The Construct

Irritating as it is, this whole hostage-taking situation has gone from bad to worse.

Call me crazy, but Rolando Mendoza’s story is just one of those where you can say, “I don’t say I agree with what he did, but I understand.” Getting sacked and taking the fall while many of his higher ups were undoubtedly more corrupt, come on.

Pretty much like OJ Simpson. Quoting Chris Rock, “He’s [OJ] paying $25000 a month in alimony, got a another man driving around in his car and fucking his wife in a house he’s still paying the mortgage on. Now I’m not saying he should have killed her… but I understand.”

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See? It wasn’t simply the incident that set people off, it’s the way we handle the situation. And yes, we’ll cry racism when we see these kinds of things on the Internet:

PS: As a casual Flash game designer, I have to say this was done in absolutely bad taste. At ibinandera mo pa talagang Pilipino ka.

De ja vu? Yet another person held a busload of people as hostage. But unlike the last one. This one ended in a bloodbath.

Instead of focusing too much on the failures of our police, I’d rather take a look at the varied reactions to the incident and provide some comments.

I really don’t want to dwell too long lest I run out of my very limited writing thanks to a writer’s block that I’ve been having for a loooong time.

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Author’s Note: Did this quite hastily the day after the SONA. Forgot to click the Publish button.

I’ve been looking forward to Noynoy’s SONA not in a strictly political standpoint, but as a discourse analyst. Having wrestled with GMA’s nine SONAs, I’m intensely curious about the linguistic profile of Noynoy’s. Now that it has been delivered, I can give it a go.

Tagalugin mo kasi.The SONA contains 1,256 unique words with more than 60% of which are Filipino words. As such, analyzing the SONA’s text through existing semantic tagging software will be problematic since the software will fail to accurately tag 60% of the data. Interestingly, the “at” string, which can occur as both Filipino (as conjunction) and English (as preposition) only occurs as the Filipino conjunction.

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So for starters, Noynoy ordered that all siren-equipped (wang-wang in Filipino parlance) cars be brought to justice.

If simply for that reason, I can like the guy. I have, time and again, expressed my dislike for politician convoys that bully taxpaying motorists while on the road.

But his move of following the same rules for himself? I think that’s just plain bollocks. I don’t buy all that “So that the traffic rules will also apply to the president and that he’s not that different from the rest of you” malarkey.

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