No civility, no breeding

Presidential spokesmen Ric Saludo and Gary Olivar should know better and I am sure they do. I can commiserate with their situation. The only way they can defend those midnight appointments of Ate Glue is to assert her right to make them. While that may be technically correct because all appointment papers are antedated to before the election ban on appointments, the question remains: should she have made them and in such heartlessly uncivilized fashion?

Then again, Ate Glue is just being true to herself. This is not the first time she has acted in such despicably high handed manner. She has shown absolutely no civility… no respect to the incumbents who have served her administration loyally. Any manager knows how to properly treat employee exits and it is surprising the highest official of the land has no clue… or doesn’t care.

Poor Ambassador Delia Albert! Awarded an outstanding diplomat one minute, and shoved unceremoniously out the door in the next. Even if Ms Albert had been so gracious about it, the humiliation is so unnecessary… After all, Ms Albert served as her foreign secretary. Her departure from Berlin is as much a concern of the host government, Germany, as it is ours. There is protocol to be followed in announcing assignments of ambassadors. A very basic one: it is not to be done before the host government agrees to take in our nominee.

Ate Glue has broken this rule so many times. I am sure the foreign ministries of many countries now have the lowest respect for the way our government conducts diplomacy. Ate Glue has trashed long held diplomatic traditions just so she gets her whim for the moment.

I am afraid to ask sources in the foreign office for a list of ambassadors dismissed by Ate Glue in such shameless fashion. I will not have enough space to list them all. I can recall what happened to the late ambassador Noel Cabrera. He was in Manila for medical treatment only to find out from the newspapers that someone has shown up in his Eastern European embassy to replace him and he was being sent to Burma.

I recall that the same thing happened to our ambassadors in various European capitals from Brussels to Paris to Rome and Athens. Lilia Bautista was all set to go to Brussels when her appointment was abruptly withdrawn to the dismay of the host government which just gave its “agrement”.

Albert del Rosasio, our ambassador in Washington DC was also the last to know that he had been replaced. It was his friend, Manny Pangilinan who had to break the news to him. The rule that I recall from the days when I was covering the foreign office in the early 70s gives the departing ambassador two months to wrap up and say his or her goodbyes.

The way Ate Glue treats her appointees can only be described as “bastos”. This is most surprising because as she is a past president’s daughter we assume she has breeding. You would think her mother taught her some manners. It is apparent the nuns at Assumption failed to do that too. Look at how she treats high officials in government as if they are nothing more than household help, who incidentally, also deserve better. Ate Glue is too cacique for comfort! But even caciques have old world manners.

Ate Glue’s lack of courtesy betrays a mind set that explains why she is hated. Even some people who have worked with her call her evil behind her back. Simple courtesies separate us from creatures that live by the laws of the jungle… and yes, the snake pit of Malacanang. The most surprising thing is why she wonders why people don’t like her.

I still remember how badly she treated Dante Canlas, the UP economics professor without whose help Ate Glue wouldn’t have been able to submit an acceptable dissertation for her PhD after a UP School of Economics panel was reported to have rejected her first effort. Dr Canlas was the last to know that he had been relieved, first of his post as head of NEDA then subsequently as our country’s representative to the ADB Board. The worse part of it is, his replacement at ADB didn’t have the qualifications that could match Dr Canlas. She was just a regular “brown noser” to her not so royal highness.

The brusque manner she handled the dismissal of Ambassador Albert and the appointment of 87-year old Alfonso Yuchengco in her place is par for the course. But it is making people wonder. Why the hurry? The ageing taipan’s appointment can’t even be considered by the Commission on Appointments between now and the end of the election season and by then, there is hopefully a new administration.

She can’t even insist that Yuchengco assume the post immediately even if her legal advisers say she can go around the Commission on Appointments for the meantime. She needs Germany to agree to the nomination. Our relationship with Germany is not in the best of terms lately. Thanks to that continuing NAIA 3 scandal, she couldn’t even set foot on Germany in her many junkets to Europe. Germany will most likely defer sending the “agrement” or its concurrence to the nomination until after a new government here takes office.

Ate Glue should join the flagellants in her Pampanga district to atone for her habitual failure to meet the demands of simple human decency.

Hell defined

Sonny Mendoza, who as president of the LTA Condominium Association must have a good idea of what hell is, sent me this classic anecdote as his way of contemplating hell during Holy Week.

The following is an actual question given on a Chemistry mid term.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle ‘s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2) If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ‘It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over!

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct......leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN “A”.

Happy Easter to all of you!

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]