Good morning, Mr. President!

This is the day! All the world wakes up with America embracing a new era. God bless Barack Obama as he rolls up his sleeve along with the rest of the nation and its dreamers and believers of the possibilities of hope and change in this time of challenges.




















Click here to read my recent opinion column in Sun.Star Cebu in celebration of this unprecedented moment of the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States of America. For the complete text of Obama's inaugural speech, click here.

Blowing the blues away

If the footloose Grim Reaper had a favorite song to send him pirouetting on a carpet of petals nipped in the bud, it could be Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World."

It's supposed to be an ode to the bliss of being alive, its lyrics utterly incandescent to our ears. We could have hummed along like we were swelling up until we could burp the rainbow into rising above us. But, alas, its evocation of paradise never fails to impress me as something fitting for a funeral procession.

It could be the cocktail of rust and champagne in Armstrong's voice, as if he were tasting the ache of bearing witness to all things sweet and light, so sharp it could whittle his heart to its breaking point.

Happiness, after all, happens like refrains in a dirge. Pretty much like background accompaniment only to our front acts and its regular repertoire of these little deaths: our anxieties, our disappointments, the jiggle of our jaundiced eyeballs to the sonic boom of our sighs.

In this season that confronts us with a compulsion to be merry--the topic of my recent column at the op-ed page of Sun.Star Cebu--it is unavoidable for the vultures of worries to spread its wings over our heads. In the face of crisis--global, local, and personal--the pursuit of happiness does loom no less than an obstacle course up the paths of Sisyphus.

What does it take to be cheerful? It's the crux of the cinematic genius of Mike Leigh in his latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky, whose chuckle-prone protagonist comes in sunlit contrast to the stripped-to-the-bone depiction of lives exiled into their inner darkness in Naked (so fully embodied by David Thewlis in a bruising performance worthy of the Best Actor prize at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival).

Worth scrutinizing, indeed, how Leigh mines the dynamics of joy without drilling and driving headlong down the borders of escapism. So far, as in most of Leigh's works, those who have seen it are up on their toes in applause. (Click here to read the chorus of rave reviews.)

No less phenomenal is Sally Hawkins whose portrayal has been rewarded with a Best Actress trophy at this year's Berlin Film Festival. She's been coasting along with a wave of wow as critics' circles from New York, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and Boston cast ripples all the way to the forthcoming Golden Globe and the Oscar awards.

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy," exclaims Marcel Proust, "they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." Here's a bouquet, too, for Mike Leigh and Sally Hawkins. See the trailer below:

Today, while the world watches

It's heady to come from a country where elections are an exercise for voters to bend backwards through their threshold of tolerance. And so being in the midst of the 2008 US election has stirred in me a strange cocktail of outrage and fondness regarding the way we Filipinos make a circus and a chainsaw massacre out of our right of suffrage.

Indeed, as my latest column in the op-ed page of Sun.Star reveals, America's election season has primed me into missing the mess of the political festival-cum-pestilence back home.

Out here, it's good riddance for the mosaic of candidates' posters and streamers more than enough to convince you that blessed are the blind. None here, too, are TV ads jolly with campaign jingles to jazz up any clown's routine. A galaxy apart, indeed, from what I've been accustomed to see in Philippine elections: a litter of sample ballots swamping the streets and a crowd jostling, sweating, and squinting for their names at the voters' list tacked outside the classrooms.

Early today when I sent my son to school, it was sort of disorienting--pleasantly so--not to see a throng of voters to the polling precincts. In the main hall of the school where the voting booths were set up, I could have sneaked in for a catnap. Which nearly fooled me into thinking that Americans (at least the Kansans) were not hot about this election. Wrong, they and the rest of America did cast their votes in unprecedented numbers. The calm and the orderly manner rendered this election all the more affirmative for an airtight process of polling with technological leverage.

So much for the ease of voting and counting the ballots through computerization--a process that remains an alien concept for the Commission on Elections (Comelec) whose prehistoric conduct has spawned watchdogs as rabid as woebegone protesters.

Later tonight, the outcome of the Obama-McCain duel--widely seen as historic and seminal--will be known. The choice America takes will be crucial, no doubt, at a time when Washington's agenda on the economy, the environment, foreign policy, terrorism, etc. have flung shadows looming all over the planet.

For those watching America as a beacon of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, among others, may the hope for a sea-change cast ripples elsewhere about the necessity for and the possibility of change for the better. Go hum, whistle: The best is yet to come.

Here comes history, Mr. Obama!

Now that the air is acrid with the stench from Bush's pisspot at the White House that leaks all the way to Wall Street, being here in America may be wrong timing for any migrant dreamer out to raise the stakes for better opportunities.

But it's also a thrill of a time to be in the midst of history in the making, hovering in the wings of change. (This, in a nutshell, is what my opinion column says in today's issue of Sun.Star Cebu.)

Economic uncertainty, notwithstanding, it's great to witness America bracing to redeem itself from its excesses and the ignorance of its arrogance and prove what greatness it is capable of.

With hope and in honor of the next President of the United States of America, I echo what will resound a few days from now: "Yes, We Can!"

Here's a music video from the Black Eyed Peas and a host of celebrities supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama.