Requiem for Porky

I'll say I never saw it coming. Though considering how my government's been jumping at every sound, I should have. I really feel sorry for him. I saw the news footage and ex House Speaker and former GMA Ally Jose de Venecia looks like-- dare I say it? --crap.

But I guess what goes around comes around. Jose de Venecia was the consummate political wheeler and dealer. The baron of brokers and the king of compromise. And I will admit that I hated this guy for his continuing efforts to reanimate the rotting corpse of charter change long after ex-President Fidel Ramos had given it up for, well, dead. There were other reasons that involved keeping Arroyo super-glued to the presidential chair long after she should have been impeached.

Now that he's been fired on account of his son's feud with the First Gentleman, he's opened up the metaphorical bathroom to let the stink out, calling for a "moral revolution." Conrado de Quiros is right when he says that de Venecia is the last person you'd expect such calls from; that if de Venecia did something right, it's that he just proved how little the current administration values loyalty and the people it claims to serve.

Rina Jimenez David writes that we may see in the fall of the wheeler-n'-dealer, the possible rise of a statesman. My knee-jerk reaction is to be skeptical-- I know humans enough that if you give them the opportunity to do something stupid, enough of them will. You can yell your head off about how they're running the planet or their relationships into the ground, and all they'll see is a locust-lunching wild man man clad in camel hair (you) with nothing to offer them but sound and drama.

But the Universe is full of surprises and just when you think something's graven in stone, something shifts... So maybe there's redemption for Porky yet.

The clouds massing outside the Fandom Cafe where I'm writing this now, the "defrocking" of Porky himself and the resurrection of the ZTE issue -- these I take as proof that whatever it is that's keeping this magic-realist country interesting is at it again.

I'm smelling a change in the air. I'm praying all of us can meet it with courage, equanimity, resilience, resourcefulness, and-- as this is Kafkaed after all--

humor.