What's up in Mabalacat? Picture tells the story

 

Commentary

What’s up in Mabalacat?

MONDAY’S flag-raising ceremony at the Mabalacat City Hall grounds took the sound and fury – okay, electricity – of a “miting de avance” as majority members of the city council took turns in their passionate panegyrics of Mayor Crisostomo Garbo before placard-waving and hurraying city hall employees, JO workers, and capitan-herded barangay folk.

 

Shared vision for the city’s progress. Exemplary governance. Dedication to public service. Commitment to the city’s growth. Upstanding leadership. Positive impact on the city and the Mabalaquenians. Thus, the honorable aldermen veritably canonized, if not apotheosized, Garbo.

What gives? Why this sudden ostentatious obsequiousness to Garbo? When, for all intent and purposes, the mayor has always had the council – save for the filibustering maverick but always outvoted Marcos Castro Jr. – at the very palm of his left hand, with the right for the petting, er, patting. And nothing of this show of force was ever staged in hizzoner’s honor except in his campaign salvoes.  

No surprise, most naturally, was Castro’s invisibility at Monday’s event. But very conspicuous in his absence was Vice Mayor Gerald Guttrie P. Aquino, Garbo’s running-mate in his twin triumphs for the mayoralty.

Ay, there’s the rub.

Photo tells the story  

OVER THE weekend, New Media Pampanga posted in its FB page a photograph of renowned businessman-philanthropist Rodolfo “Tatay Bong” Pineda and VM Aquino making the thumbs-up gesture.

The accompanying caption said Tatay invited the vice mayor “for a casual meeting” at the Pineda’s Pradera Verde Golf and Country Club in Lubao town – rubbing in the importance of Aquino, if not the significance of the meetup, with the information that he “was transported via chopper from the Mabalacat City Hall Grounds to Pradera Verde.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” So, the truism holds. Hence, New Media Pampanga did not even have to post a caption with the photograph.    

“The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: ‘There is the surface.  Now think — or rather feel, intuit — what is beyond it…’ Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy…” Thus, Susan Sontag in her book On Photography. Hope we put the quotation marks right.

Boundless speculations – from the magnanimous to the malicious, limitless deductions – from the sapient to the senseless did, indeed, the Tatay-Aquino photograph invite.

The most telling being Aquino as the Pinedas’ new niño bonito. Meaning, Garbo’s political patrons have shunted him aside. Meaning, he has run the course of his three-terms, and if he insisted on running for mayor in 2025, will just go the way of his predecessor, once forever Mabalacat Mayor Marino “Boking” Morales unseated from the post he kept for 21 years, his candidacy deemed void ab initio for violating the term limit.

Garbo opting to put up his daughter, board member Win-Win, for the mayoralty with him running for vice mayor is out of the equation, insofar as the Pinedas are concerned. Besides, it smacks of Boking circa 2016 – withdrawing his candidacy in favor of his wife Niña and then substituting for her at the eleventh hour. That very act that sealed Boking’s political damnation.

Garbo giving way to a Win-Win Garbo-Christian Halili tandem will get no Pineda sanction. Aquino is the chosen. No possible motion for reconsideration.

More familial than political are the reasons that factored in Tatay’s adoption of Aquino as Pampanga’s first family’s bet for Mabalacat City. The vice mayor’s mother is Precy Aquino, nee Pineda of the city’s landed gentry.

Garbo’s fall out of the Pinedas’ graces started with the controversies that hounded the city’s multi-billion-peso loan from the Land Bank for a new city hall and city center that even merited a complaint with the Ombudsman and House hearings. Any whiff of corruption is verboten to the Pinedas. Neither can they ever countenance Garbo’s lavish lifestyle.  

Tatay approves, Geld Aquino wins!

“Abac na balen.”  A new day dawning for Mabalacat City.

Ah, what immense power a photograph wields!