Dial M for Mayhem Abduction,melodrama and murder: Just another week in "Arroyo's greater Manila". Arrive at the Hyatt Regency in Manila and find a sign saying,"Absolutely no firearms permitted in the hotel lobby."Cast your mind back to central America 15 years ago.Smell of desperation, smell of fear,smell of desperate basket case.The start of a sobering week in depressionville. It begins with the announcement in mondays papers that the communist new peoples armies killed 18 govt soldiers in an ambush.Next day,Nur misuari,the former Moro National Liberation Front leader,has abandoned his commitment to a 1996 peace treaty and launched a military attack in Mindanao in which 100 die. These appalling headlines certainly make Manila an edgy place for the most heavily comped scribbler. Its the madness and the melodrama inside city limits that tip the most phlegmatic over the edge. The combination,spanish machismo and American gun culture gives new meanings to "scary","wild", and "violent."Day 3 in Metro sees a senior official of Comelec the govt body that runs elections, gunned down in her car in the middle of the downtown business district.Straightaway,and with no worries about libel,rules of evidence or the presumption of innocence,the press IDs another Comlec official with whom she was having a dispute as prime suspect. The city was already hypnotised and agog with the court spectacle in the murder case of the screen goddess,Nida Blanca.An alleged professional hitman confessed he had been hired to kill Blanca by her husband.This took the form of a screaming,crying and fainting performance that was then retracted,exonerating the husband,and going on to accuse the police of torture. When the violencia is not so much melodramatic as just plain crazy-like the man who was killed for an appalling Karaoke performance.The cities karaoke bars had been removing "My Way"from the playlists as it provoked so many disputes. Manila has been dubbed the kidnap capital of Asia.Trad targets are the children of chinese businesspeople.The families normally pay a lot of money and dont expect much help from the police.The trend is now beyond the chinese,this reflects hard economic times and a general breakdown of law and order.Much kidnappings now widely believed involve serving or former members of the military and police.Now even mestizo Filipinos of moderate wealth take armed bodygaurds on their morning constitutionals in their walled and gated suburbs. The subject is fascinating in that some kidnappers now sub-contract,snatching someone to resell to a bigger outfit in order to mark up the ransom several orders of magnitude and muddy the trail. While the philippines suffered the greatest thief in known human hirstory with ferdinand Marcos, it recovered slowly up till fresh disaster struck in the form of hurricane Erap.The full catastrophe once more until he was finally thrown out.The only irony of this plundering hack actors demise is the realisation that the only thing he did moderately well was keep a lid on the Manila pressure cooker.Conspiracy theorists,of which there are a superabundance,say Eraps 'tough guy',police chief,"Ping"Lascon,swapped bribes with the organized crimelords to accomplish just that. Expanded graft opportunities arose for both in other parts of the economy.Its hard to convey just how obssed Manila is with rumour.Everyone's constantly fiddling with their cellphones. They send more and receive more text messages than anywhere else in the world.Mobs are rioting, attacks on foreign enclaves are imminent,the next coups just begun,Ping will be dictator,any thing and everything fuels the e-mail rumour mills.The 'end of hirstory'is not a concept expected to gain much traction in this city that seems to be being imagined by a cyberpunk novelist.