Stop Calling for Cha-cha!

Yes. Stop calling for Cha-cha! Stop calling for a Latin dance that goes forward & backward and doesn’t really get anyhere. Stop calling for something that people do not associate with progress or anything positive.

You see, fellow Filipinos, no one outside of the Philippines uses the word “cha-cha” to refer to any act of editing, amending, revising, or correcting a country’s Constitution. It the rest of the world, this act is known as “Constitutional Reform.” Watch CNN, BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, Al-Jazeera English, Channel News Asia, or even FOX News, and you’ll hear their anchors and reporters refer to any initiative to make changes to a country’s Constitution as “Constitutional Reform.” No one in the rest of the world calls it “Charter Change” and worse, no one but Filipinos would even think of referring to it as “Cha-cha.”

Calling it “Charter Change” started off with good intentions. This started back in the 1990’s during the presidency of Fidel V. Ramos when a “fancy” way of referring to amending the Constitution was devised. “Charter Change” seemed a “cute” way to call it because it only used 3 syllables and had a sense of “alliteration” to it thanks to the “Ch”-sound used twice. Kind of like “Mickey Mouse”, “Donald Duck”, “Roger Rabbit” or “Bugs Bunny.”

But the evil oligarch-owned Pinoy Mass Media institution that is largely opposed to positive systemic change in the Philippines wanted to avoid allowing these proposed reforms to prosper. In a bid to make Filipinos oppose the reforms, many functionaries within the evil oligarch-owned Pinoy Mass Media started to refer to “Charter Change” in a very condescending way. They started to call it “Cha-cha”, in order to make it sound ridiculous.

Worse, many Pinoy Mass Media news reporters actively gave a lot of negative subliminal cues whenever mentioning the word “Cha-cha” or “Charter Change.” They would use very negative intonations, body language, and hateful facial expressions that would evoke “annoyance” and imply that “cha-cha” or “charter change” was some kind of annoying and useless proposal. But they didn’t even just stop there. The oligarch-owned Pinoy Mass Media actively misrepresented “charter change” by implying that the proposals to shift from the current flawed presidential system towards the more stable, more accountable, and more efficient Parliamentary System were nothing but a devious ploy to “extend the president’s term limits.”

Philippine Mass Media, which had long become an instrument of misinformation, rather than telling the people what they needed to know in order to make proper decisions, actively sought to make people think that “charter change” was “evil” by associating it with “term extensions” and name-calling like “cha-cha” that would give the extremely gullible Filipino Public (which also doesn’t do much research in order to verify facts) the impression that “amending the charter” is “bad.”

Just look at how evil Pinoy Mass Media has been so that during the time in the mid 2000’s, when the Constitutional Reform bandwagon was in full-swing, the evil Pinoy Mass Media suddenly started shifting the attention away from Charter Change (since many in the Public were now beginning to understand that it was necessary) towards the modes of how these amendments were to be made. It was around that time that Pinoy Mass Media started creating a “war between Constituent Assembly versus Constitutional Convention.”

See, ordinary members of the Public as well as the proponents and advocates of Constitutional Reform didn’t really care as to whether the amendments were to be done via Constituent Assembly or by Constitutional Convention. To them, what mattered was that Filipinos needed to understand that this is necessary, and  the faster this reform occurred, the better. Constituent Assembly was, based on the research done by the most prominent political scientists and researchers, clearly the fastest way to do this.

Pinoy Mass Media’s Evil Oligarch Owners realized that since people were now becoming more open to Constitutional Reform, they needed to set up a new roadblock by dissuading people from accepting the Constituent Assembly mode of making such reforms. Suddenly, two new terms were created by Pinoy Mass Media: Con-Ass and Con-con. Con-Ass was a condescending way of referring to “Constituent Assembly”, a mode of drafting reforms to the Constitution by getting members of Congress to convene and deliberate on drafting the Constitution.

(Personally, I don’t even know why the vulgarity of using the word “ass” was allowed by the editors of all the Pinoy Mass Media outfits.)

It’s not that Pinoy Mass Media wanted a Constitutional Convention. They wanted to confuse the people to make Constituent Assembly, which was the preferred and recommended “shortest path with lowest costs”, seem evil and ridiculous. By calling it “Con-ass”, it made people think – without even understanding why – that it was a means of fooling the people (“conning”) and using the term “ass” to really paint an extremely unflattering view of the initiative. But Pinoy Mass Media didn’t give a sound alternative either. They referred to the other mode, “Constitutional Convention” as “con-con”, again making it seem like this was something that “con artists” did — to con people.

Pinoy Mass Media is full of evil people who are out to stop much needed reforms from happening. They will call “Charter Change” as “cha-cha” to make it sound ridiculous. They will call “Constituent Assembly” as “con-ass” to make it sound like it’s a stinky con-game. And they will call “Constitutional Convention “con-con” to imply that the people will ultimately get conned by con-artists and con-men if this were to happen.

Remember, Pinoy Mass Media uses subliminal means of painting any reform initiative as “evil” or a “nuissance” or “annoyance” by doing the following:

1. Shortening terms used to refer to reform initiatives into abbreviated versions that seem ridiculous or stupid such as: “cha-cha” for Charter Change, “con-ass” for Constituent Assembly, or “con-con” for Constitutional Convention.

2. Using condescending vocal intonations when mentioning any of the reform initiatives, particularly when using the shortened forms they invented in order to discredit these movements.

3. Using condescending facial expressions when mentioning the same reform initiatives