“THAT’S the future, folks, unless we tame the monster that we have unleashed.”
That was some statement uttered recently at the famous Le Bourget. This is France’s first airport, the ground on which the intrepid flyer Charles Lindbergh took his first steps on European soil in 1927 after making a first in the history of flight. He was the first aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean—solo.
The “monster” is climate change, a hyperbole that US Secretary of State John Kerry employed to drive home a sense of urgency. In Le Bourget, at the COP 21 (Conference of Parties 21), negotiators have haggled over terms, parried attempts to render the language feeble and vague, to produce a “universal” and “legally binding” pact to curb global warming.
“Monster” is an oft-occurring metaphor these days, even in politics, more so in sports. There used to be one word, back in my boyhood of faded memories, to scare our wits if we disobeyed a parent’s word or dared something reckless or naughty. “Ogre!” In local parlance, “Kafre.” A dark sinuous veil of evil.
In this day and age, “monster” is a metaphor of our national life. We describe traffic is the heavily congested metro as monstrous. But we also call feats in sports such as of scoring, of rebounding, or of assist a “monster game.”
Steph Curry’s incredible streak of 40-plus scoring games in the Golden State Warriors’ record-setting 23-O start in the National Basketball Association (NBA) is enshrined as a “monster performance.” (More about Curry in my next column.)
What about the recent bloodletting at the very summit of the Philippine Basketball Association (PBA)?
In a league that boasts of firm, steady helmsmanship—one that has held the ship’s rudder steady through the rough and tumble of pro sports—no one seems prepared for what Andres Narvasa Jr. has brought to the league.
Narvasa has barely completed his first three months in the Commissioner’s chair, but he has already managed a record three-zero start. He has surpassed the record of the league’s past leadership in the past four decades of its existence.
He has denigrated the basketball skills of a boxing icon—and for what? And when someone did something that a man of principle is expected to do—utter as much as defense of the assailed athlete—Joe Lipa, the famous bench tactician, kissed the bottom of Narvasa’s boot, too.
This after Narvasa had banned an online journalist from the PBA, an act so unimaginative that it escaped the mind even during the league’s struggling years, which was a time of martial law.
The sudden departure of Chito Salud as league CEO and president is even a rarer event. It slammed like the right straight to the chin that felled Pacquiao in his final fight with Juan Antonio Marquez, his great ring rival. The punch was opportunistic, even deceptive, but savagely clinical. It was delivered at the moment of Pacquiao’s greatest vulnerability—a split-second of weakness when he let his guard down.
Was Salud a victim of an opportunistic, a monstrous play? Everyone in the league is tight-lipped. To this day it is a mystery wrapped in a riddle.
Now comes a political “monster” act that’s unrivalled, mainly in folksiness, in the way it represents our ordinary mortal lives—our language, our anger, our hopes.
It took a Rody Duterte to belch out in front of TV cameras feeding into direct multichannel broadcasts, what millions of Filipinos have done, or are dying to do, in the face of monstrous traffic—“Pu__ang ina!”
People of supposedly cultured taste and refined language reacted violently. What does this tough-talking, cursing, satirical and humorous first citizen of Davao City think of Filipinos? We’ll I believe Duterte feels their pain, and, thus, rightly, he spoke for them. He spoke, and continues to speak, for the every-day commuter, the daily wage earner, the commuter bus driver, the student, the patient rushing over to a hospital. The list can easily match a Curry-esque 40-plus game.
To me, there is no worse expletive, no greater offense to the lives of our people than to hear our leaders say, traffic jams are a sign of progress, or that they cannot kill. These remarks are callous; they are contemptible, a cause for national shame.
If we had kept a running score, like we do of almost every shot that Steph Curry makes, we would have discovered long ago how many times our monster politicians have been cursing us to our downtrodden fates.
One revelation about Duterte is the fact that he speaks not just of fighting criminality and corruption, and fighting for federalism. Surprisingly, as he revealed in that broadcast interview with Karen Davila, et al the other day, he is fighting to put a human value in the front-ranks of development. That, to the new Santo Rodrigo, is the future of Philippine progress.
Of all the candidates in next year’s presidential derby, he did not utter motherhood statements. That’s why he comes across, no matter how the tastemakers deny it, as refreshingly fresh and reassuringly knowledgeable about executive action.
Duterte plays golf. It’s his sport, not target-shooting. I wish that the next time he wields a driver on the well-manicured greens, he will shoot a eagle, not just a birdie. Or may be an ace, a hole-in-one.