It comes as certain as the lists that accompany that interplay of either drowsy night or sobering day or drunken stupor and the gut-emptying reality between every year-end and the start of the next. They are like the traditional list of the year’s best and worst that force us to reflect on the year just passed if only to seek closure, or those unrealistic resolutions that compel looking forward, self-welcoming 2010 if only to step into the next year with a positive stride.
Reflection is important when we’ve been longing for 2010 ever since our institutions had been violated and our future stolen by ambition and avarice at the highest levels.
Because all past is prologue, where did we stumble and how long might we stay fallen? We list some events of 2009, choosing absurdity to describe a year of abject strangeness ranging from meaninglessness to portents and premonitions.
Following recall and resolution anyone can create their own. Coming between the night just passed and the morning not yet quite here they wrangle both, straddling that mystical divide between being asleep and slowly waking.
The first stems from the proposal by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry for crisis stimulus programs funded by corporate and government entities providing returns measured by the productivity of specific projects.
As 2009 opened, the Finance department had virtually rejected the call. The message was clear: Private assistance was not needed. Instead, consumer taxation and borrowings would comprise economic resiliency.
By year end, that gambit would prove absurd. Pirouetting 360 degrees, the Finance Department now wants to fund its deficit by effectively borrowing from corporations through “advance taxation”. In exchange for pre-paid taxes and paying an interest charge guised as a discount, government effectively borrows what was offered interest-free.
Meanwhile, the World Bank’s (WB) Department of Institutional Integrity stated in a report previously furnished the Finance Department that as much as US$ 45 million was lost through bribes channeled to a “cartel” allegedly behind Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) projects.
The usual suspects were implicated including those at the very top and “relevant local media”. As absurdity would have it, rather than call government officials and relatives to account for the losses, it was the World Bank that was unceremoniously browbeaten.
The third absurdity is an illegal firearms possession rap hurled against a former president who rode on a restored WW II jeep with a fake firearm mounted on it. The occasion was a parade. The jeep was borrowed. The gun was plastic.
It’s absurdity is highlighted by the recent Palace pronouncement that despite butchery and illegal firearms possession charges readied against an ally, Gloria Arroyo’s “friendship” will not be severed. “Just because they are in this situation does not mean we will already be turning our backs on them”.
Another assault on sensibilities is the augmentation in the definitions of “leakage” and “plastic” where once, the former might have meant the revelation of truth, while the latter simply meant a “fake”. Within certain contexts the differences between making a clean breast and artificiality apply. More so now when the connotations of “leakages” and “plastic” refer to dripping breast implants.
The list of 2009’s absurdities is long. Its character, maddeningly manic depressive. A convicted rapist was acquitted after a green card was granted his victim. A B-movie producer was declared a national artist by Palace factotum. A presidential anti-graft body hired relatives, friends, fiancées and godchildren and then claimed no wrongdoing. A gameshow host was recruited as the ruling party’s vice-presidential bet.
In Manila the destitute poor feed on regurgitated “Pag-pag” while Arroyo’s pork barrel-fed dinner dates fattened in New York and Washington D.C. to celebrate unholy alliances.
Constructive Martial Law dovetailed constructive rebellion in a dispensation founded on constructive resignation. A remote congressional district in Pampanga turns into a criminal safe-haven where eventually Armageddon might be fought.
Finally the year of the absurd ends with one last mockery perhaps it’s most pitiable. Last July, over 16,000 classrooms needed teachers. In Arroyo’s incumbency over 4,000 educators migrated out of her economy. Today, across the archipelago, Christmas came and went without elementary school teachers receiving bonuses promised them.
It’s pathetic. Believing Arroyo hails teachers as heroes what is absurd is that maltreated educators continue awaiting benevolence, forgetting that the woman in the “Hello Garci” recordings had mercilessly sanctioned kidnapping a female teacher if only to fudge ballot boxes.
2010 should end this ten-year madness. Let’s pray it does.
(photocredit: Michael Mistretta)
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Finely woven work, Dean.
Happy New Year
One political cycle of these absurdities – if the electorate re-elect the incumbent politicians especially in Congress and Senate -chronic inhumanity.
Happy New Year Primer!
It’s like having sex with the same family member. Soon enough the practice produces mongoloids.
Dean
“Constructive Martial Law dovetailed constructive rebellion in a dispensation founded on constructive resignation.”
Great line!!
Crappy new year, eh?
I’m on page 726 0f 1069 of a rereading of “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. I think absurd is not the operative word for the Philippines; Rand would say it is “evil” as the lack of upstanding values allows the empowered of the country to abuse the country with nebulous moral grounding and the destruction of innocents using their own goodwill against them.
Nevertheless,
may your 2010 be rich with good thinking . . .
Joe
Well, we haven’t blasted ourselves into the stone age yet, so I’d like to think all is not lost. :P
A happy new year to you too Joe :D Your mood might improve if you stopped reading that tome – may I recommend Book of the Five Rings?
New Moon also never failed to raise my spirits – any book that makes you want blow stuff up can’t be bad for this New Year’s festivities XD
Twin-Skies,
Ha, I think you are probably right. I shall see if Tacloban National Book Store has your more uplifting reads. Gonna get fireworks in the morning . . .
Joe
Happy New Year Joe,
I submit that “Evil” is a much more appropriate word. But then I think that the woman is amoral which is farther below “nebulous moral grounding”.
I wonder what part of Hades is reserved for the amoral?
Dean
joe,
First, I commend you for reading such a fine Novel by Ayn Rand. One of my few fav writer of all times. Second, I let you find out for yourself who John Galt is. Third, I was falling in love with Dagny Taggart, and the emotion is getting intense.(LOL!) Last but not least, HAPPY NEW YEAR once more, to you and you love ones!
I think I prefer the game based on the novel – Bioshock.
The year 2009 is now almost gone. The year 2010 is coming. With all the
absurdities, foolishness, political gimmicks, cruelty, childish behaviors of our politicians. Some of us were amused. Others were outraged. Most of us does not care a bit. They are all part of our growing up. The trouble is: Most of us, our leaders and our politicians have not grown up. HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL! WELCOME 2010…
Dean,
Though, we are exiting 2009 with some absurdness. With the new horizon setting in, this has been such a ridiculous world. I do, and I greatly welcome the 2010 to come. To our Leaders, you have the upper hand. We trust you, and hopefully you do the same.
HAPPY NEW YEAR to all, may this 2010 be a blast…!
Dear Mario,
Fortunately, as you’ve said, there is always a horizon setting in and this one seemed so distant not too long ago.
Hopefully 2010 is a berth we can call home after such a long and tortuous storm at sea.
Happy New Year to you and your family!
Dean
“Meanwhile, the World Bank’s (WB) Department of Institutional Integrity stated in a report previously furnished the Finance Department that as much as US$ 45 million was lost through bribes channeled to a “cartel” allegedly behind Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) projects.”
Dean, are you familiar with Abaya vs Ebdane?
sinubukan nina erpat agapan ang problema sa DPWH kaya lang nadismiss sa supreme court eh.
dahil din sa “cartel”.
Nachura encouraging and pushing for the filing of the petition tapos mapupunta pala sya sa SC tapos nung nandun na sya wala man lang syang opinyon na maibigay yet he knows the case from top to bottom.Ang konswelo de bobo nya ay at least they were heard at yun naman daw ang gusto nila. SH_T!
me fast forward ba na pwede pindutin to june 30 2010.
pero kung meron mawawala na ba ang cartel?
Dean,
napaaga ang pagbati ko ng merry xmas ngayon eto kahit late.
Happy New Year!
Sorry for my comment above,that mention of the DPWH “cartel” just hit a nerve.
Dear Karl,
Thanks for bringing up the Abaya vs Ebdane case. In that bid as I understand it, the courts had upheld a proposal that went over the maximum allowable price thus violating existing limits.
The company involved in that bid is one of the companies listed by the World Bank’s integrity division.
One of the loopholes of such foreign assisted projects is the deliberate coursing of these through the executive dpartment and applying a shroud of international agreement or “treaty” over it that prevents these from being scrutinized as merely an infrastructure project subject to budgetary limits.
Unfortunately, the loophole increases the costs of such projects as in the Abaya vs Ebdane case and inflicts on the public an incremental repayment burden that should not have been there in the first place.
Also, by fattening the project cost, it allows a corruption leeway.
Congressmen such as Nachura who are now on the opposite side of the fence might not have been on the other side originally.
Like you, I am keeping my finger on the fast forward button to mid 2010.
Happy New Year partner!
Dean
Thanks Dean!
Happy New Year again.