Out of the box August 30, 2006

Published on Page A12 of the August 30, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE future has a way of creeping up fast. A few years ago, I was telling people I had read somewhere that "techies" were predicting that we would soon be having DVDs that could contain as many as five movies. The reason for that being that the industry was experimenting with making discs with bigger capacities. I myself didn't think that would happen so soon – not commercially anyway. I figured that even if they could produce discs that could hold that many movies, they would be very expensive.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

If you've been to your favorite pirates' lair recently, you'll know what I'm talking about. Your friendly neighborhood Moro trader is now selling a special kind of DVD that contains multiple movies or the entire seasons of TV series. The disc in fact contains not just five movies but all of eight movies. It's expressly marked "8 in 1." The same disc can contain the whole season of your favorite TV show. The entire "CSI" series is in five discs I think. The discs go for P60 to P100 per depending on which part of Metro Manila you buy them.

The quality isn't bad. Any compression, of course, degrades video quality, but the Chinese (from whom these things apparently come) seem to have found a way of compressing the contents at this intensity without reducing it to the kind of junk we had during the first days of the Betamax. Remember that dodo? The quality is not unlike a rented VHS, one that went from hand to hand, or eye to eye, before it got to you. Not bad if you're not finicky about video quality, bad if you invested in a plasma TV.

More awesomely, the Chinese seem to have gone where their Western counterparts feared to tread. They are now mass-producing dual-layer DVD, or DVD 9, and selling it at single-layer, or DVD 5, prices. (The cheapest blank dual layer DVD, as far as I know, costs around P250 to P300 locally.) I didn't believe it at first when I saw the discs advertised as DVD 9. But I scanned it in my PC, and, lo and behold, the thing was truly,certifiably, genuinely a dual-layer, 9-gig DVD. No wonder it could hold that much data, albeit in compressed form.

We can look at this development in two ways:

One is through the same blinders of the IPC, seeing it as an exponential leap in piracy, a bigger threat that needs an equally bigger response to stop. That is how government, with no small prodding from the United States, has always looked at it, responding with the Videogram Regulatory Board, the Optical Board and whatever other boards it has gone overboard to create.

At the very least, it's useless. Take it from the Borg (if you are a New Generation "Star Trek" fan): Resistance is futile. Might as well bid the waves hold still. With the way digital technology, like the nuclear one in the past, blasting out in all directions, the possibility of government stopping "piracy" (that word deserves whole new forums by itself) is about as bright as the "old pirates," or sellers of single-layer one-disc-one-movie, stopping the invasion of the double-layer "8-in-1s."

But it isn't just that it's futile, it's also that it's unenlightened. There is another way to look at the development, and that is to view its enormous potential. We are in fact merely seeing the tip of the iceberg. Thinking out of the box, what this means is not that we will soon have more movies or TV shows than we can hope to watch in our lifetime, what itmeans is that we will soon have more information than we will know what to do with. The rapid strides in technology have now given us more access to information than we had always thought possible. Think of the possibilities of that for education.

Not every Filipino has a PC (though I still think government and the private sector should aim to get one to as many kids as possible, or we will widen the information gap between us and other countries), but most every Filipino has a TV. And given that DVD players particularly from (where else?) China are now going for a song, probably a DVD player as well.

Now, what if we made the "8-in-1s" offer not just entertainment, not just movies and TV shows, but educational material as well? What if the BBC's "History of World War II" (a fantastic documentary, which used to be 25 discs but which can now be compressed in 4 or 5 discs) were suddenly available to students? What if "Sesame Street," which was where some people I know swear they learned their English from, complete with the accent, were there too from as far back as when it started? What if "Batibot," "Kasaysayan," "Peta Presents," "CCP Presents," "Sic O'Clock News," and all the other educational local shows the networks trashed because they couldn't compete with their more commercial fare were recycled in this form?

I know those things would have problems competing with the movie and TV fare offerings of Manila's Quiapo area and elsewhere, but what if public schools gave them away free to students the way they used to give away free powdered milk and vaccination shots? Educational TV you can't always watch because you have to adjust to its time (and because of competing fare), but DVDs you can always watch at your leisure. Who knows, maybe the parents of the kids who are required to watch "Batibot" and "Kasaysayan" as part of their assignment can pick up a thing or two from it, too.

The technology certainly makes it possible. I would earnestly suggest that the money that funds the anti-piracy agencies -- which is taxpayers' money being used to protect multinational interests -- be used for this instead. Or generally to projects that rethink how best to educate this desperate country.

The question may not be how to bring the kids to the classroom. The question may well be how to bring the classroom to the kids.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=17953

Fighting back August 29, 2006

DON'T look now, but the derailed train called "Cha-cha" [Charter change] is careening down the path of sleeping residents of homes along "da riles" [the railroad tracks]. It's the latest in a long list of oppression that in the last few months alone has included: The refusal by Malacañang to obey the Supreme Court ruling scrapping Executive Order 464, the "calibrated preemptive response" policy on protest rallies, and Presidential Proclamation 1017 (to this day, officials summoned by the Senate routinely ignore it; to this day, rallies are prevented or scuttled; and to this day, democracy remains comatose); the "killing fields" courtesy of Jovito Palparan and like-minded generals; and Congress' summary execution of the impeachment bid against Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Now, it's Cha-cha.

One Voice says it's ready to do battle with it. As indeed other groups and individuals who are preparing their briefs to present before the courts, the legislative bodies and the public in talk shows. I am not unsympathetic to the cause. I do think people ought to stand up and take notice, and fight this oppression with fire in their bellies and anger in their hearts.

There's no comfort to be taken from the fact that Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chair Benjamin Abalos says he won't act on Sigaw ng Bayan's petition to change the Charter in view of the Supreme Court's injunction against it, the petition having no enabling law. Neither the law nor the Supreme Court has stopped this government from doing what it wants. And Abalos himself has yet to appreciate the meaning of the phrase "full force of the law." He has presided over a Comelec that screwed a decade of effort to computerize canvassing by giving the winning bid to an unqualified bidder, and he hasn't been punished for it.

I do think we ought to "do battle" with Cha-cha, but I don't think that merely opposing Cha-cha is the way to do it. There is no end of ways to do battle, and I think a purely defensive posture is the least effective of them -- if indeed it is effective at all. As the impeachment bid shows, having the truth on your side means nothing if you are fighting the enemy on his turf. You want to fight back, think offensive. You want to fight back, take the battle to your turf.

My own tack is this: In lieu of just mustering arguments against the Cha-cha and taking it on in various forums, launch your own signature campaign for a movement. The only way to fight a bad idea is through a good idea. My suggestion remains a campaign called: "Snap Gloria." The "Snap" there meaning "Say No to A Phony," and the call being for snap elections. A signature campaign for something like this has several advantages.

First, it will show up the lie in the name "Sigaw ng Bayan," which the people demanding Charter change have seen fit to appropriate. The only real "sigaw ng bayan," or cry of the people, you will hear in this country is for Gloria to go away. You see that in surveys, you hear that in conversations. There is no cry for the presidential system to disappear from the nation's life, but there is a cry for Gloria to disappear from the people's lives. If the Cha-cha people can launch a signature campaign that says the sun revolves around the earth, I don't see why we can't launch a signature campaign that says the earth revolves around the sun. Like I said before, I am confident a campaign to "snap Gloria" will get more signatures in one week than the Cha-cha got in one year. Launch a campaign like this, and you will have more people lining up in your booths than before health centers distributing condoms. Some protections are better than others.

Second, it draws attention to the heart of the matter, something we may not allow this nation to forget. Which is the problem of an illegitimate president, which is the problem of an illegitimate rule. I do think the people who tried to impeach Gloria for a second time made the mistake of enumerating too many issues against her. One would have sufficed: She stole the vote. Everything comes back to that, everything owes to that. A signature campaign to snap Gloria brings that back into focus. And it ranges itself directly against the Cha-cha: The Charter is genuine, the president is fake. Change the usurper, not the Charter. That is the slogan the campaign should carry.

And third, it gives the public something to do. Opposing Cha-cha merely turns the citizens into spectators of a not very genteel sport invented by their "betters." A signature campaign to snap Gloria gives them the opportunity to fight back. Nothing is more frustrating than immobility and a sense of powerlessness. It gives way to cynicism, indifference, or – as the survey shows -- a desperate desire to flee this country and live elsewhere. The citizens need to be able to fight back. The citizens need to have a way to fight back.

The likely objection to this is that it will run against all sorts of legal tangles. There is no enabling law that says the citizens may compel snap elections by universal, or near-universal, acclamation. My answer to that is this:

At the very least, there is no enabling law either to allow a "people's initiative" to change the form of government, but that hasn't prevented Joe de V and company from attempting it. And clearly what they have is not a people's initiative, what they have is a personal initiative. Why can't a genuine people's initiative be mounted to change what truly ought to be changed?

At the very most, what is law really in its essence? Last I looked, in a democracy the people did not emanate from the law, the law emanated from the people. It was the people exercising their sovereign will that made the law and not the law playing with itself that made sovereign will. Lest we forget, Gloria was made president completely lawfully by an act of sovereign will.

She can be unmade completely lawfully by an act of sovereign will.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=17735

Dead and deader August 28, 2006

A READER, DAVID MICHAEL SAN JUAN, HAD a very interesting letter last Friday. He wrote: “What cadaver are GMA’s (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s) congressional allies talking about? The impeachment complaint was not a cadaver when it arrived in Congress: It was the most vigorous physical proof of a people fed up with lies, cheating, murders and human rights violations. It became a cadaver only after GMA’s minions killed it.”

I share his sentiments entirely, also in the parts where he thunders forth against the real and plentiful cadavers that are piling up in Nueva Ecija and elsewhere, courtesy of a war meant to stifle protest and keep an illegitimate President in power. This country can remain indifferent to that only at its peril. You keep thinking that fate can happen only to other people, you assure it will happen to you. History is full of lessons there, not least the lesson of the slaughter of the Jews in Nazi Germany, which went without protest, which left Hitler free to do pretty much anything he pleased and which brought ruination upon the country.

San Juan is right about the metaphor of the cadaver. It was Edcel Lagman—whose candidacy I endorsed in the 1990s, thinking (wrongly) he would be as unwavering in his pro-people convictions as his brother, a thought I now most bitterly regret—who kept saying the impeachment bid “was dead on arrival.” He so liked that phrase he kept repeating it again and again, and giving it florid, and lurid, amplifications as he went along. No metaphor could have been falser.

The real metaphor is “Aanhin pa ang damo kung patay na ang kabayo?” Or roughly, “What good is hay when the horse is dead?” Lagman got his roles wrong. The impeachment bid was not a dead thing that got to a living body, it was a living thing that got to a dead body. It was hay that could have resuscitated a famished horse. Alas, the horse was already dead when it got to it.

The impeachment bid is a sure sign the nation is still alive and kicking. It is a vigorous physical proof that voters are still incensed at the thought of having a President they did not vote for and would like to do something about it. Indeed, it is, or was, the most forceful indication the people still hoped they could right wrongs, correct infirmities and obtain fundamental justice by constitutional means. The last is what the majority in Congress has strangled.

No President since 1986 has had her legitimacy unrelentingly questioned. No President has had her right to rule repeatedly rejected by the ruled in survey after survey. Not Cory, notwithstanding that she was not elected into office—the Marcos loyalists insist to this day their bata won the snap elections in 1986. It was good enough that she became President by the direct and compelling hand of sovereign will. Not Fidel Ramos, notwithstanding that Miriam Santiago questioned it then and questions it now—only to refute herself by throwing her support behind someone who blatantly stole the vote. Not Erap, until he convinced people he was more the king of the underworld than the President of the country. And Erap was challenged only for competence, not legitimacy.

In fact, not even GMA herself before May 2004. Most people accepted her ascendancy to the presidency with resignation, granting the constitutionality of it (she was the legitimate successor) and taking comfort in the thought her rule would, thankfully (and wrongly), be short-lived.

No President has had her right to rule questioned unrelentingly, except GMA after May 2004—and Ferdinand Marcos after September 1972. For exactly the same reason: Marcos ruled without a mandate after September 1972, GMA has ruled without a mandate after May 2004. Then as now the protest against the dictators—how else to call illegitimate rulers?—though equally unrelentingly suppressed, was, and is, vibrant, pulsating, alive. Then as now, the institutions that existed to prop up the illegitimate rule were, and are, dead. You can smell the stench from the feasting of the maggots from Aparri to Jolo.

I caught only a few glimpses of the deliberations on impeachment last week. My stomach has limits to what it can take. I never expected much to come from it, but I also never expected so disgusting a sight to be spewed into the public’s face. My first and last impression was that we had fallen right back into Marcos’ martial law. GMA’s Batasan was the same as Marcos’ Batasan, a rubber-stamp body (forget the modifier, “legislative”) dedicated to one and only one purpose: To thwart any effort to unseat a dictator.

That impression was bolstered by the majority doing exactly the same thing that Marcos’ henchmen, many of them lawyers, used to do, which was to quote the law in the most stentorian voices to justify the most lawless atrocity. Or to conscript the law to scuttle justice. Never since martial law have I heard more lawyers toast to the majesty of the Law, the supremacy of the Law, the purity of the Law. Never since martial law have I seen more thugs gang-rape her.

That gang may preen and pose now for the cameras, but all its members have done is to conserve for posterity, a reminder of their role in screwing democracy. All they have done is to demonstrate for a public—which had still hoped it could rely on the law to right wrongs—that Law had been kidnapped by her guardians in a treacherous act of bantay-salakay. All they have done is to prove to the people democracy is dead, their institutions are dead, the dead have come to bury the living.

Marcos did that, Erap did that. They’re gone now, thrown out by a people who defied the law to bring back Law, who went beyond the law to bring back Justice, who looked past the embalmer’s craft to distinguish the living from the dead.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=17556

Till kingdom come August 24, 2006

I HAVE a fearless forecast to make at this early date. It is: If Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo remains in power until 2010, she won't leave.

I say this because I keep hearing people talking about all sorts of political configurations or tandems for 2010. Assessments and predictions are already being made about the "presidentiability" of certain individuals. I say this because I keep hearing people, gripped this early by election fever, talking about 2007 being a prelude to 2010. One Voice is expressly saying 2007 can be a verdict on the Arroyo presidency.

And I say this because I keep hearing people -- some of them tired, frustrated and bitter after trying to unseat an unelected president and finding a world deaf to their entreaty -- saying "sige na lang," let's wait for 2010 and repair the harm that's been done. Or better still, punish the guilty afterward, begin anew and build a better world.

Let me douse water on those enthusiasms or desperate hopes. Those things are predicated on the belief that Arroyo will go gently into the night or into obscurity after 2010 when the prescribed term of the 2004 president ends. I see no reason to believe so.
All the signs today in fact point to the opposite: She won't leave.

Chief of those signs are today's "killing fields." The recklessness or, indeed, wild abandon with which Arroyo is wreaking the mayhem with the aid of her head executioner, Jovito Palparan, must suggest she means to stay on after 2010. For as long as breath remains in her body. She cannot afford to be out of power.

It cannot be unknown to her that that scale of mayhem -- one wrought completely cynically (as the New People's Army, much ravaged by time and ideological setbacks, is in no position to seize power) it merely offers a convenient scapegoat -- carries with it the seeds of epic retribution. At the very least, there is the legal recourse of haling her and Palparan to the World Court to answer for crimes against humanity. This scale of bloodbath, one done with little distinction between combatant and noncombatant, indeed one that directly, deliberately and systematically targets civilians who are turned into combatants by association or mere proximity, sends off loud echoes of genocide. In lieu of ethnic cleansing, ideological purification. With the international human rights community prosecuting, she and Palparan won't escape the harsh judgment of the world.

If they do, they must still reckon with the judgment of the kin, friends, and/or comrades of the dead. As those people like to point out, they have very long memories.

Along with the motive is the means. The means comes in the form of carrot and stick. The carrot is the Charter change. The only reason Arroyo hasn't yet earnestly pushed for changing the Constitution is that she doesn't have to -- at this time. Why should she? She has until 2010 to rule, notwithstanding that she didn't win the elections. Ferdinand Marcos didn't think along those lines either, until his second term was about to end.Then he did everything in his power to get the Constitutional Convention to approve a shift to parliamentary government to allow him to run again, as prime minister. Failing that, he declared martial law.

Today's Charter change won't just allow Arroyo to run again after 2010 (and steal the vote again, which is the only way she -- or her party in a parliamentary setting -- can win), it will consolidate once and for all "trapo" [traditional politics] power. For all the parliamentary system's theoretical virtues, it will only serve one purpose in this country, which is to end the entertainers' threat of snatching the highest positions in the land. Most of the congressmen who killed the impeachment bid against Arroyo can never become senators, they will always be beaten by the popular candidates. A parliamentary system, which makes everyone an MP, or Member of Parliament, solves that problem. Arroyo can count on Speaker Joe de Venecia and his syndicate in the House of Representatives to ram Charter change through even if only they, and not the public, are clamoring for it.

The stick is dictatorship. Arroyo has already flirted with it with 1017, and continues to flirt with it even now. We live today in a virtual dictatorship, government officials routinely spurning Senate summons despite the Supreme Court scrapping Executive Order 464, human rights (notably freedom of assembly) being mugged, and Palparan going on a murder spree. Waiting for Arroyo to go after 2010 is like waiting for Marcos to go after martial law. It presumes there is a prescribed limit for dictatorship, real or virtual. Nice work if Charter change will legalize the (indefinite) extension, but it's entirely optional.

And there's opportunity to go with motive and means. That comes in the form of the terrifying indifference of the public to iniquity. Or at least their lack of desire to do anything about it, even if, as the surveys indicate, they bristle at the thought of not having the president they voted for. What's to prevent Arroyo from staying on after 2010? Marcos at least was the legitimate president in 1972, having won a reelection in 1969. His mindset was to go around the rules, not to ignore them altogether. Arroyo has no such mindset. She has never been elected president yet rules as one. Why go around the rules when you need not even acknowledge they exist?

That public passivity is an active encouragement to malfeasance. Each hour that the public despairs of ending an illegitimate rule is another brick laid at the foundation of unending illegitimate rule. The current occupant of Malacañang has already gotten away with lying about her intention to run, she has already gotten away with stealing the vote, and now she is getting away with (very literally) murder. Each one of them represents anexponential leap in perfidy.

What's to prevent her from getting away with ruling forever?

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=16917