Boeing ko, bahay ko, boo!

In one of the prescient ads that MAS ran when it just acquired its fleet of Boeing 777 were this haunting lines: “lose yourself on a journey of epic proportions, wherever you go no one will ever know.” Set that against MS370, and the ad takes on a different and rather morbid meaning from its intended allure.

MS370 is back in the news, not just because the documents used to base the decision to look into a certain area of the Indian Ocean after the flight disappeared from normal radar have been finally released, but also because China, Malaysia, and Australia will continue with the search, an open and transparent multilateral effort by three nations, already partners in trade and business profits, but never attempted something blatantly humanitarian together before.

To me, it is the revelation that the Malaysian spokesperson earlier accused to be dry of emotions, the acting transport secretary Hishamuddin Hussein, is a cousin of Prime Minister Najib Rasak, who is himself a third generation member of a family that has hugged the leadership of Malaysia since independence from Britain. We find this not so much surprising as validating what we suspected all along, that the democratic process of electing representative favors the already positioned who holds a distinct advantage.

In recent years, the Bushes and the Romneys, the Kennedys and the Cuomos, and now, the Clintons, dominate American politics. The occurrence of Reagan and Obama saves the process from solidifying on the side of the already entrenched.

We noted the Nehru-Gandhi line in India, finally deposed by Janata’s Modi whose act of inviting the heads of his neighboring countries was a coup de grace. Outgoing President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was properly cloaked and Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan, traditional archrivals in the region, and with India, a divide-and-conquer target of both the Brits and the Americans, was there as well. The presence of President Mahinda Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka, whose policies with his nation’s struggle with the Tamil rebellion did not always sit well with Delhi, was greatly Modi-fying, pun intended.

It’s the Marcos-Aquino dynasties that got us singing Bayan ko, bahay ko, boo! My maternal line is close to Marcos in Batac, Ilocos Norte. A great uncle was the police captain in town when Ferdinand was just getting into politics; an uncle was one of his close aides. But I was also a Cory Aquino partisan before Manong Ferdie was deposed. Even after I was naturalized in the United States, I kept my Philippine passport, and when the government decided that taking on another citizenship does not invalidate the Pea Eye one, I did not hesitate to renew the old book.

There are some 50 nationalities in the U.S. that are ‘tolerated’ dual citizenship. An official in the old INS once told me that the duality is not recognized and really has no validity in the United States; it is simply ignored. In a sense he is right. The Philippine passport does not serve any of my interest that the blue book cannot meet except in the archipelago where I am treated as a citizen.

All these pasa calle are simply to underscore again what I have said many times: the progeny of the ruling class in the Philippines directly goes back to the U.S. blessed Commonwealth and we had not change much since. Ferdinand himself grew up in a political family and so did his wife Imelda, a Romualdez of Leyte. Current President Noynoy gets a double whammy with flamboyant martyred Ninoy Aquino for a dad and former yellow President Cory of the mahjong fame for a mom.

In my bahay kubo of Cuyapo where I was born, it is still Bayan ko, boo hoo hoo! as peasant and proletariat hardly have any seat on the roundtable of the nation’s resources and wealth. The game has been designed to favor the 600 families that constitute the elite of the land (by an old Ateneo inventory), now expanded to 3,000. Still, that is a drop in the bucket on the mass of humanity called Pilipino.

What Pinoys have in common with MS370 is the MAS/Boeing ad: “lose yourself on a journey of epic proportions, wherever you go no one will ever know,” except in this case, the Pinoys around the world, in diaspora as an MD in Nigeria, priest of the Inuits in Alaska, au pair in Roma’s piazza Manila, mom in Sydney, engineer in Brazil, hotel worker in Xi’an, nanny in Singapore, and house maid in Hong Kong, are street-smart and world-wise, and will not be taken lightly especially since their remittances keep the foreign exchange of the Philippines afloat. Perhaps, it is time for Bayan ko, boo hoo hoo! to turn into Bayan ko, wa-ha-ha!

Today is Bayan Ko in Pea Eye’s Independence Day. I look at it not from the view of one who was born in an archipelago but rather from the smart and wise Pinoy perspective of living in a world where if there are boundaries, they are self-imposed in the mind, but are widely open in the realm of the real. The Pinoy holds the option wherever ze is, not just to make a nation proud but to make a people human, thoroughly human, and an individual alive. Let’s!