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Sunday, October 12, 2003
Tabada: Sweet, my heart
By Mayette Tabada
Matamata
Love is in the air.
The papers were turgid with it.
“I will run for president in the election of 2004,” she told 50,000 in Pampanga. “I will sacrifice my yearnings… I shall stay married to my country.”
Reading this, I broke out in tremors. Though I’m no longer the dopey adolescent who thought oral sex meant a suitor reciting Shakespeare, with expression, I still get moved when I hear sex in the air.
Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago when the First Lady of ABS-CBN made her dramatic repackaging of sexually transmitted disease? Now, no less than the country’s commander-in-chief was renewing her troth to the Filipino people. Yes sa bayan, noh to Toh.
It’s amazing how love can be so transforming.
The Pampanga gathering was supposed to be the venue for a policy speech. It became a Lakas grand rally instead. (Even the ruling party has a name that’s guaranteed to perk up limp expectations like an erectile dysfunction miracle drug.)
Unlike past visits that had her barely kissing our southern shores, the Oct. 9 visit included an unplanned session of serious hand pressing with urban poor delegates, ferried by 20 Kaoshiung buses to pack in the City Sports Center grandstand. She also reportedly engaged the local media in a 15-minute presscon, a 360-degree turn for someone who had been impervious to ambush interviews by Cebu-based reporters in past visits.
How else did the President’s cariño translate?
Granted even before she arrived: land titles and Pag-ibig loan proceeds for 5,000 housing beneficiaries, P1.3 million livelihood grant for urban poor, 2,000 Philhealth cards for Cordova (although this was not given when only 170 residents and no municipal representative showed up).
She also made the following promises: P1 billion for the anti-drug program, which includes the proposed P5-million rehabilitation facility in Guba that will be giving free services to drug dependents. And solving Cebu’s traffic woes, the P7 billion south coastal road and the P19 million Naga-Toledo road made passable by March 2004.
To feed the urban poor gathered for her visit, organizers were estimated to have spent from P0.7 to 1.1 million for a lunch of rice and burger steak or crunchy chicken.
With the pot so sweetened, who can be so cold as not to reciprocate?
Workers rushed a gigantic “Cebu loves Gloria” streamer in time for the President’s day. The Provincial Government took a whole-page ad in local dailies. And, as in Pampanga, what should have been an urban poor congress at the City Sports Center became another Gloria love-in.
Doesn’t love give you the shivers?
Last Tuesday, a local judge ruled out as pretext a man’s claim that he could not have raped his victim because they were lovers. The former taxi driver was sentenced to 14-17 years in jail for waylaying the teenager and molesting her at knifepoint.
According to the Sun.Star Cebu report by Grecar Nilles, the judge dismissed the man’s “sweetheart defense” because “(though) he claims that they were sweethearts… yet he could not even remember the birthday of his lover; neither could he show any picture, love letter, or even the slightest indication that they were indeed sweethearts.”
Does a ride on the Kaoshiung and a jolly meal mean that the poor are Madam President’s inamorata?
Years and years ago when lads still came a-courting, they had a favorite expression: sweet nothings.
(mqt_research@sunstar.com.ph)
(October 12, 2003 issue)
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