Dog tags

"AN OLD desperate dog.”

Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr. called Manny Pacquiao, over what he perceived as the Filipino congressman’s dogged efforts to stage a megabuck bout with him.

“So this guy's got all these problems and he wants Floyd Mayweather to solve them for him, huh? He's willing to do anything now after his career done took a major setback,” sneered the Moneymouth, referring to Pacquiao’s troubles with the BIR and the IRS.

In characteristic Christian humility, Pacquiao turned the other cheek with his acceptance of Mayweather’s dog tag, even as he threw back stone-hard bread, riposting he was not a dog “running with its tail wrapped between its legs.” A head-snapping jab there at Mayweather’s penchant to cherry pick his opponents, as some boxing aficionados are wont to say.

“At least I look for more fights, I don’t run away from them,” Pacquiao followed with a looping right.

Dogs are clichéd as man’s best friend, yet they tend to get the choicest cuts in the worst insults. Gone to the dogs, for instance.

Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago riled the usually cat-cool Sen. Panfilo Lacson not so much for calling him “Pinky” as for branding him as Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile’s “attack dog.” Warranting a reply in kind from the former top cop. A case of dog-eat-dog there?

“Tuta ng Kano (America’s puppy).” So the militant Left derided Ferdinand E. Marcos, Cory Aquino and all those who followed them to Malacanang down to Cory’s son BS.

Even the venerable Carlos P. Romulo, who served eight Philippine presidents – from Quezon to Marcos – and who himself sat as president – of the Fourth Session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1949-1950, was not spared of a similar epithet. No idle urban legend but a revealed truth to student activists of the First Quarter Storm was Chou En-Lai’s dismissal of Romulo as “America’s running dog” at the Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations in 1955 that helped crystallized the Non-Aligned Movement.

At the time of Cory too, I remember the Malacanang Press Corps raising a howl over a presidential factotum’s obvert reference to them as mongrels when he directed his staff to “feed the kennel” whenever his office issued press releases.

For too long a time, a collective insult, indeed, a curse, to the whole Kapampangan race is the branding “dugong aso.”

In 1981, the political leadership of Pampanga – from Gov. Estelito P. Mendoza, Vice Gov. Cicero J. Punzalan, down to the mayors led by the “Big 5” of San Fernando’s Armando Biliwang, Arayat’s Benigno Espino, Magalang’s Daniel Lacson, Sta. Ana’s Magno Maniago and Sta. Rita’s Frank Ocampo, along with Angeles City’s Francisco G. Nepomuceno, raged and ranted rabidly at then Olongapo City Mayor Richard J. Gordon for citing the Kapampangans as dugong aso in the context of regionalism’s ill-effects to nationalism in his nomination speech for Ferdinand E. Marcos in the KBL party convention at the Manila Hotel.

Actual physical threats were even thrown Gordon’s way in addition to some persona non grata resolutions. (Gordon’s topping Pampanga in the senatorial contest of May 2013, is some vindication of the forgiving-and-forgetting nature of this race.)   

Even as dugong aso stuck to the Kapampangan, the insult accruing thereat has largely dissipated. This is owed in large part to then Gov. Lito Lapid, as we wrote here sometime ago:      

“Ikinagagalit nating mga Kapampangan ang pagtawag sa atin ng ‘dugong aso.’ Subali’t ito ay ipinagmamalaki’t ikinararangal ko. Sa katapatan, wala nang mauuna pa sa aso: sa kanya iniiwan ng amo ang tahanan nito, pati na magkaminsan ang pagtatanggol sa kanyang pamilya. Subukin mong saktan ang amo, at tiyak, dadambain ka ng kanyang aso. Ang katapatang ito ang iniaalay ko sa inyo.” (We Kapampangans get slighted when told the blood of dogs runs in our veins. But I find pride and honor in this. When it comes to loyalty, none beats the dog: to it man leaves the protection of his home, at times even the defense of his family. Try to hit a man and his dog will surely attack you. This is the kind of loyalty I offer you.)
Before a beaming President Ramos at the Mawaque Resettlement Project site in 1997, Governor Lito Lapid pledged his loyalty in gratitude for the new lease on human decency, on human life itself that El Tabaco bestowed upon those the Mount Pinatubo eruptions devastated, displaced and dispossessed.
Thence, the Bida embraced FVR’s Lakas-NUCD with a fidelity the wife could only wish he committed to his marital vows with as much devotion, if not intensity.
Lapid there made a rarity: loyalty being an uncommon commodity in politics. So what is it that makes politicians and adulterers one and the same as a dysfunctional radio? Low fidelity on a high frequency, dummy…

There too was Lapid giving a novel and noble meaning to the derogatory dugong aso impacted in the Kapampangan psyche, extolling it as the virtue of katapatan, of dogged loyalty to an elder, to a superior, to a friend. No mean feat for the uncolleged Lapid.

But for the title “Of dogs and men,” there is very little I remember of a column I wrote in The Voice in the late ‘70s. It would have made a most relevant read in the subject I am discussing here. The ending of that column though is something I cannot possibly just easily forget, having consigned it as much to the mind as to the heart and put out at every opportunity that calls for it, like now.

A lesson in loyalty – of dogs, as well as of men – perfectly captured in that blurb of an award-winning Lino Brocka movie: “Sa bawa’t latay, kahit aso’y nag-iiba. Sa unang latay, siya’y magtatanda; Sa ikalawa, siya’y mag-iisip; Sa ikatlo, siya’y magtataka; Sa ika-apat, humanda ka!” (At every lash, even a dog changes. At the first, it would learn; At the second, it would think; At the third, it would wonder; At the fourth, prepare yourself!)

So Mayweather better be aware: Caveat canis, as the Latins of old put up at their gates. As much for the Pac-Man’s bite as for all the world’s love for the underdog.