Biden was more presidential but raging bull won debate

residential debates in America are not debates, they are moderated shouting matches and insulting festivals that have little or nothing to do with shaping the policy landscape of US governance.

It brings to mind Meryll Streep's assessment of America's popular culture as fostered by Hollywood. If America is not careful, she warned, the erosion of the educative mission of the visual arts, movies and television, will render American film arts bereft of any redeeming virtues. And all that will be left for benumbed eyeballs to ogle at would be "professional" wrestling and mixed martial arts--which are not the arts at all. So succinct from this lifetime achievement actress. So apropros.

    Sadly, American presidential debates are taking the same route--now more than ever under the regime of Donald Trump. In part, the reason for this is that in its current form, presidential debates are TV sound bite sessions where the main objective of both sides is to be able to say the most impactful word of phrase before the moderator moves on to the next question.

   The formula seems to be to say as many words as you can squeeze into two minutes, then trail off with a clever putdown of something like, "and my opponent wouldn't recognize these things I just said if it bit him in the nose."

   True debate--believe it or not they do this much better in high school--has rules. Everything from format, to time, to language and most importantly to decorum is covered.  The most transcendental rule is the rule of decorum: you're not even allowed to refer to yourself or to your opponent in the first or second person. You never say "I think he's crazy!"  Instead you say in strictly genteel protocol, "This humble representation believes that my worthy adversary is crazy."

   True debate involves affording each debater first crack at constructing his thesis, then his opponent interpellates him. They go back and forth two or three cycles, depending on the pre-debate agreement, then switch roles.  So it's first affirmative, first negative; second affirmative, second negative; third affirmative, third negative and so on. It's a disciplined regimen of question-answer-reply-rejoinder and nobody interrupts when it's not his turn to speak.

   Sometimes called the Oxford-Oregon format, this model was tweaked by presidential debate organizers fearful that audiences would fall asleep from the slow cadence. They integrated a destructive feature from the floor of the British Parliament, where a constructive speaker may be challenged on any point at any time by the interpellator. Shouts of  "Hear! Hear!" resonated throughout the hall as Members yelled out their agreement with the interruptor,  while the Member who has the floor struggled to regain speaking rights by trying to shout above the din "I say! I say!" until the cacophony died down. All of it is polite in British culture--after all, there is no offensive language involved just noise--and is strictly keeping in character with the political culture that still uses the viva voce mode of voting in plenary.   

   As recently as the McCain-Obama presidential debate in 2008, the decorum and language standards were still in place. In fact, McCain was so gingerly in his direct criticism of Barack Obama that when he was assailing a bad law that the US Congress had passed,  he told a national TV audience, "...you know who voted for that bill? That one...!" pointing a shy finger at Obama. 

   He wouldn't even say the simple word "him" because he felt it was too direct, too uncouth to verbalize.  It was all Obama could do to keep from bursting in laughter, but he managed to control himself and from then on simply pounced at that incident everytime he introduced himself. "My name is Barack Obama. My middle name is Hussein which, I am told, is Swahili for 'That One!'"   After the debate, both men shook hands before separating, brimming with mutual respect for each other. At his funeral years later, Obama extolled this humility among other virtues of the sainted John McCain.

   American presidential debates circa 2020 is none of that. Instead of a contest between thesis and anti-thesis, it's a battle of putdowns and comebacks in the perversely-modified British parliament style. And it is a style that suits the intemperate and profane rabblerouser like Donald Trump.

   Somebody asked me who I thought won that first debate and my answer was a quick "Of course, Donald Trump." Before that person could stab me with his pen I quickly added,"You should have asked me who I thought acted more presidential and who was more truthful, then my answer would be Joe Biden."

   Donald Trump was not looking to win against Joe Biden, he was looking to wreck the whole debate with a scorched-earth strategy borrowed from the Cold War. America has a more potent nuclear arsenal by most accounts, but it played a thirty-year game of chicken--who blinks first--with the Soviet Union because both understood the only possible outcome of a shooting war: Mutually Assured Destruction ("MAD"). The US can send aloft precision-guided ordnance and kill a specific segment of the Russian populace in carefully-selected targets. But The Soviets can unleash a barrage of aimless missiles each with a sign that says "to whom it may concern."  Just like that and the technologically-retarded Russians drew even with the US, totally neutralizing the latter's cutting-edge advantage.

   Of course, it is  only allegorical that I'm drawing a parallel between Donald Trump and the Russians. But the fact is, Joe Biden walked into a brawl with a raging bull in a china shop, I can only feel empathy for Biden for having no choice but to go through what he went through.

   Americans loved Donald Trump's debating style, no matter how disdained they are with him. He is pure entertainent. More importantly, he gives the people what they want: blood and gore.  He is cheered and celebrated  for the same reason Americans love Mike Tyson and Rambo.  These two unfettered gladiators totally demolished the opposition and took no prisoners. And neither of them are notable for the usage of proper King James English.

   The Democratic debate preparation team knew this beforehand. In fact, I thought they did splendid work addressing Joe Biden's stuttering issue well ahead of the debate. Having a little boy with a stuttering problem look up to Joe Biden as his hero helping him overcome this speaking handicap was a stroke of genius. It endeared Joe Biden with the PWD community, and that's a plus-five percent demographic.

   But I thought the Democratic party did a better job prepping Hillary Clinton in 2016.  She rattled off statistics and facts without blinking an eyelash and, more importantly, she didn't get fazed or fllustered and frustrated by the bullying antics of Trump.  If Trump did not have a spattering of uncontrollable supporters in the audience sporadically chanting "Lock her up!" Trump couldn't pull off anything. Hillary Clinton--in my book still the best president America never had--owned Donald Trump, she had him by the balls the whole time. She was one woman who was more than a match against any overrated man. She convinced America she was the political equivalent of Ginger Rogers. The press once said of Rogers she could do every dance move by Fred Astaire forwards, bacwards and in high heels.

   Jo Biden was visibly irritated by Donald Trump, who played the role of gnat, gadfly-in-the-ointment and pebble-in-the-shoe all rolled into one. It wouldn't surprise me if  the real strategy was to make Joe Biden's blood pressure shoot up so high he just might collapse on the podium.  The Biden campaign had hoped that FOX News' Chris Wallace, the moderator, would be able to control and fact-check Donald Trump in real time. He promised to do it, or break his neck trying. He broke his neck, in a manner of speaking. Watching Chris Wallace was like watching the referee in a World Wrestling Federation match, totally overwhelmed by the barreling multiple collisions between two titans, ever so late in slapping the three-count and never ever quite completing a full count no matter how close it gets to a takedown.

   There are at least  two more debates to go between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. If I were Joe Biden, I'd buy earplugs and learn to deliver my lines without allowing  Donald Trump to interrupt him no matter what. He should also stock up on clever one-liners. "Trump doesn't know the difference between a computer virus and the coronavirus."   He doesn't understand integrity because he can't even spell it.  He can't recognize danger when he sees it coming, because it's too complex  a concept for him. All he can recognize is "person, woman, man, camera, TV."

   Maybe the best preparation for Jo Biden is just to immerse himself in the comedy talk show genre and do mock debates with the writers of Saturday Night Live. Tinseltown is right where Donald Trump is coming from, it it his world, the world that revolves around the rule of suspension of disbelief.*Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

 

Tax evasion is illegal, tax avoidance is not

onald Trump is the only American president in modern times not to release his tax returns to the public despite the profound implications of such secrecy to the American taxpayer. Demands for full disclosure of his tax affairs reached full crescendo during the 2016 presidential campaign. But fully four years after he assumed the highest federal government office, those tax records remain in the immortal words of Winston Churchill "a riddle wrapped in a puzzle surrounded by an enigma."  No offense, but Churchill was actually describing the Soviet Union that time.

    Curiously, excerpts of those mystical tax records are now being spread out in full broadsheet by the New York Times.  To be pragmatic about it, if it's taking hordes of CPA's and lawyers years to make sense of any of it in a long-running audit that began more than ten years ago, what makes you think the ordinary person can grasp the full import of the exposé in one glimpse?

    Donald Trump is one of those traditional olde riche who made his fortune the old-fashioned way: by inheriting it. If you listen close to his fragmented pronouncements in the past, he doesn't so much say that he's a great businessman more than that he is a master of the art of making a deal.  There is a difference as subtle as the "b" in the word subtle. 

    He is a gambler, literally and metaphorically, but a great book author or phenomenal negotiator he is not. He throws those tasks to ghostwriters and lawyers. He just worries about looking and playing the part. His vaunted mastery in the Art of the Deal is an acquired taste. What he knows about making a deal anybody can learn in under three minutes listening to Kenny Rogers' lyrics of The Gambler, "You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run...you never count your money when you're sitting at the table...there'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done."

    Fortunately, the most that any non-lawyer or non-accountant can make of the Trump tax returns is all really you need to now: that in 2016 and 2017 he paid all of just seven hundred fifty dollars ($750) in federal income taxes.  That's the full amount he paid, there are no separating commas to count or decimal points to locate in this 3-digit figure.  Worse than that, in ten of the last fifteen years before that, he paid zero. Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

    The "Lifeblood Doctrine" in Taxation Law holds that the State has the inherent power to enforce a proportional contribution from all citizens, in money or property,  to raise funds needed to  defray the costs of government.  In general, no one is exempt except three institutions: religious, educational and charitable. Now you understand why all rich persons, be they individuals or corporations, always have "social development promotion programs" tucked away somewhere in the backburners of their corporate philosophies. Trump's foundations--Lord knows how many there are--as anybody else's exist for only one purpose and that is to deflect tax liability. If you're spending money for religious, educational or charitable ends the State owes you reimbursement, which you can claim through tax write-offs. That is considered tax avoidance and it is perfectly legal. 

    This makes it hard for Trump explain the zero-tax scenario. If he hadn't paid one dollar, Lord forbid he can prove he spent two in reimbursable expenses--which is the crux of the tax audit. Because then he would end up collecting money from the State instead of contributing to it. That is tax evasion, which is illegal.

    Tax money pays for the upkeep of the vast US military complex--considered a Trump bailiwick by most accounts. It also pays for the salaries of policemen, firefighters, EMTs and other first responders, and most importantly teachers. From the take-home pay of these hardworking people, federal income taxes are automatically deducted up to an average of twelve hundred dollars ($1,200) per year per person. After the coronavirus pandemic struck the US hard in the guts, the federal government could barely cover the cost of the monthly $650 dollars of unemployment tide-over aid to millions of Americans who contributed to the very funds they are now being deprived of. I'm really curious to watch how Donald Trump can spin around that.   

    Also, there is preliminary evidence, at least, to suggest that Trump's overseas businesses have paid more taxes in countries like Russia--even the Philippines--than to Uncle Sam, which is an indefensible demonstration of his signature slogan "America First."  

    What is at stake in the coming November elections is whether the American voters would allow an expert tax avoider--if not, arguably, an astute tax evader--to hold charge over the national tax collection device. After all, if he can stuff the US Supreme Court with nominees sympathetic to his cause, what of the lowly Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whose career officials are constantly in the crosshairs of a sitting American president they are auditing. In the end, it may not require very sophisticated calculus for the average American voter--and taxpayer--to realize that keeping Donald Trump in charge of the federal coffers is not too different from assigning a goat to watch over the cabbage patch. 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Donald Trump's early Christmas gift

great American legal eagle has passed on. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) was the voice of women's rights, gender equality, equal opportunity, affirmative action and most of all humanity.  She is irreplaceable. She is one-of-a-kind.  To use the language of her beloved legal profession, she is sui generis--in a class by herself.

    She is a liberal Democrat and proud to be. Perhaps the biggest tribute to her is the fact that bereavement over her demise erased that distinction. Legal scholars and everyday men and women, regardless of partisan color, felt the loss of this one-woman pillar of American justice.

   Even Donald Trump, no big fan of liberal Democrat orthodoxy, could say of her death  little or nothing beyond "I am sad." And that is sad.

   Eulogies are the easiest speeches to write. In solemn grief or with candor, it's difficult to say anything wrong about the dearly departed. Barack Obama said of the late Senator John Cain at his funeral he was a master at mischief, "After all, what better way is there to have the last laugh than to get George [President Bush] and I to say nice things about him to a national audience?" People who were in tears earlier were in chuckles just moments later and realizing why they so loved John McCain for it. And Barack Obama for eloquence apropos.

   As effortless as it should have been for Donald Trump to say "something nice" about RBG, he just couldn't. Even doing that is a bridge too far for the master of disparaging, of doom and gloom, sinisterism and conspiracy theory formulation.

   But it is not dumb. It is smart. Donald Trump knows he cannot extol the virtues of a woman upon whose grave he has some serious dancing pre-planned. If he pontificated too hard about the redeeming virtues of an irreplaceable woman, he runs the risk of being held on his word. He can go halfway, he can order the American flag flown at half-mast. But he cannot make the full concession of honoring a dying woman's last fervent wish: that she not be replaced until after the American people have weighed in on who must replace her. 

   A simple wish, Donald Trump's answer to which was a simple no. 

   That's why any tears that Donald Trump sheds for RBG will be reptilian. Her death is only a national tragedy to the rest of America but it is Christmas come early for Donald Trump. He was fresh out of uniting issues to rally the fast-fragmenting Republican party. He couldn't spin the COVID-19 disaster into a positive, with the backdrop of a national fatality rate still hovering at more than 1,000 lives a day. Joe Biden is proving be too tough of a piñata that just wouldn't burst no matter how hard he whacked it. 

   He needed a rallying cry and fast. When RBG died, that rallying cry became nominating her replacement with less than 45 days to the election.  He promised a judiciary packed with conservatives, and it doesn't get any higher than the US Supreme Court. He promised to overturn Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)  and to circle the wagons around the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. Big promises--huge--but as long as he didn't have full rein of the Supreme Court's composition, he was off the hook. 

   In fact, he is still off the hook. Republican mavericks slowly becoming disillusioned with Trumpism and about ready to abandon ship now have to call off their nuanced mutiny. Trump in the Ginsburg era would say "I can't deliver because the justices--they don't like me, not enough of them." in the post-Ginsburg days ahead he can say, "I can't deliver because no one's helping me replace her."

    This early Trump is sounding more doctrinaire-Republican than anyone else even just on Twitter: it's the Republicans' moral duty to appoint Ginsburg's replacement because failing to do so is an abdication of everything republicanism stands for.

   In the unlikeliest scenario that he foregoes replacing RBG, the strategically important undecided American swing-vote would say, "Hey, the guy does have an ounce of nobility."  

     In other words, Trump can do no wrong. If he doesn't get what he wants from the doubting factions of the GOP, he consolidates his hold on his blindly-loyal base. But he also gets a strong talking point about having the political maturity to look beyond the present and to advocate conservatism for future generations. That rings a bell in conservative circles all across fifty states, giving Trump a Paul Revere moment of screaming, "The Leftists are coming! The Letists are coming!" That will shake every fence-sitting Republican off the fence. Meanwhile Trump scores a point on a category he has never scored big on: thinking beyond himself, or at least beyond his time.

   But there is this, too: if Donald Trump plays his cards right, he can dissolve the slowly-defining divide between the noble and the amoral Republican. Arguably there are a few in the GOP that want to hold on to some modicum of political nobility. They want to put their foot down on such motherhood platitudes as the word of honor being a contract stronger than oak.   Of hypocrisy being anathema to conservatism, especially among evangelicals,  But standing firm on lofty principles like these does not come cheap.  Roe v. Wade is just too high a price to pay. Already, men and women of substantial repute within the party are doing more backflips than you'll see at a Barnum and Bailey circus act.

   Even in her death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg continues to bequeath on the American people the gift of truth by exposing the sincere from the charlatan.  It's just unfortunate that its by-product is the gift of undeserved golden opportunity for the man whose guiding principles in life are the polar opposite of hers.

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

 

The plague of political correctness

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wrote this article back June 23, 2018. It was a commentary on two issues in the news (1) protest against Desperate Housewives for insulting Filipino doctors and (2) the decision of Philippine Daily Inquirer to remove Pol Medina's cartoon strip Pugad Baboy after it poked fun of a conservative order of nuns. This is a critique against ultra-nationalists and excessive political correctness.]

In an episode of Desperate Housewives that aired in October 2007, a brief dialogue touched some raw nerves in the Philippine medical community.

    The offending moment came when Susan Mayer, played by Teri Hatcher, throws a fit at her gynecologist and questions his credentials because he suggests she is going through the early stages of menopause. "Can I check those diplomas," she says, "because I want to make sure they're not from some med school in the Philippines."

   To be fair, the scriptwriter did not even name any particular medical school, and the show itself did not air on Philippine television. It was watched by a predominantly American audience. But US-resident Filipinos sent taped copies of the episode to relatives back home in the Philippines. 

    Filipino doctors were livid. They  demanded an apology from the show's producer and threatened to sue ABC, the  network that airs the sitcom. Some even urged the Philippine government lodge a formal protest with the US State Department. 

    Seriously? Serve a note verbale on a foreign government over the irreverence of a situational comedy (that's what "sitcom" means) show? Cause an international diplomatic row over a punchline?

    Absolutely, said some ultra-nationalist docs. The stakes are too high to just let this thing slip by:  Filipino pride and dignity, the integrity of the Philippine medical curriculum, the reputation and professional credibility of thousands of local doctors. These things are priceless. Nobody who takes vicious license in mocking them can be allowed to  get away with it. 

    The show's producer was more than eager to apologize. In fact, the whole cast was so eager they wrote a whole episode just for that purpose.  The problem with too profuse an apology is that it turns into sarcasm, and that's exactly what happened. It is a comedy, what would you expect? 

    Forget about suing ABC.  What is vexation under Philippine law is satire in Hollywood's creative community. I do feel sorry for our Philippine doctors but picking a fight with a skunk is never a good idea. 

    For their sake, I hope none of the cast of Desperate Housewives ends up on an operating table with one of the doctors they offended holding the scalel. It could prove too difficult to heed Socrates' charge on them to "first do no harm."

   Filipinos have  heard of figurative speech, of course. In many ways, the satirical tradition is ingrained in the culture. An ambition aimed too high is a long shot or "suntok sa buwan" (punching at the moon). Say anything a Filipino aspires for and he'll be quick to claim the prophecy--"magdilang anghel ka sana" (may you speak as an angel). Filipinos speak in metaphors all the time. So a few quiet days after the offense will eventually diffuse the sting of that ill-conceived ethnic joke.

    But something else is  worrisome. It is possible we are joining the rest of the world in embracing a new onion-skinned school of thought called political correctness. The idea is to avoid offending anybody with language that is too sharp or too frank. You don't have to lie necessarily, just be considerately vague 

    Political correctness is gaining traction in many free societies today.   You better learn the ways of it fast, or you can lose your job as a cartoonist or satirist. 

    Some examples:  you cannot call people squatters anymore--they are "informal settlers." They don't live in makeshift shanties in slum areas, they have "sub-standard housing in the economically-depressed zones." No one is an idle bum anymore these days. He's not unemployed, he's just  an "inactive member of the reserve work force" because he wasn't fired from his last job--he was "retrenched." The boss didn't find him goofing on the job, he just "failed to make the threshhold of productivity evaluation." The company is not mismanaged or bankrupt, it was just "addressing a liquidity issue" so, of course, the company did not terminate half the people on payroll, it just "downsized its operations." 

   Unless you learn to talk this way, prospects of promotion--oops, that is exclusionary-- prospects of "upward mobility in the corporate ladder" become pretty dim. Even in something as harmless as a cartoon strip, you simply cannot call nuns hypocrites--they are conservatives. Apparently, even calling them cloistered is offensive now--the term was still good as of 1968 when Julie Andrews portrayed the playful governess Maria after discovering that she wasn't built for the cloistered discipline of the nunnery in The Sound of Music. No--today's nuns are not cloistered isolationists, they are "holding the line against the unregulated onward march of crass modernism." They don't obstruct social development, they "fiscalize" nor do they foist close-mindedness--they "strengthen faith-based ethics and behavior." 

      So you cannot call them antagonists of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transexual (LGBT) community or enemies of Reproductive Health (today's 5-syllable politically correct lexicon for sex). They are "gender-proper pro-lifers." If the Inquirer's Pol Medina only knew all of this, he'd still have his Pugad Baboy cartoon strip.

    But sometimes, linguistic contortionism like this can also backfire. The Taiwanese didn't fall in love with the Philippines government's characterization of shooting an unarmed Taiwanese fisherman as an "unintended killing." What does that make of the dead fisherman--an accidental cadaver? 

   This  thinking that if you change the description of the condition, you somehow change the condition itself has resulted in retrogression, not progress. The government used to look heroic running the National Disaster Coordinating Committee--because you can see them actually succeeding in rescuing victims of calamity. Now they just look goofy as the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management and Coordinating Council--because you can see them utterly failing to reduce the severity of every calamity. Or even to finish pronouncing their full office title before the next typhoon arrives. 

    In many ways, the candor of irreverent cartoon strips like Pugad Baboy--indeed there are many other Filipino cartoons of lesser luster but no lesser relevance--was a refreshing antithesis to this plague of the Language of Man-Pleasers. Many years from now, sociologists and anthropologists will not be studying  the language found in lawyers' briefs, letters to the editor or government memos--but the rich colloquialisms in cartoons as the more accurate portrait of the   language of that period. 

    But right now, those who call a spade a spade--and not a "personal earthmoving appliance"--must suffer the chagrin of these linguistic illusionists who say "handicapable" instead of handicapped or cripple (what's wrong with cripple? It has no negative connotation in any dictionary, it is even the   word used  in the bible); the immaturity or inability of some to adjust to a good roast as a "violation of the human right to dignity" and the timidity to take a stand for freedom of expression as "responsiveness to due process." 

     It is useless to argue with anyone about freedom's value because the other person is obviously unaware that he is using the very freedom you are promoting to try to prove you wrong. You might just end up suing each other. There is only one thing even more useless than arguing about values and that is litigating it.

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

How to lose your class and fan support overnight

was going to write an article extolling the nobility of professional athletes taking up social causes to the sports arena. Making the most of their fame and platform to start a dialogue on race issues, when most of society treats this issue like the proverbial elephant in the room, is not only courageous but intelligent most of all.

As you might expect, "King" Lebron James heads the list in this category. But shy Naomi Osaka, the erstwhile prim and proper delicate Japanese princess of women's grand slam tennis, was en route to second seed in my book. So I started researching the internet and stumbled upon this abhorrent image of her and boyfriend whatever-his-name-that-no-one-should-care-about-is taken just moments after she had won the Finals for the  Women's Singles title in the 2020 US Open.  And instantly, Naomi Osaka is dropped from my list. 

Is it Naomi's fault?  Of course, not. But it is Naomi's teaching moment to gain or lose, depending on how intelligent or juvenile she chooses to react to it.  In fairness, we could presume she was not even aware his boyfriend--I'll just call him "IWACI" explanation at the end of this article--was flashing the "F--k You!" finger signage. I did come across at least two images of different occasions with him flashing it while either standing or sitting beside Naomi.  So if Naomi is unaware of IWACI's propensity to do it, then she's not only shy but naive as well and I rest my case.

I'm still doing the piece on cause-oriented jocks, but it's going to be all-Lebron James for now. If that speaks volumes about the effect of an improvidently-composed image, the fact  that my commentary about it gets written ahead of the athlete's tribute it displaced speaks even more.

There's a reason why Naomi Osaka wearing seven different face masks with the names of seven victims of modern-day lynching is impactful as it was. These black victims of police brutality  are relegated to obscurity, or on the way to it by diminishing public interest. From high up in the stands in the upper bowl of Arthur Ashe stadium, you can't even read those names. In fact, you can't read them courtside.

These names only became readable because there were no fans in the stadium, they were all at home watching on TV. Television's powerful zoom lens brought these names on these face masks  to people's eyes. The fact that it was Naomi Osaka wearing them enabled the imagery to penetrate people's minds.  The message is simple: it is the unique privilege of those who are in the spotlight to let us see what we haven't seen in a while or won't probably look at ever.  It is symbolic. That's all it is. And that is why it's powerful.

So when IWACI poses beside Naomi, left hand slung over her like newly-subdued prey, to those of us who don't know IWACI and wondering "Who he?" that image comes plainly across as "It don't matter who I am, the girl is mine, so up yours sucker."  That middle finger, that look in the face, that smug countenance, they all converge to speak the profanity.

That took a lot of license to say but--yes--that's the point.  Naomi and IWACI cannot say, "it wasn't meant for you" or "that's not what it was meant to say."  

No, no, no--we cannot confuse roles here. You're a celebrity commanding attention. I am audience. Let us be clear: you send, I receive. You project, I interpret. When I look at a picture, I will determine what it says to me.  

Isn't that why you wore those masks with no more words on them than just plain names?

You wanted me to think. You wanted me to react. I'm lazy to do any of that otherwise but I'll just do it because you--Naomi Osaka--are the one telling me, Naomi Osaka fan, to do it. That is the power of platform you just discovered. That is the power to trigger dialogue that you and your boyfriend IWACI just squandered. 

Alright, reader, so I owe you and here it is: IWACI stands for "idiot with a capital i"

Indifference hurts everyone, nut just the indifferent

resident Donald Trump was in California today, giving his take on why the raging forest fires scorching the west coast is the result of human negligence--particularly Democratic state administrative negligence. But to avoid directly butting heads with the state's political leadership, he pluralized the blame by saying people in California have not done a good job raking fallen leaves across millions of acres of forest. Those unraked leaves are the fuel that is feeding the unprecedented inferno from California to Oregon and beyond.

    At least by implication, Trump absolves anyone living outside of California from any share of the blame. That includes him in Washington, presumably.

   His statement reflects an old evasive attitude in environmental philosophy often referred to as the paradox of the "pygmy in the forest." It is a denialism school of thought that sees the inhabitants of the forest as its main destructors. The pygmy cuts down tree branches with his primitive machete to use as fuel to cook food. Since he doesn't have a chainsaw he can't really go for the trunk. But he strips off its bark to make a canoe, depriving bark beetles of home and food. He rides his canoe on the river where he catches fish, harming marine life.Then he digs the earth for a latrine, depositing human organic waste in the soil, despoiling the groundwater. He then spears a wild boar, diminishing the wildlife population. He picks a flower or two for herbal use, disrupting the vegetative pollination process. He builds a small fire that alters the humidity around him. The smoke rises to the forest canopy, annoying a hive of wild bees. He fetches water from a nearby stream, unfairly competing with deer or elk for that precious lifegiving resource. Bad, bad pygmy. He is the scourge of the forest.

    Meanwhile, half a world away, baby Donald is born to his rich parents in a modern hospital in a western society far, far away from any forest.  His overprotective parents will have no synthetic fiber or material touching their precious baby's skin. His diapers, his clothes, his towels, the sheets on his crib--all made from natural fiber spun from natural cotton and hemp grown in mountainside farms in Bolivia cut from the forest after felling down thousands of trees. Some of the wood--hundred year old cherry and such--make up Baby Donald's all-natural wooden crib. When he is older, teenage Donald develops an insatiable craving for all-beef hamburger. The beef comes from cows  raised in livestock farms clear-cut along the fringes of the Amazon forest in Brazil. Year after year, as the demand for all-beef patties shoots up the cattle rancher drives his bulldozer deeper and deeper into the forest to create more grazing land for more cows.  By age 15 juvenile Donald has his learner's permit from the DMV. He needs a car, made from steel and aluminum from mineral ores mined deep in the Indonesian jungles. His iPhone has gold contacts in the motherboard, extracted from gold mines in the northern Philippines and copper wirings from ore gouged out of an open-pit mine in sub-Saharan Africa.

    If like Donald Trump  your worldview is no larger than America Only, you will probably never realize that the birth of a child in a western society impacts on the environment on a more massive scale. The needs and the lifestyle of the consumer culture to which Donald belongs is the driving force for a wider-range  destruction of the world's forest cover than the existence of an entire pygmy village living right in the middle of the forest.

   There are three elements of fire: heat, fuel and oxygen. Donald Trump sees fuel--California's unraked forest leaves. He could not see either heat or oxygen because they are invisible. But he can feel heat--the planet's temperature has risen so high the polar caps and great glaciers are all melting. Sea water level is rising globally pumping thermal energy potential into more storms forming offshore in greater number, frequency and severity. With less trees--because they were felled to provide grazing for cows to produce beef for Donald's hamburger--less carbon dioxide is taken off the atmosphere, where it remains trapping solar heat energy, causing California and the rest of the planet to literally simmer. Powerlines carrying electricity to light up  homes and drive refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, furnaces, flatscreen LED TV's and all--flick a spark that ignites an overhanging tree branch with dry leaves (not the leaves on the ground, Donald). Once the fire starts, the high winds resulting from the altered global wind patterns fan the flames to Armageddon proportions.

    The people of California are only pygmies in the forest. The forest fires raging in California, just like the forest fires that devoured millions of acres of the Amazon in 2018, are the result of a global crime in which all societies--enlightened and indifferent--are equally complicit. When environmental calamity strikes, it hurts both the ecologically aware as well as the indifferent one. But the blame is not unequal. Even the most proactive naturalist is responsible for a carbon footprint, no matter how small.   

    The solution is for all to agree that climate change is real, and climate change is here to stay. Developed societies--especially the United States of America--bear the biggest burden to act on mitigating climate change because it has the greatest capacity to adjust through sacrifice. It is the biggest polluter and has the biggest buffer space for environmental reform. Right now, under Donald Trump, the US is just the biggest international blame denier and blame pointer. It would have been unimaginable in recent modern technological history for the United States--the first nation to put a man on the moon--to be the ONLY COUNTRY IN THE WHOLE WORLD  to exclude itself from the Paris climate accord.

If environmentally indifferent America is to be held to account, it is for denying science and defying reality. If enlightened America is to be held to account, it is for failing to hold the indifferent to account.*

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

 When you have a leader who refuses to return to policy rationality, your failure cannot just be in the form of lack of outrage. You must aim higher and more proactively than just accepting the mediocrity of your environmentally-blind leadership.  

Five Reasons why I think Donald Trump will win

f the US elections were held today, Joe Biden would win. Most polling statistics indicate a Biden lead of five to eight points average, well over the 2- or 3-point margin of error. But that lead has dropped from two digits in early to mid-summer before both political parties held their national conventions.  Neither candidate got the so-called post convention bump, a sudden surge in approval buoyed by the excitement of the convention. 

That "bump" is nothing to celebrate. As a metric what it measures is public opinion that was stampeded into the statistics scales, not the intelligent or calculating voter sentiment that has a longer shelf life than the wispy emotions of the day's politics. 

The notable absence of that "bump" for Biden after the Democratic national convention  means his support base is stable, not given to the volatility stirred by mere pep talk. He should be glad. But the absence of that same bump after the GOP convention should be worrisome for Biden, too. It indicates that Donald Trump's supporters may not just be the same provocable mobs seen in 2016 either. Or it could be that those same mobs have grown  in political maturity, something that Democratic conventional wisdom often denies. The premise, by and large, is that voters with college education--the intelligentsia--are Democratic-leaning while the country yokels of rural America  are the blind lemmings willing to jump off the cliff after Donald Trump. No bump means no more distinction between those demographics. And that's good for Donald Trump.

So as the fall comes around, with both parties hitting post-convention full strides in their campaign, the popularity gap between Biden and Trump will significantly narrow down some more. And if the race tightens up to neck-and-neck, I'll stick my own neck on a daring prediction that Donald Trump will win--for FIVE REASONS.

1. Donald Trump is very successful in defining himself and in defying others' definition of him. The Biden campaign wants the elections to be about character, the subtext being that Biden has a noble character while Trump has none. That is a huge mistake in strategy. Trump voters support him not because of his character but inspite of it. On the other hand, Biden's spit-polish image as "Mr. Clean"--a campaign strategy as old as the ballot--sells extremely well to people who already support him. Biden trying to convince America about who Donald Trump is and what he is all about will fail because that is a task  that Trump does best: defining himself.  Trump would simply say "If you wanna  know what's on my mind, let me tell you. Don't have to listen to somebody else trying to read my mind." And when Biden turns around to extol his own virtue in comparison, he will find himself preaching to the choir.

2. Donald Trump doesn't use the political paradigm. What applies to him doesn't apply to others. In a perverted way, Donald  Trump is like modern art. The only way to appreciate Picasso--the  man--is to  appreciate Picasso, the paintings. Those who like modern art are rabidly obsessed with it. Those who dislike it or are indifferent towards it don't get "it." They never will, too. That's Donald Trump. If you don't like him, it's because you don't get it and that gives you no chance to win over those who do. 

3.  The Democrats seem to have forgotten that politics is addition. If they can't heed that within the party, they can't heed it across the divide. Although Bernie Sanders has endorsed Joe Biden, the practical truth is that he has not demonstrated any more support for Biden that he did for Hillary Clinton whom he also endorsed in 2016. The involvement of the DNC's rising mavericks like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren in the Biden campaign is cameo at best. And the total absence of the democratic old guard--its big guns like Al Gore, John Kerry, Madeilene Albright--is too conspicuous to hedge the impression that the party is not united. They're all just quiet together. 

4. They dropped the big bombshells on Donald Trump too early giving him plenty of time to do damage control. The utterly irrelevent email "scandal" that torpedoed Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016 was totally survivable. In fact, when the FBI declined to indict her for lack of probable cause, it should have been the end of the discussion for that distractive issue. But with just days  before the election FBI Director James Comey peeled off a scab that hasn't healed right, there was no more time to do last-minute damage control. In contrast, all the bombshells against Donald Trump were dropped and detonated with more than 60 days to go. The burden becomes not how Trump will diffuse the crisis but rather how the Democrats can sustain its impact and stretch the public's interest in it until election day. They simply jumped the gun too soon, and shot long range instead of point-blank on the eve of balloting when late damage would have been irreparable for Trump. As it is, by the time the November election comes, all that negative press would already be history

5. I just know Donald Trump will rack Hillary Clinton over the coals one more time, and the democrats are unprepared to deal with that.  The strength of Joe Biden is that he is likeable at best, and harmless at worst. Donald Trump doesn't have enough time to erode Joe Biden's character and credibility--and he doesn't have to. He is not looking for a new hate object in Biden to offer to his supporters, he just needs to offer somebody to hate, and who better than somebody Trump has already spent the last four years destroying--Hillary Clinton. Of course, she is not on the ballot but Trump couldn't care less. The election in November is not about Hillary Clinton, but Trump can make it about her. "Puppet of the radical left" or "Trojan horse of the socialists" is not catching on as Trump's nicknames for Biden. But I think it's only a matter of time before his think tank will come up with "Backdoor to the White House for Hillary Clinton."  Trump would say, if you vote for Joe Biden he will appoint Hillary Clinton Secretary of State again. Or they will make Kamala Harris resign the vice-presidency and put Clinton in her place. At age 74, Joe Biden might not make full term. He would already be a senile 78 by the end of only his first term. To put Hillary Clinton just one hiccup away from the presidency via the easy route is a dire scenario enough to rouse even the most moribund Never Trumper. It's the wildest conspiracy theory--and it's too complicated to sort out, fact-check, analyze for feasibility or test for credulity if dropped as a late bombshell, just like the James Comey bummer.  So look to Donald Trump exploding this mother-of-all-scare-tactics in the critical homestretch when all the Democrats can do is make Hillary speak in  her own defense. And then she would be the one making the election about herself, falling right into Donald Trump's provocation trap.  Unlikely you might say but remember you read it here first.

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

Trading ABS-CBN: requiem to a personal ambition

ere is full disclosure up front: I own ABS-CBN shares.

Be not impressed. I'm a small player--microscopic would be an understatement--in the local stock market. I've never traded right on the floor of the stock exchange or bought big blocks of stocks so enormous it needs a bank to underwrite the payment. As a matter of fact, because I bought so few shares they're probably not even in my name but is simply logged in the account of my broker R. Coyiuto Securities. 

I'm just some back country yokel who had a  few bucks to throw around and thought what consequential  thing can one still buy with only P25,000 these days? I thought of an iPhone but quickly found out that iPhones in that budget range went out of production ten years ago. 

Then all this cacophony broke out about ABS-CBN fighting for dear life before a moody franchise-renewing committee in Congress. Depressing news like that weighed down on ABS-CBN's shares like a millstone tied around its neck. So that inner voice of trading wisdom--I think its name is greed--began reminding me of the rules of thumb. Buy low, sell high. Catch the low on the way down, not on the rebound. If you see the bandwagon, it's too late. Be ready to jump the ambush but willing to hunker down the long wait during the ensuing hibernation. I mean, I  was feeling it.  I was imagining myself back in '84 surveying Steve Jobs' Apple shares at 25 cents and thinking I'm not biting the fruit that got that idiot Adam into trouble in the garden. I'm not buying into that scam. Of course, I would live to regret it, so I vowed never to make the same mistake.

My friends (whose status with me is currently under review) kept telling me the best stocks to buy are those that nobody wants. They even had a term for it--basura stocks ("garbage") and with ABS-CBN's fate in the toilet, it needed very little push to persuade someone like me who didn't have the pocketbook for blue chips anyway.

I snagged 1,600 shares for the bargain basement price of P15 apiece. As soon as I did, the end of the world came crashing down on me. Those shares tanked and sank deeper than the Titanic at P3.00 pesos per share, throwing me into the poorhouse even a lot quicker than overnight.  But I thought it's not that bad. Not really. I'm only 57, I might be okay ten, maybe fifteen years down the line--who knows? 

So I'm sure if I wrote something that sounds like I have the deepest empathy for ABS-CBN--which I do, sincerely, by the way--no one can accuse me it's inspired by the promise of the quickest of rewards.  

First of all, I truly, truly don't care for any of that politics behind the rejection of ABS-CBN's franchise. Such as it is, Congress is the embodiment of the people, composed of representatives elected directly by a grassroots constituency. So if the congressmen's  decision to reject democratized access to broadcast information at no cost for their constituents is reflective of the quality of their advocacy for their interests, then I think losing ABS-CBN is the least of the Filipino masses' problem at this point. They'd be surprised if they knew how much more they could lose for allowing tyranny like that to flourish in government. 

In fact, even people in government--from Congress, Malacañang, the judiciary, the solicitor-general, even the NTC--may not even fully appreciate what many unheard and unrepresented sectors lost. And I'm not talking of lofty platitudes only like democracy, justice, freedom of expression, press freedom  etc. I find much of that conversation corny myself. Any two people who engage in a dialogue about principles that could never be surrendered as those are bound to talk past each other anyway. So analyzing this issue from the political standpoint is an exercise in futility, really.

Instead, for the most selfish of reasons, I feel pity for my 87-year old mother for instance. Daytime TV is her only companion and watching ABS-CBN has an almost therapeutic effect to her state of morale. I can't tell any jokes funny enough to make her laugh as heartily as all that cheap slapstick on daytime soap could. I now that's a left-handed compliment and I don't care. It's beneficial to the kindest, gentlest, most loving mother in the whole universe for me, and yanking the station off the air is nothing short of abject cruelty.  Now she sits on her rocking chair, a mute TV in the corner, looking out of the window--I think she's trying to watch reruns of her favorite shows in her imagination.

Now she's talking a lot  about rejoining my sister in Winnipeg, except my sister had devastating news for her. "Mama, the Filipino channel here in Canada is gone, too." In fact, my sister reports, many Filipinos suddenly became cultural orphans disconnected from their true home, the Philippines. A lot of them don't even really watch what's on the Filipino channel they just like to have it on all day so they could hear people continually talking in Tagalog. This is especially true for those who lived alone. They'd teach their dogs to speak Tagalog if they could if it meant being able to hear something soothing to their ears, and calming to their yearning hearts.  

Western evening news isn't as exciting or relevant to them as all that footage of traffic in EDSA, or flood calamities in central Visayas--and who's dating whom in Philippine showbiz, all happening halfway around the globe. If they leave home, eat dinner out or just amble along the busy shopping malls, they are engulfed in a foreign culture. Alienated at best, openly despised at worst by hostile Caucasian eyes they could almost read as saying Donald Trump's signature philosophy, "Go back to that shithole country you came from." It's shithole to Donald, it's home, sweet, home to them.

Those of us in the safe and familiar surroundings of true home that we take for granted can never understand. Alienation is not real to you, if you're not on alien soil. ABS-CBN's programming doesn't bring these kababayans home. It keeps them home. It makes them feel like they never left and that all the money they send back is just going over the fence and not really crossing international economic borders.

I don't really know if ABS-CBN can weather this present storm. At the rate it's molting its roster of celebrity staff I don't even now if they can retain enough crew to keep going. I know my small investment is probably never going to pay off in my lifetime. So I'll put it in my will and bequeath to my children. I hope some day they'll see me as Steve Jobs.  

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON

  

 

Concealing COVID-90's risk borders on genocide

hat did the President know and when did he know it?

In his own words, Donald Trump admitted to Bob Woodward that he knew about the extremely virulent nature of the SARS-Covid-2 virus. He knew it almost at the onset of the pandemic, with ample enough time to sound the alarm and enable the American public to take early precautions that would have prevented many of them from getting sick or dying.

In the first place, all that you need to know about the degree of virulence of this virus is its name--nothing more.  The general public may have gotten used to its much shorter nickname "COVID-90" but just spelling out its full name tells you everything you need to know. Its acronym's prefix SARS stands for SEVERE ACUTE RESPIRATORY SYNDROME.

If you have to combine two superlatives "severe" and "accute" at the risk of redundancy to stress how deadly this virus is, whoever thought up that name couldn't have done a better job. Anyone who tries to swap its self-announcing and auto-warning name with a prejudice-loaded spun-out name like China Virus--or worse, a playful pun on a yokel sport Kung Flu--is not being irreverent or plain funny. He is actively engaged in preventing awareness of the danger from even germinating in the public mind.

That is not passive concealment of a threat. That is being proactive in the wrong direction. In the beginning phases of the pandemic, there might already have existed a nominal measure of instinctive precaution in the public mind. What Donald Trump did was to convince them to let go of that last thread of basic self-preservation thought. By and large, he succeeded in doing that.

That is an amazing achievement given how America is such  a tough society to "unprotect." You find coffee paper cups emblazoned in screaming red capital letters  "CAUTION: LIQUID CONTENT IS EXTREMELY HOT AND MAY CAUSE SERIOUS BURN."  They print the word "AMBULANCE" in optical reverse so that drivers can read the word right side up in their rear view mirrors and know to yield to lifesaving emergencies behind them. No words are minced on cigarette packaging telling what every smoker already knows. Even toys are labeled to tell specifically how old a tyke has to be first to go bouncing on a pogo stick. When it comes to protecting the health and well-being of people, America is totally unbeatable.

So why would its own President, the sum total of whose duty is to protect American lives, lead the charge in unprotecting 300 million Americans, mocking the sensible among them to the point short of yanking the protective masks off their faces? Donald Trump didn't even help put those masks on these faces, yet he's leaving no stone unturned in making sure the mask-wearer is made the pinata of public scorn and ridicule.

It's pointless to point out to Donald Trump that six million Americans have now been infected by COVID-90. That is the same number of Jews who were gassed to death by Adolf Hitler during the holocaust. That an average of 1,500 Americans are dying EVERYDAY due to the virus is a meaningless statistic to anyone who doesn't, wouldn't, couldnt and refuses to understand it.

Donald Trump is not in passive denial of the risk. He is in active advocacy of fatally accepting and embracing that risk.  He is the total picture of the pundit who read somewhere that the fatality rate among people who jump off a tall building is 90%. That nine out of ten people who jumped off a tall building have all died. He grabs somebody and says, "Nine people jumped off that building yesterday and they all died. You're the tenth person to try it today You should totally jump, I guarantee you the statistics say you will live!"

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON