Roxas, the Absurd

NATTERING NABOBS of negativism.

Alliteration crafted by the legendary columnist of the New York Times Bill Safire (On Language) for a speech by US Vice President Spiro Agnew hitting the liberal press. (Agnew preceded his president, Richard Nixon in being driven out of office, but that’s another story.)

Anyways – especially for my seminary elder Ronnie Tiotuico, tourism director,   who complains of being always driven to Messrs Webster and Roget by my columns – nattering means chattering; nabob is originally a term for governor in India under the Mogul Empire but has evolved to also mean any person of wealth and prominence; and negativism is habitual attitude of skepticism.

Nattering nabob of negativism.

Fittingly suiting Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas for his seemingly obsessive compulsion – or should it be compulsive obsession? – to stomp on Pampanga at every jig he takes.

Blinder than a bat on anything good about Pampanga. Eyed as a fly on the minutest bad. Roxas is.

Where others – the Japan International Cooperation Agency and US Agency for International Aid included, the mogul Manny V. Pangilinan too – see the Clark International Airport as best option for the country’s premier international gateway, Roxas saw the least possibility, short-sightedly looking only at the long distance between Metro Manila and Clark, and the prohibitive cost of building a railway system to span it.

There, totally blinded to the fact that distance is best measured not in miles but in travel time. A case in point: It takes 45 minutes to motor from Balintawak, Quezon City to Clark spanning over 70 kilometers. It takes some two hours by car from Balintawak to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport only some 20 kilometers away.

As then head of the Department of Transportation and Communications, Roxas was all bullish about the development of other airports in the country, some serviced only by missionary flights. And, all bullshit about Clark, over which he sat as chairman of the board of Clark International Airport Corp. Come now, give but one good thing that went Clark airport’s way during the incumbency of Roxas at CIAC!

Effete corps of impudent snobs.

Another one from Agnew, appropriated and appended to Roxas, singularized into effete impudent snob. Perfect phrase there characterizing his injurious insult of Gov. Lilia Pineda when he imposed the presence of former Gov. Eddie Panlilio right at the very presidential table during the regional peace and order council meeting in Clark last October.

Panlilio was trounced by Pineda in the 2010 elections. What personality had he even just to attend that RPOC meeting exclusive to local government units and the police?

Panlilio is the 2013 bofficial bet for Pampanga governor of the Liberal Party which Roxas heads. Insolence written all over there. And Roxas said he had taken a leave of absence as LP president so as not to give any impression that he uses the DILG for partisan purposes? Effete snobbery, if not thick-faced hypocrisy, there indeed.

Insolently impertinent – doubly, aye, redundantly, impudent – was Roxas in tagging Pampanga as election hot spot.

Pampanga is perceptibly, if not officially, ranked fourth – behind Laguna, Cebu and Cavite – among the Most Progressive Provinces in the country, and ahead of Pangasinan, Bataan, Davao, Iloilo and Palawan. Go check the web.

To put Pampanga now in the same league as Abra, Maguindanao, Lanao del Sur, Masbate and Basilan is the depth of stupidity, the abyss of absurdity, the nadir of irrationality, that could have only been born from obstinate insolence.

Progress can’t exist, much less thrive, in unpeace and disorder. A fact that won’t tax the intellect of the gnat. That Pampanga is progressive makes a clear negation of its hotspot listing. 

We just have to give it to Roxas, the Absurd. 
Absurdier yet is the general silence of political leaders – with the exception of the ever-loquacious Jerry Pelayo, Candaba mayor and president of the Pampanga Mayors League – over Roxas’ damned list.

The LGEs high-dogging it with their tails between their legs? Or Roxas got their shrivelled balls in his hands?     

I am most specially concerned with City of San Fernando Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez, also president of the League of Cities of the Philippines.  

Last time I looked, San Fernando is still a part of Pampanga. So it is covered by Roxas damning list.

If there is anybody who should raise the most hell against Roxas, it should be Rodriguez. For how can the City of San Fernando – hall-of-famer as most business-friendly city in the country, hall-of-famer in fastest business licensing processes, hall-of-famer in the Harvard-designed performance governance system and best practices template for all LGUs, habitat for human excellence, etcetera – be now consigned to the depth of some backwaters or boondocks ruled by hoods? 

Ay, Roxas nga pala is president of Rodriguez’s party. So party politics – read: exigency and expediency – at play here?

So what happened to principled politics that Rodriguez supposedly long embodied?

Here I go again, clutching at straws. Only to be instantly reminded of what I have written time and again of principled politics as an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed.

For in politics, “no one acts on principles or reasons from them.”
To quote further the French writer Leroy Beaullieu in the 1890s yet, politicians are “…the vilest and the narrowest of sycophants and courtiers that humanity has ever known; their sole end basely to flatter and develop all popular prejudices, which, for the rest, they but vaguely share, never having consecrated one minute of their lives to reflection and observation.”

Absurd. Really, absurd