Archive for April, 2009

Pardon me while I start raving.  Pebbles and rocks fall from the air; whomever it hits… I do not care.

What we have is this: Ted Failon, a famous newscaster, is a suspect in the shooting of his wife, Trinidad.  It made waves, all right; it’s in the headlines, it’s in the blogosphere, and it’s everywhere.  People have all sorts of theories as to who shot who.  What shocks me – and what irks me at the same time – is my friend and fellow FV contributor, Patricio Mangubat, going as far as to report the incident at Filipino Voices, and then having to (at the very least) parenthetically refer to this incident in New Philippine Revolution in this way:

Clearly, these are all INITIAL REPORTS and I wrote them here just to update our readers on this case. The police is investigating this incident, which has shades of that O.J. Simpson murder case some years ago.

Will Failon be our next version of O.J. Simpson? Remember that some years ago, former Ilocos Congressman Farinas was, himself, accused and speculated to have murdered his wife Maria Theresa Carlson. Farinas was later cleared after reports say Carlson committed suicide by jumping from the open window of their condominium unit.

We need to reserve judgement on this one and avoid speculations since the authorities are doing their jobs to get to the bottom of this very controversial incident.

First of all, I hate taking bloggers to task, on account that I’m a blogger.  I don’t want this to boil over to the kind of blog-troversy that’s starting to turn into a train wreck over at Reyna Elena’s blog.  As much as I respect Reyna, as much as I respect Patricio, and as much as I have nothing but respect to the Filipino blogging community…

I think that it borders on absolute bollocks – yes, bollocks - that we’re talking about the Failon shooting incident right now.  Hell, after this entry is over, I might as well take off my own boots and kick my ass for even writing about it.

When the American painter Andrew Wyeth was living in New England, he had a neighbor named Christina Olson, who suffered from a muscular disorder that paralyzed her lower body and turned her arms emaciated.  Christina didn’t want any help; for all her pain and agony, she did – and wanted to do – everything on her own.

Some say that Wyeth painted Christina’s World when he saw her trying to crawl back to her home, from the fields surrounding the Olson homestead.  How she got to the fields, nobody knows; all Wyeth saw was the woman crawling, dragging herself back to her house.  Owing to her condition and her stubbornness, there was no other choice for Christina but to crawl.

Not on her own two feet, but through her weakened hands and arms.  Christina struggled, but she wanted to get back home on her own.  She dragged herself through the field; clutching blades of grass, wounding her hands from pebbles and rough soil.  Her deformed body, supported by her twisted spine, moved along the terrain slowly.  Inch by inch, Christina Olson crawled back to her world.  The fields weren’t her place, but the house she was trying to reach was her universe.  Had she indeed been alone, had she been thrown out into harsher weather, and if she had a weaker spirit and resolve, she certainly would have expired right then and there in the knoll.

I guess no one is certain of how long it took – and how difficult it was – for Christina to crawl back to her house, but she wanted to make it there on her own.  Christina was too stubborn and too proud to be lifted back into her home by anyone.  All that stood between Christina and her home was a sloping field that would take any other able-bodied person no less than three minutes to traverse.