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?

Chip Tsao should take a break from beating deadlines.
Or perhaps even quit the writing business altogether.
Just recently, the Hong Kong-based writer wrote a column that failed to bring his message across to his readers.
Not that that’s such a big deal.
Many of his Filipino counterparts are a chip off the old block.
Even on slow news days — in which deadline beaters have more time to check their facts, grammar, and sentence construction — Filipino journalists regularly fail their readers, a fault of either their education, intelligence, career choice, or their publishers.
Of course, I may be unduly incriminating myself, being currently employed by a media company.

Hong Kong-based columnist Chip Tsao said he was being satirical when he wrote that the Philippines was a "nation of servants." Photo courtesy of www.pep.ph

Nevertheless, as a struggling semi-professional humorist, I have yet to encounter a situation similar to the one faced by Tsao a week or two ago.
Our man in Hong Kong was roundly criticized for writing that the Philippines was a “nation of servants,” in a column entitled “The War at Home.”
The remark prompted many Filipinos — especially leftists who have nothing better to do — to openly condemn what he wrote, express their heartfelt indignation, organize demonstrations, and pressure Manila to file a protest against Hong Kong, and its parent company, China Inc.
In less than 48 hours, Tsao and his publisher apologized, with our man saying that what he wrote was, you know, satire.
Like most bloggers and self-proclaimed journalists, I remain grossly uninformed about abstruse issues that govern humanity, including, but not limited to, the life and times of crazy, middle-aged Asian men (i.e., myself in a few years).
But I’m not exactly stupid, despite appearances to the contrary.
I happen to know a thing or two about satire, having read the Bible when I was in seventh grade, Gary Lising’s “How Green is Your Mind?” in high school, and Amado Guerrero’s “Philippine Society and Revolution” as a zit-faced college freshman.
Upon hearing Mr. T use the “S” word to justify his writing, my built-in bullshit detector went off, a device whose batteries I thought had long expired.
I went online to see what the hell the whole thing was all about.
I read Tsao’s column. Several times.
It was satire, no question about it.
But it was not that well-written.
As a result, functionally illiterate Filipinos — including those who believe that Al Gore invented the internet — were misled into thinking that Tsao was serious.
Owing to his failure to make his point obvious, Tsao should apply for a sabbatical while taking comfort in reading the badly-written comments and/or reviews about Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
But at the same time, we Filipinos should get a grip.
For starters, we should stop being oversensitive.
Filipinos are fair game, much like Americans and Australians, Canadians and Kazakhs.
And that means no unnecessary outbursts of patriotic sentiment, no overdramatized acts of nationalism whenever someone makes a pejorative comment about us and our country.
After all, however anyone looks at it, there appears to be very little to rejoice about being Filipino nowadays.
And our collective inability to appreciate satire, however poorly-written, doesn’t really help our race any.