Duterte’s stand-up comedy act (SUCA)

BY way of an erratum, I begin this piece with a side discussion on what I’d call “mental cheat syndrome” among writers—or at least in me. It is this tendency of my fingers typing something else than what my mind originally intends for me to write. Take for example this phrase from my past article, A Day In The Lives of One-Time Communist Rebels: “Kintanar’s proposal, which was approved by then CPP Chairman Rodolfo Salas, alias Kumander Bilog … was for a quick, urban-based insurrection in the genre of the Sandinista uprising in Panama.” I knew, all right, Sandino was from Nicaragua, but why my fingers typed Panama is beyond me. I just thought, while ruing that I had incurred the chagrin of one reader over the mistake, I was a victim of a cheating by my mind. For my fingers could not have typed that erroneous information if it had not reacted to an impulse generated by my brain. So a piece of advice to writers—or at least, to me: be very careful in copy reading your article. Mental impulse that produces cheat is like a thief that attacks when you least expect it. Deadline pressure should not be an excuse for incorrect writing.

Better said than done, for here I go again. Breezing through my column yesterday, I cringe in self-shame as I read: “By this I do not mean to motivate the president into campaigning against the abolition of capitalism. He won’t do it; he can’t. Like the character of the proliferation of drug in Old China which came about as an offspring of capitalism, the Duterte presidency is an offspring of capitalistic funding.”