Turn me on, Dead Woman

There’s this thing that keeps nagging at me.

 

What if there were no “Hello, Garci” tape?

 

Instead, what if there were a video footage of GMA
and Garci in a swanky five-star hotel room, and the words coming from the room
were not “Hello, Garci,” but “Yes! Yes! Yes! Garci, oh yes! Give it to me, Garci!
Give it to me! Give it to me hard,
you bad, bad boy!

 

Sihnong nanay
moooooh?

 

That would be a truly grotesque footage, worthy of web hosting
space on WhereisGod.com. GMA would vanish from her seat faster than you can say
“Bienvenido Jesus Torres.”

 

But no, we don’t have that. We don’t have that kind of
certainty. Instead, we have this little “Hello, Garci” tape, this little clay
of a soundbyte that people from all caves mangled into ghoulish proportions. We
have this “Hello, Garci” tape that’s so corny but still enough to turn the past
many months to culminate into the passion play of yesterday’s Edsa
celebrations.

 

My country, the Philippines,
turns me on so much I get a hard-on each time I watch local news. Everybody’s
passion just gets to you. But there’s a point where you just stop caring.
There’s a morning when you just wake up, take a careless look at the TV, and
mutter to yourself,

 

“Fuck you all.”

 

Right about now, I just want to give all these people
exactly what they want. They know the solution, right? People like Cory know so much about “supreme sacrifice,”
right?

 

So, this is an open plea to Gloria: For Mang Pandoy’s
sake, why don’t give them the fucking helm?

 

But please only ask one
little condition: that each one of them—every single one of them—is fed to
angry African ants if they’d perform as badly as the buffoons they’re dying to
replace.

 

Then it would be the turn of people like me to sit back
and see how they would do it. How these people—all these people who care so much about the country’s future
they’re willing to forget taking a bath and brushing their teeth and giving
their mothers a flower on Valentine’s day—would turn around the economy in a matter
of months or, say, five years.

 

I’d love to see how they’d “lower” the prices of fuel. How
they’d give across-the-board increases to whatever levels of salaries our
workers demand.

 

I’d love to see them do it because it would be like
watching a magician pull a brontosaurus out of a hat.

 

But then somebody told me yesterday that true change would
not happen without the participation of everybody.

 

I just stared at him and said, “Exactly.”

 

This reminds me so much of Hamas after they won the Palestinian
Central Elections last December. They won after years and years of playing the
gadfly, stinging (or blasting) the secular Palestinian government while, on the
side, trying to erase Israel off the map. After Hamas won, Scot Adams joked, the top members probably
huddled in a small room and muttered, “Oh, crap, we won. Now what?”

 

Yesterday, the whole Edsa thing was turned into a Grand
Martyr Generator: everybody who got a wound, truncheoned, and arrested would later
go around telling friends and admirers their war stories.

 

Hey, Ma, look! I lost
a tooth!

 

I had a chat with somebody last night who actually went
there and asked him, What is wrong with you guys? Did you really go there and
expect to find a phalanx of smiling and happy dispersal police?

 

Did you really think you could provoke the beejesus out of
these already nervous policemen and expect nothing in return but a benevolent
nod, a naughty I-saw-your-peepee wink?

 

And did everybody really expect that the incumbent
government, after the past many months of filtering all the rumors of
destabilization and political coup, would sit at home and watch old reruns of John en Marsha?

 

Now, the media and everybody’s cousin are climbing the
towers and banging the gongs because “it’s martial law,” as if everybody’s
surprised, as if nobody ever felt they had it coming.

 

So this is a plea to Gloria: Give them whatever in hell
they want, and let’s see.

 

Give them what they want, then we’ll see.

 

And the truth is, my heart is bleeding over it, knowing
fully well how our deepest shame, our most painful lesson will always hit home—not
out of a lightning strike, but on the dullest of days,

 

the day you get what you want.

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