The Sharon moment
Photo: Is this what Godard meant by “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”?
Heavy traffic to and from Tagaytay last Saturday, the highway clogged with private cars. The restaurants on Tagaytay Ridge full. Long queue for ice cream at FIC. Weekenders in sweaters and jackets, imagining they’re in Scotland. Saturday evening spent half an hour looking for parking space at Greenbelt. Greenbelt 3 restaurants packed. Sunday afternoon the restaurants were still packed, and there seemed to be more people strolling about than during the holiday season. What’s going on? Isn’t there supposed to be a financial meltdown?
Robin says it’s our Sharon Cuneta moment. You know those early Sharon movies like Bukas, Luluhod Ang Mga Tala (Tomorrow, The Stars Will Kneel), Bituing Walang Ningning (Star Without Luster), and Pasan Ko Ang Daigdig (I Carry The World), where the heroine is snubbed-oppressed-laughed at by the snooty upper class types, and she looks up at the sky and swears that she will have her day? Apparently that day has come.
The US, UK, Korea, the rich countries have been hit by the credit crunch, and their citizens are feeling the pain. The Philippines will feel it later, because in the first place it’s harder to get credit around here, and in the second place, we can’t really tell if we’re in a boom or a recession. Whenever the government announces that economic indicators are up, we don’t really notice. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer; we scuttle from one financial crisis to another, and those of us who work for a living are just happy to pay our bills. (We hear that the rich lost tons of money in the Wall Street collapse and they whine about being poor, but poor to them may mean flying first class instead of taking the private jet.)
Fortunately, it’s harder to fall from the 30th floor than from the ground floor. In her movies, Sharon becomes rich and famous, so it’s her turn to snub-oppress-laugh at the snooty upper class types. We may not have become rich, but the rich countries have become sort of poor, so it’s almost the same thing! They’ve fallen from the 30th floor onto the basement parking level, so we can stand on the ground floor and sneer at them from this great height. Enjoy it.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 19th, 2009 at 05:12
Nice neigbourhood picture!
I think it’s not the Sharon Cuneta moment; it’s more the “bahala na” attitude at work.
I’ve always marvelled at how we, Pinoys, trek to the resorts, malls, movies, restos, clubs, concerts, and wield the latest cellphones, Ipods, Iphones, laptops, blackberries, ( recession or sans recession) and wear only branded clothes, while the non-Pinoys or those Pinoys living outside P.I get by with ‘made in China, Vietnam and India.”
January 19th, 2009 at 09:20
Our Sharon Cuneta moment! I love it! It’s perfect! And I get a little annoyed every time we co-opt the woes and wishes of what’s out there as our own na rin. Recession elsewhere? No siree! Not us! That’s our default state. Just check out the man-on-the-street soundbites the TV news reporters love tacking onto their nagbabagang balita. Christmas? “Matumal ang benta.” Back to school? “Ang mahal ng notebook.” These, in spite of the non-stop kaching of cash registers. It’s recreational whining, is all. Gosh, we lived through the gulag of the Marcos years, the freefall after Ninoy was shot, Erap’s wholesale plunder and gas prices that hit P61 a liter. We didn’t kill ourselves. We marched in the streets, sold longganisa on the side, mothballed the car and took the MRT and…here we are, living our perfect Sharon Cuneta moment.
January 19th, 2009 at 14:12
Awesome post. Thanks.
January 20th, 2009 at 19:24
The Sharon Cuneta moment… Funny!
January 20th, 2009 at 23:31
I was also in Greenbelt around that time. Most of the people there were balikbayans who tagged along their relatives for last bonding moments. But last Friday, Greenbelt was not as full as before.
January 21st, 2009 at 23:19
Hmmm, so i ask this question again:are we a rich country pretending to be poor,or are we a poor country pretending to be rich?Just check out the parking lots of Greenbelt, Mega,Rockwell, Podium, Trinoma, the Fort, MOA,(it boggles my mind how MOA’s immense parking lots are nearly almost always fully occupied at any given time) and they’re always full. But go inside any of these malls and you’d hardly see anyone buying anything. Mainly they are just lounging, strolling about,just looking. Me, I hit the malls in my track suit, sneakers and stop watch, burning off calories. That’s all we should burn now, calories. I wish there are bicycle lanes inside malls so we can go riding indoors. That would be so…. green.