A Valentine’s like no other
I have a feeling that love and romance are going to be different this coming Valentine’s Day, as we watch the invasion of new mutants of love.
No less than two AFPs—the Australian Federal Police and our own Armed Forces of the Philippines—have issued warnings about love scams, mostly Australian male victims of Philippine offshore gaming operators (Philippine only in geographical location but owned and operated by mainland Chinese), illegal as of Dec. 31, 2024, but apparently still zombie alive and well. The predators are not necessarily women in this age of artificial intelligence, creating new possibilities for love and budol (scams), which I just featured in a recent column.
Check yesterday’s (Monday) Inquirer for excellent tips from AFP commander of cybercrime operations Graeme Marshall on how to fight love scams.
Meanwhile, I worry about another love threat of international proportions.
For almost three weeks now, we’ve seen an unfolding romance that’s affecting millions of people right now mainly in the United States, but with more and more victims throughout the world, as the world’s media headlines describe this threat with adjectives ranging from “tumultuous” to “appalling.”
Wait, wait, appalling romance? Yup, it’s the stuff of tabloids, a tinge of scandal here and there, even shock and awe. But let’s hear it from one of the protagonists himself:
“I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man,” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, posted on the social media platform X, which he owns (together with Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink the satellite communications company, among others). The world’s richest man was explaining how he feels about the US president, currently the world’s most powerful politician.
We’re talking here about a bromance, a relatively recently coined English word derived from bro as in brother, cleverly fused to romance. The term was said to have been coined by an American writer, David Carnie, to describe male skateboarders who spend a lot of time together.
The term caught on quickly and seems to have resonated with Filipinos, especially among wives and girlfriends grieving for their men who, for all their macho strutting and pare-pare gruntings, seem to derive more joy spending all their time with their bro.
This bromance thing is a love that dares speak its name, nurtured in all kinds of places, from cockpits to the hallowed halls of the academe, from military barracks to the less hallowed halls of Congress.
“It’s work,” these bros declare and indeed it is; I’m old enough to have seen all too many life-changing decisions made by men in bromances, enthralled and mesmerized with each other in corporations and institutions, and by all-male drinking, powered by alcohol.
How did this Trump-Musk unfold?
It helps that Musk was the largest donor to Trump’s campaign coffers in 2024, pitching in some $277 million. That’s a lot of money. But surely it wasn’t just money. Maybe. Trump didn’t reward Musk by appointing him ambassador or some ceremonial but pompous position. Instead, Trump created a new agency, bypassing Congress: the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, not because they were dog lovers. DOGE, not coincidentally, is the name of a cryptocurrency.
Musk moves into improvised offices with a bunch of young zealots (the youngest is 19), the moving in being literal because the boys are supposed to look for evidence of government inefficiency and, absent none, to create the evidence. Federal employees have been suspended, fired, or ordered to resign from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), responsible for US humanitarian aid, the first to be eviscerated (such an animal word, used to describe removing the intestines of animals in a slaughterhouse). The carnage is global because USAID is everywhere, including the Philippines.
Federal workers, numbering some 2.4 million, are now all vulnerable, many fired or asked to resign. It’s a purge, pure and simple, including officials who dared to fight Trump, including those who prosecuted the violent mob leaders of Jan. 6, 2021, who responded to Trump’s claims the 2020 elections were stolen from him. Those prosecuted and convicted have since been pardoned by Trump.
So much power among bros, with almost no control over the love that’s in the air. But, from past Valentine’s, we know we need more than the heat of romance to keep love going, especially political bromances with all its feelings tainted by ambition and lust, not sexual lust, but the lust for power. Time magazine already produced a cover showing Musk behind a desk, presumably in the White House.
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mtan@inquirer.com.ph
