Overload

After some time, you figure out how US American media will eventually beat Donald Trump: By covering him to oblivion.

After some time, you get tired of it: News that repeats itself. It becomes overload. And while contemporary humans still have that old traditional taste for excess, they are also quite, by now, even more susceptible to that timeless and universal affliction – boredom. And so is revealed something of a vulnerability of the Trump campaign. How does he level up? How does he ratchet up the rhetoric?

But the point of this is not so much American politics as much as our own. After spending too much time watching grisly deaths of alleged drug pushers in the streets, one gets too much of it. One tires of the sight. They become just numbers – 10 everyday on the average. And then, they become more unreal the more we see them.

And of all the deaths that we ever had to countenance, we remember the most a particular one. He was a body wrapped in packaging tape coming to us with a card that said something. We remember it for its obvious symbolisms. We interpret it for meaning. We interpret it as art. Packaging tape tells us this is the killer’s gift for us in general and for someone in particular. And how we so deserve it: This, “thingy” to commemorate an event, his event, our event.

The body is simply an object, anonymous at best. The body is not someone. And so we do not feel the loss unless we think: Someone owns this body, someone with a name, someone with family. Will we ever see ourselves or a loved one gift-wrapped this way? But after so many deaths, they begin to lose their newness – more importantly, their newsworthiness. And so, instead of watching this news everyday, we change channels, passing by CNN.

But whom do we see there but Donald Trump? Finding ourselves even more bored than we already were, we go watch the funnies.

Better to read a book, na lang; something like “Krakatoa” by one Simon Winchester, New York Bestseller lister; something cataclysmic, even apocalyptic, but less troublesome if only because the volcano, Krakatoa, erupted in 1883, at such a time when the far corners of our planet were just being connected by telegraph. Krakatoa was a fitting global event happening at a time when the world was only beginning to be “globalized.” And one cannot help but read about all these with a bit of nostalgia for those times when cataclysm – which for those within directly affected periphery seemed like the “end of the world” – could still be interpreted as a geologic and meteorological occurrence. What has changed since then? We are more inclined now for tragedies of our own making, more inclined now to deny that our tragedies are even tragedies at all, since they are supposed to be as inevitable as murder and global warming.

It is only the state machinery at work. Our world will be much safer for us if the poor in our slums are better behaved, meaning – less criminal. If they are going mad from hunger and shabu, then shoot down some of them if only to teach the others a lesson. After that, they will all be more docile.

There will only be the hunger to worry about. And isn’t that, too, as inevitable as global warming?

And if a Facebook commentator calls hypocritical those people who condemn extra-judicial killings for not complaining equally as vehemently about the deaths of Lumads, and one massacre after another in our country; then perhaps, he must be right. We must be hypocrites, all the more so by the stringent standards he holds up to himself. For how can we even start to condemn the deaths of so many? We run out of time and space. After so many deaths, our wellspring for lamenting the dead runs out. Better to lament stupidity and the stupid. They are easier to identify. Always, they identify themselves by their own words and deeds. Otherwise, it is better to read a book.