Tearjerker
Mike Myers to Ex-Girlfriend with a sinister-looking gift box in Wayne’s World: “If it’s a severed head, I would be very upset.”
Me to boob tube as the sinister-looking box belched, warmed and braced to serve me The Broadcast: “If it’s GMA saying ‘I’m so heartily sorry’ on national TV, I’d be very, very upset, sick to my stomach, acutely nauseous.”
And indeed, last night I was.
GMA is playing the emotion card because some smarty-pants in Malacanang finally admitted to the sodden truth that The Administration has run out of delectable political choices that it’s now banking on GMA’s very Achilles heel—Gloria trying to charm her way out of perpetual non-charm, wiggling through corny lines that were supposedly sincere. If that’s the frigging case, then The Administration is indeed in bad fucking shape—like Arlene Muhlach or Dabiana or Sharon Cuneta—finally collapsing on its own over-weight.
I can imagine the geniuses around GMA throwing in their cards, and finding each one short of an okay-enough solution:
Should we shoot Pimentel and gun down the rest of that rag-tag-but-pretending-to-be-united opposition? Nah, too bloody.
Should we finally amuse the leftists and give them a dose of martial rule? Nah, too copycat, too 20th-century. And besides, martial rule is not only outdated and corny (as the French say, it’s “cornichon”)—but it also has no grace, no flourish—like Christian Bautista cavorting on the stage in a vein-popping unwatchable attempt to ape Gary Valenciano—brutish, devoid of finesse, arms flailing in all directions like The Clown From Hell. If you have some piece of brain, on this day and age, you don’t resort to that.
I can imagine somebody—The Final Genius—throwing the card about Filipinos being emotional—let’s touch that throbbing, Kleenex-worthy nerve. Filipinos rarely think (after all, they voted for Erap and Noli and an entire den of buffoons and thieves)—Filipinos just cry and pray and cry, they just watch cheesy telenovelas and love getting emotionally choked on Mga Batang Yagit and Mga Anghel na Walang Langit, they just stage protest rallies left and right, they just feel their way through things instead of thinking methodically through them—oh my god, the “emotion card” might just work!
So GMA, in a rare eureka moment, pounds an alcogelled fist on the table and exclaims, “The hell you’re oh-so-right, Einstein!”
So there she was, GMA before the camera, probably trying to effect a tear but the goddamned tear wouldn’t just pop out of the corners of her eyes. She was “touching” the masses—although not in a Romy Nonong Jalosjos or a Michael Jackson way, mind you, but according to the subtle cues somebody like Charo Santos Concio of Maalaala Mo Kaya might have orchestrated.
But later, after watching and thinking about it, I’ve decided what GMA did—the apology—is a good card, after all.
I’m getting sick of this country’s habit of non-thinking, of whining, of yelping, of Oh-God-My-Poverty-Is-The Fault-Of-Those-Rich-Kids weltanschauung. I’m getting sick of watching college kids in their naivete being made to believe that an ideology as dead as Charlie Chaplin or as outmoded as La Suerte’s cigarette products or Dolphy’s kind of humor still matters in an age dominated and run by The Martini Effect and Personal Media and not anymore by good old-fashioned Plow and the proverbial bleeding-heart Peasant.
When they speak of dire predictions of impending martial rule, the leftists and their poseurs sound so agitated and excited that they actually seem to be hoping for it—all probably to finally get ample justification for all those gnashing of teeth, whining, waving of silk-screened banners under the red hot tropical sun. Probably so that they can finally walk around, after years of parroting tired lines, of disappointments, of political doomsdays missing the target date and target places—and tell their bourgeois friends “See, I told you she’s gonna do it.”
While in other countries, the height of coolness is founding a high-tech startup or coming up with an idea that they could sell to the world, in this country, all our brilliant kids’ idea of “coolness” or being “progressive” is attending an LFS meeting or taking to the streets and learning which is the best angle to hold a megaphone. No wonder we are so “revolutionary”—and so fucking poor.
There’s a protest rally for every public holiday, every government decision, every finger that got bruised. Protesters of all stripes in this country are like Mammachi in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things: Doing it all and weeping for the pain of it not out of love but by sheer force of habit–which cheapens and waters down whatever intention that supposedly fires every staged rally.
So I’m oddly glad GMA did it. I would be even gladder if that little stunt actually shuts up the protesters (wishful thinking, I think this is) and cuts the fantasies that feed the delusions of the so-called opposition—united only in their common greed and common personal scores to settle.
I hope the next thing GMA would do is rounding up these kids and sending them to Robert Kyosaki’s seminars—to knock some financial sense into them so that the next time there’s a price increase, these kids and their parents and their “cadres” would be so in-tune and sane enough to realize it’s a global thing that no government can give a magic pill to, that the fucking simple point is proactively grappling with these things with a better grip on one’s personal finances. That there are no class struggles, only personal ones, and they can be overcome if one would only be so willing to engage in the backbreaking, ganglia-burning burden of actually thinking.
Maybe GMA should call Garci again–but this time, to have him invite somebody like Martin Sorrel over to Manila–to give us a taste of the long view, and shake up our provincialism and small thinking.
Uncategorized | Comments (4)
Memory
There was this French film I saw some years ago. I couldn’t
remember the title, the director, and the names of the actors, mainly because
all of them were in hard-to-pronounce French. All I remember is that it was a
story about two lovers grappling with the tremendous dilemma of memory. If love
is true and pure and eternal, how does it measure when you lose your memory?
When you no longer can remember anything, even your own name?
The woman has a degenerative disease that gets worse and
kills her short-term memory. Her memory and all the things she remembers—even
the identity of her lover—is like a carpet being rolled up, or a star imploding
into nothingness. She lives out her days posting her notes all over the place, on
the refrigerator, on the doorknob, on the alarm clock. Notes about her daily
schedule, what she does at this and that hour, what she buys for breakfast,
which of the two toothbrushes were hers. All she remembers is that she is in
love with this man—this man she finds silently crying at night and has the
courage to tell her her stew tastes great even if it tastes like gutter
slush—but even that, that last thing, is fading in her mind. The feeling of
lostness, of blackness, descends more and more on her each day like a thick, impenetrable
blanket. The dilemma is so massive that the little things and great sacrifices
they do to keep their love alive appear so pathetic and small. Until one
morning, he finds her in the middle of a courtyard in the rain, her memory—and everything
that mattered in their lives together—gone forever. The End. Or so that’s how I
remember it.
In Stephen King’s novel Dark
Tower, in Book One, the Gunslinger asks Brown, a man who lives amid the
tumbleweeds in the desert, if he believes in the afterlife.
Brown nods, munching the beans and the corn. The beans,
Stephen King says, are like bullets in the Gunslinger’s mouth. Afterlife? Brown nods and says, I think
this is it.
Some months ago, when somebody asked if I believed in hell,
I told her, Yes, I do. Hell is here (pointing at my heart), hell is here,
(pointing at my head). Hell is you and I, living together with our desperate,
separate, unbridgeable confusion.
Hell is this narrow space through which we all walk and
dance with our spikes and blades and other deadly things that we hate but need
to live with to survive our days. Hell is the kid outside the glass wall, peering
wistfully at the warm, happy party inside.
That is hell, and it exists in jagged corners and small
edges of all our lives. It happens here. Now. There’s nothing supernatural about it.
As Stephen King’s Brown said, the two of them eating beans
in the middle of the desert: I think this is it.
In Ynarritu’s film 21
Grams, the thesis revolves around the fact that we all lose 21 grams of
body weight when we die. Everyone. 21 grams. No more, no less. Years ago,
somebody told me that that 21 grams
was the soul, departing. Yet, somebody also told me (this one’s smarter) that
it can be explained by Einstein’s e=mc2. You make the right transpositions,
make it mass equals energy over velocity of light squared. Or to put it simply,
energy is also mass. When we die, we lose mass because we finally lose the body’s energy—we lose
all the minute electricity that used to power our muscles, heart, neurons. All
that minute electricity, upon dying, is the
21 grams that everyone loses. It’s not the soul, my friend said. Don’t be so simple.
But this is besides the point, the film tells us. The point
is that when you lose 21 grams, what do you really lose? It’s equal to a stack
of nickels, a bar of chocolate, Ynarritu says—but it’s also somebody’s world collapsing, fates realigned, stories cut short. When that happens, what is it really are we measuring? What happens, what
is gained, and ultimately, what is lost?
When you die, or you lose your memory, what is really lost?
Love, for one, becomes a dried-out corpse, a joke that’s no longer funny. Hell,
heaven, love, hatred, memory—all those absolute human reasons and absolute
truths, they are matter, Yossarian realized in Heller’s Catch-22. Matter. Garbage. Things that rot, crumble, scatter in the
air, vanish. When you lose the material foundation, all those supposed
“eternal” truths fall down like a stack of cards.
Brown says, "I think this is it." I can imagine the Gunslinger, who has seen it all when the world moved on and seemed different, and who has grown to realize that both the dreadful and joyful things around him are threads of a story the Man In Black is weaving, I can imagine him nodding in assent.
I also think this is it, the Gunslinger would have said. All else is shit.
