Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - HBO’s new series, True Detective, is driving Twitter insane. It has inspired crazy insane theories, hyperbolic reactions, and the hilarious #TrueDetectiveSeason2 that features pictures of any random pair of misfits as stand-ins to stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Conversely, Twitter has also made a largely clichéd whodunnit show more enjoyable than it would otherwise be.

When infused with the show’s internal logic, the EDSA Revolution anniversary week becomes a lot more palatable. “Time is a flat circle,” lead character Rust Cohle says, channeling Friedrich Nietzsche, he of the Eternal Recurrence Theory and the gloriously terrifying moustache. “Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”

This got me thinking: how many times has that bloodless revolution in 1986 actually happened? How many times have we commemorated and deconstructed EDSA? How many times have we argued over the merits of what happened, over false prophets and broken dreams? This is the terrible and secret fate of all Filipinos: we’re stuck. Will we ever fulfill the promise of EDSA? Who knows? As detective Rust Cohle once said: “This is a world where nothing is ever solved.”

Anyway, here are other insane things that happened on Twitter this week.

#PrayForPangasinan signals
end of times, logic

“Isang misteryosong sakit ang unti-unting kumakalat ngayon sa Pangasinan, isang sakit na tila kumakain umano ng balat at laman ng tao,” was an actual thing that came out of Julius Babao’s mouth during ABS-CBN’s evening news program Bandila. What promised to be a news report straight out of Resident Evil disappointingly turned out to be a couple of human interest stories on a rare skin disease, which was never identified anywhere in the report.

The Internet, however, was far from disappointed. #PrayForPangasinan instantly shot up the trends list as a number of websites connected the bogus report to the equally credible “prophecy” of one Sadhu Sundar Selvaraj who warned of a disease that will spread in Pangasinan and “will consume the flesh of men.” To be fair, the so-called prophet also said “The Lord says there is a place called Pangasinan.” That one’s pretty accurate.

Here we are, in 2014, and a significant amount of people still take everything on the Internet seriously. The only outbreak that happened this week was the one that spread all over social media, one that happens way more frequently and infects way more people than any actual deadly virus. Please pray for them.

‘Walang Pasok Bukas,’ screams Twitter

Ah, that sweet echo of youth, resonating all across Twitter like a victory cry of the lazy. The 28th anniversary of the EDSA People Power “Revolution” was a holiday for students, because that is how our educational system chooses to commemorate our most recent historical landmark — by sending students off into the blissful wilderness of extended sleep and oblivion. Meanwhile, people old enough to remember the EDSA revolution and what it actually meant observed the occasion by remaining incarcerated in the tyranny of work and the demands of adulthood. But that’s cool, I guess, because the younger generation is presumably learning about the triumph of democracy over dictatorship in school and not perpetually submerged in social media, where history is continually revised by people who consider Ferdinand Marcos as the best thing that ever happened in our country. Hey, wait a minute…

‘Ferdinand Marcos a great leader’

— clueless youth

Pro-Marcos memes have been proliferating all over social media unprovoked for a few years now, so it wasn’t surprising to see them again, very much provoked, on the anniversary of the dictatorship’s demise. Here’s one that is so spectacular, it has to see the light of traditional media as well: a picture of Marcos next to the following copy: “If I stole money from the people why the Philippines is richest country next to Japan during my regimen (sic ad infinitum).” If you read some of the tweets, it doesn’t get any better. Here’s one sample: “Ferdinand Marcos, he once made his country one of da richest in da world, but his ppl blames him for everything he’ve done.”

These are the kinds of people defending the former dictator on social media, if anyone’s curious. I don’t equate the ability to write well in English with intelligence, but I do consider writing well in any actual existing language to be a sign of intelligence. I mean, come on, people. I think we can all agree that Marcos was one smart dude. He deserves better defenders. And perpetual infamy. I’d settle for the latter, actually.

‘EDSA Revolution’ begrudgingly trends

With the sun already setting on Tuesday, the #EDSA28 hashtag pushed by various news organizations was yet to trend. It seemed bleak there for a moment, until “EDSA revolution” finally crept up at the bottom of the trends list like an afterthought or a grocery item absently thrown into the cart out of sheer force of habit.

I think this is undeniable at this point: the memories of EDSA are inexorably fading. It’s as if the luster of those three magical days in 1986 no longer give off the same hue, rendered dated by the color palette of today’s youth — yellow no longer means freedom, freedom no longer a scarce resource, corruption still present but in more gradient colors, heroes and villains no longer confined in black and white. The picture of the past, as painted on social media, isn’t a recreation — it’s a fantasy play. In the lamely-executed pro-Marcos memes of Twitter and Facebook, the oblivious youth get to live in an alternate universe where the Philippines that they dream of actually existed, only to be taken away by their elders. Their faux-memory of Marcos-era Philippines is almost too comical in its impossibility, more mythology than history, more Camelot than ‘70s Manila in decay.

Yet the story that rings more like a fairy tale — the one about people standing as one, leaving their homes to stand in the way of tanks and tyranny, as if from a corny Hollywood movie — that one actually happened, albeit for a few days. It’s the story a new generation of Filipinos seems intent on forgetting. They’d rather believe in the messianic narrative about one righteous man leading his country into a golden age than the one about hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women deciding their own fate.

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Which of this week’s social media trends did you hop on? Tweet us your reactions @PhilStarSUPREME!