‘Those who rule the roost today will be the roasted tomorrow.’
IF you are old enough, you’ll remember “the Quad.” It was a housing that, as the name suggests, consisted of fours: four wings emanating from a central point and four theatres that provided classy entertainment options for residents of Makati and nearby towns and cities.
At that time Makati, was itself a town, as was most of what we know now are the component units of Metro Manila. Indeed, when the Quad was built, “Metro Manila” as we knew it, only had four cities: Manila, Quezon, Caloocan and Pasay, and everyone else was a municipality.
The Quad was where you took your date if you wanted to show off. There were even times when musicians would be playing in an open-air area while passersby stopped to listen in between shopping trips or lick on their ice cream cones.
Eventually, the Quad gave up pole position when Greenbelt was built; over time, as Greenbelt expanded, even an aviary that was such a refreshing refuge from the concrete jungle that Makati was becoming had to give way.
At that time, some Ayala executives even questioned the need for Greenbelt: building four new theatres, one argued, would already saturate the market given the four theaters in Quad and the additional ones within the Mile Long complex along Chino Roces Avenue. (I know this for a fact because once upon a time I had to glance through what was called the “Ayala diaries,” which were entries of daily events, meeting discussions and even decisions that the highest company executives engaged in or made. It was an effective, pre-computer, manual way of logging in important moments that key decision-makers had to be aware of.)
Anyway, just as Greenbelt meant the disappearance of the aviary, so did Quad had to give way to Glorietta. The central activity center of Glorietta, seems to me, is the very spot, open air, where musicians would play for passersby on lazy weekends.
It was this Quad that came to mind when my aunt in California called me yesterday to discuss travel arrangements she was making with classmates from the UP College of Nursing. What provoked me to go down memory lane of a Makati central business district of times past was her reference to the QuadComm hearings that are being televised and that she, an ocean away, takes pains to follow.
She was telling me how this or that young congressman was showing promise, how that one needed to master English better, and how this or that resource person needed to go to jail. As she was speaking, I smiled because I also wanted to tell her that their President-elect needed to go to jail; but I kept my mouth shut.
Instead, I told her, honestly, that I have never followed any of the hearings of the QuadComm as I have basically tuned out of Philippine politics and would prefer to discuss the repercussions of the fall of the Assad regime than discuss why some political families are at war with themselves.
Sometimes, I catch myself wishing, impossibly, that politics would just go the way of the Quad, replaced eventually by something more relevant to our needs. But human nature being what it is, and us Filipinos being who we are, I suppose we are condemned to forever having this type of politics as a circus and a circus for our politics. So much time and effort spent and nothing much gained for the welfare of the public at large.
Those who rule the roost today will be the roasted tomorrow.
