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About Constancio Asumen, Jr.
Mr. Asumen has most recently assumed the responsibilities of
Chairman-of-the-Board for ACE LILACS, a budding startup venture
in the marketplace of ideas. The list of previous vocations he
had engaged in before this, includes being a farmer, fisherman,
stevedore, national scholar, college professor, journeyman
laborer, freelance scribe, typesetter, proofreader, systems
analyst, software developer, cab driver, etc. He holds a masters
degree in Mineral Science & Technology (1973, Kyoto University)
with a major in Exploration Geophysics. Somewhat of the
quintessential Ivy League under-achiever, he is an embodiment of
the can-do attitude so prevalent amongst most first generation
Americans. He is an ardent adherent to the tenet that anything
worth doing is worth doing well. Mr. Asumen maintains a
website here. |
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Past Articles
Historical
Parallels & Intersections
The
Repugnant Obama Paradigm
The Myth of
Moderate Islam
ObamaCare:
How Lucky Can You Get?
Assimilation Overkill Begets Bigotry |
Social Bookmarking
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Constancio Asumen,
Jr.
Historical Parallels & Intersections
November 16, 2009
Should
lessons gleaned from History provide
Due faith and courage for your future course,
Be best prepared to emulate with pride
The brave defenders of your sacred shores.
Allow not blunt your own awakening
By rhetoric that politicians use
To thwart your conscience into weakening
The selfsame vehemence of vengeance's cause,
The which would break the fetters of your soul
And tear the mask of shameless tyranny.
Default's the cross of falsehood bearing all
Unreason for your seeming destiny
To drown, in surfeit, bliss of ignorance,
To crown, in glory, sweet irrelevance!!
The above sonnet was
second in a series of eight (plus a quatrain, the vestigial relic of
a failed attempt at a ninth in the series) Patriotic Sonnets which I
penned in one night, to quench the fire of anguish in my soul. The
experience absolutely astonished me because it usually takes me a few
days, even weeks or months, to finish one sonnet. I simply accepted it
gratefully that poetry provided a healthy channel through which I could
creatively vent the turmoil boiling to explosive proportions in the
depths of my being.
The occasion was the culmination of the so-called
People-Power Revolution in the Philippines which resulted in the
ouster of Ferdinand Marcos who ended up exiled in Hawaii and the
ascendancy of Corazon Aquino to the presidency. Marking the end of
fourteen years of the Marcos martial law, it could have been an ample
cause for celebration. For me however, whose career trajectory has been
drastically altered by kindred forces of persuasion as produced that
revolution, the irony was poignantly delicious.
Twelve years earlier, I managed to become a persona non grata to the
Philippine government. Thus, from the perspective of a person without a
country, which was my immigration status then, several days of
monitoring from afar the events on the streets of Metro Manila was, to
put it mildly, hugely devastating. The anguish mainly stemmed from my
inability to even become an eyewitness to the unfolding of history in
which I very much yearned to have played an active role.
Overwhelmed by the emotion of that period, I filed the episode in the
innermost recesses of my reverie under the heading "missed
opportunities.” Never in my wildest dreams and nightmarish
hallucinations did I imagine that the same sentiment could, roughly a
generation later, equally and even more appropriately apply to the
results of the Presidential Elections in this good old U.S. of A.
The Ironical Parallel
In physics (or mathematical physics, if you are a stickler for labels) a
vector entity consists of magnitude and direction; direction has the
added component of sense, e.g., clockwise or counter-clockwise, leftward
or rightward, etc. The elements of momentum are conceived as mass and
velocity and the elements of velocity are speed and direction. Vectors
are construed to be parallel if they do not intersect at any conceivable
extension, through the end of space and time.
In politics momentum is traditionally conceived to be the gathering of
mass, trending towards victory. Somehow the notion of sense (as used in
mathematics) is conveniently omitted in the reckoning. Leftward or
rightward is deemed of little consequence. The only thing that matters
is victory. Here, in a nutshell, lurks the irony in the parallel tales
of two elections.
The events in the Philippines, in the spring of 1986, promised the end
of tyranny and portended the resumption of civil discourse as an
indispensible component of governance, hopefully, ushering in a
healthier flourishing of democracy and nurturing of individual liberty.
In the United States, in the autumn of 2008, the Presidential election
was decided on the hoopla of hope and change drenched in hyperbolic
rhetoric which effectively drowned journalistic decorum to maintain any
pretence at integrity. It put the Oval Office decisively lurching into a
monopoly of power without any effective constraints in place. In short,
the seeds of tyranny were safely and decisively planted.
The jury is still out whether or not the 1986 Philippine Spring
succeeded in vanquishing tyranny to nurture expanding liberty. The
leading indicators point to a political governance being still in the
clutches of a ruling oligarchy, whose grandiose schemes still exclude,
by default, the folks in the rural provinces. As for the 2008 American
Autumn, the indications are not very encouraging.
To borrow the compelling formulation of
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., ”We are at that delicious moment in a modern
Democratic presidential administration when the bizarre fantasticos who
decorate each chaotic regime make their painful appearance -- though
this administration is bringing a whiff of the ominous.” Ominous is the
operative word.
The sweeping implementation of the Obama agenda represents precisely the
flourishing of a flawed vision for this nation. It leads us,
irreversibly onto the slippery slope of tyranny, in the manner
prescribed for by Saul Alinsky of "Manual for Radicals” notoriety. This
is beyond scary. It is downright outrageous.
A case in point is the decision to
give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) a civilian court trial. This has
the practical effect of handing over the entire U.S. judicial system to
the enemy for their use as a propaganda forum. Factor in the fact that
the only lawyers, eager willing and able to undertake the defense of KSM
are the ones with predominantly anti-American ideological leanings, it
is tantamount to putting America herself on trial by the al-Qaeda thugs,
as orchestrated by their leftist defense lawyers.
In the economic front, "The Halcyon Days of Yore” has become an
appropriate moniker for the Carter Administration. This is Obama's first
significant legacy in history: the much vaunted change and hope
promised, ad nauseam, in the campaign produced a change which is most
definitely a prelude to unmitigated disaster. Let me illustrate it in
personal terms:
The other day, I received a notice from my credit card provider that my
finance charges rate has been changed to 29% APR. Before this the
highest I have ever paid for credit card interest was 24% during the
halcyon days of James Earl Carter. Worse yet, the Obama agenda are
designed to deliberately transform this nation of doers and achievers
into a nation of hopers. Poor Ben Franklin, he could be agonizingly
squirming in his grave.
The Ironic Intersection
At the time of this writing, the POTUS is in Asia and the Far East. The
buzz in the airwaves is that the undisclosed mission is to persuade the
Chinese government to sustain its commitments for the ongoing purchase
of Preferred US Treasury Bonds. This is the only way to underwrite the
Obama agenda. Debt, perhaps supplemented by the printing press, has
become the lifeblood of Obama’s America.
This brings me to the eighth in the series of
the 1986 Patriotic Sonnets to be so deliciously appropriate:
Beyond reform is your predicament,
It's time you venture forth a better way!
Nor tears of bitterness, nor mute lament
Can free you from your own captivity!
That captors are your very native sons
Is but insult added to injury
And no excuse for patient tolerance
Nor cause to languish in your misery.
With debtors' need false leaders agonize,
For credits, they may make your people bleed;
Bleeding, you may yet seek to galvanize
To life true leaders of a nobler breed:
By visionary men are nations built
Thy lack of vision is this nation's guilt!!
The irony is portentously uncanny. Nostradamus himself could not have
predicted this embarrassingly unbecoming alignment of the stars. Only
three generations ago, the Philippines was under American tutelage on
nationhood and Jeffersonian democratic governance, nurtured by the
potent combination of Monroe’s Doctrine and George Dewey’s guns.
It took less than a year of the messianic genius of the transformative,
transcendent Barack Hussein Obama to align the stars and galvanize the
tides so as the Philippine-American karma would intersect in debt and
indebtedness. The former an ex-colony, the latter the former’s
ex-colonizer, now the twin are quasi equal partners in misery.
If I were not a red-blooded American, and if this were not my America
too, this intersection would have been the ultimate schadenfreude of
hyperbolic proportions. Poor Ben Franklin, what could he possibly be
doing in his grave?! |
