Millennium blues October 2, 2006
I REMEMBER IN THE EARLY 1970S READING an article in the Wall Street Journal about a typhoon in Bangladesh. The typhoon was exceptionally severe to have merited space in a newspaper whose normal attention, as its name proclaimed, was riveted to the ramparts of American capitalism. At the time, Bangladesh was an epically benighted country, having just emerged from the loins of Pakistan in a grinding war. It was so impoverished, or indeed famished, that George Harrison, the “quiet Beatle,” loudly drew attention to its plight in a concert called simply enough “The Concert for Bangladesh.”
I remember the Wall Street article well because of the way it started. I was working at the time under a boss who was a stickler for old-fashioned journalism, who demanded that reportorial stories begin in the “inverted pyramid” style. That is, where all the important facts were up front, the first paragraph, if not the sentence, containing the what, who, where and why. This story did not begin that way, which opened up whole new vistas for me.
It began with the sentence: “A typhoon came to Bangladesh with precious little to destroy.” It captured in that pithy way the essence of things. Notably, the cruelty of the event, devastating a country that was no stranger to devastation. It drove home not just the furiousness of the storm but the cosmic irony of it: It was a divine, or devilish, comedy that made you cry. What a truly, monumentally, hapless country, you thought.
That was the sentence that leaped to my mind last Thursday, with “Philippines” instead of “Bangladesh” in it: “A typhoon lashed at the Philippines with precious little to destroy.”
In the scheme of things, that is even more cosmically ironic, or divinely or darkly comic. At the time the Wall Street Journal wrote its story in the early 1970s, the Philippines, if no longer expected to become the next Japanese miracle—no small thanks to Diosdado Macapagal, who wrecked industry with decontrol; and Ferdinand Marcos who wrecked everything else with rapacity—at least stood at par with, if not better than, its Southeast Asian neighbors. Today, thanks to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, it has become the new Bangladesh. An idea Bangladesh itself, which has raised itself up by its bootstraps over the years, might object to violently.
Those were my mortal thoughts last Thursday while the winds swirled around me. I do not mean that in a metaphorical way, I mean that in a completely literal way. I caught the storm last Thursday in quite a dramatic way. I physically caught it. I was due at Naia past noon that day as I had a plane to catch to Hawaii. I was due to speak at a gathering of Filipinos in the United States in an event called the 4th Global Filipino Networking Convention 7th NaFFAA Empowerment Conference. My session had to do with media and the killings in the Philippines.
I had no wish to miss it. And so despite the shrill warnings of Pagasa the night before that there was a super storm brewing that day—which bore the almost farcical name “Milenyo”—I drove off to the airport past noon. Since schools and offices were closed that day, I thought it would be a short and sweet, though gray and wet, trip. I thought wrong. Very, very wrong.
By the time we got to Ortigas, the winds started rattling our car, a thing that failed to faze my son whose first instinct was to click away at the world with a camera. Oh, the invulnerability of youth! Traffic crawled to a halt past Ayala, some branches of trees having fallen on the road, the vehicles traversing it snaking this way and that to avoid the obstructions. AM radio began screaming Nature’s fury, reporting flash floods, landslides and fallen electrical posts south of Metro Manila. The devastation was plain for me to see. On the airport road, on our opposite lane, the tangle of poles and wires housing a huge billboard had crumpled and fallen on a bus, crushing a section of it. It was a jumble of twisted metal, and I wondered how long it would take to extricate the bus from it.
The winds were howling madly by the time we got to the road going to Naia. The branches of trees littered the road plentifully and the winds shook our car like an angry mob. Once we got to Naia, the distance from the car to the womb of the airport took on the aspect of eternity. Getting off the car was hard enough, opening the door gave the sensation of pushing against heaven. Traversing the covered walk to the gate of the airport was a veritable war. The floor had gotten slippery from the driving rain, and as I struggled past it—I felt like swimming upstream—the winds hurled missiles in my direction. They were in the form of signs, posters and whatever else wasn’t fastened to the ground in that place. I cowered, and got hit in the arm by a poster.
In the safety of the airport womb, I worried about my son who was driving home. Globe was down, and I waited in line at the pay phone to call him up in his mobile. I was vastly relieved to know he was OK, his voice suggesting he was pretty oblivious to Providence’s improvidence.
My flight was 3:30 p.m., but it was close to 10 at night when we finally took off. As I waited at the airport that late afternoon looking through the glass panels where a haze had collected in the distance limned by a dull gray light, and while soft tones tinkled through the loudspeakers, and passengers padded the floor like zombies inside the airport lounge, I thought:
A typhoon came to the Philippines with precious little to destroy.
* * *
Tomorrow, all roads go to Conspiracy Café and Garden in Visayas Avenue in front of Sanville (landmark, Shell Station). The “Stop the Killings” Bar Tour moves on to it. From there, the tour goes weekly over the next couple of months. I’ll announce the stops along the way.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=24185
I remember the Wall Street article well because of the way it started. I was working at the time under a boss who was a stickler for old-fashioned journalism, who demanded that reportorial stories begin in the “inverted pyramid” style. That is, where all the important facts were up front, the first paragraph, if not the sentence, containing the what, who, where and why. This story did not begin that way, which opened up whole new vistas for me.
It began with the sentence: “A typhoon came to Bangladesh with precious little to destroy.” It captured in that pithy way the essence of things. Notably, the cruelty of the event, devastating a country that was no stranger to devastation. It drove home not just the furiousness of the storm but the cosmic irony of it: It was a divine, or devilish, comedy that made you cry. What a truly, monumentally, hapless country, you thought.
That was the sentence that leaped to my mind last Thursday, with “Philippines” instead of “Bangladesh” in it: “A typhoon lashed at the Philippines with precious little to destroy.”
In the scheme of things, that is even more cosmically ironic, or divinely or darkly comic. At the time the Wall Street Journal wrote its story in the early 1970s, the Philippines, if no longer expected to become the next Japanese miracle—no small thanks to Diosdado Macapagal, who wrecked industry with decontrol; and Ferdinand Marcos who wrecked everything else with rapacity—at least stood at par with, if not better than, its Southeast Asian neighbors. Today, thanks to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, it has become the new Bangladesh. An idea Bangladesh itself, which has raised itself up by its bootstraps over the years, might object to violently.
Those were my mortal thoughts last Thursday while the winds swirled around me. I do not mean that in a metaphorical way, I mean that in a completely literal way. I caught the storm last Thursday in quite a dramatic way. I physically caught it. I was due at Naia past noon that day as I had a plane to catch to Hawaii. I was due to speak at a gathering of Filipinos in the United States in an event called the 4th Global Filipino Networking Convention 7th NaFFAA Empowerment Conference. My session had to do with media and the killings in the Philippines.
I had no wish to miss it. And so despite the shrill warnings of Pagasa the night before that there was a super storm brewing that day—which bore the almost farcical name “Milenyo”—I drove off to the airport past noon. Since schools and offices were closed that day, I thought it would be a short and sweet, though gray and wet, trip. I thought wrong. Very, very wrong.
By the time we got to Ortigas, the winds started rattling our car, a thing that failed to faze my son whose first instinct was to click away at the world with a camera. Oh, the invulnerability of youth! Traffic crawled to a halt past Ayala, some branches of trees having fallen on the road, the vehicles traversing it snaking this way and that to avoid the obstructions. AM radio began screaming Nature’s fury, reporting flash floods, landslides and fallen electrical posts south of Metro Manila. The devastation was plain for me to see. On the airport road, on our opposite lane, the tangle of poles and wires housing a huge billboard had crumpled and fallen on a bus, crushing a section of it. It was a jumble of twisted metal, and I wondered how long it would take to extricate the bus from it.
The winds were howling madly by the time we got to the road going to Naia. The branches of trees littered the road plentifully and the winds shook our car like an angry mob. Once we got to Naia, the distance from the car to the womb of the airport took on the aspect of eternity. Getting off the car was hard enough, opening the door gave the sensation of pushing against heaven. Traversing the covered walk to the gate of the airport was a veritable war. The floor had gotten slippery from the driving rain, and as I struggled past it—I felt like swimming upstream—the winds hurled missiles in my direction. They were in the form of signs, posters and whatever else wasn’t fastened to the ground in that place. I cowered, and got hit in the arm by a poster.
In the safety of the airport womb, I worried about my son who was driving home. Globe was down, and I waited in line at the pay phone to call him up in his mobile. I was vastly relieved to know he was OK, his voice suggesting he was pretty oblivious to Providence’s improvidence.
My flight was 3:30 p.m., but it was close to 10 at night when we finally took off. As I waited at the airport that late afternoon looking through the glass panels where a haze had collected in the distance limned by a dull gray light, and while soft tones tinkled through the loudspeakers, and passengers padded the floor like zombies inside the airport lounge, I thought:
A typhoon came to the Philippines with precious little to destroy.
* * *
Tomorrow, all roads go to Conspiracy Café and Garden in Visayas Avenue in front of Sanville (landmark, Shell Station). The “Stop the Killings” Bar Tour moves on to it. From there, the tour goes weekly over the next couple of months. I’ll announce the stops along the way.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=24185
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