Animals

DILG undersecretary Marius Corpus minced no words commenting on the report transmitted by the fact-finding committee he chaired to the Department of Justice. He said those responsible for the noontime show that became an occasion for a stampede treated the fans like animals.

In remarks he later qualified to be personal, Corpus drew a stark analogy to the decision to give away a handful of tickets to a horde of people pushing to get in. He likened it to throwing a few scraps of meat to a pack of hungry wolves. The outcome would be nearly predictable.

That decision to hand out a few tickets to a frantic horde is now being considered to be the trigger for the deadly stampede. That could be considered by the prosecutors to be a homicidal error in judgment.

ABS-CBN took exception to Corpus’ personal remarks. But the official insisted that conclusion was insight gained from the testimonies of victims themselves.

ABS-CBN said they did not intend the horde of fans to their amazingly generous game show to be treated shabbily.

Perhaps.

But it will be very hard to argue that the poor people dazzled by the imagery of so much cash being thrown around were treated with respect.

Those who died on the path to a raffle ticket and, possibly, so much cash so casually dispensed were camped around the venue for as long as three days. Imaginably, they ate and drank very little while they guarded their place in the queue. They sat under the hot sun. Intoxicated by this new opiate of the masses, many of them arrived at the site with only enough money to get there and no money to go back to wherever they came from if they did not win any cash from the game show.

How could ABS-CBN have allowed this to go on day after day until a great tragedy finally happened?

I have wondered allowed many times, at the sight of people queuing up around the ABS-CBN compound, why this network allowed that to happen. There should be a better system for distributing tickets and scheduling seats in devastatingly popular live shows so that people flock to the studio only when they are sure of places.

I thought maybe there should be a system of enlistment or a system for bringing tickets to the poor communities inviting people to attend the game shows. In which case, they would not have to camp out, push and shove, urinate in the queues and stand for hours and days without assurance they would be seated.

Devising such a system to prevent hordes from pushing and shoving for a seat in the arena would probably add to the costs of producing the live show. But the audience would be treated with some dignity, as invited and honored guests. There would be little danger of overflow crowds crushing each other for a chance to get to the gates.

A more systematic way of collecting people to an event would have prevented the ugly phenomenon of a live audience that was tired and hungry, sleepless and angry. It would be a live audience treated with respect and not with contempt by those who were producing these spectacles obviously because doing so was profitable. These were audiences who would, with their meager purchasing power, create profits for advertisers of products sold down-market – the same advertisers and products who gave the money that was so freely dispensed in the dazzling raffles.

The crowd of down-market consumers who pushed and shoved until a murderous stampede happened were not treated as valued clients by that game show that lured so many to their deaths like a modern Pied Piper.

It seems to me the producers of that show more than tolerated this business of people camping out and queuing for days without assurance of a seat – and, of course, without assurance of a raffle prize that would make the painstaking effort worth it. It was as if the system was sustained so that the crowd would bear all the uncertainties while the producers would be relieved of the uncertainty of having a sufficient live audience for their show.

Besides, the sheer spectacle of hordes lining up in the sun and in the rain added to the mystique of this warped media product. It gave real faces to the compelling sense of anticipation the generous game show wanted to create. It provided video clips of a real live following. It steeled the fans and transformed the audience into a cult that goes through trial by fire and stampede to properly belong to a magic circle of people who might win in the raffle.

In a word, all the benefits of having people stake out the show for days on end accrue to the station and the show’s producers. All the pain, the indignity and the peril accrue to the poor people for whom a seat in the show means a chance to grab some easy money.

Let’s not stray into long-winded demagoguery about crushing poverty and hopelessness, about the lack of opportunities to make a living and about government not doing enough to bring down our society’s misery index.

Poor people do not stampede everyday.

Their delusions need to be toyed with systematically, their expectations exploited cynically and their behavior bended by the irresistible seduction of millions of pesos thrown wildly into the audience to produce the sort of calamity we saw last Saturday.

Of course, those responsible for this mass hypnosis are free delude themselves with the thought that they are bring fun and joy to the dreary lives of those who have the time to spare and the desperation to burn so that they line up for days without food or water, uncertain to have a seat. Of course, they are free to imagine that they bring relief to the poor by keeping them dazzled by glittering raffle prizes while goading them to buy shampoo in sachets and skin-whitening soap.

Of course, ABS-CBN is free to assert the network is not treating its audiences like animals.

But those who were trampled last Saturday died like animals; those who trampled upon them behaved like animals. Those who stood on the queues for days on end led beastly lives on the line.

They endured so much inhumanity for the possibility of being thrown some scraps from the table of rich corporations who advertised so that this pornography of crass commercialism might be staged.