Friday, October 10, 2008 Malilong: Bailing Teehankee out By Frank Malilong The Other Side
DON'TS take it personally, folks. Racist or homophobic abuse is a way of life in civilized Europe. And it does not choose its victims.
When the English football team played a World Cup qualifying game in Zagreb last month, Croatian fans targeted Emile Heskey, a colored English striker, with racist chants. Last week when Portsmouth visited Tottenham in an English Premier League match, Spurs fans rained monkey boos on Sol Campbell, another colored player.
The two incidents so incensed Rio Ferdinand, who plays centre-back for Manchester United and England’s national teams, that he accused Fifa, the world football’s governing body of being inutile.
“Fifa makes comments about what they do but never back it up with actions,” Ferdinand ranted. “The football association need to take a look at themselves.”
“Inutile” might as well be the term to describe BBC, the broadcast company that aired the show that no less than our ambassador to the United Kingdom, Edgardo Espiritu, described as “very malicious and a blatant display of racial prejudice.”
In what amounted to a rejection of the public outrage over the sketch that featured a Filipina maid as a sex object, BBC, according to a wire report, said that it was waiting for a formal complaint to arrive before it “will deal with it according to correct procedures.”
So save your breath, ladies and gentlemen. There is no way BBC, acting under its “correct procedures,” will make amends for the racial slur or even admit that there was one.
But why should we be so upset when our own record isn’t exactly unblemished?
Tagalogs portray us, Visayans, in their movies and TV shows as dumb maids with funny accents, an insult aggravated by the fact that it comes from a people who pronounce “tingle” as “tinggil.” Don’t many of our jokes make fun of the Boholanos? And we still wonder why they don’t want to share their water with us!
Let’s be like the Boholanos: bear the insults with quiet dignity. Don’t get mad, just get even.
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Getting people out of jail free is one of the perks of the Office of the President. Executive clemency is a power that is almost boundless.
That is why the release of convicted murderer Claudio Teehankee Jr. cannot be contested anymore despite what some high-profile lawyers say. Teehankee is, for all intents and purposes, a free man.
I don’t think President Arroyo reached the decision without counting the costs. She knew that a free Teehankee is sure to touch some fairly sensitive chords. The embarrassing lesson from the Romeo Jalosjos episode, in which the congressman was released only to be brought back to jail because of public outcry, is too recent to forget.
That she went ahead to bail Teehankee out seems to indicate that she doesn’t care about popularity ratings anymore. Either that or this administration invented the art of shooting oneself in the foot.
Freeing Teehankee is fast turning out to be even more unpopular than the aborted release of Jalosjos. It does not help that Arroyo’s own justice secretary, in a singular act of insensitivity, told the families of Teehankee’s victims to seek justice from Jesus above if they’re not satisfied with her decision.
I do not think they have to go that far. Not yet, anyway. And they don’t have to ask for it. Two years from now, the people will give it to them. That is when Mrs. Arroyo’s endorsement of a candidate for successor will be exposed as a kiss of death.
