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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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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By noon of June 30, we’ll have a new president.

I really find it funny that it’s been declared a special non-working holiday. Well, sure, quite a lot of people voted for Noynoy and those people would probably celebrating once their “manok” assumes position.

Others have been calling for a “ceasefire” on criticism against Noynoy as president for his first few months as president. Grace periods are for pansies.

As a Filipino one can only be hopeful for things to come but isn’t it one’s duty to be vigilant of things. Let’s face it, Noynoy is not the new face of Philippine politics. If he’d be one thing, he’d be the poster child of oligarchy and the repressive elite.

Winning the election is one thing. Transforming the nation to make winners of us all is another. We’ll see.

In other news, the Lakers beat the Celtics in the NBA Finals and that’s just too damn bad.

Finally! A bit of time to blog. For the past month, I’ve been splitting my time between work and thesis writing. And boy that wasn’t a pleasant experience at all on so many levels. I remember the pressures of writing my undergraduate thesis (gaining 20 lbs in the process) and I now realize how easy that was compare to this one. How I loath not having the resources to be a full time student.

My topic’s not really that alien to me since it’s basically a continuation of my analysis of representations of identities in discourse. Back in 2005, for my BA thesis, I examined representations of Fernando Poe Jr. in the editorials of the PDI. For my MA thesis, I examined the representations of GMA in the 2001-2009 SONAs.

I enjoyed writing my BA thesis. I enjoyed going over PDI editorials and examining the representations of FPJ. And even though I personally agree with PDI’s ideologies, it wasn’t too tough to keep the discussion objective.

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