Cebu Gov. Pamela Baricuatro and Rep. Duke Frasco of the province’s fifth district publicly argued over the latter’s proposal to build an airport in Sogod municipality.
Supporters of the Trillion-Peso March (TPM) would find discussions about infrastructure, strictly speaking, incompatible with any congressman’s constitutionally stipulated job to craft and oversee the implementation of laws, as well as to wield the power of the purse.
The TPM calls for the end, among lawmakers, of pork barrel politics in any transmogrification and under whatever disguise. Legislators who stop dreaming up infrastructure and focus on fulfilling their actual mandate help rid themselves of perceptions, fair or otherwise, of interest in the pork behind the project.
In the public interest, journalists, meanwhile, ought to be critical in reporting infrastructure ideas from lawmakers. They are absolutely free to float them, but such ought to be presented by leaders in the executive branch of the government. As much as the Supreme Court ultimately settles legal disputes and interprets the Constitution but strictly speaking does not legislate, legislators may debate and settle the national budget. But in the eyes of critical citizens, they overreach when they conceptualize projects — a task of the executive.
The governor is the governor. She should, observers say, be confident about that instead of appearing sufficiently irritable as to entertain every digital gauntlet thrown at her. Now is not the time for Dutertistic hyperventilation in the public sphere. Time and energy were splurged on the Frasco proposal as well as on the public teaching of lawyer Regal Oliva about the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) refusal to temporarily release Rodrigo Duterte, erstwhile Philippine president. Those would have been better spent improving the form, substance and communication of the Province’s post-Sept. 30, 2025 earthquake plans, now that related civic relief and rehabilitation work is slowing down.
Incidentally, the ICC reaffirmed its jurisdiction over alleged crimes against humanity on suspect Duterte’s watch from 2011 to 2019 in Davao and the Philippines when the country was a state party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court.
No one in the end begrudges the former chief executive’s devotees their filial respect for him. But hailing and reaffirming their unending loyalty to him is an impoverished response to studied points of international litigation.
Christmas and a new year are coming. Earthquakes will outlive our generation. What is the Capitol’s strategic plan for earthquake-stricken northern Cebu communities facing bleak holidays (a period that mental health experts say is a high season for depression) and the rest of tremor-prone Cebu? In fairness to the governor, a castle, er, airport in the air is certainly a curious thing to broach. But is a genuinely, scientifically earthquake-resilient province part of her legacy projects?
We can do without the social media earthquakes which unfortunately have exacerbated what the late, renowned media scholar Luis Teodoro called the “celebrification” of politics and governance. And politicians’ social media accounts ought to have better uses than to zap perceived adversaries, especially when the communities they supposedly serve remain on shaky ground.
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Teodoro also criticized Filipinos’ “politicization” of the celebrity. Prime illustrations include our catapulting of actors such as Joseph Estrada and Vicente Sotto III to Malacañang and the Senate presidency. Yet the older notion of the political in everything confronts us all afresh in the new Tarog movie about Manuel L. Quezon, the Philippines’ second president.
According to reviews, the movie highlights, among others, the rivalry between Quezon and Sergio Osmeña, Sr., eventually the country’s fourth president. I have not seen the movie, and being firmly part of the “the book was better” camp, I feel no desperation to watch it.
In any case, President Quezon’s best-known grandson, the leading historian Manuel “Manolo” Quezon III, has troves of historical accounts of Philippine presidencies on his website, www.quezon.ph. I hope moviegoers will be inspired to read Manolo’s works. Not only has he conceded that his grandfather, like any human being, has flaws, but he also has an unrivaled grasp of Philippine political history. This, I am certain, is the necessary complement to artistic portrayals, especially reputedly iconoclastic ones, of Philippine leaders.
Given the generally positive reception of President Quezon and his family prior to the movie’s release, I hope it does not play into the machinations of those who wish to score additional points from Luzon-vs-Visayas sentiments that can easily draw from the Quezon-Osmeña rivalry that Tarog’s work has profiled.
The last time Visayans went on mob mode and literally sang “It’s my turn,” they elected president the suspect who is now under ICC custody.
We cannot afford to be starry-eyed about the politics of art. Were it not for watchful, critical historians, the cause for the beatification of the Venerable Pius XII would have been doomed by Hochhuth’s (1963) “The Deputy, a Christian tragedy.” This play claims that the pope was a moral failure in the face of the Holocaust. This line apparently influenced historiography to the point that Kertzer (2022) wrote a history book that may be considered a fruit of confirmation bias for the image of a villainous Successor of St. Peter. Fortunately, six other historians have released books from 2020 onward that give the pontiff a positive review, and Kertzer’s thesis has been debunked by Rychlach (2022) in the article “The spurious effort to make Pope Pius XII a villain.”
The cause for Pius’ beatification continues.
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Cebu Archbishop Alberto Uy correctly chimed the glorification of villains in the commercialized popular celebration of Halloween, or the Eve of All Saints.
In response to the decay, parishes around the world have been organizing Halloween masquerades in which churchgoers dress up as their favorite saints.
We should have room, however, to mimic the macabre, too, whether to laugh at it the way He who sits in the heavens laughs at his enemies (Psalm 2:4), or by way of art as catechesis, which has a long history in Christianity (see portrayals of St. Anthony the Abbot resisting a horde of demons, the Virgin Mary punching the devil in the face, St. Michael crushing Satan underfoot, or St. Martha subduing a dragon). Gargoyles, we cannot forget, front Gothic churches, a nod to St. Romain’s defeat of the gargouille, whose head, a remnant of the burning of the monster, was made into a spectacle to warn evil spirits about their destiny.
Halloween, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day, respectively, invite the faithful to meditate on hell, heaven and purgatory. We also address the problem of the glorification of evil in Halloween if we revisit the grotesque to situate it anew within eschatology. There are reasons St. John the Evangelist was granted visions of the final battle between good and evil. And dressing up as a saint can never substitute for Minotaur-headed support for so-called leaders who normalize extrajudicial killings, character assassination, or silence that indubitably colludes with oppressors.