Vitaly Zdorovetskiy, the American-Russian blogger, must have felt pretty indestructible while careening around our third-world isles.
With school-age pranks such as snatching security guards’ caps, absconding with a trike, hulking over elderly women and, in general, making a nuisance of himself, he must have thought his antics, filmed for precious content, were a lark. How he snickered at these small brown folk cowering before him.
There is a new breed of humanity borne out of the social media age. Those who make a living off of their own creativity, filming, editing, publishing, and touting their own social media bubbles. It is enough to sustain them, the clicks and hits funneling precious ad revenue to their bank. So, their challenge is to make ordinary folks watch. The longer, the better. And to keep coming back for more.
This ecosystem is what has bred Vitaly and his ilk. And what do they do, exactly? Nothing much. They do humdrum things like ride a boat and eat local delicacies and walk on beaches. Their fresh eyes capture nuances otherwise lost to regulars, which is great. But sometimes, all they do is just make nuisances of themselves. Rage, after all, is pretty good fuel.
Vitaly must have thought that the only consequence he would face would be deportation. Break a few minor laws here and there, gather enough material for his latest YouTube video, and then make his merry way out. Or, if he gets apprehended, he gets chucked onto a plane straight out of Manila.
After all, that’s what happens when we catch aliens breaking our laws in the country. It’s so much trouble to try them in our crowded courts and then jail them in even more crowded cells. It’s so much easier to jettison them asap. Travel to the isles and set up a cyber-scam center? Recruit laborers for prostitution or modern enslavement? Work without a visa? Cuff, and then deport.
Vitaly might have been betting this would be his worst-case scenario. Well, newsflash, dear. Wrong assumption.
Our authorities were quick to arrest him, and then in no time at all, he was paraded before the media to listen to an important announcement: Vitaly was being held indefinitely to answer for his crimes.
Jailed here? In a Philippine jail? And probably without access to his devices and gadgets? No communication with the outside world? Where’s Vitaly going to get his usual dopamine fix? That deprivation will make him go nuts.
Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla says Vitaly will not be accorded special treatment. Thus, he will eat the food given to regular inmates. Gulp. Well, that’s new. Foreigners are so often treated with kid gloves that the disparity becomes glaring. This time, though, it will be Vitaly doing the glaring. At his food.
All hail Remulla. Enough kowtowing to foreigners who come and lord it over. We Pinoys are too often shunted off to one side while service staff rush and giggle to serve Caucasians. The alacrity in attending to the needs of Filipinos are markedly different when a foreign customer shows up. Secretary Remulla must have been channeling his frustrations at this very trait. Either that, or I’m channeling my own frustrations.
One google search on Vitaly, and we get all the dirt on him. Multiple arrests: macho stunts that have attacked women and gays, terrorized the frail, and abused the plight of the poor and the homeless. You wonder why, given all these arrests, he didn’t seem to have learned his lesson (some cases were reportedly dropped, more questions).
Given his history and all these incidents, we beg you, dear Philippine authorities, to please provide him the full penal experience. Let him savor the surot and the ipis. It’s summer, so the heat should be sweltering, and the humidity should be perfect to induce him to bare his sweaty chest. No air conditioning a la Conrad Hotel.
We might be accused of being hardboiled about a man we hardly know, true. But perhaps one does not need to do in-depth research. A view of those vids might suffice.
Sometimes, schadenfreude is exquisite.