A (perverse?) fascination for Money Pakyaw
Sunday, July 2
You know you've made it big when your whole life is a business venture in itself. Therefore, before anything, I would like to congratulate Manny Pacquiao, not only for his astonishing victory over Larios, but also for his victory in conquering the Philippines and creating a whole new market, the business of, as a lot of my friends say, Money Pakyaw.
Well, Manny is not only a brawny fighter, but I also find him to be quite a wise guy. At least he realizes that his fame won't last long, and decided to make a run for our money, through the countless TV ads he has acquired. Or maybe he was just blinded by the ginormous sums of money offered to him by these companies. But he doesn't stop at that, look at those friggin shorts, a compressed miniature compilation of all those big highway billboard ads, all of which are quite annoying, not to mention distracting (it's hard to focus on Manny's punches when suddenly you catch a glimpse of the Mickey D sign on his shorts).
So what is it with our rather perverse fascination with this boxer? As a foreigner once put it, Manny is our Philippine Superbowl, the World Cup, the Olympics, and the NBA championships all rolled into a neat all-around package. It's hard to deny that Manny is quite charismatic in his own way, and me and my friends best remember him for this in his McDo ad with that catchy line: "PaparaPacquiao!". And of course it always is refreshing to hear ,amidst all the depressing news of government injustice and various other problems, the news of a Filipino boxer beating his opponent to pulp.
But is this still so? The president has already realized how much publicity Manny can produce and is riding the waves of Manny's popularity for her own purposes. Even more obvious, as I mentioned before, is the exploitation of Manny by the mass media, most notably the fugly ABS-CBN. True, I look at Manny as maybe the appropriate epitome of the Filipino spirit, courageous and unwavering. But lately, with all the media frenzy, the meaning of what Manny stood for has been trivialized and is being wastefully transformed into yet another media shibboleth.
thrown by A.Paul @ 15:05,
