Trends of the week

MANILA, Philippines - The world is weird. Twitter is weirder. The Philippines is the weirdest. That’s the main takeaway one would have this week after disembarking from the nauseating ship of social media, which can be crazy and erratic, yet still pales in comparison to the shores of real life. This was an interesting Independence week, to say the least. There’s freedom, then there’s Pinoy freedom — a state of wild, haphazard movements that teeter awkwardly towards anarchy. No amount of hashtags can ever capture the sheer insanity of a Senate privilege speech devolving into a Saturday Night Live skit, of alleged sex videos involving a cabinet secretary, of a reality TV show encouraging contestants to shed their clothes, and of a boxing champion taking another job he’s grossly unqualified for. In the Philippines, all bets are off. Luckily, we’re on social media most of the time, where our weirdness always feels right at home.

Pacquiao keeps taking random jobs

Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao, the champion boxer/aspiring singer/businessman/one-time game show host/pastor/congressman, just added another slash in his ever-expanding title this week as he was named head coach of PBA expansion team Kia Kamao. Pacquiao now has enough slashes to slice the wrists of all the infinitely more qualified basketball coaches in the country.

Manny thinks he’s the perfect man for the job, claiming that boxing and basketball have plenty of similarities. Sure: both are sports, both require physical exertion that leads to sweat, and both start with the letter “b.” Then again, Manny thinks he’s the perfect man for any job.

Basketball Twitter reacted violently, calling the move a travesty and criticizing the PBA and the Kia franchise for making a mockery of the league. This does seem like a loud cry for help from a league desperate for a renaissance, a rebirth of the glory days of Robert Jaworski. Pacquiao is the closest thing to the Big J that the country has had — a charismatic athlete beloved by the masses. He has all the right attributes to be the next Jaworski in the PBA — well, everything except actual expertise in basketball. Coaches need that, you know, to win basketball games.

MTRCB trends, so something must be up

You wouldn’t believe this but, after the MTRCB summoned ABS-CBN to “explain” Pinoy Big Brother’s nude painting challenge that disturbed Senators Pia Cayetano and Nancy Binay, Twitter had some thoughts. The vocal diehard fans of the show predictably came to its defense, branding the reaction as “OA” since the nude painting never occurred (PBB contestant Jayme Jalandoni declined after being talked out of it by her father). Others, who probably find the show’s arbitrariness to be distasteful and excessive, lauded the MTRCB for “doing its job.” Sen. Cayetano didn’t care that the nude painting never transpired because the entire premise itself was twisted.

The producers of the show may not see anything wrong with the challenge. For them, it may have simply been a playful, high-risk dare meant to demonstrate the lengths people are willing to take to succeed, because after all, the Big Brother franchise is an attempt at social experimentation. But all social experiments are aimed at getting tamper-proof insights into real-life situations. PBB is a television show where everything is a performance. There might be people out there contemplating posing nude for art class for additional income, but none of them are doing so in front of thousands of complete strangers. The world is weird, but PBB’s weirdness is unnatural.

Bong Revilla’s joke isn’t funny anymore

Imagine you have a co-worker who is under investigation by HR for corruption. He has finally decided to speak to the whole department about the issue. He invites everyone to the conference room where he unexpectedly starts to thank random people. As you’re still trying to process what the hell is happening, he plays an AVP about him, made by him, featuring a maudlin song performed by him. It would be incredibly insane, right? No normal human being would pull something like that, right?

Well, obviously you’re not one of the voices that Senator Bong Revilla hears in the dystopian fun house in his head. This totally happened on Monday, in an institution far more important and prestigious than your regular office, with far higher stakes, so of course the absurdity was far worse than anyone can possibly imagine, because the Philippine government is one long, ongoing mean prank played on Filipinos who have long ceased to find any of this nonsense funny.

Oh, but we try. Twitter knows we tried. We tried to make fun of Sen. Revilla’s spectacle of stupidity because it was such an overt joke, because his mere presence in a legislative body is one big joke. But we just can’t anymore. Soon, the laughter transitioned seamlessly into sobbing, the senator having successfully turned Twitter into a bunch of drunk people who have simultaneously lost the capacity for denial. There were tweets about leaving the country. There tweets contemplating the merits of another dictatorship. There were tweets filled with expletives aimed at Revilla and the government in general. It’s impossible to satirize something that is already intrinsically satire — a senator against whom there is overwhelming evidence of plunder, wasting government time and money for awkward, stomach-turning, soul-crushing self-aggrandizement. When he used a toy truck during another privileged speech a few months ago, we laughed, the way one would laugh at an embarrassing neighbor, except this neighbor allegedly stole our savings, so now we have no energy left to laugh at a stupid music video. What’s next? A dance number? A magic trick? Whatever it is, Twitter will no longer be amused.