Thursday, June 28, 2007 Covington: Of airports and onions By Gary Covington Looking In
LAST Wednesday was sad picture day. A front-page photo of the old and, as the caption noted, apparently abandoned airport buildings.
I'm not much of a flier - I prefer boats which have stand-up bars and passing scenery to look at, but I've trundled through Davao's old airport on quite a few occasions and have always been impressed with the feeling of light and air and cool caused by the ceiling being way up there.
No tacky suspended ceilings. An enormous open space enjoyed by sparrows. An old fashioned airport building where passengers could watch planes arriving and taxiing and doing aeroplane things.
So unlike the vast modern people processors which eat folks at the front door, digest them through miles of corridors and tunnels and then eject them straight into the waiting transport.
Coming from manic Manila's sweaty lunchbox of a domestic airport passenger lounge to Davao's huge swooping building was a coming home moment and I'm no doubt screwing up my adjectives but you know what I mean.
And now the place is empty. Echoing. I expect falling apart and everything inside which wasn't nailed down long since vanished to the junkshop. Surely some use could be found for the structure - a cultural performance theater? An annex to Davao's museum for larger exhibits? I don't know, it seems such a waste and a shame to merely abandon the place.
On Tuesday Mati - up there in Davao Oriental - became a city. A referendum had been held, votes cast, votes counted and a declaration made all in the space of a few days. There were no riots, no missing ballot boxes, no polling stations burnt down, no shootings and the losing party didn't ask for a recount. In fact, the process was so quiet as to be hardly noticeable.
Why can't the national elections be held like that? Both ballots after all concern the same end result - money and power. Think of the time and expense and chaos that might be avoided.
Davao news and the aerial spray ban was stopped in its tracks, at least for three months, by a Regional Trial Court temporary injunction. Up jumps Dagohoy Magaway, spokesman of the anti-aerial spraying group MaaS - "For 90 more days we will be bathing in chemicals ...our children and the rest of the people residing close and within the banana plantations will be tailed (sic) by gradual and painful death."
Have you ever heard such melodramatic claptrap? Oh - and by the way Mr. Magaway, I hope that the "children and people residing close and within the banana plantations" are not drawing their drinking water from the local wells because that's where the chemical runoff goes - whether sprayed by aeroplane or bicycle pump - straight down to join the groundwater system and eventually emerge at springs and in wells and in the local rivers.
Headline of the week was on Monday - "Govt can't stop onion smuggling." So what? The management can't stop corruption, illegal logging, the Abu Sayaf, habal-habals, even oversize and illegally sited billboards so why should onion smuggling be a special case?
This week's gobbledegook comes from Nokia the phone people whose instruments are not called cellphones any more. They're "multimedia terminals." Boggle, boggle, boggle...
