Of ‘mouse’ and men

LOS ANGELES, California – Leaving Salt Lake City, Utah, you’re in topcoat and muffler. Snow caps the surrounding, towering summits and ridges of the Wasatch and Oquirre mountains. It’s raining freezing droplets, but your Delta Air B-767-300 takes off smoothly, although we passengers are crammed knee to knee.

In the USA, the land of the giant hamburger, the juicy Wezler sesame dog, the bottomless orange pitcher, and the endless cornucopia of fries, families grow to be Big Mama and Papa, bigger Junior and Jane. These leviathans, smiling cheerfully, waddle aboard your airplane and squirm and wiggle their way into Economy seats. One wonders whether the aircraft will manage to take off, but it does and even claws its way to 34,000 feet.

You hop, wading through some turbulence, over the snow-smothered Rocky Mountains, then drone onwards to cross over the more sere and barren mountains of southern California. Within two yours, you’re descending into the warm embrace of the sun.

Stepping off the plane, why – you’re almost back in Manila. The warm breath of approaching summer is in the air. The world is flooded with sunshine. The drivers well, drive like crazy – as in Metro Manila.

New Jersey’s frosts, Washington’s rainy chills, Salt Lake City’s showers and damp have been left far behind. In the hot streets of Los Angeles, Anaheim in Orange County, you begin to miss them. But you’re not just homeward-bound. L.A. smells of home, and it’s not just the tang of the Pacific Ocean, layered over by smog and gasoline and diesel fumes – increasingly expensive fumes at the gas pump at that.

Oh well, we’ll be home today (Sunday) – and straight to the gala Santacruzan procession, co-sponsored by O.B. Montessori with Manila Mayor Lito Atienza as the Hermano Mayor: a "Procession for Peace" through the intercession of Our Lord of Wisdom & Compassion and Our Lady of Liberty and Love!

Join us this afternoon (4:30 for the adoration prayer and 5 for the procession), with all those colorful and symbolic carossas, 200 beautiful sagalas, thousands of men and women united in prayer. The procession begins at Malate Church and will proceed down Roxas Boulevard, roped off for the occasion. The first time we’ll hold our grand Santacruzan by the Bay on our matchless Sunset Boulevard – Roxas.

Unless bad head wind delays our flight, but weather watchers say not, so we’ll be there, jet lag and all – bearing the greetings of Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom now celebrating its 50th Anniversary in Anaheim with the "Happiest Homecoming on Earth."

* * *

I wish we could approximate the tranquility of the House of Mouse – now turning 50 – and hosting 400 million happy revelers a year. The only explosions you hear there are not of "bombers" but of fireworks, the only gunshots are blanks from the Western spoofs, and the Sleeping Beauty Castle has been installed with flying royal banners, inlaid with precious stones, gold decorations and five regal turret "crowns". Indeed the world-famed Disneyland centerpoint has become more magical.

Last night, from my 14th floor picture window in the Hilton Anaheim, overlooking Disneyland, we watched the magnificent fireworks display, exploding in fantastic colors and starbursts in the night sky – almost as rich as the marvelous fireworks which attended the "return" of Hong Kong to Mother China in 1996. But all is not Chinese – in a few months (August?) Hong Kong’s brand new Disneyland is being launched. "To become rich is glorious," the late, revisionist Chairman Deng Xiaoping had exclaimed when he wrenched China rightwards towards modernism. It’s not come full-rudder yet, but rich in economic terms China has become. (Outside the tourist belt, though, who can know what’s happening?) However, Mickey, Donald Duck and Jiminy Cricket are now welcome in even Olympic-bound Beijing – hitting for 2008. Donald Duck and McDonalds linked with Peking Duck – what a combination.

But I digress. In the Philippines, alas, we’ve earned the terrible reputation, especially in the past two weeks, of having become a shooting gallery – for mayors and newsmen. We journalists, with five of our number already gunned down this year alone (68 slain since Marcos fell and "freedom" was restored) are sitting ducks.

* * *

Sen. Aquilino Pimentel a few days ago demanded that recently-appointed Philippine National Police Chief, Director General Art C. Lomibao, "resign" in the wake of a wave of killings which threaten to overwhelm our already frightened society. (I was tempted to headline this column, "From Mickey Mouse to Frightened Mice." Frightened of whom? The Dirty Rats, of course, those murderous hoodlums, some of whom are cops hiding behind their bad-ges).

Lomibao must not resign. He must regard these insolent affronts to his newly-acquired position as national Police Chief as a goad: in short, he must move fast to ferret out and crush the killers. And winkle out the masterminds in short order, too. The fact that three journalists have been murdered during his watch, two within less than a week of each other’s slaying, is a dirty finger thrust by the killers in his face.

The murder last Maundy Thursday of Tacurong City columnist (Midland Review) and anti-corruption crusader Marlene Esperat was solved by Lomibao and his men very swiftly, the suspects quickly arrested. Lomibao must make sure the succeeding two assassinations are solved, too.

Last week, Dipolog City broadcaster Klein Cantoneros was shot down. Last Tuesday, Philip Agustin, publisher and editor of the weekly Starline Times Recorder was shot dead by unidentified men in Aurora province. Even the Dingalan Mayor Jaime Ylarde – a former police officer – had to vehemently deny he had anything to do with it.

Five in a row this year alone! And, counting the media persons killed since the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship, and presumably the restoration of "freedom", no less than 68 journalists have been murdered in our country. Our disgrace has already been noted worldwide.

The point we seem to miss – from President GMA and Speaker Joe de Venecia (who jointly have offered a P5-million reward to spur the solution of anti-journalist killings) to our judges and justices – is that killers, bullies, and hoodlums kill with "impunity" (an increasingly pertinent term) because they are not punished for heinous crimes. Owing to the President’s own wishy-washy approach, many convicts on Death Row are not sent to execution, but their executions delayed – perhaps eventually to be derailed. Our court and justice system is slow, sluggish – and corrupt. Our prisons leak like sieves: violent criminals, terrorists, kidnappers, drug lords, manage to "escape" – again with impunity. The axiom violated is not just "justice delayed is justice denied." Justice, in fact, is not meted out at all in so many frustrating instances.

Send those villains and vermin to the lethal injection chamber, or the firing squad or to the gallows! Capital punishment has not failed – it has not been implemented. As for our courts, our overcrowded, depraved and lax penal system, our lazy and sometimes corrupt lawmen, these are a formula for a society and a republic in breakdown.

President GMA once asked all of us in her SONA "to bite the bullet." Thus far, she’s not demonstrated any bite herself. That’s the problem.

The President must move on this one. If she’s not feared by the ungodly, then how can she be the Commander-in-Chief?

* * *

I was the guest speaker at a combined meeting of the Cerritos Rotary Club and friends from the Filipino community Thursday night. The dinner-meeting was held in the Skyline Room of the City of Cerritos Library (Los Angeles).

I was especially happy to see a large group of fellow Saluyots, among them a delegation of both Rotarians and non-Rotarians from my home province, and indeed hometown, Sto. Domingo, Ilocos Sur! There were our friends, too, from old association in L.A., San Francisco and San Diego. They had all come to our get-together. Our "tito", retired Commodore Ramon Alcaraz, now 90, the fighting Navy officer who had quit the armed forces and left for the US rather than serve the Marcos martial law dictatorship, received a well-deserved award at the meeting. He was almost killed in a freeway accident, when his brand-new Ranger was sideswiped at high speed by an off-lane vehicle. Alcaraz arrived in the hospital "clinically dead", but was thankfully revived. I was happy to see him, although he now walks painfully with a cane. Mabuhay to you, Tito Ramon – you can’t keep a good Navy officer down!

Another dear friend who came was Precious Javier, the widow of our hero, the murdered Antique Governor Evelio Javier. (She still works in L.A. while her son Gideon – a Harvard grad like dad – works in the Philippines, and recently, by the way, returned his green card, declaring he’s fully Filipino. That’s what Precious told my wife and this writer.)

The president of the Cerritos Rotary Club is, of course, our columnist Ernie Delfin.

The Rotary group was there in force: Grant Engle, the Centennial Governor; William H. Poloquin, Rotary District Governor (District 5320) and his wife, Wilma.

We had Ms. Laura Lee, Council member of Cerritos, who greeted us on behalf of the city government (she originally came from Taiwan). We had fellow journalists like Manila-U.S. Times Chairman, Publisher Johnny M. Pecayo, retired copy editor Herman Azarcon of The Detroit News who used to write for me in the defunct Evening News, Alma Luna-Reyes, J.D., Executive Publisher of Forum Asia Magazine, Tomy Banaag of the Pangasinan Brotherhood in America, Inc., photographer and portraitist Raphael Maglonso, Norberto "Jojo" Reyes, my nephew, Lito Soliven who runs a successful medical supplies business, and Armin Reyes, Board of Education Vice-President (ABC Unifired School District). Armin (a Captain) returned only last month from military service in Iraq – he survived it. He’s a son-in-law of former Cabinet member, FVR-time Jun Enriquez. And I mustn’t forget my second daughter Marinella, who lives in Los Angeles.

Since this is beginning to sound like a society column, it’s time to stop.