Robert Blair Carabuena’s 27 seconds of infamy

The Carabuena incident recalls the 2006 Hong Kong Bus Uncle episode.

SAN FRANCISCO—Robert Blair Carabuena, now Manila’s poster boy for road bullying after he was caught on video slapping around a defenseless traffic enforcer, has yet to explain his side of this story.

He should.  Soon.

For the enraging episode captured in the 27-second clip taken by a Channel 5 news team paints a pretty disgusting portrait: one of a Volvo-driving, up-and-coming corporate exec who apparently thinks he can get away with a lot – including assaulting a humble public servant in broad daylight.

What could he have been thinking in those fateful 27 seconds? ‘How dare this MMDA guy stop me and touch my car! Doesn’t he know who I am?’

The video makes one’s blood boil. The focus has naturally been on the class arrogance vividly on display as traffic enforcer Saturnino Fabros found himself being publicly humiliated for doing his job by an affluent and arrogant professional.

The video also again highlights the power of social media. A major TV network took the video. But instead of ending up as just another clip aired on the evening news and then forgotten, it went viral, promptly provoking strong emotions worldwide.

Viral videos aren’t new. In fact, they’re pretty much part of our lives now.

They have, at times, served to inspire, like the clip of the unnamed woman who went out of her way to help a girl in the middle of a rainstorm.

But increasingly, viral videos have also brought to light not-so-uplifting scenes and emotions. They’ve captured tension and conflict, recording troubling and even ugly encounters which are then disseminated quickly to global audience.

Screengrab from YouTube.com

The Carabuena bullying episode captured class conflict and just overall bad motorist behavior in Manila. A few years ago, a video of a fist fight on a San Francisco bus underscored racial animosities in the city. In general, these videos have captured and reflected tensions in a modern megalopolis.

That’s what happened in Hong Kong six years ago in another famous viral video episode featuring a man now known as the Hong Kong Bus Uncle.

In April 2006, a young man on the upper deck of a double-decker bus in Hong Kong tapped the shoulder of another passenger, a middle aged man talking on his cell phone call.

The young asked the man to keep his voice down which made the older guy snap. He turned around and began berating the younger guy. Another passenger discretely began filming the encounter with a cell phone.

Unlike the brief clip of the Carabuena encounter, the Hong Kong Bus Uncle video is six minutes long. It showed the older guy relentlessly castigating the young man who was clearly stunned by the verbal assault.

The middle aged guy’s tirade later became famous: “You have pressure! I have pressure!”

The video quickly went viral, and was covered by major U.S. media outfits, including CNN and the Washington Post.

In what could a lesson for both Carabuena and Saturnino Fabros, the clip also made the two bus passengers famous. The Bus Uncle, Roger Chan, even ran for public office, taking advantage of his unexpected notoriety.

Beyond becoming another quirky example of the new world of social media and viral videos, the Hong Kong Bus Uncle incident also was seen as a symptom of a bigger problem: the pressures of living in a big modern city like Hong Kong.

“Bus Uncle speaks an unassailable truth: ‘I face pressure! You face pressure!’” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote in a June 2006 op-ed.

“We all face pressures at work and at home. We all have deadlines to meet and bills to pay. We handle our pressures because that’s what being an adult is largely about, managing pressures so they don’t end up managing us. But we all have those days, don’t we, when it feels like a losing battle.”

“I am Bus Uncle, potentially, and so are you,” he also wrote. “Each of us has a tiny, raging Bus Uncle buried deep within, just waiting to burst free. One tap on the shoulder is all it takes.”

Well, for Robert Blair Carabuena, one tap of the car and a civil servant doing his job were all it took for him to give in to the pressure and lose it.

But then again, Saturnino Fabros and other hard-working, underpaid Filipino civil servants, who typically find themselves being subjected to abuse on the job, have had to deal with much greater pressure – including having to deal with arrogant citizens who can’t deal with the pressure and think they can get away with pretty much anything.

 On Twitter @KuwentoPimentel. On Facebook at www.facebook.com/benjamin.pimentel