An Augustine, but not yet

ALL YE, faithful: Rejoice.

Twenty heritage churches in Pampanga, the Metropolitan Cathedral included, have reopened four months after being impacted by the 6.1 magnitude temblor that shook Luzon on April 22.

However, four – those that took the brunt of the quake – have remained closed: the pisamban maragul that is the Holy Rosary Parish Church in Angeles City, San Andres Apostol Parish Church in Candaba, San Nicolas de Tolentino Parish Church in Macabebe, and the San Agustin Parish Church in Lubao. The celebration of the Mass in these parishes remains outside the churches.

Among those that reopened is the Sta. Monica Parish Church in Minalin.  

I take the news of the churches’ reopening as some measure of grace, coming as it is on the feast of St. Monica (August 27) and on the eve of that of her son St. Augustine (August 28). My devotion to them, along with my veneration of St. Anthony of Padua, inhered in me veritably the day I learned to walk.

Mayhaps, that explains the stirrings of the soul I’ve always felt at every visit to the Sta. Monica church. That I best articulated here over seven years ago, at the time the church was declared by the National Museum as a national cultural treasure.  

…COMPLETED IN the mid-1700s by the Augustinians, the church has remained relatively intact, having withstood devastating earthquakes, typhoons and floods, and the Mount Pinatubo eruptions that swamped it with lahar. (Include now the  April 22, 2019 earthquake.)
No ostentatious ornateness but architectural splendor defines the façade – an outdoor retablo in concrete, where niched between Corinthian columns the images – as old as the church too – of Saints Peter and Paul, Francis of Assisi, and Catherine of Alexandria, with the top of the triangular pediment holding the image of St. Monica. Twin hexagonal four-story bell towers buttress the façade.
At the churchyard are the only four capillas posas still extant, in their original form, in the whole Philippines. Small chapels in red bricks, these served as holding areas for catechumens prior to their baptism inside the church in the early days of colonization…
Aye, being edifices of faith, churches are not simply viewed. Churches are objects of contemplation, and, but of course, centers of worship, loci of adoration. More than the sense of wonder it evokes, the Sta. Monica Parish Church invokes deep stirrings of the soul…There commenced my personal pilgrimage. With St. Augustine, whose presence is embossed throughout the church named after his mother.
Crowning the window above the pasbul mayor, the main door of the church, is an escudo of an eagle – the symbol of St. John the Evangelist whose gospel was St. Augustine’s favorite.
“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.” So, I remembered St. Augustine saying in Tractatus in Ioannis Evangelium. There entered I the realm of faith.
At the vestibule, above the baptistery, is the heart of Sta. Monica carved on the adobe keystone – the image of a spade pierced by an arrow. Significant of the sufferings and sacrifices of the mother for the conversion of her sinful son.
“But I wretched, most wretched, in the very commencement of my early youth, had begged chastity of Thee, and said, ‘Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.’” Thus, St. Augustine in Confessions.

La Consolacion

Taking center spot in the iconography at the main altar is a painting of the Nuestra Senora de La Consolacion y Correa. Beholding the image dredged memories of my dearly departed maternal grandmother.
May 4, the feast day of St. Monica (in the pre-1969 General Roman Calendar), Apu Rita took pre-school me to this same church for Mass. As was her wont whenever we went to any church, she told me anecdotes about all the saints present at the altar.
Her take of La Consolacion – from memory now – St. Monica prayed nightly to God, through the intercession of the Virgin Mother, to change the sinful ways of her son Augustine. One night, as St. Monica wept, the Virgin appeared to her and as a token of compassion took off a black cloth cincture from her waist and gave it to St. Monica. It was that cincture that finally effected the transformation of Augustine. From then on, members of his eponymous monastic order have worn a black band across the waist as a pledge of devotion to La Consolacion.
In remembering Apu Rita, I heard St. Augustine saying: “What is faith save to believe what you do not see?”
Unschooled, unemployed, unfettered from the material world, Apu Rita totally devoted her whole life between home and “her one, true, Mother Church.” Again, hearing here anew St. Augustine, and St. Cyprian too, declaring: “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.”
Lest this be misconstrued as Roman Catholic conceit, the most recent Catholic Catechism interpretation of “Outside the Church there is no salvation” is that "all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body." Everything universal, nothing parochial in the expanse of the Church here.
The visit to the St. Monica Parish Church coming a day after the local media’s commemoration of the 19^th month of the Ampatuan Massacre, I was moved to pray for the repose of the souls of the victims and that justice be done. And then remembered St. Augustine saying in De Civitate Dei: “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies. For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms.”
His City of God segueing further to current times: “He that is good is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.” (Now even more apropos of the Duterte regime.)
…At the churchyard, my last look at the church centered on an escudo of a flaming heart – the very seal of the Augustinian Order – appliqued to the keystone of the main door.
Ah, how could I ever forget, the very core of St. Augustine’s Confessions: “Our heart is unquiet until it rests in you”
Maybe, I need to spend more time in churches than in coffeeshops. That will certainly make a lot of people less stressed, less upset, if not happier.
So, then I cry: But I wretched, most wretched, in my every commentary, had begged charity of Thee, and said, “Give me charity, give me unquestioning acceptance of the powers-that-be, only not yet.”
So, then I pray: God let me do a St. Augustine, but not yet.

Off heroes day

NATIONAL HEROES Day is dedicated to men and women, known or unknown, who sacrificed their lives for Philippine freedom.

A national holiday, the day has become – rather than an event to remember our heroes – one more delightful excuse for malling, vacationing, and just loafing.

Most pronounced this year as it fell on a Monday, hence an automatic long weekend. Or have you not noticed the traffic gridlock going to Baguio, the overcrowding of malls, the extra vibrancy in party places?   

On the contrary, the quietude at the heroes’ monuments, save for the perfunctory wreath-laying rites.

Save your tears ye who hold this day sacred, the very law governing the current celebration of National Heroes Day – RA 9492, signed by Pres. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on July 24, 2007 – was crafted precisely to hew to her so-called “holiday economics,” making most holidays “movable” to Mondays and thus, long weekends for vacation breaks, malling, and other economic generating activities.  Thereby putting premium on commercial profit from the non-working day over the nationalistic, if sentimental, remembrance of all who consecrated their lives that this nation shall not perish.

Aye, the day of, indeed, for heroes turned by the stroke of a pen to the day off heroes.

It is then left to us hero-worshipping sentimentalists to do our own private remembering, and weep.

In my long-gone days of youth, Jose Abad Santos shared equal space with Andres Bonifacio, Jose Rizal, and Macario Sacay in my pantheon of heroes.

Those endless school plays of the last hours of Abad Santos highlighted by his admonition to his son Pepito to “show these people that you are brave…that not everyone is given the opportunity to die for his country” fixated in my thought processes the parallel lives of Bonifacio-Rizal, Sacay, and Abad Santos.

Martyrs all at the major epochs of our history as a people: the Spanish Colonization for the first, the American Period for the second, the Japanese Occupation for the third. Joined in later by Ninoy Aquino and Evelio Javier during the home-grown dictatorship.

In my teens, at the onset of my conscientization of socio-economic and political issues, Jose Abad Santos was relegated to lesser lights in my own hierarchy of heroes, in favour of another Abad Santos, his sibling Don Pedro.

Born to the landed gentry, Don Pedro became a traitor to his class when he embraced socialism and devoted his whole life to the propagation of the cause. I saw in Don Perico a conversion, albeit secular, akin to that of Francis of Assisi, on the spriritual plane. The son of a rich merchant named Pietro di Bernardone, the monk called Brother Sun renounced his father’s wealth and turned to a lifetime of prayer and devoted service to the poor.

Through the years, my list of heroes grew longer: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Angelo Roncalli, also known as Pope John XXIII; Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong; Che Guevara, all alone; Yassir Arafat as well as David Ben-Gurion; Emiliano Zapata, whom I tend to believe, not without conceit, was my great, great grandpa; Chino Roces, and Lorenzo Tanada.

Heroic ground

Varied as they are, there is a common ground for my heroes, for all heroes, for that matter. The essence of heroism draws from both the Messianic and Mosaic elements found manifest among revolutionaries and liberators, as well as among those who set the order of things through laws, norms or standards of human conduct.

The sum of a hero’s life impacts on the times and the world beyond his own. Thus, the collective epitaph for heroes: “He left this world a better place than when he came in.” Better yet: “Now, he belongs to the ages,” as said of Abraham Lincoln by his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. As indeed, heroes belong to all ages. Revisionists, be damned.

Comes to the mind the question: Are heroes born or made? Better phrased yet: Do heroes create circumstances, or do circumstances create heroes?

The latter has traditionally been the preferred position buttressed by historical epochs.
Without the American Revolution would there be a Washington? Without the Civil War, a Lincoln? Could Turkey’s Ataturk have arisen without the Ottoman persecution? Or Lenin sans the Romanov’s enslavement of Russia? And for that matter, Ninoy without the Marcos dictatorship?

If memory serves right, I think it was Arnold Toynbee that provided the synthesis to hero-born versus hero-made contradiction, to quote liberally (from faded memory): “When he has in him to give, and the situation demands of him to give, he has no other recourse but to give.”
Aye, even if one possesses all elements of heroism in him – generally thought of as intelligence, honor and integrity, courage, selflessness and commitment to a cause, self-sacrifice and love for others – absent a situation that will warrant the extraction and expression of these elements – a triggering mechanism of sort – the hero will not come out of him.
Akin here the lamentation in Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: “…Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air…”

The essence of heroism inheres in the person and is drawn out of him by the circumstance. Both born and made is the hero then.
Bonifacio-Rizal. Sacay. Abad Santos. They all had in them to give. Placed in the situation, they gave it all. So, we remember them. Bonifacio-Rizal with shrines, countless monuments, educational institutions, even a match brand and a bank for the latter, movies and books, streets, barrios, towns, even a province, again for the latter. Ninoy too.

About Sacay? One forgotten movie. About Abad Santos? A few schools and streets, and the P1,000 bill shared with two others.

Oh yes, I remember. The Abad Santos ancestral home in San Fernando designated as a shrine by the National Historical Institute had long been torn down. With nothing to even suggest it ever existed. Its NHI marker perhaps sold to the nearest junk shop. What sacrilege!

If that is our way of remembering our heroes, then, indeed, we are a nation accursed. Is it not said – and said so truthfully – that a nation that does not honor its heroes is doomed? Again, Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

What future lies for us if we have opted not only to forget but even to disgrace our heroic past?

Most despicably disgracefully so, as in interring the remains of the dictator at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.  

Nation builders

TAXES BUILD nations. Hail now the nation-builders in this spot of the Republic called the City of San Fernando, Pampanga.

The top business taxpayers:         

San Miguel Brewery, Inc. (Business Tax-Manufacturers-Non-Essential)

Toyota San Fernando Pampanga, Inc. (Business Tax-Wholesaler, Dealer, Distributor-Non-Essential)

Star Appliances Center, Inc. (Business Tax-Retailers-Non-Essential)

UNAHCO Inc. (Business Tax-Manufacturers-Essential)

United Laboratories, Inc. (Business Tax-Wholesaler, Dealer, Distributor-Essential)

Super Value, Inc. “SM Supermarket-SM City Pampanga” (Business Tax-Retailers-Essential)

NLEX Corp. (Business Tax-Contractors & Independent Contractors)

SM Prime Holdings, Inc. (Business Tax-Services)

East West Bank Corp. (Business Tax-Banking & Financial Institutions)

Josefina T. Siy of A.A Saver’s Mart (Business Tax-Single Proprietorship)

Sally G. Go of Lison Enterprises (Business Taxpayer-New Public Market)

Marina Cunanan of Pedmar Gift Shop (Business Taxpayer-Old Public Market)

The top Real Property Taxpayers:

San Miguel Brewery, Inc. (Corporation)

Mr. and Mrs. Melchor and Vilma Caluag (Individual)

Recognized for their outstanding tax contributions:

Barangay Telabastagan (Top Barangay Community Tax Collector)

San Fernando Electric Light & Power Company (Top Franchise Taxpayer)

SM Prime Holdings, Inc. (Top Amusement Taxpayer)

iPremiere Builders Corp. (Highest Increase in Tax Contribution)

At their recognition rites last week, Mayor Edwin Santiago credited the city’s taxpayers for their contribution that resulted to a whopping P1.59 billion total income collection for 2018. This, as he expressed confidence in their continuing sense of good corporate citizenship to help the city reach its target of P1.9 billion income collection for this year.

Not exactly unlost, even to the most casual observer, was the high-profile presence of Barangay Dolores chair and Association of Barangay Captains president Vilma Caluag, recognized along with husband Melchor, as top individual real property taxpayer. It was Ms. Caluag’s first coming-out public event after her bitter loss to Mayor Santiago in the May polls.

Taxes transcending politics, all for the good of the city there. Now, were Santiago’s coterie of rich and super-rich friends as tax-conscious – we would not dare say as honest and upright – as Ms. Caluag, there would certainly be more, much more than merely P1.59 billion accruing to the city coffers.   

“As we know, taxation is the lifeblood of our nation. Kung wala ang bawat isa sa inyo, mahihirapan kaming magpa-aral, magpa-kain, magbigay ng trabaho, manggamot at maghandog ng iba’t-ibang serbisyo sa bawat Fernandino.”

Fittingly, Mayor Santiago gave due recognition to what the city and its people owe the development they currently enjoy.

As fittingly, the mayor, perhaps, should also give due course to those who owe the city and its people in unpaid, and underpaid taxes.

Yes, so many of big corporate names, individuals with the predilection for ostentatious display of their wealth, so conspicuously absent in the city list of top taxpayers.

Shame on them.

  

The folly of history

AUGUST 21 marks the 36^th anniversary of the martyrdom of Sen. Benigno S. Aquino Jr.

In the current of these times of historical revisionism, I inflict upon my readers these sophomoric musings on the nation’s defiant mourning over Ninoy’s murder, serialized in The Voice under “The Hero in History” published from late 1983 to early 1984. Here’s yet another reprinting of Part V, titled Macoy or Ninoy?  

THE IDEAL conclusion of revolutions is the liberation of the people. This liberation can come in various forms: from foreign or home-grown oppressors, from want and fear, from repressions of the basic rights of free speech, press, assembly, etcetera,
Now, if we believe that the ideals started by the Revolution of 1898 were continued and bore fruition in 1972;
If we believe that our people’s liberation was effected by Martial Law;
If we believe that President Marcos assumed all the ideals and aspirations of our people in his declaration of Martial Law;
Then, it is logical to conclude that Marcos is the Filipino Hero in History.
But do we believe in any of those basic premises?
For more than a decade we have been led to believe that everything around us is “the true, the good and the beautiful.” Thanks to the controlled media, we were spared the sordid realities of life in these islands where Asia wears a smile. Thanks to the manipulated press, our vision of this country for that period was constricted by high-rise hotels, networks of superhighways, beautiful edifices. The “development” of the City of Man was simply awe-inspiring, so mind-boggling that we were mesmerized to believe all that emanated from the Palace by the Pasig.
On account of these and more mind-bending bordering already on mass brainwashing, the general mass developed short-sightedness, rather, a myopic mindset – the people refusing to think beyond Marcos, failing to envision any alternative to the Marcosian thought, seeing impossibility to find any leader other than Marcos.
In a way, the ruling elite’s boast of no-alternative-to-Marcos was more hallowed than hollow. For the Opposition behaves like a bunch of Boy Scouts lost in the woods, each one wanting to take the whole troop to his chosen direction.
There was indeed a great need to unite the Opposition and subsequently form a common front against the regime. This by coming out with an alternative to Marcos. The more important thing though was to convince the people of the soundness of their alternative for their acceptance, and ultimately, support.
The call for national reconciliation by itself would have served as a call to arms. Its enhancement by the martyrdom of its firmest believer and foremost proponent adds the dimension of spirituality to it. By the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, national reconciliation transcended political lines.
To say that Ninoy’s martyrdom awakened the people is an understatement. It would be most fitting to state that Ninoy assumed the role of a political Christ whose Calvary did not only open the eyes of the Filipino people to realities but heightened their senses, strengthened their hearts and firmed up their resolve to attain liberation.
Events consequential to August 21 likewise provided an antithesis to the long-held Marxist thesis of class struggles. Current movement towards freedom, democracy and justice transcends status: plebeians and patricians, workers and capitalists – the traditionally warring factions have united in Ninoy.
All the rallies, political discussions and heightened conscientization of the people point to the direction of Ninoy in the process of being the Filipino Hero in History. Inasmuch as the process has no guarantee of successfully meeting its desired end, i.e. total liberation of the Filipino from oppression as catalyzed by Ninoy’s martyrdom, we cannot at this time say that Ninoy is our Hero in History. A hero in the company of Rizal, Bonifacio, Sakay, Abad Santos, he definitely is already.
Some years from now perhaps, history will pass a definitive judgment on Ninoy. As it shall pass the same on Marcos.
But even at that future time, the basic questions shall remain:
Who woke up the people from their deep slumber?
Who freed the people’s minds from imposed fixations?
Who liberated the Filipino from fear, from silence, from despair?
Who led the Filipinos to think, act Filipino?
Who brought back the dignity of the Filipino before the world?
A lot more are to be asked, Countless questions shall crop up begging for answers. But there shall only be one answer, of two choices: Marcos or Aquino.
Take your pick: Ninoy or Macoy?
A SHORT two years after this piece saw print, EDSA came. And the rest is history. Ninoy’s. And, by consequence, Cory’s.

On perfect hindsight, Marx proven right anew.

Of history repeating itself: the first as tragedy, Ninoy; the second as farce, the son Pnoy.

Alas, Duterte happened. And Marcos got a state burial at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

The folly of history, as it can only be.

The case for Clark

NOTWITHSTANDING the opposition, vehement from both fisherfolk and climate change warriors, it’s all systems go for the business mogul Ramon Ang’s international airport in Bulakan, Bulacan.

Notwithstanding the assurance of Bases Conversion and Development Authority president-CEO Vince Dizon that the Bulacan airport will be “no problem” to the Clark airport, it cannot be helped that fears over the future “operability” of the latter not only persist but even gets more frightening. Given that the two airports would virtually share the same airspace.

Clark is it! So, we have been carping about even while the Americans still lorded it over the then biggest military installation outside continental USA.

Clark is it! So, we believed even at the height of the Pinatubo devastations.

Clark is it! Not so much for some pride-of-place sentiments, as for sound logical, even geophysical reasons.

Here is one argument for the cause of Clark written here over five years ago, under the heading High ground.

BAGUIO. DAGUPAN. Iloilo. Cagayan de Oro. Cebu.  Zamboanga. Naga. Laoag. Batangas. Davao…

And – topping them all – Angeles.

That is in the field of least vulnerability to climate change effects, as determined in a study of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Bank of Philippines Islands Foundation (BPIF).

"Climate exposure, socioeconomic sensitivities, and adaptive capacities are melded to generate scores which show each city's climate vulnerability. A chronic recommendation is to climate-proof local infrastructure by moving coastal roads and communities to high ground, improving community drainage systems and investing in natural solutions like mangrove forests to parry inbound storms." So noted WWF-Philippines vice chair and CEO Jose Ma. Lorenzo Tan during a presentation at the Widus Convention Center in Clark only last Tuesday.

Ensconced inland and rising over a hundred meters above sea level, Angeles City, by accident of geography, has neither storm surges nor tsunamis to fear at the threat of every storm.

Plus factors there for Angeles City to make any comparison with Metro Manila all the more odious – to the latter’s utter disadvantage. Which Tan himself highlighted with his call on government to decentralize the capital region to the point of transferring government executive departments to the provinces, with, presumably, lesser vulnerability to the impact of climate change than Metro Manila which already "represents a concentrated risk."

It can only be Angeles City – megamized with its immediate suburbia of Mabalacat City, Porac and Magalang – as destination point of any hegira from Metro Manila. He did not say it, but Tan did not have to.   

Suffice was his call on the government to decide to “finally fully develop” the Clark International Airport as premier international gateway, in the wake of projections that the Ninoy Aquino International Airport has already reached beyond its lifespan.

Sangley, Bulacan

"Why build a new airport when there is an existing one?" Tan asked, in obvious reference to various plans of government and business taipans preferring over Clark some large reclamation projects in Sangley and in Bulacan to ground the Philippines new premier international airport.

Sheer squandering of time and resources, an exercise both futile and fatal, given the storm surges, liquefaction and subsidence inherent in seaboard areas.

As one natural law holds: Water reclaims its own.

In actuality, the findings in the WWF-BPIF study are not newly revealed truths.

For so long, in its campaign for the full development of the Clark airport, the Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement has always harped on the high elevation of Clark – along with Angeles City, naturally – its distance from bodies of water, its flat expanse and strategic location – at the heart of Central Luzon, serving as gateway to the North; at the hub of the Asia-Pacific region.

Metro Manila’s congestive constriction, its below-sea-level elevation – the apt word maybe submersion – show the starkest comparison for such an easy, sound decision. It’s actually a no-brainer situation. Which, would have augured, if not agreed, well with the state of mind obtaining in this government.

Alas, it did not. And from the way the currents of events are, it is not so, it will not be so. At least until 2016. The actualization of the potentials of Clark International Airport, I mean.

But we can salvage some consolation here. Our faith in the supremacy of Clark over any other airport, extant and planned, as premier international gateway; our vision of a future – so bright, you have to wear sunglasses, to steal some wag’s blurb – for Angeles City and its environs have been given their weight in gold with the stamp of the WWF-BPIF.

So, we just have to keep up with our Clark advocacy. Dare to struggle, dare to win. As the activism of our past inflamed us.

Finally, as much a signal honor as a daunting challenge to Angeles City – to its government as well as to its people – is that ranking of least vulnerability to climate change effects.

With the increasing migration and its equally increasing social cost to the city – from garbage to ghettoes, from the exhaustion of natural resources – water, foremost – to environmental pollution, not to mention unemployment, poverty and crime, Angeles can easily lose that rating of least vulnerability.    

In that sense, vigilant action is not just the call of the hour, it has to be the way of life for the city.

We cannot anymore afford to squander through indifference, neglect or abuse, what nature has so generously bestowed upon this city.    

Thus, our Cory

"CORY AQUINO may be popular, she is popular. Why? For losing the husband in the hands of Mr. Marcos.” 

So, President Duterte disparaged the legacy of whom Time hailed the “saint of democracy” on the very day right after the 10^th anniversary of her death.

No, I won’t go the way of the netizens that blasted the web with their own deprecation of Mr. Duterte. I’d rather reprint my take on Mrs. Aquino, published here Aug. 7, 2009, two days after her funeral.     

Thus, our Cory

LEADERSHIP – the word as well as its application – has been so much abused and misused that we now have a warped sense of it. So shallow is our notion of leadership that we automatically affix “leader” to any elected official, to presidents and chairs of just about any organization with at least two members.

So long as there is one to command and another to follow, there exists leadership. There too bogs down our concept of the word. For leaders and followers do not make the whole dynamics of leadership. There is the third element of goal.
From the book Certain Trumpets, the thesis on the nature of leadership by Pulitzer Prize winner Garry Wills, I quote: “The goal is not something added to leader and followers. The goal is the reason for the other two’s existence. It is the equalizer between leader and followers. The followers do not submit to the person of the leader. They join him in the pursuit of the goal.”
Wills further expounds “…the leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leader and followers…all three elements (leader, followers and goal) are indispensable.”
Critical indeed is the requisite of a goal shared by both the leader and the followers in the holistic perspective, in the true nature of leadership.
Sadly, it is there – in the element of goal – that political leadership in the Philippine context is much, much wanting and thereby we the people almost always suffer.
More often than not, in fact as a matter of practice, the goal – as translated to interests – of the leader does not match, if not altogether contradicts, the goal or the interest of the followers.
No self-respecting presumptuous leader would ever accede to that. Thus, we all hear our so-called political leaders on the campaign trail vow their very “sacred honor” to the interests of the people. See those screaming streamers posted around: Bayan ang Bida, Serbisyong Tapat, Serbisyong Totoo, Serbisyong Todo-todo, Paglingkuran ang Bayan, ad nauseam.
Behold what political leaders do after getting elected! Conveniently forgetting their campaign promises, dishonoring their very vows to work for the interests of their constituency.
While honor may still obtain among thieves, it is a rarity among Philippine politicians.
So how and why do they get away with it? I mean thieves getting positions of leadership and robbing us, the followers, blind.
It is in the manner we choose our leaders. As a rule, Filipinos vote with their emotions, rarely with their intellect. Comes here the magic word charisma.
We are mesmerized by anyone with a flashy lifestyle: movie stars, entertainers, athletes, the pa-sosyal crowd, the perfumed set. Instantaneously, we stamp the word charisma on celebrity.
From the essential “divine grace,” the meaning of charisma has been so twisted that it is now a synonym to just about anything that is “attention-compelling,” even to its essential antonym of “infamy”. Yeah, the infamous we now call charismatic.
And so, we appended charisma on Joseph Estrada. To invest “divine grace” in one who makes the grandest mockery of the Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Commandments of God is the most detestable sacrilege, the most damnable blasphemy. But did we know any better?
Star-struck, blinded by the flash of celebrity, bewitched by their larger-than-life personae, we readily elect fame over capability, choose passion over vision, favor make-believe over hard reality.
Erap has been deposed, tried, imprisoned, convicted and pardoned. Erap is again a front-runner in the 2010 presidential race.
Again, Santayana’s damnation is upon us: We are a nation that cannot, that refuses to remember the past. We are a nation damned.
In the 1970s, a great political mind distilled the nature of Philippine politics thus: “Personalist, populist, individualist.” Then he went on to arrogate unto himself all the powers that can be had, and more – elevating himself to the pantheon of the gods, assuming the mythic Malakas of Philippine folklore with, naturally, the beautiful Imeldific, as his Maganda.
A keen student of history, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos took unto his public persona semblances of the charismatic leaders of the past: his World War II exploits – later proven false – invoked Napoleon, if not Caesar; his political philosophies gave him an aura of the Borgia and Medici clients of Machiavelli; his vision of a New Society paralleled Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal; his patronage of the arts that of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Marcos even exceeded himself in self-cultivating an image of being his country’s hero-in-history in the moulds of Napoleon of France, Bolivar of Latin America, Lincoln of the USA, Garibaldi of Italy, Lenin of the Soviet Union, Ataturk of Turkey and Mao of China.
A wee short of divine rights, Marcos took upon himself a Messianic and Mosaic mission for the Philippines: Save the country and its democratic institutions from anarchy, lead the people to prosperity.
Indeed, what other Philippine leader did possess “charisma” greater than Marcos?
EDSA 1, the Cory Magic swept the land.

Ridiculed as “walang alam” (know nothing), plain housewife Corazon Cojuangco-Aquino brought down the towering intellectual, the almighty Marcos in one bloodless revolution – a contradiction in terms there, invoking what could only be some divine guidance.
There was charisma, in its purest essence. There was our Cory.

From rustic to cosmopolitan

MAKATI NORTH of Manila.

Over five years ago, it was once-forever and still-future Mayor Marino “Boking” Morales that first arrogated unto his domain, Mabalacat City, that appellation that bespeaks of the highest level of urban progress in the Philippine setting.     

Morales’ grounded the claim on his city’s positioning as the central business district of Pampanga, “owning” the greater part of the Clark Freeport Zone, its international airport included.

Makati of the North.

Mayor Condralito de la Cruz staked his own claim of the title for his beloved Porac, “solidly” grounded on the committed investment of P75-billion for the Alviera development covering 1,800 hectares in Hacienda Dolores.

Today, both Morales and De la Cruz are out of office: the former infamously ousted by the Comelec in 2017 for having overstayed, the latter gloriously stepping down after three full terms. As contrasting as their political fade-out is the direction taken by their Makati wishes.

Where Mabalacat City is yet to show but the slightest semblance of Makati anywhere in its territory, Porac already has the Ayalas – Makati’s very creators – putting all their money’s worth in their Alviera project.

For years now, posterizing Alviera is the Sandbox adventure theme park, a crow’s short hop from the Porac exit of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway.

Last Wednesday, July 31, opened what can be the very jewel of the estate – the Alviera Country Club, unarguably Central Luzon’s premium fitness and recreation destination.

Backdropped by the Porac mountains, the sprawling 5.6-hectare country club designed by Leandro V. Locsin Partners already makes an al fresco masterpiece by itself.

The amenities are…for want of a better word, five-star – a network of swimming pools, a gym with dance studio, and multiple indoor courts for basketball, volleyball, tennis and badminton. For children, there is an outdoor splash park, an indoor play area, locker room and change area.

Then there are the well-appointed ballrooms, restaurants and bars, a mini-cinema, a spa – all bearing Capampangan names.

Who could have ever thought of such grandeur ever being born out of the desolation of lahar wastes and cogon wilderness?  

Roy David

I remember the dearly lamented Mayor Roy David.

The worst of the Mount Pinatubo eruptions having subsided, the volcanic debris that buried his town transformed – at his initiative – into the very instrument of its rising – sand quarrying, the mayor saw beyond, way beyond, the thousands of dump trucks and hundreds of payloaders ringing in the needed revenues 24/7 to the municipal cash registers.

There’s more to Porac than sand, he was wont to say, his eyes moist at the industrial and commercial enterprises then starting to locate at the Clark ecozone.

In 1997, hearing of furniture magnate Pert Cruz of Angeles City having secured a vast tract of land in Porac abutting the city, David lost no time in engaging Cruz to his development mindset. Materialized there, the magnificent Royal Garden Golf and Country Club in 2008.

No, David did not see his dream coming to fruition, having died in 2002, but he could not have even dreamt of, and be happier more, with the Alviera development right in the heart of the Porac homeland.        

Aside from the leisure component, there is the Alviera Industrial Park, where now in-place are noodle manufacturer Monde Nissin, and stone-engineering firm Badan Building Materials in its Phase 1 area. Soon coming is Heavy Duty Manufacturing, Inc. engaged in quality exhaust components for different industries. With strong demand for more industrial space, 32 additional hectares have been opened up for a new phase.

And of course, the residences – Avida Land already accommodating move-ins for its first community, is on its second project; Alveo Land with similar success, also opening sales for a second residential project; and Ayala Land Premier scheduled to launch its second residential community as well.

And more: The Alviera East Commercial Center set for completion in 2020. The campuses for Miriam College Alviera and Holy Angel University to commence construction with target completion and operations in 2022 and 2023 respectively. The 23-hectare La Salle Botanical Garden with its nursery already in place be operational by 2020.

Aye, from rusticity to the metropolitan, with all the finer things it brings, Porac has made the leap.

Makati of the North, indeed.

Pride of place is premium motivation in appropriating successful brand names for another. Even when it sounds, and truly makes like that dialog from that Sharon Cuneta starrer as “a second-rate, trying-hard copycat.”

Aping the good in another is no monkeying around, it is serious business, profitable when it brings in the results. As in Porac. But not in Mabalacat, as yet.