It’s fiction, stupid

Creative nonfiction, Lee Gutkind believes, is the genre of the century. By definition, creative nonfiction is information framed in dramatic stories about important subjects like politics and economics using techniques employed by fictionists. It is also called literary journalism whereby the writer is a reporter, a novelist, a poet and an essayist all rolled into one.

But, what I would like to really blog on is about another hybrid: the uncreative fiction (it is not a genre yet, hehe). Anyway, it is uncreative because it’s just a rearrangement of events. It is a fiction because it is yet to be grounded in real facts, which means that I am still unsure about the causality or of the beginning, the middle or the end. In other words, there are still so many dots to connect the episodic events together.

Now, here’s the structure of my fiction.

As La Gloria’s approval rating trended perilously downwards, Big Uncle became alarmed about the prospect of another People Power of a dimension potentially different from the first two upheavals. People Power III, U.S. analysts calculated, could create seismic shifts in the power relations in the region in a manner that could severely damage U.S. interest.

The analysts were of course well aware that People Power has been denied respite owing to a sequence or confluence of events: the insurrection of the Great Unwashed, the Oakwood mutiny, the cry for the ‘Angel of the Cross,’ the challenge of Ang Panday, the tyranny at the canvass, the E-VAT woes and worries, and the requiem for the Da King, among others.

The Great Beast, its muscle being thus constantly honed and limbered up (at some well-paced intervals although at various intensities), has been battle-fit since the last roar that swept La Gloria into power.

Now, it was just a matter of time, the experts reckoned, La Gloria would suffer the fate of her predecessor.

The inevitability of People Power III being seen as given, Big Uncle began to scout for a lackey as La Gloria’s successor. There was a sense, too, a quickened ouster of La Gloria would catch off guard those power grabbers waiting in the wings as well as honest-to-god people power practitioners and thereby ensure Big Uncle to impose, more or less, his choice. So, the Garci tapes, obtained by a coalition of anti-terror operatives as a matter of routine operations, had to be let out to trigger the revolt.

Big Uncle’s calculation was awfully off. On the one hand, La Gloria was tougher than it was thought, and on the other, People Power practitioners hemmed and hawed.

So, CIA enlisted a tobacco-munching-former-West Pointer of an FVR and an ex-future-president-on-a-last-trip-to-become-a-Prime Minister of a JDV to deliver the ultimatum to La Gloria to cut and cut cleanly via a Charter change. With the call for her resignation still mounting, La Gloria obliged to the “graceful exit” offer.

But the President’s men outclassed the Opposition on the run-up and during the impeachment (not necessarily People Power, however). The impeachment vote was a rout. And Big Uncle in fact saw an Iron Lady in La Gloria of the caliber of Da Apo - that is, a real(able) McCoy after all.

Now, now what to do with FVR and JDV? Leak out the Venable deal (a furtive contract between RP and a lobbying firm for the purpose of obtaining US funding to tweak the Philippine constitution) and decapitate the senescent do-Dou as well as their Cha cha brainchild.

Something more for the sub-plot. Whose hero is Aragoncillo? Clue: Who was the initiator of the plot?

Just look again at the FBI complaint. And read between the lines. Did you notice too the dots (as in . . . and . . . and . . .)?

Well, it’s fiction dude. But which one?