They say that when you fold one thousand cranes, your wish will come true. While I don’t seem to be a big believer in wishes, I really do. I also believe very much in the power of magic… yeah, I can be hopelessly romantic and naive at times. Sometimes, a little bit of magic – and some wishful thinking – is all it takes to make this world a better place.
I’m folding one thousand paper cranes for clean, honest, and fair elections in 2010.
Cute. Naive. Hah. Humbug… but I believe in wishes.
I am simply not that kind of man.
Ramon Tulfo, in his latest opinion piece for The Philippine Daily Inquirer, implores and exhorts us to “understand Chavit Singson.” The news goes that Chavit beat up his live-in partner due to her being unfaithful. Those are things best left to the courts to decide, but what really irks me – as a Filipino male – was when Mr. Tulfo has this to say:
I’m not saying he’s right, but we should understand him in the context of our macho society.
Any other Filipino man who caught his wife or partner in bed with another man would have acted in the same way Singson did. Or even worse.
I am not writing this to judge Chavit – again, the courts should and will decide whether Chavit is guilty or not – but I am writing this as a dissenting opinion to Mr. Tulfo’s generalization. As a Filipino male, I am simply not that kind of man to beat up a woman.
I don’t believe in search engine results being a determining factor in your influence in the blogosphere (and once again, I hate that word), but there’s nothing wrong with some vanity searches every now and then to inflate your own ego. We all need it. Heck, some people do it for the sake of ego inflation and end up proving nothing.
At one point in your life, you probably already Googled your name. I Google my name and get results for impeachment complaints and writers’ workshops. A friend of mine says that your existence depends on your searchability, so I guess I cannot cast doubt on my existence anymore. Not that I have it made, that I’m an “Internet celebrity,” or that I’m “famous,” though.
In the grand scheme of things, at least in my world, that still doesn’t count for a lot: I don’t earn anything from my blog anyway. As far as random ego-boosting is concerned, though, I can take pride in searchability from absurdity.
Let me share some of them with you in this week’s X-List of weird search results.
When Senator Benigno Aquino III became an apparent Presidentiable, many people have considered his decision to go on a retreat as “gimmickry,” not the least of which was Malacañang. Of course it’s a gimmick; as gimmicks go, it invokes the mythical and the literary. Like the temptation of Christ, for example. Or the Buddha’s quest for the middle way. Or Jurgis Rudkus hoboing it in the American farm towns (no, not the game, but Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) before he makes it back to the Chicago stockyards and discovers socialism.
Or even Shaider entering the Strange Realm to kick Fumma ass while controlling Vavilos… not that there’s anything wrong with it, though.
A friend of mine says that if anything, we should tolerate and accept corruption. Corruption is so endemic, so intertwined, with our lives that we probably cannot exist without it. Our way of life is so attuned to corruption that it has become normal for many of us.
Minor acts of corruption often give way to bigger ones; when we chastise an elected official for kabalastugan and kalokohan,we’re all forced to look inward and think about how much we do contribute to a culture of corruption. We really can’t cast stones, if that’s the spirit of good citizenship.
My friend is right, in a way: if a majority of us commit small degrees of corruption, then larger acts of corruption can always be justified as normal. Someone buying large properties abroad and refusing to declare them, for example, will always be framed by people who pay off fixers at a government bureau. Wala talagang malinis. So a cycle of institutionalized corruption continues.
For the first time in quite a while, a bout of temporary insanity forces me to quit whining, think of solutions, and work within the box.
An interesting remark, indeed; while many are glossing and beaming over Mar Roxas’ “big boy” decision to give way for a Noynoy Aquino run in 2010, the reality has to set in: that despite whatever nobility there is in giving way, the dynamic remains: we face another shot at a second-generation President. The very thing some of us deride – dynastic politics – may very well be here, in the less acerbic form many of us were taught to despise in introductory political science.
We vote on faith, as many political commentators write. While we want to justify our votes on the basis of convoluted – perhaps even contrarian and to a certain extent cacophonous – claims, voting is an act of confession. We confess to our faith in a candidate. There’s competence and there’s cheating, but faith is that one thing that keeps us going to the precinct come election season. I guess that despite everything you can lob at Noynoy now, we’re pinning our hopes on the past.
Not on what happened before, but what could have happened. That, I think, is who Noynoy Aquino would be if he chooses to be the Liberal Party’s standard bearer: a candidate of faith.
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