Bad shape | SunStar Cebu | Feb. 16, 2010

The two survey leaders talked about the fiscal deficit that will come after our favorite president shall have stepped down and will probably even become House speaker. Manny Villar says the deficit will bloat to P300 billion or about “3.5 percent of GDP.” Noynoy Aquino pegged it at P272.5 billion or “4.1 percent of GDP.” Hold your breath because that’s not what I’ll talk about.

It is pork, which, under my or our current state, is the root of all evil. It is not money. It is that sleek, shivery sliver on your plate. A friend has a name for it, “pork shake,” eloquently illustrated by that ominous morsel of humba shaking at every turn of your lazy suzanne. At other times, it comes as that scheming layer of white underneath your crispy lechon. I don’t know why, the craving for that fatty part could come as acquired taste, much like with sashimi—the taste buds eventually liking the erstwhile incomprehensible gustatory anarchy excited by raw fish and the wasabi. But pork fats are simply, dizzyingly divine on top of a hot haul of rice.

Talisay City, in the Joavanese era, still finds its redemption through lechon. As the food critic Anthony Bourdain said, the lechon is simply “the best pork in the world.” Better than Mexico’s, he said, although Mexicans can very well ignite their pork with fiery jalapeño. But our lechon, in the realm of the senses, is incontestably mystical. In the hollow of its belly transpires the miracle at every turn of the bamboo skewer, it is as though the bamboo itself is secretly exuding the ghosts of Malakas and Maganda into the hog’s fibers and unleashed a brand new creation story. It makes you dizzy.

Indeed, because dizzy is what you will feel at the first instance of reality check compressed in a little document your nurse will hand you. Just last week, I had my first dose of meteorite crashing into my oblivious eating habits. My sugar shot up to borderline and my cholesterol level had the wallop of Mike Tyson. You want political perspective? It’s like looking at a bloated fiscal deficit after an excess of pork. The karmic chain does not exempt physiology, and I hope the same goes, too, to a presidency.

And so there are cutbacks since then. Somebody said a diet is the penalty we pay for exceeding the feed limit. “If it tastes good,” advises one cardiologist, “spit it out.” Does this mean it will all be downhill from here? Not exactly, and while I was plotting out a regimen on the way to the office, I saw Joel Garganera, although for one moment I thought I saw Usain Bolt on P. del Rosario St. in full running gear. Joel, godsend, reinforced the idea, plus here’s colleague Max Limpag, persistent seller of the couch-to-5K formula. So maybe, one of these days, I hope I’ll run out of excuses and finally tread the miles. It’s one fighting chance against blood sugar and cholesterol, certainly. “To run against pork” sounds very political, indeed.

It’s all a test for one’s conscience. To milk or not to milk the country dry, that is the question. Are you going to agree to an immense annual budget and leave the next president with a severe ulcer? Sorry, but let’s get back to my current state.

It’s about a week now with no red meat and no sweet things. I used to coax a friend into partaking on a piece of cake and pass a jeer that should his sugar level rise, he could sing “This time I’ll be sweeter…” Now the joke’s on me, and the doctor said white bread, for which I’m such a sucker, is a no-no, too.

Woody Allen says that when we lose twenty pounds, we could be losing the twenty best pounds we have, that which contain “our genius, our humanity, our love and honesty.” Well, that’s poundage, not blood sugar or cholesterol. Besides, I don’t have the genius. I wanted to run last Sunday, but ended up with a half-pounder burger instead. It had nothing to do with the Philippine economy.

(januarinbox@yahoo.com)

Bobos | SunStar Cebu | Feb. 8, 2010

BOBOS is a portmanteau of bourgeois and bohemian. The term was coined by David Brooks in his book “Bobos in Paradise,” in which he tries to talk about the new breed of ‘90s yuppies. These are hybrid corporate upper class people, he said, who have the ‘60s idealism and the self-interest of the ‘80s.

By some stretch of the imagination, you can conjure up an image of a Beatnik in tuxedo—top-earners with the sensibility of a hippie. How is that possible? Brooks describes these people as indulging extravagantly in “inconspicuous consumption” (posh dwellings and profligate waterbeds), but at the same time deeply sympathetic with the working class. These people see money not as an end but a means to achieving something.

This new upper class, says Brooks, does not disdain mainstream society and are tolerant of the views of others. You’ll perhaps find these guys, sporting a Rolex, in an FGD segueing a presentation into an oratory on poverty reduction or saltwater intrusion.

Brooks says the trend is all about changing tastes and preferences of a preexisting upper class, and not a descendent of any social mobility. Brooks, of course, is describing an American phenomenon, although it’s curious if some similar pattern can be seen in our country—emergent and affluent yuppies who are as invariably animated about the future of the country as they are about a new car.

This was what came to my mind when I read about Michael Macapagal, who was introduced by journalist Lito Gutierrez of PDI very interestingly in his story’s lead: “Snug in the supple seat of his gleaming milk-white E Class Mercedes and tapping on the walnut and leather trim of its steering wheel to the beat of ‘80s soft-rock ditties, Michael Macapagal is a picture of the fulfillment of the American dream.”

This “stateside” Macapagal leaves the care of his escrow business to his wife in the US, and heads home to the Philippines to campaign, no, not for Arroyo, a relative, but for Noynoy Aquino. He plans to raise $2 million from Filipino friends in the US for his candidate’s campaign.

I can’t tell though if we have the likes of Michael manning the corporate skyscrapers in our own neighborhood while looking out the window and be moved by the stark contrast outdoors. I can’t tell, too, if we have our own version of Brooks’ bobos in our backyard—‘70s liberal and ‘80s rich.

There was a thread on Facebook that was launched by a comment against a presidential candidate. It was instigated by a left-leaning user and the thread, in fact, fell heavily towards that orientation. After reading all the comments, however, I noticed something.

There was palpable generation gap—the younger activists and those who have had their time in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The younger ones defended to the death Satur Ocampo’s decision to be under Manny Villar’s camp. The older ones criticized just that.

I will leave a fellow columnist who is lettered on the topic to give you context if he wants to. I find the differences curious though.

What could have changed the mindsets, transformed the preferences of the precursors? Could they be the local evolution of the bobos—the ‘70s, ‘80s front-liners who have gotten comfy mainstream, mellowed by family and time and now stand on balanced ground? “I’m voting again after 12 years,” a friend says, and he isn’t alone in saying that. “But I’m not voting for Satur Ocampo,” he says. To think that he was hard-line picket vanguard in his youth, it comes as a surprise. Has he read a better version of history?

I noticed not a few old-guards, former warriors coming out of their cocoons this season, mobilizing an old spirit. “All we need is an honest man for a president,” I heard one say, “We can take care of the country.”

The Fly | SunStar Cebu | Feb. 5, 2010

So there we were in some cramped nook trying to understand how this PCOS machine works. I could not concentrate. I was looking at the sample ballot, a card roughly longer than your legal-sized bond paper. Anyone who had taken a licensure exam would fall into a déjà vu. It looked like the answer sheet that compressed your entire college life in exchange for a small ID from PRC. But it was not what diverted my imagination. It was something else.

Looking at the machine, I imagine the 1986 Goldblum movie “The Fly.” In case Dolphy had bungled your memory lately, the plot had a scientist experimenting on a machine capable of what he called “teleportation.” It was supposed to transport a person electronically from point A to B. No sweat.

Just as my imagination was going through “The Fly’s” plot, the Smartmatic rep explained that the machine is so programmed to err on the side of safety. It was taught taste, meaning it knows fine dining it won’t overeat when the voter over-votes. It spits out your ballot if you treat it like a coloring book. You only fill a hole for each position, and the intensity of fill has a certain threshold for the machine to count it.

Does the machine have a USB port or something, I’d have wanted to ask. The machine will use the three major mobile networks to transmit results and I thought that if they’ll do that, it might need those USB dongles like how you use your Globe Tattoo or Smart Bro. If it’s built-in, you’d have a modem that transmits to three network options? I simply missed that part about transmission. If the machine has any portal at all, will it be possible anyone can feed a virus or a program to rig the results? I understand “encryptions,” but I also know how feeble they can be in the face of a clever virus. I remember Onel de Guzman, the diminutive college boy who fed a network worm that ate up about $5.5B in damages in major countries in 2000.

My mind flew again to “The Fly”: The scientist Brundle tells the journalist before he fed himself into the pod, “Don’t be afraid.” But something goes wrong with the experiment. A fly finds its way into the portal and is sucked into the circuits along with the human. A mutation takes place, although it is to be felt gradually later by Brundle. He notices changes and keeps himself in isolation. He develops fly-like traits, throwing up digestive enzymes into his food and leaps around and clings to walls and ceilings. Finally, the pregnant wife dreams she bore a maggot.

The thought of a maggot brought me back to the Smartmatic rep who at that point already sounded too certain about the machine and some parts of the room too sold out with the idea.

I thought that if the machine is spic-and-span a work of art, then there’s nothing to worry about. The training part for teachers may not even take an entire day; teaching a bunch of eggheads a lesson in math is definitely more complicated than learning to operate the PCOS machine. I can now hear the Smartmatic guy telling this bunch of journalists, “Don’t be afraid.”

What I am afraid, however, is when the president we have chosen mutates into a maggot with a severe propensity for flightiness. A candidate shows just such trait, and it’s scary. When you spend a billion to campaign, it’s like the fly spewing digestive enzymes to dissolve its food. In the movie “The Fly,” after the scientist makes the assurance that things will be okay, the journalist replies, “No. Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Ship of fools | Sun.Star Cebu | Feb. 2, 2010

1. WE stopped at Park Mall and walked all the way from the parking lot to the gate facing the CICC. When we were about to get out, we spotted Bert Emphasis. I told my friend we should say “Mano po,” but we were in a hurry and could be forgiven if we forego with manners. Already, there was a throng building up right at the gate, some wearing yellow, some green, some blue, and red.

2. We scaled the elevation leading up to the CICC entrance, thinking someone with arthritis will have an uphill battle. Do you mean the elections? No, but I must have, subliminally. We didn’t have a ticket, so we looked around for anyone who could possibly let us in. Some Chinese-looking man stood near the entrance, so we approached him and told him we didn’t have a ticket. He looked at us for a few seconds, groped into his jacket’s secret pocket and drew out a blue ticket. We said thank you while his face still sported an amused look. He was probably thinking he was just conned by two gutsy terrorists.

3. The left door led to a cordoned path to a room that had a widescreen in front. On the glass door a sign read: “Supporters, please proceed this way.” I was thinking if it was the proper door for us, but it didn’t ask for any ticket. We figured maybe we could just proceed the other way and present our ticket at the appropriate entrance. We could feign innocence and lie about being neutral. We took the escalator and saw the entrance for us, VIPs I supposed already by virtue of the blue ticket. “Please keep your tickets, sir, for the mock elections,” some lady wearing the Ateneo Business School told us. Okay, and I said to myself maybe they should just raffle off a plane ticket to Nigeria or something.

4. So we found ourselves in a big room, and host Bunny Pages was already explaining what was going to happen that afternoon. “Cebu’s elite are all here,” some reporter behind said. True, indeed, it felt like you were in a cocktail party minus the, well, cocktail. Nobody, of course, came in a cocktail dress. A quick survey would make you think you were in a salad bowl with a good dose of leafy veggies, with a sprinkling of cheese and carrot cubes. “Choices and Voices” was the show’s name. “It sounds so gay,” I told my friend.

5. In came the candidates. Noynoy Aquino came first, and there was good applause. I think Erap Estrada came next, and then Manny Villar, who was ambushed by some supposed fans for a photo opportunity. “That fan’s planted,” someone protested from behind, and he was wearing a green shirt. Dick Gordon and Eddie Villanueva walked in and the applause came in trickle. In came Gilbert Teodoro and there was wild cheering from the girls in many parts of the hall.

6. In the forum, Erap—deliberately or not—provided the comic relief. I don’t know if someone was directing the cameras, but they caught the former president in various awkward moments. For one moment, I thought it was rather cruel, but Erap seemed to love it. Good for him. “Now, to answer your question,” he said, but this was on the last second of his three-minute chance.

7. When the boy Trevor asked them how they intend to help those kids sticking their famished faces on his car’s window, the candidates gave their answers. I thought that someone with the savvy will level with Trevor and answer his question in his own terms. Forget the audience, talk to the boy!

8. Anyway, the forum ended and we did cast our ballot. Gibo won and you’d hear all those administration supporters gloating about the results.

9. Around this time, many of the businessmen, in another part of the city, was wolfing on P5,000-worth bowl of porridge. The money goes to a candidate’s campaign kitty.

10. So we went out of CICC and saw the poor crowd waving their placards and banners. It was an entirely different ballgame outside the ship of fools.

Chinese food | Meanwhile | SunStar Cebu | Jan. 31, 2010

SO I found myself one day with a Chinese-speaking clique partaking what could be the best pata tim I’ve ever tasted. The chef, a quiet fellow, sat across me, exuding a kind of mysticism present only among mortals who have the world’s best-kept secrets in their custody. He’s over seventy years old, said a seatmate, but he has to leave us to whip up some feast for us.

Pata tim is a kind of enlightenment after three meticulous steps, each of them having its crucial seconds when one can seize the right spirit and flavor. Cooking is no different from meditation, and spices and herbs are your keys to the universe. Done right, a dish could be the oozing Milky Way on a platter. When you eat, you’d feel the Emersonian “I become part and parcel of the universe” thing.

So this pata tim prepared for us by this septuagenarian mystique was simply cosmic, and to take it in bearable morsels, you have to tuck it in a pao, a bun that can pass for an angel’s pillow. A bit later, I realized this was the same chef whose great cooking I haved tasted in a famous restaurant when I was a kid. He had retired, possibly passing on bits of his secrets to younger cooks.

The circle spent the next hour talking about their favorite presidential candidate. “He’s a regular guy,” one said. He told me about that one Friday when he was with him on a very late night. “He told me he missed his bed and his sando that had holes on them, that was all he talked about, very down-to-earth,” he said. “You see, that’s the guy who doesn’t need so much, simple, and that’s how I know that this man is not the kind who’d steal our taxes.”

He was talking about Noynoy Aquino. This was the best quote he got from Noynoy, “Pasindi nga.” He was then holding his cigarette. Another in the group, one of the more active leaders in Cebu’s SME organizations, recalled Noynoy arriving at a forum venue and saw a glass of soft drink on the table before him. “Sa ‘kin ba ‘to?” He said yes, and Noynoy drank the whole glass and said, “Nauhaw ako.”

I took the knife and dug into the tender pork, the cut bringing forth a gushing of rich brown sauce that tasted like the history of China. With that in the pocket of a pao, I felt the succulence of a country without Arroyo. The business sector, he said, simply wants fair game. “That’s why we’re for him,” he said. “And these chambers are actually a minority.”

You do not, of course, measure a candidate’s worth by how he misses his sandos with holes or how he gulps a glassful of Coke. Worth, however, boils down to a candidate’s humanity. While all the other candidates are busy trying to play God and Superman, here’s one who kept his humanity with unfazed modesty.

I want to vote for somebody I can talk to, who doesn’t give me bull. I remember that one radio program where Leo Lastimosa, after an interview with Noynoy, said his reservations for him was reduced to 10 percent. He said that, off-the-air, the man was brutally frank, which is to say he’s not one who’d say one thing and mean something else.

But I was there to listen to this clique as we feasted on pata tim. There were attempts, but no cook in town has quite captured the taste of this hefty feast. This is a classic unto itself, stuffed with the spirit of meticulous tradition and history's greats. Oh, such could be the richness of people power.

Unscrupulous | Meanwhile | SunStar Cebu | Jan. 26, 2010

I DON'T mind singing his campaign jingle in the john, which is what usually happens first thing in the mornings when we’re usually autistic. I believe some of my friends also find themselves singing his jingle, too, while sashaying into the toilet. A classmate in college used to sing REM's “This one goes out to the one I love” while relieving his bowel of last night’s binge. This time though, there’s this one persistent campaign jingle that tops his toilet repertoire.

What should be in a jingle that makes it easy to remember, I ask a friend who knows a thing or two about music. My friend explains that it has something to do with the simplicity of the tune, when the notes are not too jumpy, something like a plateau sloping gradually only on three levels—like do-re-mi or mi-re-do. It’s the usual, simplistic pattern of pop songs, my friend says, that makes them easy to recall and really stick in the head like Bert’s wig. “Who’s Bert?” I ask. “I don’t know,” my friend says, “Ernie’s partner? In Sesame Street?” Uh ok.

My friend takes a pause and, as if some shining apparition fell before him, says, “It’s much like nursery rhymes, they’re simple and children can easily pick them up.” I see. So I got his explanation, and I go about my day feeling enlightened. But the day ends, and there is something else. On the first flight of stairs, I am singing the jingle again. Ah-ha, so there it is—children. The jingle, or the TV ad, comes across as a nursery rhyme—like Jack en Poy, or Monkey-monkey or Ambuchiki. Although, Ambuchiki is more like a battle-cry against Chip Tsao.

The supposed candidate wriggles his butt in between the children and sits with them while they chant his name. Its creative pool probably thinks it’s a stroke of genius, but that’s the price for selling your soul to the devil—one’s work becomes dispassionate, devoid of soul, lacking subtlety, and above all dishonest.

So what comes to my mind watching that ad? It reminds me of those manipulative protest marchers who would put children at the frontlines supposedly as shield. It reminds me of Middle East terrorists who would plant children on potential targets to soften an offensive. That’s what the campaign ad is like; it feeds innocent children into the mouth of this filthy beast of whatever name you call this season. At a time of need for deeper sensitivity to children’s rights, this ad is unscrupulous. Singing in that setup is no different from swimming in a sea of rubbish.

“What are they singing? His name, his frigging name! What is he, a diaper?” A friend rants on Facebook. He says you only use children in advertisements if the product has something to do with children. The candidate is not even close to Wet Wipes, he says.

Keep your cool, I tell my friend. But just when I tell him that, the country’s comedian appears on TV and endorses the candidate. When a comedian speaks in utter seriousness, you’re supposed to believe in him. His joke is as real as his claims to gravity. In fact, I long for the day when the comedian and the candidate would do one stunt together. Maybe a chase sequence around a coconut tree; ending only until the nuts fall on their heads. That will be the day, man.

The candidate says he’s using TV only to level the amount of exposure the other candidate, who he says has the better access, is getting. But the “infomercials” have been there since Adam and Eve, and mankind has been singing his campaign jingle since the discovery of toilet training.

Oh, and as I close this paragraph, the advertisement blares on TV again. Friends, countrymen, maybe for health reasons we should just stick to “Nobody, nobody…”

I didn't like him | SunStar Cebu | Jan. 22, 2010

This was in one of those obscure islands in the middle of a strange seascape leading to a channel called Bucas Grande. It was lonely but beautiful, and its shores dove to depths of unimaginable life forms. But it was the journey going there that built the suspense.

There would be odds and ends of strange vegetation along the way, mangroves with a mighty hold, and just when the water turned deep green for you to think you were heading for perilous trenches, you’d see a man standing on knee-deep surface, holding on to a fishing rod.

The sea would turn calm sometimes, but just as suddenly would slap our outrigger and leave the engine with a muted drone. You’d see the water boil up, forming into pools of swirling bodies and swerve our boat in all directions.

In this boat, while the rest of the clique would tuck themselves in the small cover in the middle, there would be me and another man braving the cold rain in the open. To keep us warm, he’d nudge me with a bottle of gin, which we took turns in deep swig. Each time I took my shot, he’d laugh out loud, yell in the rain and give me a thumbs-up, “That’s my man!” Then we’d laugh, and it’d be his turn. I was fresh from college, and he was, well, some name in the public sphere already.

In the afternoon lull in the island, he’d suddenly slap my shoulder and summoned me to the outrigger. “You stay at the back, and just paddle,” he said and sat in front so he could steer our boat to wherever we wanted to go. “Don’t worry,” he said.

So I picked the wooden oar and dug into the greenish water. He did the same, and the boat moved swiftly into the open sea. This was a breath of fresh air and we cut through the tiny whirlpools along the way while the island behind retreated into a bluish hue. We were far from shore already, and in a moment, he fell silent and seemed restless. We were still moving on, and I stirred into the water just the same.

He held on to his oar and sat still, silent. I stopped, too, leaving our boat cuddled in the arch and sweep of the crossing currents, although it brought us farther into the open sea while the rain ate up every faint blue strip of land in sight. After a long pause, he turned to me, and said, “Do you know how to steer this thing back to the island?”

He’d tried steering the boat at the front rear to make a turn, but the swirling water made it impossible. I took his place, but just the same, we were moving further out, our souls being fed into the Pacific Ocean. Why not, I suggested, sit the other way around and sail the boat in reverse. He burst into laughter and threw me the thumbs-up again, “That’s my guy!” In a few minutes, we were back in the island drinking the rest of what remained in the bottle of gin and laughed our heart out.

I told him I was going to write a poem about what happened, and he said he couldn’t wait to read it. It was a brief vacation among friends, and we’d be back in the city. In the few occasions that we’d bump into each other, he’d always ask for the poem like a father would to a son about his report card, and I told him, I was still going to write it. I never really got down to writing it, and life’s strange currents pulled people apart.

Over a decade passed, and I grew to dislike the kind of politics he chose. He’d turn into a stranger I didn’t know. He’d be at the forefront defending a president I find so contemptible. Last week, I wanted to write something. There were a lot of things he said that I didn’t like, but I won’t name them now. But his life was quicker than my writing.

We now face this funny and painful rite of hauling out memories for the dear departed, and sure enough we’re all guilty of a few embellishments. That boat story is true, it is no allegory, even as it can be in many ways. I didn’t like him that much, but only because I didn’t know him that much. Cerge Remonde was real, still is, and deserving of all the fondness.