“VOLUNTEER FLOOD czar Engineer Marni Castro on Monday branded the breaching of the tail dike and the subsequent flooding as “an act of nature” which is beyond man’s control.”
So reported Sun-Star Pampanga.
I sense something already askance there. “Volunteer…czar” may well be a contradiction in terms.
In its original sense, czar or tsar is the Russian emperor – starting with Ivan the Terrible and ending with Nicholas II who was dethroned and ultimately executed in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Hence, the term has come to mean autocrat or tyrant.
In its informal sense, czar refers to one appointed and vested by authority with special powers to oversee, regulate, manage or supervise a program or an activity.
Engineer Castro is neither Russian nor tyrant and is not known – after his P1-a-year consultancy with the City of San Fernando – to have been vested with any special powers by any authority.
So he arrogated unto himself such powers and then offered his services for free? Thus his being a volunteer czar? Funny.
No I don’t mean to demean whatever intention my friend Mister Marni has. Always, he has the best intentions in his heart. I could vouchsafe for his sense of citizenship, as manifested in the fight to save Pampanga from the onslaughts of Mount Pinatubo.
His moniker “Mister Megadike” is well deserved, though it was not picked up by enough City of San Fernando electorates to merit him a council seat in two elections past.
What I am saying is the word czar is miscast for Marni under the present circumstances. There is absolutely no question about his volunteerism though.
Then there is there is the “flood czar.”
I was ready to pounce on the inappropriateness of the phrase that could be construed, literally, as “supervisor of floods.” And go for the more definitive “anti-flood czar” or “flood-control czar.”
As used in a Philippine Daily Inquirer story thus: “We all agreed that flood control management for … Metro Manila should be handled by the MMDA for better coordination and we designated [MMDA] Chairman [Francis] Tolentino as the flood control czar,” Valenzuela Mayor Sherwin Gatchalian said in an interview after the Metro Manila Council (MMC) meeting yesterday.”
And in another story in the same paper thus: “As if that was not enough, Cayetano questioned the expertise of the MMDA whose head, Francis Tolentino, holds the title of anti-flood czar.”
But then a headline in The Daily Tribune shouts: “Solon to Noy: Name ‘flood czar’ who’ll oversee anti-flooding programs”
A matter of style, it may all be. Each paper having its own stylebook.
Still, “anti-flood czar” clears the title of any misunderstanding even if it fails to clear the rainwaters off the streets and homes.
So much for semantics. Maybe I should minimize, if not altogether stop, reading Bill Safire.
“It is an act of nature. The tail dike, like a car, has depreciated so much after 16 years. The flooding was not man-made. Wala naman gustong bumaha. In any case, may kasalanan tayong laat (sic, the Kapampangan there showing?) sa nangyari.”
Force majeure, Engineer Marni Castro deemed the breached tail dike affair.
Act of nature. The flooding was not man-made. Yet, under the same breath: “may kasalanan tayong laat sa nangyari.”
The tail dike has depreciated, indeed. So much so that it readily crumbled at the rush of heavy rainwaters.
To use the Engineer’s analogy: You can’t stop a car from getting old. But you can stop it from looking old. As that old advertising blurb of a car wax pointed out.
A car is a car. A dike is a dike. The latter you can prevent from crumbling by regular maintenance and repair.
Act of nature, aggravated by the neglect of men. That’s the story of the tail dike breach. And that story should not happen again.
Yeah, it’s time the provincial government made Engineer Marni flood-control czar. Officially, even if his services are voluntary.
