“I love these kids; that’s why I am here. We have a field trip. I invited the children for a field trip.”

In the Philippines, a Tondo day care center owner hijacked a bus of his own students and teachers and held them hostage near Manila’s City Hall, to demand better treatment for Filipino children.

A moment now to let the irony sink in.

Amee is collecting, linking and quoting news updates on the hostage crisis, and the more I read, the more tragicomedic the whole situation sounds.

Giving the crazy man a portable radio so he can tell the credulous general public to light candles for the country, getting action-star senator Bong Revilla on to the bus to negotiate and pledge to support the hostage-taker’s cause, Ducat himself railing against untrustworthy politicians and corrupt dynasties while he himself is running for a councilor seat and simultaneously praising President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for fighting corruption; plus the mere fact that Ducat had previously held priests hostage with grenades for unpaid dues so that Alfredo Lim had had to negotiate with him, and that he was subsequently freed because the grenades were fake, then that he was allowed to run a daycare center — it’s all the standard circus of dangerously wild-eyed (yet sloppily ham-fisted) posturing amid incompetence.

Remember Panfilo Villaruel and his violent seizing of the NAIA control tower in the name of fighting corruption? I wonder if anyone plans to lionize Ducat for daring and chutzpah in the name of better education and housing for children, rather than see him for what he is — a raving kidnapper and hostage-taker?

At the time of this writing, the situation has ended, and Ducat has freed his hostages. I’m very interested in knowing if anyone actually did rush to light candles for him at 7:00 PM.