Saipan's economic parachute

Some concepts don’t mesh with the term “homemade.” Dentistry would be one candidate. And, seemingly, parachuting would be another.

And yet we’ve been faced with one of the more bizarre news stories in recent memory, when a would-be hijacker in the Philippines decided to pull an airborne train robbery, and after snaring the loot, jumped out of an airliner from a reported 6,000 foot altitude. This, of course, is where the “homemade” parachute angle comes in, and, well, the results were predictable.

A lot of my pals are guffawing at the story, and it really is too appealing to ignore.
Americans are suckers for a good desperado story, and if the train robberies of yesteryear are being replaced by airborne shake downs, there’s an air of tradition about it. In the states, D.B. Cooper remains legendary; he’s the guy who snared money and parachuted from a Boeing 727 and who may be, for all we know, living the good life with his loot somewhere. Even a ruthless felon seems to get some grudging respect if such daring do is employed.

By contrast, Reginald Chua (a/k/a Augusto Lakandula, there seems to be some inconsistency about the name), the gent with the homemade parachute, will go down in history as one of the biggest, king-hell dingbats of all time. There’s something in that for the terminally hapless. The world is full of dingbats, most of whom are just human static and who are born, live, and die anonymously. The only thing that keeps them going, I suppose, is the allure of glory in the afterlife, a package deal in which meaningless mortality is followed by meaningful immortality. Heaven isn’t such a grand concept, though, if you’d have to endure all of eternity living cheek to jowl with those who insisted on talking about it the most during their terrestrial stays. I’d rather have eternal tickets to a Spice Girls concert so I could finally find the spiritual fulfillment that I so richly deserve.

And for his part, Mr. Chua seems to have found his own version of immortality. His story–a legend in the making, no doubt–will certainly endure. If someone would sponsor the project, I’d go to the Philippines and craft a biography of this guy. Anyone who jumps out of an airliner with a homemade parachute has a story that needs telling, and I suspect a good many people (folks as warped as my cadre of pals) would gladly plunk down $14.95 to buy the tale from Bestseller books.

We can’t characterize it as a tragedy, since anyone who brandishes a weapon on an airliner is a would-be murderer, and should be slowly roasted in Hell, or perhaps even Gary, Indiana, for such a twisted and cowardly misdeed.

Still, I sense a pang of sympathy for him coming from some people. A six-thousand foot free fall would, to borrow a technical term from the field of advanced aerodynamics, royally bite.

Saipan’s two year economic free fall isn’t much fun either, but, like Mr. Chua’s case, there is a compelling, comic angle about such terminal haplessness. He had his home made parachute, we’ve got our home spun economic ideas. Unlike Chua’s case, ours is a tale that I will compile and tell, and, for many of the same reasons that his tale is compelling, ours will prove to be popular as well. Some stories just beg to be told.