People are lining up for doomsday. The queue is happening in cinema houses where the film by Robert Emmerich called 2012 is being shown.
The film is based on the prophecy that in the year 2010, this world as we know it, is coming to an end. But true to the Hollywood kind of filmmaking, audiences all over the world are applauding as highways crack open after tremendous earthquakes. They laugh when the cars of senior citizens hit a wall and zoom out into the outer space. It looks like Hollywood has done it again: to transform the apocalypse into comedy rather than caution.
Indeed, it is always funny when the apocalypse is imagined for the sheer business and fun of it. The reality, of course, of the end of this world, will never test our sense of humor. What it will test is our own way of grappling with reality and the signs around us that things may not be what they may seem.
The doomsday has always been a part of the childhood tale I heard from my grandmothers (who believe a great portion about the apocalypse) and grandfathers (who seemed to have a great sense of logic and humor to laugh it off). Either way, the narrative about the ending of the world competed with stories about half-human and half-horse haunting maidens and about men who balance themselves on palm fronds when the moon was full.
Adding enchantment to an already engaging tale about doomsday were figures who materialized from the seas and caves announcing the end of humanity. One of these men was called Señor Pisi-Pisi who so convinced people - mostly old women - in Ticao that he was Christ made flesh. Some recalled that he even made his followers drink his urine. That was how compelling his presence was. People forgot that if indeed their Savior did come back, he would certainly not make a strong presence through a distribution of his urine.
Another "messiah" was even more dramatic: He sailed into view as if the sea just brought him to the island. Imagine a scenario where an old man appeared through the mist surprising those who lived near of the beach of San Fernando in Ticao. That would have been apocalyptic. The man had wounds all over the exposed parts of his body, including his head. The people had to grapple with their own sense of iconography. If the wounds were on the hand and feet, then this must be Christ himself in a Crucifixion mode. But the wounds were festering! This must be Lazarus risen from the grave. Look again, the old fisherman said: There is a rooster at his feet. Then, this must be San Pedro. We are all saved. He has the key to Heaven.
I do not remember now which came first: the people discovering that it was a hoax or the simple ways of the town goons who kicked the hell or the heaven out of the messiah who, they realized, was also into cockfighting.
We had a good laugh listening to the misadventures of these individuals who saw in the simple faith of the people a chance to exploit them and earn money. But later on, the surfacing of more individuals who were seen as merely having messianic complex started to make many people uncomfortable. Some of them had odd ways but their declarations certainly had meanings. They were clowns but their words were about governments that did not care, a church that was for the rich, and a society that made rich people richer and poor people poorer.
On May 27, 1967, members of Lapiang Malaya converged in Pasay. They were peasants from different parts of southern Luzon and were protesting the problems that plagued farmers then and even now. They were wearing capes and had amulets. With bolos only as arms, they advanced to meet members of the Philippine Constabulary or PC. They were not afraid of bullets because they had pebbles in their mouth that their leader told them would protect them from all harm. At the end of the brief battle, nearly 40 were dead and some 40 more were wounded. The rest were arrested for sedition for they were asking Marcos to step down.
Their leader, Valentin de los Santos, a Bikolano, was consigned to the mental asylum in Mandaluyong.
Years and years after that, social scientists would explain this seemingly bizarre occurrence as a demonstration of the "everyday resistance." People who feel hopeless against a system that oppresses them do little, strange things to express their hopelessness and also hope against a world that favors only the powerful and the elite.
The man who floated up into the town, confused as he may have appeared about what to icon to represent was actually subverting a religion that did not make sense to him and, eventually, to other people. The punitive god who is always promising to destroy the world is a strange being for people. When this god materializes in whatever form, they stop and believe and, later, run away, confused about the presence of destruction in their religion.