Deliver us from evil
Next to the unhappy wives of the Republic of Malta, population 410,000, only one other country can claim to be affected by the results of last month’s non-binding referendum on divorce. Malta’s contentious approval of the legalization of divorce leaves Catholic Philippines the only nation in the world without the right to freely divorce – with the exception of the Vatican.
Malta may be cause for celebration for the progressives, whose champions lost no time pushing House Bill 1799 to the House committee on revisions, but it is also a reason to give thanks to the Lord God, at least according to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines.
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Defenders of the faith
Today it is the opinion writers being blamed by the Aquino administration.
On Thursday, the gentlemen of the Presidential Communications Group put the slow collapse of the yellow juggernaut squarely on the shoulders of the nation’s opinion writers.
“We don’t have any problem with the Malacañang Press Corps,” says spokesman Edwin Lacierda. “There’s no problem with the news itself but perhaps with the columnists who are always criticizing him.”
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Codename Hero
Geronimo
The story is told that he could walk without leaving a single footprint.
The military men called him a renegade. His people called him a hero. After Mexican troops massacred his family, he eluded capture for decades, resisting colonization, demanding his people’s freedom, disappearing into his beloved Sierra Madres even as 5,000 American soldiers thundered in pursuit. His small band of warriors stood as the last line of Apache resistance against white America. His name was legend long before he surrendered in 1886. They called him Geronimo.
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Forgetting Edsa
The story of my country begins with a mad king.
There are some who say the king was once a just man, and a wise one, whose heart turned dark at the taste of power. Others say he had always been mad, and hid his madness behind a cunning charm.
The king had a queen, the most beautiful in the world, and again there are those who whisper that it was she whose madness turned the king’s. So they ruled, the black king and his butterfly queen and their army of bloodthirsty knights, from a golden castle built on a lake whose waters turned a darker red with each cruel year.
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Assault on reason
A little past eight in the evening of February 3, 2011, a group of plainclothes policemen raided a high-end relaxation spa in the Metrowalk Ortigas Center on Meralco Avenue. Clients on massage tables heard shouts from the outside—“Dapa, dapa!” One man sweating alone inside the dry sauna, shouted at by one of the policemen—“Nagtatago ka, ’no?”—left the sauna to join the six other men sitting along the hallway. He thought it was a holdup. It never occurred to him that the spa was in any fashion illegitimate. When he asked a woman who stood in the hallway speaking into a police radio, she told them it was a raid.
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All along the watchtower
The congressman thought the flight attendant was berating him. If he had known her voice was naturally high-pitched, he said, he wouldn’t have called her a menopausal bitch. That his remarks are still offensive to the entirety of a gender, irrelevant of any alleged bitching, escaped the attention of the good congressman.
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Method To Madness 2011
The reporter was bored. Her heels were high, her mouth was wide and the cheap green medical mask slung over her neck hung lopsided as she lit her ninth Marlboro in an hour. The reporter had never been a chain smoker, but on the eve of the New Year a little more than 20 centuries after a Jewish storyteller sucked his last gulp of sour wine out of a sponge, the reporter decided that sucking smoke out of a stick while tapping her foot outside an empty emergency room was a slightly better deal than just tapping her foot outside an empty emergency room. Her cameraman agreed.
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