Springs Eternal

This is it - the moment all the government fawn-ctionaries have been waiting for. It's now officially the ASEAN Summit, when everybody puts on their best clothes and pretends to be as civilized as the international delegate next to him or her.

To some extent, the Philippines has something to be proud of. There was an immense level of effort, of coordination, of getting the participants to learn their lines and play their parts in this spectacle that now has the world's press zeroed in, critically watching and weighing.

The streets are cleaner, the public works have been given a new coat of paint, everything looks marginally fresher. The best Philippine furniture is on display for the world to marvel at, and the soldiers have provided a comfort level to law-abiding citizens (or at least, I hope that's what it is, and not my embryonic pro-totalitarian leanings starting to manifest itself). At night, the Christmas lights (still hanging up there), combined with the forthcoming Sinulog fiesta decorations, make the avenues look spectacular.

Of course, on the other hand, there are still the hanging questions, those vignettes that are sure to stain the summit somewhat. Like the purchase of those overpriced and flimsy streetlights that, if you ask me, almost amounts to plunder. (All right, I already snarled about this last month, so I won't repeat myself. I'll just sit here and hope that the corruption watchdogs will really take up the cudgels, as they threatened to do, and prosecute those responsible).

Or the fact we had to spend tax money to entertain the wives of the heads of state, who, if you ask me again, should have been just left home alone to play with their favorite charities while having their coiffures done. Not that those diversions would be something that the First Gentleman would have appreciated doing, so maybe playing host and tour guide to a bevy of regional beauties did engender a feeling of usefulness on his part. And explain why he maintains that the task of entertaining the First Spouses, to the extent of letting them crash a local wedding, is just as important as the affairs of state.

(One day, I will try to study the merits of the first gentleman's belief that impressing Mrs. Singapore and Malaysia with dancers in native costume is just as momentous as debating the questions of free trade or the regional movement of economic forces, or even whether the summit participants should sanction Burma/Myanmar for continuing to jail Au Sung Kyii. Maybe on the day I receive a government grant for this scholarly study, but not now).

Let me not even get to the issue of why we keep having to spend on the hotel, airplane and food bills of all those government hangers-on, the minor functionaries whose only known function is to spend tax money. (To keep unemployment numbers down? To ensure domestic spending figures are consistently on the rise? The economic reasons are there, although I'm not exactly sure that's what my Economics 101 Professor, Solita Monsod, was trying to teach.)

Then, there were the minor irritants, like the SUV that had to fall off the island's main (and showpiece) bridge, which managed to wreck the bridge's repainted railings right the day before the summit started. Talk about ill timing. Or the over-paranoid city cops that collared a news photographer who was only taking shots of billboards of the likenesses of the heads of state.

By the time this gets published, we'll be halfway through. Hopefully, nothing in the scale of the US Embassy bombing in Greece would have occurred to give us a bad name. And in the end, I just hope that the lessons from this exercise will stick. That people will remember that we can if we try, and if we work together. That it is possible to make the city better. More livable. More preferable than other cities.

On the part of the delegates, I hope they leave with something other than wry expressions on their faces and funny quips about the not-quite MENSA scores of the Philippine undersecretaries. Maybe Cebu was able to strike them just as it struck me, once. That this is a city of promise, of potential. And as is the case with most things of the future, that here, lies hope.