Odd recent events affecting our lives

There have been incidences of odd recent events that affect our lives. These are odd events because we never expected things to turn out this way and having happened — these events now threaten to make dramatic impacts.

Regular Chair Wrecker readers might have said “odd” upon noticing that yours truly failed to write a column last Thursday and Sunday. Now before any of those Chair Wrecker ‘haters’ get any funny notions, let’s immediately quash any speculations that the STAR fired or suspended your Chair Wrecker.

Far from it, the STAR staff and management provided your Chair Wrecker with all the much appreciated support and prayers for having entered the Makati Medical Center for an 11-day confinement last November 11 to 22 over what a biopsy revealed as cancer and its subsequent surgical removal.

While cancer is generally greatly feared, it is an odd incidence insofar as your Chair Wrecker is concerned. Nobody in our family ever died of cancer. That fact alone reduces the possibility of encountering the dreaded disease. Not only that — the cancer which your Chair Wrecker encountered tracked a mere one percent incidence among males.

One of your Chair Wrecker’s doctors thinks that the immuno suppression imposed on yours truly as a result of kidney transplantation nearly 8 years ago allowed what is normally low cancer incidence to thrive. The doctors are optimistic that the low grade cancer yours truly encountered was fully contained with a 96% chance that it will not spread.

My sister Dorothy noted that “You have been afflicted with so many life threatening health problems but each time God seems to sustain you.” On a previous grant of another lease on life, Italian Carlo Gentile, a good friend from the Focolare Movement said: “Don’t worry. God is not yet ready to meet you.” Whatever it is, it is great to be back to wreck more chairs.

Still on the topic of odd events, US State Secretary Hillary Clinton came and went and many of our idiotic countrymen — people who do not know the truth — heaped praise and adulation on her instead of calling her to task and demand that she explain the real US agenda in Mindanao.

How can a people who stood to suffer the Balkanization of their country and the placing of their very homes at risk as Ground Zero of a possible US-China War lustily cheer a point person in the making of all that? The comparison would be that of Jews celebrating the life of Heinrich Himmler.

What made Filipinos more pathetic was the fact that the few who recognized the real US agenda and sought to protect Filipino interests were met by violent dispersal. While we may disagree with the prescriptions of the Left, it works against us when we dismiss their analysis of the Philippine situation as wrong without scrutinizing these issues first.

Leftist prescriptions of Class War or Cultural Revolution may be repulsive to many of us but let that not lead us to deny that we do live in a semi-feudal structure that is overly influenced by dominant foreign powers. Our corrupt and plundering rulers cannot inflict damage that can compare with what the foreign exploitation has been doing to our country.  

Still more odd events unraveled when Nacionalista Party (NP) presidential standard bearer Manny Villar chose Loren Legarda as vice presidential running mate. We find that odd considering that we normally select a person whom we can trust as our second in command.

Loren Legarda was part of two plots to oust Manny Villar as Senate President — of which the second succeeded and resulted in giving the post to incumbent Juan Ponce-Enrile. Loren Legarda actively pushed for the investigation of Manny Villar’s supposed “Double Insertion” for the completion of the C-5 Road Extension Project and the subsequent Villar Ethics Case.

Some would say that Loren could reflect badly on Villar as a case of poor judgment. Others say that it showed desperation on the part of Manny Villar to have to get a vice president like Loren who had already “stabbed” the NP presidential candidate no less than three times.

Likewise an odd event was the recent choice by Lakas Kampi CMD Party presidential standard bearer Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro of Edu Manzano as vice presidential running mate. The choice became all the more odd when seen as the decision of a presidential candidate who is packaged as “galing at talino (competence and talent)” to the 2010 voters.

Edu Manzano may be more qualified to be an elected public official compared to other showbiz personalities and he certainly makes more sense than most of these showbiz type public officials — some of whom end up as décor in the Senate. However, a previous stint as Makati City Vice Mayor and Optical Media Board Chairman hardly justifies placing a person one heartbeat away from the presidency.

Choosing Edu Manzano as VP running mate may be a good campaign strategy for attempting to inject public interest in Gilbert Teodoro’s candidacy but it also reflects badly on Teodoro’s judgment. To many, Teodoro would seem very Machiavellian than what he may want to appear to be, if at all he is willing to be perceived as such.

No end ever justified foul means.

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Chair Wrecker e-mail and website: [email protected] and www.chairwrecker.com