Enter the witch doctors
This is not intended to be at Malaysia's expense. But at least in the search for the missing Malaysian Airlines jet, the Philippines can take comfort in the fact that it does not have the franchise on failure and humiliation.
The Philippines may have bungled in so many things and reduced itself to global disappointment on so many occasions. But at the very least it has not reached that point of humiliation and defeat that it would publicly resort to something like superstition to address a matter that is best left to expert science.
And that is something that Malaysia precisely did. After days of abject failure to locate the missing aircraft, a failure clearly brought on by inability and mishandling, Malaysia was forced to call in a witch doctor to help locate the missing aircraft.
It would have been so funny if Malaysia had not been so damn serious. And indeed Malaysia never batted an eye as it paraded a shaman who performed a ritual with coconuts, a wicker basket, a cane, a fish hook and a pair of bamboo binoculars to help locate the plane.
The resort to magic may be intended to cover all bases, but it sure takes a lot away from Malaysia's standing in the global community, a standing brought by hard work, discipline and good management, both in government and in the private sector.
With a number of countries throwing in dozens of air, sea, space and land assets into the search, it does sort of seem discomfiting that Malaysia would jerk around and bring forth a shaman, which is to say it has failed and is acknowledging it.
What this means to the Philippines is that at least our bungling of the Luneta bus hostage crisis no longer stands out as a global embarrassment, what with those scenes of hapless policemen pathetically trying to smash their way into the bus getting played endless on tv then and in memory now.
Malaysia has taken over the front seat. What gets played out now, on tv and on the Internet, is a clip of that Malaysian doctor, mumbling incoherently as he bangs two green coconuts together while aides pretend to row a boat furiously --- all in the hope of summoning the favor of the spirits in finding the plane.
Had Malaysia made known its readiness to fall into the rituals of the spirit world in addressing a 21st Century tragedy, maybe the Philippines could have offered a more appropriate form of assistance by flying in our own witch doctors instead of sending ill-equipped search planes and boats.