New year, same GMA

This is an unusual week. Today we celebrate the start of the Year of the Horse, hoping for luck and prosperity. Tomorrow we grow somber, reminding ourselves that lucky or luckless, prosperous or poor, to dust we shall all return.

A day after contemplating our mortality, we will celebrate life once again. On Valentine’s Day we’ll wonder if we’ll live happily ever after with our Mr. or Ms. Right, our spouse, lover, roommate, significant other. Do men wish to live happily ever after with just one woman, or is this a romantic female hallucination?

Recent surveys have shown that Filipinos are the happiest people in this part of the world. A friend in the States e-mailed me an article about Hong Kong written by an American, reporting that among the people in the former British colony, the Filipino expatriate community seemed to be the happiest even if they are mostly maids who are often looked down upon by the locals.

Are we easily pleased, mababaw ang kaligayahan? Do we consider life too short to worry much about anything? We do laugh a lot — we like to say we laugh so we won’t cry.

An imam told me recently that he wanted me to be happy. I asked him to define happiness. His reply: "Happiness is waking up in the morning looking forward to a new day, and coming home at night feeling you’ve accomplished something."

Are you happy? Happy Lunar New Year!

If you’re a feng shui adherent, remember the fate that befell your kindred spirit, Joseph Estrada. You can plaster your walls and doors with mirrors and ba-guas and hang wind chimes over every entrance and window, rearrange the furniture and even tear down "unlucky" doors and stairs. But there are some tragedies even the stars, the moon and geomancy can’t foretell.

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President Arroyo doesn’t seem to go for feng shui or any type of mumbo-jumbo. Instead she goes for prayer power, and when that doesn’t work, she turns to taray power.

I don’t know if President GMA has a resolution for the Chinese Lunar New Year, but she can give up trying to be something other than a taray girl. It’s excruciating to watch her trying to hold her tongue and be on her best behavior. Bitches are born and can’t be unmade — but maybe that’s too harsh a description for the President of the Philippines. Okay, I’ll call her a pugilist.

It’s sometimes entertaining watching her in action, skewering her critics (including the press), putting her foot in her mouth. But with her vaunted IQ, she must know that she can be too pugnacious for her own good. The President is mother/father of the nation, as the case may be. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is no mother figure at all. She’s turning out to be brawler-in-chief, baiting her critics, refusing to heed her own calls for a political détente.

What did she hope to achieve by saying critics of Balikatan are Abu Sayyaf lovers and are not Filipinos? There will always be dissent — and very noisy dissent — in this country. Even Ferdinand Marcos couldn’t bamboozle his critics into silence. Her statements didn’t win anyone over to her side. I doubt if the statements affected public sentiment about the war games – pro- and anti-American Filipinos are pretty much unwavering in their mindset. But the statements reinforced her pugnacious image, which is the last thing a President should want when she’s supposed to be trying to unite the nation.

Inevitably, President GMA has found herself being compared to her predecessor, who met criticism with a sneer. The difference is that Erap Estrada at least had an overwhelming mandate and therefore had some right to sneer at his critics, many of whom – as he had often rightly pointed out – didn’t vote for him in the first place.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo also had an overwhelming mandate – to become vice president. Because of the way she was swept to power, she should go for a bit of humility. And a bit of originality. If you’re going to borrow rhetoric, Mrs. President, don’t get it from the widely quoted leader of the free world.

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Despite her intemperate remarks, it still looks like a good year ahead for President GMA. Even without consulting a feng shui expert, you can see that the global economy is improving, and it’s going to take the Philippines along with it. During the rough times we did better than our neighbors, with GMA at the nation’s helm, and we should do well when the good times roll in.

If the taray girl can hold her tongue and stop provoking her critics, we might even do great in the Year of the Horse.