IN this culture that adores love teams, pines for happy endings and finds transcendent release from the heart-rending aches and distress of everyday living, the AlDub show last Saturday created the perfect spectacle to feel genuinely good for at least a day.
To the tastemakers in the media, the show did more than that. Its glow carried far and wide from where it emanated, in Bocaue, Bulacan, and created a national mood that could only be described as “electric.” When was the last time a segment of our 100-million-plus nation had ever had such a collective experience that transcended social classes, economic inequities and political fortune and misfortune?
As I write this piece, thinking of what event or who that personality could be that momentarily united us, I am still awed by the magic of the show. In the fashion of a fairy tale, Alden Richards tried a shoe on Maine “Yaya Dub” Mendoza in a special event of GMA 7’s runaway noontime ratings-buster Eat Bulaga.
When the split-screen sweethearts finally got to hold hands together for real, and to sing and dance, the biggest indoor arena in the world—the Philippine Arena—rocked, swayed and swooned. More than 55,000 shrieking souls took over the gallery—not an empty seat could be seen.
Among the “selfie” generation in this age of Twitter and Facebook, the vaunted social media didn’t just buzz, but lit up. One paper reported that at 7:30 in the evening of Saturday the hashtag, #ALDubEBTamang-Panahon went ballistic with 30.2 million tweets. I don’t belong to the AlDub Nation, which must include nameless fans—limp from excitement—that live beyond the confines of our 7,000-plus islands. But on that day, AlDub Nation was in dreamland awash in the emotion of the “close encounter.”
As entertainment, nothing was spared by the show’s producers. It had a script made for—well a telenovela—and a cast one could easily fall in love with. Yaya Dub is now part of our vocabulary and conversations. She sits in the living room of millions of households. Her image enthralls, inspires vision of an impossible romance and the possibility of a happy ending after all the missed opportunities and the mysterious interventions of fate.
Her image for now is an icon for our age—but an icon for what?
Producers of the show are not into thinking about economic or even political change—any change to might prove that things, indeed, have come to uplift the “masses,” for so long the excuse of politicians in this country for allocating and disbursing incredible amounts from the public purse.
Instead they harnessed the program’s raw power to support the show’s outreach programs. The show’s proceeds—P14 million as announced—would go into the building of libraries in three schools, in marginalized areas, in Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. One of the main hosts of the show, Sen. Tito Sotto of Eat Bulaga fame, was proud to announce that the AlDub Library Project “complements the show’s EBest scholarship programs.”
Learning doesn’t come with just a school building planted in the middle of somewhere. It must come alive with ideas that nurture the mind and fire up the imagination, and that challenges old assumptions and triggers debate over which way to go in the future.
It must be something more modest than this that the host envisioned. Its director, Poochie Rivera, said the AlDub Nation would like to accomplish something meaningful. This show aired over GMA 7 with no commercial interruptions. Company logos, flashed on the screen from time to time, instead took over the usual spots.
Its raw power to stir people into positive action demonstrates what Filipinos, ignited into collective action, are quite capable of—the politically dangerous Edsa I and the technology-driven Edsa 2—and what they are, frustratingly, not. By the second I mean they could not stay, or have hard time staying the course.
They lack focus, they show fragmentation instead of determination, and they even cast aside the virtue of sacrifice and meld back into the old ways. It is as if they let a certain fatalistic tendency to let fate accomplish the goal of what they have started. The two Edsa revolts ultimately demonstrated the fickleness of change, showing up everyone—participants and observers alike—that the more things change, the more they look the same.
So what does the future hold for the AlDub Nation? For now its grip on the popular mind is phenomenal and unprecedented, no doubt made possible by the availability of the social media.
Some of its critics think the fever for this made-for-television entertainment would die down, too. And when the fire turns to ice, it would be time too to think back on what it set out to do—and fell short of accomplishing.
Now, I can come up with the name of that personality who could unite the nation, if only momentarily. He is a politician. When he accomplished this feat, he wasn’t. He was a gladiator on the ring, when his fists struck like lightning, and they were thrown with the anger of thunder.
Manny Pacquaio is it, the global icon, pride of our race, and the greatest fighter of our generation.
And look what he is fighting now. Even as he looks forward to a Senate seat next year, one he could get hands down, he has a fight to finish, not in the boxing ring, but in the Court of Tax Appeals.
He is being asked to pay about P2.2 billion in allegedly unpaid taxes. How could that be, the multichampion and his wife Jinkee argued in their plea filed in the Supreme Court, when their collective net worth is just over P1 billion?
The other face of fame is misfortune. This should be for everyone a cautionary tale.
1 comment
VERY WELL ARTICULATED….