Jack The Scribbler

Photo from Danny Pata/GMANews.TV

(Decided to post this blog entry written by fellow drinker and deadline beater, Alex Magno, the writer, not that other guy, after I read the piece in a note on Facebook. Thanks, Alex. I owe you a beer, I guess. Or at least a link on the left. That’ll come soon enough, don’t worry.)

Let’s all spare ourselves the fancy analysis.

Rolando Mendoza, a former police officer, decided to arm himself and take a busload of tourists as hostages.

Why? He claimed to have been a victim of injustice and he wanted that corrected.

How?

By doing an injustice to total strangers so that the authorities would hear him out.

We all saw that on television, heard it on the radio, traded posts about it on the Internet, and today, just a few hours later, will read all about it again in the papers.

What he did was clearly a matter for the police to handle. But as many of us witnessed, the police failed to handle the matter successfully.

An agitated Mendoza shot some of the hostages, nine of whom were reported dead as of this writing, after which he was shot dead himself by one of his former colleagues.

They have their reasons for their failure, no doubt.

But I’d hate to be the cop who’d have to explain what happened to the relatives and friends of the dead hostages.

Who to blame?

Well, if Mendoza had not taken those tourists hostage, we’d probably be grumbling about some other headline, like the floods caused by constant rain.

Whatever his reasons, sympathetic we may be or not, he was apparently “pushed over the edge,” as President Aquino put it.

It was he who started the whole thing.

Let’s not forget that in the sound and fury of the buck-passing that has already started.

But that’s why we have cops — so they can prevent people like Mendoza from hurting other people, and if possible, even themselves.

That could have been the ideal end of this multimedia drama, if only the cops had done their job well.

So blame them, and by the principle of the chain of command, let their superiors share some of the responsibility.

Unfortunately, things always look easy in the commentary after the fact.

I guess that’s why it’s called a post mortem.

My sympathies go to the cops who, despite their limitations in training and equipment, might have really tried to make the best out of a really bad situation.

And my condolences to the survivors of both the hostages and the hostage-taker.

We all wish this never really happened.

———————

Timelime of what is now considered as the mayhem in Manila can be accessed here.

From thedailytribute.com

Is President Benigno Aquino III Southeast Asia’s George W. Bush?

Far from it.

Although Dubya was caught unaware when a plane crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, it took him just a few minutes to compose himself.

Not so with this other presidential son.

It took the popular Philippine President three hours to react to the bloodbath, a Manila Times editorial on Wednesday entitled “Who’s in charge?” said.

“And when the President did face the news cameras at around 12 in the morning of August 24 [a full twelve hours after the incident was reported] he couldn’t say exactly how many died during the incident, and even blamed the media for their faithful coverage of the event,” the editorial said.

It continued to say that “[t]his was the President’s first national crisis — the blame for which he can no longer pin on his predecessor — and the government appears to be fumbling all over.”

“Why did it take a full three hours before the Palace could respond to the crisis? Where was the much-touted Presidential Communications Group, which supposedly included a unit that could respond real-time using the latest IT?” the editorial asked.

Who knows? Was the communications group too busy tweeting?

Artwork by Vonnegut

1) Reduce and stabilize your population

2) Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

3) Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

4) Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

5) Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

6) Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean and stupid.

7) And so on. Or else.

— from a list indicated in page 112 of Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1990s by American writer Kurt Vonnegut