What is time to you? Is it a one-way affair that originates from a certain point and ends in a permanent terminal? Or does it start from that terminal and ends where it started? In Albert Einstein’s quantum physics, there exists another physical reality where time is not measured on a 24-hour basis. Or we can posit the question: when does time begin?
In another domain, there is neither night nor day nor morning nor dawn. There is only the constant sun and the cold and indifferent moon.
For us poets, time is a dry leaf that begins as a seed and ends in decay and becomes part of the soil. For one-way humans that begin as eggs, time ends in death and the human suffers the same fate as the dead leaf.
Apply whatever is the theory to Joseph Estrada, the convicted economic plunderer whom Department of Interior and Local Government Secretary Reynato Puno had, in a jiffy, secured Gloria Arroyo’s presidential pardon. Why the abominable act of Puno to the chagrin of government prosecutors and those scandalized by the seven mansions of Estrada’s seven wives and his Manila Boracay hideaway equipped with a beach and the whitest of sands?
We can only recall that the man was supposed to have gotten P545-million in illegal gambling pay-offs and P189-commission from stock market purchases using our hard earned SSS, GSIS pension funds. Not to say the millions in the garnished Velarde account that dissipated in the bank soon after he obtained Gloria’s pardon.
Now he wants to be president again, not because the people want it, but because of his belief that Gloria is miserably failing in her job that was originally given to her in a silver platter by a civilian-military coup. The little woman must be replaced by the womanizer.
He must be Asiong Salonga whose life was made into a prize-winning movie that featured him (Estrada) in the title role. Asiong Salonga was a shady Tondo character, the lord of thugs, a Robin Hood who helped the downtrodden in his turf in the 1950s.
Asiong Salonga the movie is the story of a life frozen in time. Estrada, it appears, is living that role since then—hero to the poor, a hero who did not and will not live among them but whom he successfully exploited in his political ambitions.
Estrada must be the major character of Martin Amis’ Time Arrow, a novel about the life of Tod T. Friendly. The story which is actually a history of Europe and the gassing of the Jews begins with the death of Tod in modern America. Time, of course, is reversed as the story is narrated in a sort of flashbacks, a tool in the shorter fiction which employs it as brief as possible. Can the reader see the comparison? Will the great unwashed be exploited again by this man who wasted two years of a chance to improve our economic life?
Shall our collective life as a nation be frozen again in time because we never learn?
Time is also frozen to condemn officials of the Gunglo dagiti Mannurat nga Ilocano iti Filipinas(GUMIL)? We have written about their patta in Sta. Maria, Ilocos Sur. According to GF financial report, more than P500,000 was spent for the construction of the house but the unfinished house speaks for itself. The rotting iron bars and the deteriorating concrete and stones speak volumes of perfidy and dishonesty? Martin Rochina, chair of the GF building committee, never bothered to answer our letter sent via LBC to his Pasig, Metro Manila address regarding receipts of purchase of construction materials and the payroll. Jose Bragado, then GF president, spearheaded the construction sometime in 2002. In April 2005, in a report before a gathering of mannurat in Suso, Sta. Maria, Ilocos Sur, the so-called Iluko literary icon claimed there was still P200,000 of the Gumil house money when Dionisio Bulong took over the presidency of the writers’ association. Was the amount--how it was spent--indicated in subsequent GF financial reports?
They froze the money in the bank or dissipated it like the Velarde account? Time will tell even as we freeze the issue at this point.
*in EYES WIDE OPEN, weekly column in a San Fernando, La Union tabloid
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