An SOS to Mr. Sarkozy

September 27, 2007

An SOS to Mr. Sarkozy from SUNDAY STORIES  By Marlen V. Ronquillo  

If brain trafficking is allowed  under globalization, we should hurry up and scribble a note to the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, and make an urgent plea.

We should ask that the slivers of brain to be spliced off from the French intellectuals under France’s “think less and work more” current mood should be sold or donated to the Philippines under preferential terms. There is no country that needs it more than the Philippines, we should tell the French, which is exactly the truth.

Instead of stockpiling somebody else’s trash, we should go for the French brain—tons upon tons of it—to enrich the intellectual wasteland, Asia’s Sahara of the Bozart, which our country has become.

The benefits from such bold act of importing brains from the land of Descartes will more than offset the initially pathetic condition of having to draw from somebody’s else’s brain to prop up the barely functioning local ones.

We will definitely suffer from the initial embarrassment but the dividends we will reap later will be awesome.

I will give you a case in point. 

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Rage and loathing at the NLEX

Rage and loathing at the NLEX (SUNDAY STORIES By Marlen V. Ronquillo ) 

To the poster girl of the North Luzon Expressway (NLEX), a smiling one in blue jeans, plaid shirt and yellow baseball cap with the cut-out saying “Happy Trip,” the reaction of most motorists and commuters these days is to mutter the “f**k you” word. The venom and sting, of course, is directed at the “Happy Trip” exhortation rather than the smiling girl painted gloriously on plywood.

On early Monday morning (September 3), as I was stuck in a traffic jam at the NLEX’s Meycauayan-Valenzuela portion, only the tug of civility pushed me into reconsidering my decision to scoop mud from the rain-drenched shoulder of the expressway and hurl—ala Joba Chamberlain—a fastball at the “Happy Trip” sign.

Looking through the open and untinted windows of the motorists also stuck at the NLEX at rush hour, the grim faces said it all: they were contemplating doing worse things than what I had in mind.

Nothing can build up public rage more than being stuck in traffic in a toll road that charges you a fortune in fees—and is being advertised as a road that assures motorists of a safe, fast and efficient travel.

The NLEX ads and the smiling poster girl have a Stalinist ring—Uncle Joe calling for worldwide egalitarianism while butchering political dissidents in the Gulags and pick-axing Trotsky in Mexico.
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