Primetime Soap

It’s not hard to imagine that the people who actually reach the summit
of Mt. Everest experience a brief moment of crystal-clear lucidity.
It’s perversely easy for me to see them standing there in the middle of
all that ice, holding their country’s flag, then that crazy question
suddenly popping in their heads:

“What the fuck am I doing here?”

“Why
am I standing here, holding this stupid goddamn flag, at the summit of
some goddamn mountain? What’s my point? What have I achieved? What have
I solved?”

Truly frightening, bothering questions. Especially if you’d remember
you’d risked life and limb just to get to that point. Especially if
you’d peel off all the layers of “motherhood statements” politicians
back home had been slathering on the climb. You listen to them and
you’d be seduced into thinking that climbing this mountain is all worth
it; after all, in a country with almost no staggering scientific or
cultural achievement, we’ve always been edgy to glorify every bit of
scrap that comes our way, even pedestrian ones.

I have nothing
against climbing mountains per se, but I have something about people
climbing a really tall mountain and not admitting they’re doing it just
for the heck of it, and not for some country’s glory.

I’ve
always maintained that mountain climbing in itself is patently, baldly
stupid. In my personal book, I can always agree to climb something that
might kill me—but only if you’d show me the point. I won’t climb that
just for the heck of it. At least, give me a goal besides merely
reaching the summit and skirting avalanches. You want to reach the
summit, for example, because you’re contacting alien life forms from
Cygni 66. Or because you’d get your grandfather’s millions only if you
could prove you could bring home Jimmy Hoffa’s frozen dick.

On
the other hand, I think it’s equally perverse to make that climb and
rationalize it to death; as if these climbers are in a panic to lend
their act some semblance of a panacea, to dress it up to make it seem
like a solution to some unbridgeable abyss, some impossible problem.

Why
couldn’t they just do a George Mallory and admit they’re climbing it
“because it’s there,” period. Why do we always feel like we owe it to
some invisible majority to rationalize every stupid, personal, and
selfish thing we do and embellish it with cloying lines like, “We’re
doing it for the country.”

Come on. Although I’m sure there’s
somebody somewhere who would be glad to buy that crap, I’d still choose
the classic route: Sell that to the marines.

And why am I going ballistic on a Wednesday afternoon?

Because
last week, three Filipinos reached the summit of Mt. Everest amid much
fanfare. And although the whole event was not as dramatic as the TV
networks would have wanted it to seem, I believe the truth is more
colorful.

The first two climbers were backed by a local network
called ABS-CBN; the third one, Garduce, was backed by a rival network
called GMA.

I’d often find myself laughing whenever the two TV
stations would report on their bets in the early days of the
preparation. ABS-CBN had my favorite hobby-horse, Abner Mercado,
reporting from Nepal; and GMA had Jiggy Manicad. The funny thing was,
for ABS-CBN, GMA’s Garduce didn’t exist; nobody would even mention the
guy. I don’t remember Abner Mercado even saying something as bland as,
“And here’s the latest news on the ‘other’ climber: Garduce was caught
wearing split-crotch panties!"

On the other hand, for GMA, the
group called First Philippine Expedition was a funny myth you told your
campmates around a bonfire to warm things up.

Simply put, the two networks mutually denied the efforts of each other.
If that’s not ugly, revolting, and cheap, I don’t know what is. In
fact, they only began “acknowledging” each other’s boys when Oracion,
for instance, reached the summit first.

Besides, I really don’t see the point of all the fuss. If a man without legs could climb it
in a flourish, what are our three Filipinos (one of which is called
“robot” because, friends say, he’s “superhumanly indefatigable”) and
their backers so happy about?

If you took a knife and cut the
whole thing down to size, what you’d see are the two rival networks
pushing these happy people around as part of their little “ratings
war.” But I have to be clear that I have no problem with Big Corp
“pushing pawns”—because if I’d work for them, I’d also do the same; I
have no conscience. But what I’m harping on is that they could have
done it better; they could have injected a little more drama.

Here’s what I think should have happened with the Everest adventure:

Garduce
reaches the summit as the third one to do so. He’s already secretly
bitter about it, but it turned out to be worse because upon reaching
the mountaintop, he found a small note from the two ABS-CBN boys that
says, “Garduce! You’re Third! LOL!!!”

So Garduce fumes and
climbs down faster than an avalanche. When he finds Oracion and Ermata
at base camp laughing about “that note” and the fact that nobody really
cares about third placers, Garduce totally loses his marbles. He looks
around, sees the legless New Zealand guy
holding his spare metal leg, grabs the metal leg, and uses it to slug
ABS-CBN’s boys in the head. Abner Mercado, seeing that GMA’s Jiggy
Manicad is about to join in the fray armed with his rolled-up
“reporter’s notebook,” jumps on the whole bunch and uses his full
weight to trap everybody under his armpits.

Everybody realizes that violence is bad when they all get a mighty whiff of Abner’s evil effluvium.

The
end. They all go home to meet with Carlo Caparas for the movie rights.
I leave it to Carlo’s genius to come up with an amazing movie title. Or
maybe the two networks’ hacks could turn it into primetime soap, which
I think is great, although it’s tough guessing where they’d fit Angel
Locsin in the whole thing.

Uncategorized |