Primal scream

From what is known about Jun Ducat, the man is prone to bizarre behavior.

Two decades ago, he held two parish priests hostage in the City of Manila in order to collect what was due him as a contractor servicing repairs in the church. He pulled the act using fake grenades.

After that, he held a hunger strike in Sampaloc to demand that Chinoys be banned from seeking elective posts. That was after he ran for a congressional seat in the city as an independent candidate and lost.

Now this.

Early yesterday morning, he took a busload of preschoolers from his own private institution on what was supposed to be a field trip. The bus ended up in front of the Manila City Hall and the children were declared hostages by their own headmaster.

The whole nation was, in effect, held hostage for the day. All the media carried his rant. All the world sat and watched this outlandish drama unfold, the children used as props by an individual seriously suffering from attention deficit.

I caught Ducat’s initial interview yesterday morning on radio. He railed against the poverty that would deny his beloved schoolchildren the opportunity to complete their education. He demanded the highest authorities of the land to appear before his bus and guarantee the education of the very children whose lives he put in peril to be heard.

I could not help breaking into laughter, perverse as that might seem under the circumstances, when he told his interviewers — Ted Failon and Korina Sanchez — that he was pushed into this extreme act by listening to their daily commentaries. Theirs and those of Anthony Taberna.

I generally avoid listening to morning commentaries on AM radio. These permanently negative commentaries ruin my day. They induce an overwhelming sense of frustration and despair. It is as if nothing right could ever happen and we are all doomed to go wrong.

Here, I thought, was the fruit of irascible wrath planted by commentaries that are not only unbridled but colored with constant disdain — not only for the institutional authorities but also for the sensibilities of common citizens who want balance and fairness and the chance to arrive at a reasoned judgment by themselves without being browbeaten daily by irresponsible talk radio.

When this guy Ducat demanded that his students be guaranteed free education by every responsible authority media could get their hands on at that moment, my first reaction was: Shoot this man.

The broadcasters were frantically trying to get every senior bureaucrat on the phone to make commitments to a hostage-taker under severe duress. In the heat of the moment, they must have thought they were doing the children a good deed, raising their chances of surviving this incident inflicted on all of us by a madman. But they were also setting the stage for a horrible moral hazard.

If this guy got the media time he so craved for and managed to win his absurd demands, then every day thereafter other schoolchildren will be in greater danger of being taken hostage by people who think they are doing them a favor by using the threat of violence to extract concessions from the authorities.

It is exactly like paying ransom to kidnappers. When that is done, more kidnappings are ensured. It will become a cottage industry of sorts. There can only be more victims if criminal acts are rewarded by a society that succumbs to such pressure.

As I write this, chasing after my deadline, the hostage-taking is still in progress.

It is clear the media, eager to cash in on this tragic event, has taken control of the situation. Broadcasters are in direct contact with the hostage-taker and are carrying his rant in real time over all radio and television outlets. An actor-turned-politician has inserted himself into the negotiations — with the best intentions, of course. The police, the ones who should be dictating the course of events, have been reduced to the margins of this spectacle.

I am nearly sure the way this incident is being handled will only encourage more publicity-seekers to pull such ploys in the future.

I found it disconcerting that Failon and Sanchez, having beaten everybody else to get the hostage-taker on the line, did not yield the phone connection to the police general they had on another line so that negotiations may proceed according to the book. They scored a scoop and they appeared bent on bleeding every ratings point from that advantage — at the expense of allowing the proper authorities due course.

The most dangerous slant that could be put on this incident is that the hostage-taking represents a primal scream by a citizen who has had enough.

With all the media at his disposal, Ducat spent the better part of yesterday delivering his version of a state of the nation address — something his criminal act does not entitle him to do. He had all the time to rant and rave about all his pet peeves, hurl wild accusations at officials, condemn all politicians across the board, vent his frustrations and deliver all his pent up oratory.

But this is not a citizen who has had enough. This is a citizen we should have had enough of.

He should have been jailed the first time he took a hostage to enforce collection of his bills. That would have prevented yet another media circus — one that happened because we allow rules to be so easily flouted and the proper authorities so easily sidelined by the onrush of reporters who crowd in and cause media dynamics to rule the conduct of a hostage situation.