Radioactive fall-out from pork and Fukushima

MANILA, Philippines - Radioactivity presents itself as a useful metaphor for the disastrous outcome of pork barrel manipulations in the Philippines, at least to this nomad on hiatus in Japan. As thoughtful Filipinos and Japanese deal with the nearly unimaginable mathematics of their separate disasters, it is Fukushima that offers clues into the comparable scale of these events.

Scale, of course, is best comprehended by an imagination expanded by science.

Per liter, waters deep under the Fukushima plant now contain 950 million becquerels of radioactive caesium-137, three times more than Chernobyl’s total release. And in the same mix is 30 times more strontium-90 – an isotope that invades bones – than the caesium-137 that is passed out of organisms quickly. As 400 tons of this cocktail leaks daily into the Pacific Ocean, the imagination is stretched way beyond the work of grasping garden-variety catastrophe.

Today, for example, the word becquerel, the unit measure for radioactivity, is suddenly terribly familiar to Japan residents.

The Philippine pork allocations, at the extreme levels of P200 million per senator and P75 million per representative, through most of the last decade, also strikes the imagination as numbers at the far edges of comprehension. Also as inevitably catastrophic: to begin with, an estimated P10 billion skimmed off the national budget by just one scandalously amoral con artist and her enablers in the political firmament. Very big numbers.

Today, for example, figures like P24 billion (the monies allocated in 2013 to Congressional pork by the Philippine government) are suddenly all too familiar to Philippine residents.

To be sure, the Fukushima meltdown’s impact zone is global; the Philippine pork high jinks, local to a country that nonetheless has a globally dispersed population. The former will work itself into the food chain connecting diets and environmental dynamics in and around the Pacific. The latter will work itself into the chain of ideas linking Filipinos everywhere.

Fukushima will always recall the 2011 tsunami, enveloping the continuing, prolonged post-event in the softening haze of High Tragedy. The pork barrel in the Philippines will always conjure imperial impunity from the bad old days of colonization, enveloping the continuing, prolonged post-event in the intense aura of High Opera.

The Tokyo media are forthright about the apocalyptic measure of Fukushima. Still, the typically circumspect Japanese journalist cultivates sobriety. Then again, despite the gain in Zen calm, it is a mood with vaguely repressive undertones. 

Meanwhile, the Manila media are similarly forthright about the ruinous size of pork abuse. True to form, the typically effusive Filipino journalist ratchets up emotional, indeed strident, response. But then again, despite the shrillness wearing down of precision thinking, it is a mood with potentially liberating outcomes.

The differences between the events are clear, in any case. The similarities remain obscure.

The similarities, then. The operators of both enterprises worked beyond public scrutiny. Both events were built on an exercise of authority that brooked no interrogation. While the Fukushima operations were not exactly criminal, its decision-making and communications with its public, to this day, remain in large measure veiled. While not all members of Congress abused their pork, enough of them did – at gargantuan scale – to merit descriptions of a level of corruption embedded in a systems-wide practice of clandestine transactions.

Fukushima will destroy lives within but also way beyond the 30-year half-lives of caesium-137 and strontium-90. The Philippine pork affair – even if stopped, and given the caustic effects of corruption on the social fabric – will continue to destroy lives indefinitely, although hopefully at diminishing degrees. Such is radioactivity. Such is corruption. Even if ways can be found to wholly terminate the core zone of the systems meltdown, nevertheless the meltdown of tissue, bone, social fabric, natural and cultural equilibriums, and integrities will persist for some time.

To this Filipino wanderer, then, the two catastrophes not only coincide, but overlap, and produce a binocular vision.

Something quite useful comes into focus where the two events overlap. Hint: cesium and strontium did not exist in nature before these isotopes were produced and released into the earth’s atmosphere by the nuclear tests conducted by a number of countries from the 1940’s onwards; and after the detonations by the United States of the plutonium and uranium fission bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.

The United States directed the post-war reconfiguration of governance in both Japan and the Philippines. Both countries were allowed their declarations of sovereignty – however an autonomy that sustained American strategic interests and aligned with an American version of progress. In Japan, a pacifist Constitution created a nation without a military and an arsenal that excludes nuclear weapons forever. Forever, however, has turned out to be a short time. The US has altered both provisos in recent decades.

But, more importantly, the reliance of Japan’s energy infrastructure on nuclear reactors follows an American paradigm. So does the realpolitik wisdom of the pork barrel in the Philippines emanate from American political culture. 

These deeply problematic aspects of Japanese and Philippine current events are thus still radioactive fall-out from the Second World War. Until the 1980’s, both countries did tremendously well under American tutelage, and have had little reason to consider and embrace other concepts of security and progress. But perhaps that time to move on has arrived.