distressed and disconcerted

by the torrent of killings, drug-related and not, with many innocents presumably “caught in the crossfire”, but just as badly by the shabu menace that’s past eradication and likely impossible to “contain” in this third world country without livelihood options for mules, runners, and pushers and without free health and support services for addicts asking for help.

and disgusted by the announcement of house speaker pantaleon alvarez (whom we don’t know from adam, yet who is sooooo powerful all at once with that super majority na, super minority pa) that the prez has changed his mind re a constitutional convention for the shift to federalism upon the advice of previous presidents fvr, estrada, arroyo, and aquino because, you know, concon is too expensive, argh.  please naman, mr. president, this is too important.  we simply do not trust congress.  if we can’t afford to do it properly, then let’s not do it at all, instead work with what we have already, like senator nene pimentel’s local government code of 1991 that could work for the bangsamoro, too.

and disgruntled, still, by that disastrously pa-creative coverage of president duterte’s first SONA, those “disturbingly lingering, unflattering low angle ‘ilong’ shots,” ika nga ng isang veteran TV director, not to speak of the rather pointless tight shots on the presidential hands and other indie film gimmicks that were all quite inappropriate to a SONA, seriously distracting from the speech of a president who does not really speak very clearly, whether in english or tagalog or bisaya, and so you need to focus and to watch his lips if you want to catch the full sense of what he’s saying from one sentence to the next.

calling out presidential comms sec martin andanar: what were you thinking? there was nothing “master class” about that SONA coverage.  the president cannot be boring even if he tried (except to diehard critics of course) just because he’s unlike any president we’ve had before, and we need help deciphering him, adlibs, asides, and all.  and i hope it’s not true that you’re tapping the same indie feature film director (famous for poverty porn) to direct information campaigns critical to nation, unless the idea is to distract from the issues maybe, or from shifts in the presidential mindset? make it impossible for us to keep track? OMG

p.s. sana pinaghahandaan na ninyo, at ng mainstream and social media na rin, ang information campaign on federalism and constitutional change.  we expect nothing less than savvy and clarity on all sides.