15 Minutes

Filipino activists with blogs the world over are probably atwitter with yesterday's events, but for my part, all I can do is shake my head at the stupidity of everyone involved.


Trillanes' stunt (and let's be honest, that's really all it was) worked pretty well in that he basically wrapped both the local media around his finger and got Malacanang to declare a curfew, something that hasn't been done since the Marcos days, but to my mind he really didn't do himself any favors by walking out of his trial and basically putting himself squarely in contempt of court taking over a posh hotel with no real plan as to what he was going to do. If he had hoped to walk out of that hotel the newly-appointed President of the Philippines, then he's even stupider and more deluded than people have given him credit for.

There isn't really much to say about the clumsiest attempt to unseat the administration that hasn't already been discussed ad nauseam in newspaper, radio and television editorials, other than that it's given the government another opportunity to shoot itself in the foot by declaring another curfew (though that's been quite healthily discussed as well).

What I find funny about all these "expressions of outrage" is while everyone knows what the disease is, nobody, and this has been the case for nearly three years now, has presented a cure, in no small part due to the fact that the opposition cannot even agree on what that is.

Trillanes and his motley cadre of supporters looked downright foolish in last Thursday's escapade, with some of the people presented rapidly distancing themselves from him when it all went south, such as the bishop who claim that he just happened to be in the hotel at the time of the incident. Riiiiight...

But equally foolish was the Arroyo administration, with its drastic midnight to five a.m. curfew summoning up images of martial law more dramatically than all three of its ill-advised Executive Orders and issuances last year which the Supreme Court slam-dunked.

If they keep this up, along with their own infighting (such as the latest Arroyo-De Venecia imbroglio), it wouldn't be hard to see the administration imploding the way Erap's did when Chavit Singson ratted him out. The only question is who'll be around to pick up the pieces, because currently no one seems to be properly positioned to do this.

The way I see it, it isn't that hard to get the people behind a personality; there's really too much shit going on for people to not want some kind of change. The lack of any concerted mass action is not attributable to exclusively to apathy, the way I see things. I've said this before, and I'll say it again: those idiotic activists pontificating on the radio, on TV and in their newspaper columns all miss the point; it's not about not wanting things to get better. Our problem is we don't want to hitch our stars to people like Antonio Trillanes. Some idiot columnist whom I've already taken the time to lambast in the past described Trillanes as a hero and a martyr or something like that, but I have to say; what kind of hero knowingly puts people, like media men and other civilians, in harm's way?

I agree that the Filipino people do need a hero, but one thing's for sure, we won't find it among the crop of buffoons just jockeying for their 15 minutes in the spotlight.