Crackpot

Several international news organizations got in touch with me the past two days, setting interviews about the Ducat hostage-taking as a symptom of all that is wrong in our society. I parried the interviews, charging the news organizations with attempting to over-read what is ultimately a tragic prank pulled by a crackpot.

Over-reading is a disease plaguing a media industry burdened with too many channels, too much time to fill and a shortage of usable content to keep them going.

The Ducat incident is simply too tempting a springboard to beat up on our country, our institutions, our culture and our abundant follies as a people. The event was intensively covered by global cable news, a welcome relief from the repetitive stories about violence in Iraq and futile effort to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb.

This incident, although handled unremarkably, at least ended happily.

The victims were the most poignant there could possibly be: preschoolers who did not fully understand what was happening around them. The man responsible for this prank is a most unlikely criminal: a do-gooder who set up a daycare center in the city’s poorest district.

He obviously loved the children and was loved in return. With grenades and guns, he tried to blackmail the rest of society into ensuring a better future for his wards.

It is easy to wrongly characterize this heel and make him appear a hero. Surely, the direct beneficiaries of his generosity — the families of the children taken hostage — did not know exactly what to think of this grandfatherly figure with a warped sense of how things should be done. Those who praised his deed are badly in need of intensive therapy to restore them to a proper sense of citizenship and civil behavior.

If there is anything that ought to be collectively examined about our culture in the aftermath of this incident, it is the proposition that the poor have the right to extort. In order to secure the education of his wards, Ducat terrorized all the rest of us by threatening to blow the children up.

The warped values that drove him to that incident is the same one that encouraged some of us to worship Robin Hood types — those criminals with golden hearts glamorized in the movies of Ramon Revilla Sr.

I remember, in connection with this, the case of Ben Tumbling who was killed by the police over two decades ago. A small-time hood in the town of Malabon, urban legend had it that he had magical abilities to somersault into the dark alleyways and disappear after the commission of a crime. The fruits of his crime he generously partook with his impoverished neighbors.

Curiosity drove me to come to his wake and there I found thousands of people cramming the streets around his shanty, possessed by a certain religious fervor. It was as if a saint had died. I wrote a lengthy essay about it that grappled with the sense, but mostly the nonsense, of our popular culture.

The poisoned idea that criminal extortion is just if the fruits of the crime are shared with the poor reappears in many forms in the dark underside of our popular culture. It encourages us to lionize corrupt politicians who dispense patronage generously or tolerate gambling lords who build chapels. It is the principle employed by armed communist goons who collect "revolutionary taxes."

This poisoned idea warps our sense of civic responsibility and undermines the rule of law. One consequence is that tragic-comic incident at the Bonifacio Shrine last Wednesday.

Happening in the darkest depths of a campaign period, a dark hole that consumes every bizarre event and converts it into political points, the hostage-taking took center stage in the vacuous debate plaguing this particular election.

One senator and one senatorial candidate managed to pull rank and commandeer the handling of the negotiations with the hostage-taker, violating every protocol in the book about how such incidents should be dealt with. As it always happens in our highly personalistic culture, charisma triumphs over procedure.

It was not only the politicians who made the police lines extremely permeable. Media practitioners were negotiating directly with the hostage-taker, amplifying his rant in the airwaves and crowding in on the captive busload of children. Had any of those grenades gone off, our broadcast industry would have been seriously decimated.

Spokesmen of the opposition, envious of the media mileage won by an administration candidate, accused the politicians on the scene of politicking. But they could not help bleeding the incident of its partisan juice, repeating the hostage-taker’s incoherent rant about corruption and all that.

Deep into repeating Ducat’s rant, they conveniently forgot to condemn the crime that underpins the event. They forgot to tell us that this crackpot had broken the rules of civic culture and whatever he had to say could not possibly be dignified. A criminal act invalidates everything else.

Cynically exploiting the same event in order to score political points, the only difference between the opposition politicians repeating Ducat’s rant and the administration politicians commandeering the negotiations is that the former were too cowardly to actually be within killing range of two live grenades.

It is a good thing that the day after the useless drama, many sections of our media were examining both the competence of our police officials as well as the behavior of our journalists. This is the more fruitful course of discussion.

While at it, we might as well examine the frailties of our popular culture that produced the sort of mentality that grips Jun Ducat. Our popular culture, and not just Ducat, is sick and in dire need of diagnosis.