : “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies. For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms.”
His City of God segueing further to current times: “He that is good is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.”
On the way to my parked car at the churchyard, my last look at the church centered on an escudo of a flaming heart – the very seal of the Augustinian Order – appliqued to the keystone of the main door.
Ah, how could I ever forget, the very core of St. Augustine’s Confessions: “Our heart is unquiet until it rests in you”
Maybe, I need to spend more time in churches than in coffeeshops. That will certainly make a lot of people less stressed, less upset, if not happier.
So then I cry: But I wretched, most wretched, in my every commentary, had begged charity of Thee, and said, “Give me charity, give me unquestioning acceptance of the powers-that-be, only not yet.”
So then I pray: God let me do a St. Augustine, but not yet.