In his recent blog post, Ben Kritz describes the utter failure of the Melissa Roxas affair to capture the sensationalist tastes of the Filipino public, much less raise any semblance of “outrage” in the United States (Melissa Roxas is a U.S. citizen).

I don’t think there is anything disturbing about the Filipino public’s being desensitised to this sort of thing.

Melissa Roxas is a Filipino-American person who is affiliated with some kind of U.S. chapter of the commie group “Bayan Muna” (an organisation headed by Satur Ocampo — go figure). By the way, try reading the “vision” statement of Bayan Muna out loud while resisting being siezed by the gagging reflex…

Bayan Muna, the people first. This is our battlecry. A society where true freedom, democracy, justice and peace prevail. This is our vision.

… and you may end up seeing your lunch shooting out of your nostrils.

Anyway, Roxas comes to the Philippines apparently to check out the real happenin’ “Bayan Muna” scene herself (this indeed is a Fil-Am generation raised on Reality TV!). To be fair, most “activists” can relate with that primal urge to make makibaka with da masa in da bundoks (roughly translated: to come down from the proverbial hill to consort with the revolting peasants at the battlefront). Again, go figure — she ends up, of all places, in Central Luzon, according to her affidavit, to “join with their members at La Paz, Tarlac to conduct an initial survey of the place for a future medical mission”. It’s like saying that Gabriela is all about women’s issues with a straight face.

There goes another rice noodle out my nose.

Like, Kritz, I’m left scratching my head trying to figure out a basis for an understanding of what happens next. Roxas’s account of her “abduction” and “torture” is readily available to the public in Ding Gagelonia’s thin-on-analysis “The Ordeal of Melissa Roxas” piece (well, he’s a “reporter” after all). For its part, the Bulatlat article I cited at the beginning of this blog does not fail to highlight that it is “a sworn affidavit” (kind of like describing an inspection as ocular — How else does one “inspect”? With one’s nose?) and, get this, that it is but another case …

[...] typical [of] the 200 cases of abduction and 1,010 cases of torture recorded since Gloria Macapagal Arroyo became president of the Philippines in 2001 [...]

But of course, Ka Satur; so therefore Arroyo is the cause of all that “injustice”, right?

It is interesting to note how the mouthpiece of a satellite organisation fronting for a movement whose singular mission is the destruction of everything that we currently consider to be legitimate, would find any semblance of value in a document such as a “sworn affidavit” that derives its credibility from endorsement via the country’s legal system. I suppose convenience is always relative.

[NB: GetRealPhilippines.com is currently migrating off its Geocities account which will go offline by the 26th October 2009. In the future, the above link can be accessed here (that page may not have been migrated as of this writing). Watch this space for updates on our migration project. - benign0].

So why has the public’s care factor towards such “atrocities” gone cold? Perhaps it is because not only have such kinds of news been commoditised, the preferred approach to dealing with them has been commoditised as well.

The Dingman as well as his fellow Bulatlateros just happened to have cherry-picked but a single sample of what is really a routine thing going on in the Philippines. And I’m talking about not just extra-judicial deprivation of a person’s liberties (as what happens in an abduction), I’m talking about extra-judicial everything — even in our preferred approach to changing heads of state.

Tough luck.

You simply can’t sensationalise something “extra-judicial” in a society where the term “extra-judicial” describes an entire way of life

The approach of using sensationalism as a means to get some kind attention or even resolution for all sorts of stuff in the Philippines has itself become commoditised. So we have a commodity injustice being actioned by a commodity method of raising public awareness — just like the options for deposing the commoditised Pinoy despot don’t seem to extend beyond our tired old commoditised “revolutionary” (read, ocho-ocho) approaches.

In the Philippines our unimaginative diskarte simply does not cut it any longer — not even if it involves a Fil-Am balikbayan, those demi-gods once revered for winning Los Angeles beauty titles and filling airplane cargo holds with big bulky boxes of corned beef. Nowadays you have to be a Ces Drilon to ellicit any kind of significant “outrage” over an atrocity created by any one of the hundreds of bands of bandits that roam the Philippine Islands with impunity. And even that little incident’s been swept under the rug.

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