Time’s Aquinorroyo whopper cum blooper
Anyone who has a basic sense of perspicacity in politics now sees the emerging final battle: Erap and his great masa votes swamping the oligarchy’s last champion, Aquinorroyo. As the pace setter for the rest of the Philippines in elections past, and being the center of opposition sentiment in the country, Metro Manila is generating quite an unequivocal trend that is now being gleaned by the latest honest polls.
By the way the national debate is going, framed by the NP vs LP tit-for-tat, the Yellow dummy is getting to be perceived as just another Gloria Arroyo clone. And with Lakas-Kampi lieutenant-generals such as Joey Salceda joining him, and half his family tree still working for Gloria, this is becoming clearer by the day.
Once the masa sentiment all over the country fuses, the nuclear reaction is going to be unstoppable, which is why Uncle Sam is doubly worried.
Enter Time magazine with its puff piece on Aquinorroyo via a total whopper of a fish story about the US’ new dummy, reminiscent of what this publication has done for previous Gloria Arroyos (i.e. Corazon Aquino and Fidel Ramos). Carrying Aquinorroyo on its cover, Time describes its new pin-up as one who conducts himself “with an air of almost Gandhian simplicity and uprightness” and with an “awkward figure: Shirt loose, pants baggy and hair thinning (making him look) more an abashed
computer nerd...”
But this Time coverboy with “Gandhian simplicity,” it must be stressed, did a Rambo rampage in RAM’s 1989 coup attempt and is a known gun aficionado. He is also an unabashed apologist for the violence inflicted by his family’s security guards on Hacienda Luisita strikers of whom over a dozen were killed.
Mahatma Gandhi is the anti-British and anti-colonial Indian leader of struggle through passive resistance. He led hundreds of millions of his countrymen — both Hindi and Muslim — to freedom by resisting the onerous British colonial taxes and trade impositions, such as the tax on salt, a basic human necessity, and the ban on India ’s domestic production.
Gandhi and his people marched 240 miles from Ahmedabad to the coastal town of Dandi, and upon reaching the sea, they started making salt from seawater, thus breaking the law. This led to civil disobedience in many parts of India where 60,000 people were arrested. That salt march gave Indians the self-respect and confidence that they could gain independence. Moreover, Gandhi broke the British monopoly on cotton cloth by promoting the spinning wheel — which appears on the Indian flag today as the symbol of self-reliance and independence.
Mahatma Gandhi is mankind and human history’s icon of universal love and peaceful struggle or Satyagraha, as well as, truth. It is ironic that the international body supposedly set up to honor the great contributors to human achievement and international peace, the Nobel Peace Prize, has never awarded its much vaunted recognition to Gandhi. Is it because the white-led Nobel Peace Prize committee does not want the anti-colonial icon to be projected as the paradigm for the rest of the world in combating the West’s modern-day neo-colonialism?
Gandhi used to walk his thousand endless walks and marches for the cause of anti-colonialism in his self-woven loin cloth, treading the long miles barefoot or in sandals. He lived in his Ashram, a religious hermitage, most of his later life. That is the simplicity that Gandhi lived by.
In contrast, the Time puff piece for Aquinorroyo merely attempts to paint him as upright and downright simple, down to his loose shirt and baggy pants. But I don’t know what his thinning hair has to do with simplicity or how his simpleton persona could be interpreted as computer-nerdiness.
What is clear is that someone who is upright would not set up a commercial security agency named BSA (which stands for Benigno Simeon Aquino) to take advantage of his mother’s imposing presidential presence and corner almost all government agencies’ and buildings’ security contracts amounting to hundreds of millions in the seven years she was the supreme power in the land. That was clearly not a deed of an upright man but of an opportunist preying on the vulnerability of government subalterns.
In fact, would an upright man even vote against the airing of the “Hello Garci” tapes and be against finding out the truth? So much for their Gandhian analogy!
Former Ambassador Kristie Kenney made the US’ imperialist stand very plain when she appeared on a local entertainment show wearing yellow. Time merely upped the ante with its whopper of a puff piece. But given this blatant, incompetent, ridiculous, and, I must say, pathetic attempt at drawing parallelisms between Gandhi and the Yellow dummy, the whopper became more of a blooper.
At any rate, I am delighted by such a blooper as the people can now see how badly the US wants to replace the “old” Arroyo with the “new” Aquinorroyo dummy. So let us all remember everything that came with the Aquinorroyos: Neo-colonial and elitist rule, VAT, globalization, privatization, oil deregulation, precipitous power and water rate increases, the loss of
Sabah, the unconstitutional Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain, the resurgence of insurgencies, rice shortages, coups d’etat, ad nausea.
A vote for another Aquinorroyo is a vote for US interests against the Filipino nation. Spread the word.
(Tune in to 1098AM, Sulo ng Pilipino, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.; Global News Network, Destiny Cable Channel 21, Talk News TV, Tuesday, 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. on “Tsinoy Candidates: A Critical Review;” also visit http://hermantiulaurel.blogspot.com)
(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL:
http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100419com4.html
