Sulo ng Pilipino

Monday, February 2, 2015

BS Aquino: 'USIP-sip'

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Sunday, January 25, 2015

Baby Brandon, Glyzelle and reality

Baby Brandon, Glyzelle and reality

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-26-2015 MON)

Last Friday three-year-old Brandon Emmanuel Lao, who suffered from a hole in his heart, along with pulmonary hypertension and a damaged left lung, died at the St. Luke’s Medical Center in Quezon City. Baby Brandon would have been just another statistic except for the fact that he was the baby at the crowd meeting with Pope Francis at the Mall of Asia Arena over a week ago selected by a Vatican security to be blessed by the pontiff.

According to Rappler, “It was a meeting that was never supposed to happen but Pope Francis’ encounter with 3-year-old Brandon gives hope and comfort to his parents, and maybe even the rest of the world.”

If only Baby Brandon did not die and lived to his fourth, twelfth, sixteenth, and even more birthdays, the Philippine and Catholic media would have most certainly proclaimed him year after year as “The Miracle” of the latest pontiff’s blessing and the hope to the world.

The local Roman Catholic Church, from the bishops down to the laity, would have also trumpeted this as evidence of the “special place” of the Philippines in the Christian world. But was that meeting of Brandon “never supposed to be” or was it a PR opportunity the Vatican staff are always alert to, which, unfortunately this time, did not end up a “miracle”?

Days after Baby Brandon was given a papal blessing, a former street child and ward of a Catholic community-run charity, 12-year-old Glyzelle Iris Palomar, one of the selected youth audience for the papal visit to the University of Santo Tomas, tearfully asked the pope, “Many children get involved in drugs and prostitution. Why does God allow these things to happen to us? The children are not guilty of anything.” The pope, in turn replied, “Let God surprise you,” after which he turned to the audience and said, “She is the only one who has put forward a question for which there is no answer and she was not even able to express it in words but rather in tears.”

Glyzelle was actually crystal clear in her words as she obviously had deep personal reflections of a fellow street child’s plight. It was the Pontiff who was flabbergasted, judging by his failure to comfort and teach. Perhaps in defense of this deflection, some would say, “But would a 12-year-old understand a serious explanation?” Glyzelle’s perceptivity would most certainly have allowed her to. Instead the pope told the audience, “I invite each one of you to ask yourselves, ‘Have I learned how to weep, how to cry when I see a hungry child, a child on the street who uses drugs, a homeless child, an abandoned child, an abused child, a child that society uses as a slave?’”

At my age, I have never, ever encountered a more obscurantist answer--never! Strangely, Francis did not appeal for reforms as people have come to expect, such as in this headline from the UK’s Catholic Herald of May 22, 2014: “Pope Francis warns of the dangers of ‘unbridled capitalism.’” So what cat got the pope’s tongue here?

There are so many evils of unbridled capitalism in the Philippines that have created uncounted numbers of Glyzelles in the country, such as the unbridled electricity industry profits destroying the economy and jobs and the capitalist entertainment culture of sex, crime, and violence despoiling the nation.

The Philippine Catholic Church has been silent on the massive profit gouging inflicting the highest power and water rates in Asia that the poor of this society can no longer afford. I have raised these issues since the late 1990s with church officials to no avail, from Bishops Bacani to Tobias (the latter of whom once agreed that action should be taken but then fell silent on it). A lay Catholic leader, incensed by the profit abuses, wanted to secure a time slot on Radio Veritas to hammer these issues but was told that one of the sacred cows of the radio network is this telecommunications advertiser that also owns a major power utility company. So there you have it--just learn to weep and cry.

The papal visit cost P200 million for security alone, enough for a year of public education for 15,000 children and for feeding 28,571 of the poorest families (as per the NSCB estimate of P7,000 per family) for a month. Three non-working holidays already cost P3.6 billion in economic losses as thousands upon thousands of workers lost billions in daily wages. But the worse impact has been cultural--where reality is swept under the rug, as street children were whisked to “resorts” and blissful insanity wafted even into erstwhile critical, progressive intelligentsias’ brains, so much so that after a week, news headlines still imagine or milk papal “assassination” stories for distraction.

Even if I stand alone, and I hope I’m not, the denunciation of such “nincom-popes” must be waged.

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Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Rockstar PR and cynicism

Rockstar PR and cynicism

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 01-19-2015 MON)

At our Sunday runners’ group breakfast at the Salcedo Market, a number of us had this to say about the Pope Francis media coverage: “Dozens of TV and radio ads punctuated each segment of the pope’s sermon; the telcos and privatized public utilities were hogging the limelight with the pope.” Another recounted his conversations with taxi drivers, one of whom reportedly said, “After the pope, corrupt, corrupt again,” referring to life in the Philippines. For my part, I wondered how much this rockstar tour with 50,000 police security et al. is costing us taxpayers.

It’s been months of PR hype and weeks of monomaniacal coverage for the pope, from his pre-arrival to his one-week stay, courtesy of the oligarchy-controlled Philippine media. Naturally, a “bandwagon effect” follows. This came after a “possessed” month of preparations and procession of the Black Nazarene as masses tried to rub towels on the icon to bless their increasingly sordid lives, where the only ascension to the heavens involves the price of basic utilities. Is it a coincidence that the MRT/LRT and tsunami of water rate hikes came at a time that these two high points of Catholic in the Philippines came in full swing, supposedly to drown out public protests?

For the Philippine Catholic hierarchy, the visit of the pope was a much needed shot in the arm after its debacles the past year, i.e. its defeat in the fight against the Reproductive Health (RH) Law. One would think: How could they have lost if God was on their infallible side? But the actual winners of that RH fight were not the pro-RH advocates either; it was the subsidiaries of the Carlyle group producing birth control devices. Of course, the total losers are the Filipino taxpayers who will have to shell out taxpayers’ money to fund the contraceptive devices and drugs, allocations from which politicians will get their share via a new system of “pork barrel.”

The proportion of Catholics among Filipinos, which used to be 85 percent, is now reported to go as low as 65 percent, even as the general proportion of Christian Filipinos (including adherents of sects like the Iglesia ni Cristo) may still be at 85 percent to 90 percent. Of course, “baptized Catholics” constitute 80 percent to 85 percent of the population since baptism remains to be a perfunctory practice among many Filipino families. There are, however, many deviations from mainstream Catholicism. A friend of mine, for instance, refers to himself as a “Born Again Catholic,” which he explains is more “evangelical” and “democratic” than catholic, which is still perplexing.

For sure, the mass religious gatherings have taken a minimal toll this year, with two dead at the Black Nazarene procession (a heart attack right on the Black Nazarene carriage and another crushed by either the carriage or under the feet of mesmerized devotees) and one death in Tacloban as hasty preparations there for the pope’s sermon caused part of the scaffoldings for the papal stage’s sound system came crashing down. But no matter the abbreviated Leyte trip due to threat of the approaching typhoon, last year’s “Yolanda” victims were just too good an international scene not to be taken advantage of.

Pope Francis created a global stir when asked of his reaction to the Charlie Hebdo incident. He said freedom of expression “has its limits,” likening the insult to faith to “a curse word against my mother,” upon which the offender “can expect a punch.” Whoa! Whatever happened to “turning the other cheek”? Was this then the justification for the Philippine Catholic Church’s cry for blood in calling for the jailing of Carlos Celdran (who damned the “Damasos” but not the Catholic faith)?

Actually, there is intense dissension in the Church today caused by Francis’ forcing of “reform” for the survival of Catholicism, which is in steep decline in Europe as well as in North and South America; and this is in contradiction to the conservative principles of “the Last Pope.”

But then I remember this from the 1970s rock opera “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” where the titular character exclaimed, “Why waste your breath moaning at the crowd? Nothing can be done to stop the shouting! If every tongue were stilled, the noise would still continue! The rocks and stones themselves would start to sing!”