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 20^th-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 And besides, martial rule is not only outdated and corny (as the French say, it’s “cornichon”)—but it also has no grace, no flourish—like Christian Bautista cavorting on the stage in a vein-popping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.

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