Love, chemistry, politics

What’s on your mind? Asked the hubby when he recently came home.

Sex, I answered.

I didn’t say this because our work keeps us apart. Or because the older son and his friend may be queuing with other couples when “Fifty Shades of Grey” opens in theaters nationwide just before Valentine’s Day.

But because when the younger son recently took a college entrance exam, his chosen course was Chemistry.

Sex, I thought.

I’m pretty sure Juan wasn’t inspired by Carl Djerassi, the chemist who discovered The Pill and fathered a scientific and social revolution.

His passing away at 91 on Jan. 30 was buried in the local dailies’ inside pages. For the Facebook generation, Djerassi’s name may just be semantic noise.

But his accidental discovery continues to have an impact on us.

In 1951, Djerassi led a research team that was trying to find a cure for arthritis when they stumbled instead on norethindrone. It’s the synthetic molecule that became the building block of the first birth control pill.

Djerassi freed generations of women from the “morning after” shakes (“Am I or am I not?”). He returned to women the control of their bodies, which machismo and moral uptightness locked away from them.

When women could have sex without worrying about and bearing the consequences, the sexual revolution began. According to a Feb. 3 article on The Daily Mail, Djerassi admitted the pill speeded up the “separation of sex-for-babies and sex-for-fun”.

And The Pill spreads the love, too. Instead of squalid futures awaiting a house bursting with squalling babies, couples can plan each pregnancy and prepare for each child’s future.

I wonder, though, if Djerassi’s sexual revolution was not premature. In the country, an unplanned pregnancy can still get a Catholic-schooled coed to drop her studies until she can wear again the school uniform without the tattletale bump.

But reproductive health education is forbidden by religion from crossing the thresholds of schools where vulnerability to love or alcohol predisposes many teen pregnancies.

The state prohibits anyone younger than 18 from watching “Fifty Shades,” the movie revolutionizing those boring articles of men’s clothing (neckties and belts) into gladiator arsenal for the realm of the senses.

But for years, anyone of any age could buy the book. The trilogy even has a Filipino version.

But outside the sexually liberating realm of pop culture, girls are still getting conned by their boyfriends mouthing the world’s oldest cliché: “If you love me…”.

Over the years, birth control pills evolved, reducing the side effects but keeping Djerassi’s simple formula: prevent ovulation, prevent pregnancy.

Though given that power by science, women have yet to muster mastery in the arena of politics—not just the clash between church and state but also the gender wars, where a woman’s assertion of her right to say “yes” or “no” requires men rethinking their sense of entitlement.

Djerassi said inventing the pill for women, not men, was giving the former a fighting chance in the survival of the fittest. “Would you, as a woman, put your entire reproductive risk in the trust that he has remembered his Pill?”

Djerassi, that man of science, believed politics, not science, will decide the reproductive wars. For women’s sake, we hope he is wrong.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s February 8, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

How to peel a pomelo*

AFTER watching my tentative cut into a pomelo, the uncle took away the knife before I could mangle our dessert.

Slice off the head (knife thuds). Then the “puwet (bottom)”. (Thud.)

I was going to ask how he can tell one from the other since the pomelo looks just like a lumpy ball to me.

His knife was already moving so I just answered my own question. (The “puwet” is bigger than the head. Look again at that pomelo.)

The uncle made downward slashes around the thick yellowing rind. The ring of equidistant gashes transformed the fruit into the kind of bangle that expands and contracts because of the elastic holding it together. Then I realized:

The quickest and neatest way to peel a pomelo is to husk it like a coconut.

I grew around coconuts. An image flashed of how one gripped and pulled away sections of the husk until the inner fruit was glimpsed. When the uncle turned over the peeled pomelo, I only had to pull off the spongy membrane around the sections encasing the translucent pink flesh.

The pomelos that ended on my plate were always ready to eat. I grew up in the city. The uncle was born in the countryside. Seventy years later, he also ends up in the city. The countryside he carries with him everywhere.

Whenever the uncle stops me from proceeding on an impractical route—like hacking at a pomelo in my impatience for something sweet—I wonder which makes all the difference: the sum of years one has lived or the years that mark character.

I would never dream of asking the uncle. “Kalokohan (foolishness)” is his way of dismissing anything that does not improve a bit how things are done, like politics and religion.

A few nights ago, we listened to a TV report about the Bohol mayor who turned away aid for his earthquake-hit constituents. The donors he accused of not using proper channels for their assistance then explained how they would be violating rules if their aid were to be coursed through politicians.

The following night, it was the same mayor and the same aid officials. But from talking about food packs, they now pursued “politics” and “development”. I waited if the earthquake-hit residents would appear and speak out about the aid no one was giving them, but the newscast ended with the anchors chatting about a 60-year-old man’s love for his 16-year-old sweetheart that quite a number of people were set on forbidding.

The night after, the mayor returned. The aid officials were replaced by other officials. The mayor was still resisting for reasons I lost interest in following. But he seemed to enjoy his sudden ill-fame, this irascible white-haired autocrat, perhaps the only thing in the town left unshaken by the earthquake.

In Bicol, the uncle’s hometown, the pomelo is called “lucban”. Cebuanos call it “boongon.” The version in Carcar is “takoy.” It is pale like a pearl, unlike the salmon-pinkness of the variety in Davao.

The uncle recommends dipping pomelo in salt and pepper. I find myself using salt only when the pomelo disappoints.

How can one tell if a pomelo is sweet or dry or, worst, bitter? All pomelos look alike, I complained to the uncle. The rind is the problem. It is too thick and hides the real state of the fruit beneath. If one knew how to read pomelos by their exterior, it would save one from making a bad buy.

You cannot do anything with a pomelo’s rind but remove it, said the uncle, his voice implying that he thought it was foolish to expect more from things created to be contrary, like pomelos and politicos.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Oct. 27, 2013 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Artista” comes to town

THERE’S no one like an outsider to focus attention on oneself.

My classmate Mark is most curious about Cebuanos. During last semester’s course on journalism history, he quizzed me about how and why Cebuanos vote.

He only irked me once, when he asked me if Cebu was really “GMA (Gloria Macapagal Arroyo) country”. I hissed back that in the 1970s, Cebu was the seat of vocal opposition to Marcos while the rest of the country, including Manila, was in thrall
of him and the KBL (Kilusang Bagong Lipunan).

A registered Quezon City voter, Mark wanted to know why there was no anti-epal movement spearheaded by Cebuanos. “Epal” is urban Filipino slang for people who grab attention (“pumapapel”). The term includes politicians who exploit projects for self-serving mileage.

Since we were hissing back and forth while our professor was seated across us, I could only retort that Cebuanos at least never voted an entertainer into public office.

Now it seems I might have spoken too soon. It’s not contradictory data dug up by Mark, a history major. It’s the salvo fired by Annabelle Rama who, after publicly castigating ABS-CBN and dyAB broadcaster Leo Lastimosa, said she will be the one to end the Cebuano shutout of actors and other showbiz denizens seeking public office.

Lastimosa criticized the Commission on Elections (Comelec) for accommodating Ruffa and two other Gutierrez siblings, the children of Rama and actor Eddie Gutierrez, ahead of citizens lining up to register as voters of Cebu City.

Rama, who is running to represent Cebu City’s north district, interpreted Lastimosa’s criticism as an attack against her family and gave another demonstration of her signature ability to shoot her own foot with her mouth (pardon the messed-up metaphors).

Comelec officials explained they accommodated the Gutierrez family to preserve order during the registration. The family’s reservation was honored despite the standard of registering on a “first come, first serve” basis because, according to Comelec, star-struck fans might mob Ruffa, Richard and the rest of the Gutierrez family and friends who may not all be movie stars but whose mestizo looks are significantly not impaired from not having to stand for hours under the sun or in lines snaking from sunup till sundown.

Since I have been conducting a Rick Riordan marathon this sembreak, let me draw some wisdom from the old myths. According to Riordan’s retelling, when the gods and goddesses of Olympus chose to appear to mortals, they had to resort to disguises to make them look more ordinary than ordinary. It wasn’t because they left behind in Olympus their powers and conceits—they didn’t—but staring directly at the raw essence of godliness always reduced mortals to donkeys or insanity.

In Cebu City, at least, there’s no need for demigod disguises since the Comelec is around to protect celebrities from zapping mortals who are not yet fried under the sun or from lining up for hours. The law also allows quickie residency since it allows mga “dili ingon nato (roughly translated to mean people not like us)” to set up residency at least six months in the place of registration, and conveniently extends the registration until seven months before the elections.

Yet, Rama is right. Anyone who meets the requirements of candidacy is entitled to run.

In a democracy, there should be no discrimination against anyone desiring to serve the people. Of all the biases, none is more insidious than the prejudice against the Filipino voter.

“Trapo (traditional politicians),” epal or whatever tag of infamy that wordsmiths have yet to invent have long exploited voters’ weakness for the moneyed, prominent and popular. It is a fatal flaw that can be counteracted by being informed before casting one’s vote.

The registration controversy involving Rama’s kin and friends reveals not just the ease of accommodation granted to and accepted as a form of entitlement by those considered not ordinary or extra-ordinary by society. It also exposes the vacuum of humility, temperance and intelligence in some aspiring public servants. Voters, caveat emptor (Latin for “beware”).


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)



* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Nov. 4, 2012 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday column

Inbreeding and regression

IN OSMEÑA country, an Osmeña recently said that “Cebu cannot prosper if we will have the culture of being attached to one family.”

In Linette C. Ramos and Rene H. Martel’s June 13 story published in Sun.Star Cebu, Tomas Osmeña “frowned” on the idea of an incumbent politician fielding a wife or offspring to run for office.

The Cebu City mayor was reacting to some barangay captains’ plan to request him to endorse his wife Margot, instead of Vice Mayor Michael Rama, for the 2010 elections.

The mayor’s stance is prescient for Cebu and the rest of the country. Not only Cebu City Hall and other local government units are restive during these times.

Citizens, civil society and institutions like the Church have taken to the streets to denounce the renewed plan of administration allies in the House of Representatives to amend the 1987 Constitution through a constituent assembly (Con-Ass).

The popular opposition stems from the perception that the Con-Ass proposal of some administration allies is aimed at postponing the May 2010 national elections and extending the terms of office of all elected officials, including President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, while a new Constitution is being drafted.

Protesters say that the law should be followed, referring to the holding of elections in 2010, as well as the strict implementation of Article II, Section 26 in the 1987 Constitution that prohibits political dynasties.

Yet, despite the legal provisions and the psychic scarring inflicted on the national consciousness by the Marcoses, Estradas, Arroyos and their ilk, why are we still so entangled with political families and their dysfunctions?

Analysts and foreigners say that the Filipinos’ fixation on political families reveals the state of our political immaturity: we may now move in information superhighways but we have retained a remnant of our feudal state. In a primitive agricultural economy where the state is hardly present or too bureaucratic and remote, the community leans heavily on the richest and nearest family that’s willing to help in exchange for labor and loyalty.

If the ties forged by the land ensured that a family ate, endured and died as their ancestors did for centuries before them, what did it matter if the local patron or his sons claimed, now and then, the feudal privilege of imposing their will and securing their interests?

Using this formula, the de Medici family converted their hold in Mugello, Tuscany, a small town in Florence, to an empire that made them the richest and the most powerful family in Europe.

Their power spanned four centuries, from the Late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and then the Age of Discovery.

The name “de Medici” means “a family of doctors,” which, in the 14th and 18th century, could mean healers who tended the sick, as well as “barbers who made plant and herbal potions, drew blood with leeches, made pills, teas or drops from herbal and plant extracts,” points out italophiles.com.

It can also explain the family’s interest in botany, as reflected in their prodigious gardens, where many herbs and exotic plants thrived, as well as in the unexplained deaths of their enemies and disliked relations.

The Medici family produced three popes, Florence rulers who shaped Renaissance culture, accounting and banking, strong women leaders, including a queen and a queen consort of France, as well as several members of the Spanish, French and English royalty.

Did the great Medicis have a weakness?

Honore de Balzac famously wrote that the House of the Medici was “the sovereign house with the greatest contempt for legitimacy anywhere in the world.”

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” column in its June 14, 2009 issue

Mayor PMS and the sound of silence

Petulant. Misanthropic. Scurrilous.

Timing myself, I found that I needed 17 minutes of browsing through my Roget’s Thesaurus to find adjectives that could be substituted for every letter in PMS.

PMS also stands for pre-menstrual syndrome, a monthly state that bedevils some women.

When certain men shy from publicly calling a “difficult” woman a bitch, they blame “PMS.”

But the comeback mayor of Cebu has recently proven that women have not yet cornered the market in being quarrelsome, sulky and coarse.

Displeased over charges of contest rigging made by Miss Cebu contestant Kimberley Therese Burden and her family, Cebu City Mayor Tom Osmeña dismissed their plaint as a “non-issue’ and called Kimberley as “just Miss Cellphone.”

I sympathize with the mayor if, like other Cebuanos concerned about joblessness, criminality and other concerns of governance, he wants to move on from what must be the longest-running beauty pageant.

On the other hand, the mayor’s penchant for name-calling leaves the usual afternotes.

Name-calling, whether the baiting is done in playground jungles or the corridors of power, has a drawn-out corrosiveness: people are often entertained for a long time by the taunting even if few exactly remember the circumstances leading to the nickname or its author’s original intent.

Who of us remember in clear detail the issues spawning “Gwen Doling,” “Queen of Darkness,” and “Tandang Zorra”? If the tags still have a sting, it is not just because online news archives ensure that it will be an indelible mark in the Web.

Instead of training people to focus on issues, name-calling feeds a mental laziness that is quite happy to pigeonhole people, on the assumption that nicknames stick but people hardly alter.

Why would the mayor saddle Kimberley with the crushing burden of the “Miss Cellphone” tag? She is not only a young person, with unlimited opportunities to contribute meaningfully to life after moving on from this episode. She is also a private individual, without the access to media that a public official like Osmeña has.

Praising Miss Cebu Kris Tiffany Janson for the “silence” she maintained during the “Texter’s Choice” controversy, the mayor observed that hers was “conduct becoming” of a true Miss Cebu.

Silence, as a virtue, should be taken into context. Perhaps in the world of beauty queens, being outspoken and demanding the correction of a wrong is as unseemly as tripping on one’s gown. By this standard, the feisty mayor himself would be an awkward duckling in a beauty tilt.

Then again, beauty contests hardly mirror the real world where, as Mayor Osmeña must have observed from working with non-government organizations, women have to break the curse of voicelessness and speak out to assert their rights.

In the face, though, of our propensity for Freudian slips-of-the-tongue and name-calling, I agree wholeheartedly with the mayor on the virtue of silence.

After grappling with a thesaurus and being wordless for 17 minutes just to come up with a whimpering bomb of a taunt, I cut short my aspirations in the art of name-calling, as well as take back that “Mayor PMS” tag.

According to our elders, if you have nothing positive to say about a person, don’t say anything at all.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” column, published on Mar. 15, 2009

Dream team

THE CATFIGHT between Tom and Gwen may do for now, specially with the national pug, Manny Pacquiao, resting on his laurels.

I am not a ring connoisseur, preferring the more quiet excitement of a book. But the latest clash between the Cebu City mayor and the Cebu governor may hold out some tidbits.

For one, I am curious if Tom and Gwen’s spitting will reinvent the meaning of “catfight”?

My dictionaries define a catfight as one involving a lot of shirt-pulling, eyeball-scratching and hair-tugging between two “cats,” a figure of speech for a spiteful woman.

The question of gender has never been publicly raised in the word war between Cebu City Hall and Capitol. Maturity, intelligence, self-control, sense of humor—these have been speculated as lapsed or absent in one or both parties.

Perhaps news pundits should drop the gender-obfuscating “catfight” for “dogfight,” especially if Tom or Gwen or both abandon the public exchange of spite and start punching or arm-wrestling.

According to references, a “dogfight” is an aerial combat between fighter aircraft. But since the contested object is territory, not a man, “dogfight” is more appropriate than “catfight” for the current lack of love between these two politicians.

I said so to Natan recently when I submitted my nape again to his labaja (razor). My barber disagreed.

Tom and Gwen are one, was Natan’s take. No division, just addition.

One? I snorted. You must mean “one,” as in an eye for an eye.

Since he has been shearing my head and my boys’ for more than a decade, I have deeply absorbed the political analysis Natan dispenses as freely as the sneeze-inducing Kateena powder that he dumps on my nape.

The first time I saw him, Natan had hair so long, I mistook him for a follower of Father Tropa, the Lamplighter. But since he obviously knew his labaja as well as an abattoir worker, we go to him for our haircuts. Not only has he never cut us, I endure even his choice of powder to listen to his political commentary.

If you make a long and scholarly study of tabloid news—as Natan does—you will arrive at the conclusion that love and war are opposing faces of the same coin. The drunkard who smashes in his woman’s face will tenderly caress that purple visage in front of network cameras to avoid rotting in jail.

Yet I was not ready to accept that my barber had indeed become a Lamplighter, a peacenik, during the interval it took for my tresses to grow a quarter of an inch.

‘Tan, I was referring to Tom and Gwen, not Tom and Katie.

To the unkempt youth that just stepped inside the barber shop, my barber shouted advice that he should first pour gasoline on his hair, set this on fire, and then come back for his haircut.

‘Tan, Gwen just launched “One Cebu.” You think that’s a subliminal wish to repair fences with Cebu City?

Or is she just maneuvering to gouge out the city even if this will make Cebu a one-eyed freak?

His scissors snipped, snipped: Tom said that if the right hand gives an award to the left hand, that’s the fault of the ego, not the hands.

Sure, I said. Because Gwen awarded her father and brother in the Garbo sa Sugbo, Tom paid a compliment to the Garcias’ healthy ego.

The scissors snipped and stopped: Tom’s healthy, too. You seen him from the waist up?

The Tom-Gwen dogfight puts Cebu in the news better than just Tom or just Gwen. When my barber predicts that the addition of two bloated egos can better launch a PR campaign, I have no reason to suspect his mathematics; only his choice of powder.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug.10, 2008 issue

Forbidden

ONE rainy afternoon reminded me of the exercise I had been neglecting. So I turned on the television set to look for something that would get this old heart racing.

The news roundup on two channels showed photos of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the First Gentleman, taken at the Shenzhen Golf Club last Nov. 2, 2006.

Ah, my old ticker leaped at the sight of the familiar conjugal trademarks. Mole and Waistline, according to the report, played golf with officials of the Zhong Xing Telecommunication Equipment Company Limited (ZTE), a Chinese equipment provider that won the bidding for the $329.5-million National Broadband Network (NBN) project, five months after that November date on the green.

Why does golf seem to be at the center of the national cesspool of wheeling and dealing?

When Ping Lacson was chief of the Philippine National Police, one of his first mandates to reform the heirarchy was to declare golf courses taboo for officials during office hours. Perhaps he was thinking PNP bigwigs could work harder for the salaries paid by taxpayers.

Or he might have been bothered by the negative publicity stirred up by stolen photos and leaked stories of PNP officials swinging the iron while in the company of drug lords and other shady characters they were supposed to be investigating.

In the 1930s, William “Bill” J. Shaw and a small group of enthusiasts converted a small golf course in Mandaluyong City into a meeting place to foster “harmony, cooperation and friendship among nationals of different countries.”

Nearly eight decades later, Wack Wack Golf & Country Club sticks out in the memory of news watchers as the playing grounds of Benjamin Abalos, former elections chairman, Wack Wack director and immediate past president, and allegedly one of the three fat cats in the NBN-ZTE mess.

If Wack Wack has become part of the political news domain, it is the coup of Abalos, who, to finance his studies, first worked there as a caddy.

Then elections chairman, Abalos frequently met First Gentleman (FG) Mike Arroyo over a friendly cup of coffee at the Wack Wack club house (confirmed by Abalos); brokered the NBN deal with the FG in between breaks off the green (denied); witnessed the FG, during a “chance” encounter at the same golf club, wag a finger to warn off Joey de Venecia III, representing a competing bid, from the NBN project (denied); treat ZTE officials to a “friendly” game of golf (confirmed); bribed, during a game of golf, then Neda director general Romulo Neri with P200 million to endorse the ZTE offer (denied by Abalos but reported by Neri to PGMA, who allegedly said, endorse the firm); threatened to silence NBN-ZTE whistleblower Jun Lozada for opposing the $130-million bribe sought by Abalos from the Chinese firm (denied by Abalos; asserted by Lozada, who paid a P6,000- fee for using the green at Wack Wack and P485 worth of Tee House refreshments, alleged by wags to be “hamburjer sa wack-wack ni abalos”).

It looks like, with Abalos’ signature, Wack Wack may come upon a new meaning to its name, reminiscent of the sound made by a crow, harbinger of omens.

To be fair, the game is beloved by real gentlemen. But even in China, golf has its critics, who call it “green opium” because it ruins green fields better used for agriculture, as well as civil servants who fall victim to a mania for “golf-related corruption.”

According to Asia Times Online, venal communist party officials spend taxpayers’ money in unsanctioned holidays or broker deals with businessmen. One official even died on a golf course while negotiating with potential investors.

Like the majority of Chinese peasants and the Filipino working class, I will never set foot inside a nine- or 18-hole course. But thanks to our politicians, I looked up the word in Wikipedia and learned that golf was first listed as “gouf” under a 15th-century Scottish statute on forbidden games. It means “to strike or cuff.”

Although it has been claimed that golf is an acronym for “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden,” I know that is strictly an urban legend. If you want to skip Wikipedia, drop by Malacañang.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 18, 2008 issue

Watch the language

SHOULD we wonder when an intention to fight terrorism creates sheer terror? When cameras are placed to freeze public smiles?

We should not. We must rage and denounce.

In the novel acclaimed as his criticism against the dream of a utopian state, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” author George Orwell shows how the last “man” in Europe is turned against the person he loves by a regime employing spying, illegal detention, torture, brainwashing and extermination.

To ferret and wipe out the enemies of the state, Big Brother, as the leader of the elite Inner Party, passes a law: “Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death.”

The irony of ironies is that Big Brother commits the original thoughtcrime by using language to deny reality and mutilate truth. So in this futuristic state, where Big Brother is neither kind nor loyal, Newspeak is far from truth and closer to invention.

Dictatorships and thin-skinned tyrants need no instruction in Newspeak, where the Ministry of Truth turns out propaganda; the Ministry of Peace conducts Perpetual Warfare; the Ministry of Plenty hoards and rations; and the Ministry of Love tortures and kills state enemies.

How does any autocrat get away with this doublespeak? By rewriting the past, punishing criticism, and allowing only the Official Truth, one creates “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them,” Orwell writes.

Though written in 1949, Orwell’s vision is not so much hallucinatory as prophetic of present realities.

“1984”: Telescreens, hidden microphones and informers are planted in public places and households. Purpose: catch subversives in the act of thoughtcrime, which divert from the orthodox view and endanger Big Brother.

July 12, 2007: Acting on the directive of Governor Gwendolyn Garcia, Cebu security consultant Byron Garcia declared the start of the implementation of the “bawal ang nakasimangot (frowning is banned)” policy for all provincial employees. To encourage Capitol employees to be courteous to all visitors, surveillance cameras will monitor and record.

“1984”: Displayed everywhere is a poster of Big Brother, with the slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” Before his destruction by Big Brother, Winston Smith realizes that, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake… Power is not a means, it is an end… The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

July 20, 2007: The Human Security Act (HSA), or Republic Act No. 9372, is implemented on this day. According to the Arroyo administration, the anti-terror law will protect the people from acts of terrorism. Critics say that HSA allows law enforcers, on mere suspicion, to subject the accused to preventive detention, warrantless arrest, house arrest, prohibition from the use of cell phones, computers and any other means of communication even when granted bail, surveillance and wiretapping, and examination, sequestration and freezing of bank deposits and other assets.

“1984”: To complete his brainwashing, Winston is sent to Room 101, the most dreaded place in the Ministry of Love. A cage of hungry rats is placed in front of his eyes so, when released, the rodents “will eat their way through his skull.” Screaming, Winston begs his jailers to torture instead his lover. After this final betrayal, Winston is released and scheduled for later extermination after he is paraded publicly as “cured.”

July 20, 2007: The Army reveals publicly for the first time that Jonas Burgos is a member of the New People’s Army. The activist-son of Malaya publisher and press freedom icon Jose Burgos was abducted from a mall by an armed group on April 28. The Army does not say how its background check on Jonas affects the search for him. According to the HSA, those wrongfully detained are entitled to P500,000 compensation for each day spent in jail. Given a financially and morally bankrupt state, critics say this will only fuel more “disappearances.”

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 22, 2007 issue

Soup commissioner

SOUP is simple but good fare.

What can be more heartfelt? By boiling water and putting whatever ingredients are at hand, a person gets something savory and healthy. The late Doreen Fernandez wrote about the sinigang soup that got her out of her sick bed. Reading it made me wish I could get sick and then find my way back by discovering sinigang.

What else is more flexible? Sinigang shows that democracy can work. The shrimp sinigang lovers are no better or lower than the beef sinigang aficionados. If you are against the entire health movement, there is no one to stop you from stewing pork cubes jiggling with marbled fat or bangus stomachs filmy with sweet blubber.

What is more forgiving? You can throw out the okra and keep the gabi. You can buy powdered tamarind or pick the young leaves of a wild pepper bush. The soup will still turn out to be soup even if you were born all wrong for cooking. I should know.

What can be more familiar? Up to now, my mother’s family pronounces anyone a “true” relation if, at the end of a meal, the person’s plate is swimming with leftover broth poured lavishly on rice before the soft mounds are leveled with the tines of the fork. Nagbahug means to eat wetly, a feat that makes me look down on paper plates as a waste of good trees and good soup.

This bahug-bahug tradition is apparently not just within our thirsty clan. According to wikipedia, soup is traced to the older term, sop. This was a slice of bread soaked with the juice of roasted meat. The oldest soup is said to date back to 6000 BC, with the main ingredient being hippopotamus.

According to the same online reference, in 16^th-century France, a “highly concentrated, inexpensive soup” was sold on the streets as a quick antidote for physical exhaustion. These street vendors were called restaurer. By the 18^th century, the shops specializing in soups and other fare came to be known as a restaurant.

For all the good will it has wafted in history, soups recently acquired a somewhat unsavory aroma when it was embroiled as the alibi for the meeting between Benjamin Abalos, chairman of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), and the parents of Team Unity senatorial candidate Miguel Zubiri.

The Comelec is completing the national tally to decide the hotly contested race between Zubiri and Genuine Opposition senatorial candidate Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III for the 12^th and last senatorial seat.

Pimentel filed a motion asking the National Board of Canvassers to direct Abalos to disclose the circumstances of his meeting with the Zubiris. The opposition candidate pointed out that a judge cannot “allow family, social or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment.”

It was just for soup, explained Abalos. On the evening of June 29, he said he was not feeling well and stepped inside a restaurant to restore his well-being with soup.

The restaurant happened to be at the Makati Shangri-La Hotel, where the Zubiris were also celebrating their wedding anniversary. Abalos said he was leaving the restroom when he met Zubiri’s mother by chance. “I know ethics. It's rude not to greet people," he was quoted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Abalos complained that a “political spin” was given to this encounter to discredit the national canvassing.

From mealtimes immemorial, I believe it is impossible to take in, let alone savor, hot soup in 10 seconds, the time Abalos said it took him to greet the Zubiris and beat a hasty exit.

It is even more mind-boggling for a government official to recover flagging health by slurping soup in a place so posh, it is obviously not maintained by government paychecks.

I do not know the social etiquette in places where the soup’s name might be as unpronounceable as the price. Based on my street knowhow, soup is served free when the customer orders rice, viand and drinks.

But perhaps the soup commissioner had such other transactions in mind when he stopped by, after the controversial canvassing, for hot soup for his health.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 8, 2007 issue