Still, more than ever, scary June 28, 2006

IF I remember right, many Flipinos also waited for some kind of deux ex machina, a thunderbolt from heaven to strike Marcos to solve their problems then. And they were elated when the usurper-dictator was stricken with lupus. They waited for lupus to take its effect, but it never did. Not until much later anyway, when he was no longer in power. It wasn’t lupus that did Ferdinand Marcos in, it was the people. Which was as heaven had always said it would be. It was writ in its very gates: God helps those who help themselves.

It’s a good reminder for those who are currently waiting for a thunderbolt to strike Arroyo, or its equivalent in disease. At the very least, that is waiting for Godot, and Godot arrives only for those who do not wait. At the very most, because the thing that laid Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo low last week is not of the same order as lupus. It’s worse. As my friend, Billy Esposo, told me in a text message last weekend, St. Luke’s Hospital withheld the real diagnosis of Arroyo’s affliction. Written in the most scientific terms in medical scrawl, it said: “Patient is full of ‘s--t.’”

The comparisons with Marcos made me recall a couple of columns I wrote shortly before the last elections warning of where Arroyo was going. The first column was called “Scary,” which came out on Feb. 23, 2004, and the second was called “More than ever, scary,” which came out exactly a month later.

In the first column, I said Arroyo looked dead set to do another Marcos. “This is the part that scares the hell out of me. Arroyo has acted with this degree of unscrupulousness without a popular mandate… What would happen if by chance and more frenzied application of lying, cheating and stealing, she should get a second crack at power?” I said that if that happened, Arroyo, like Marcos, would never relinquish power but would do everything in her power to keep it.

This sparked an angry reaction from a reader who said surely I knew in my heart it wasn’t true, Arroyo was no Marcos. I replied in the second column that I didn’t just believe this to be true, “I feel it to the marrow of my bones… If I had any doubts then, I do not have them now… Hers is a dogged pursuit of power the likes of which we have not seen since Marcos. She has already pawned the present. She’ll soon pawn the future -- if she hasn’t already.”

From hindsight, I was slightly off the mark only in two respects. One was in saying if she won a second term by a more frenzied application of lying, cheating and stealing. She never did. I never imagined she would actually call Election Commissioner Virgilio Garcillano to rig the results. That is a scale of ruthlessness comparable to Marcos waiting in the bushes with a sniper’s rifle for his father’s enemy, Julio Nalundasan, to brush his teeth. Except that in this case, the victim is democracy, shot through its very heart.

The second was in saying Arroyo’s is a dogged pursuit of power that has not been seen since Marcos. In fact, it hasn’t been seen at any time in this country, the Marcos era included. Marcos at least was restrained by his lawyer’s mind to found his atrocities on legal plausibility. Arroyo is not restricted by anything.

To this day, I do not know how it was possible for many of us to not have read this monumental danger that stared us in the face in 2004. The signs were everywhere, lit in neon. To this day, I do not know why many of those who now desperately seek to rid this country of her thought to prop her up to begin with. The only reason I can think of is that most of us completely underestimated what she was capable of. Our judgment was based on “natural expectation,” on a belief that “she would not dare” go past universally accepted limits.

It was the same thing during Marcos’ time. Marcos caught the country flat-footed when he declared martial law because, despite all the signs being there, most Filipinos, including the opposition, thought he “would never dare” do it. It just wasn’t done. Well, true enough it wasn’t done -- by normal people for whom normal expectations applied. But what if you were dealing with someone who was ruthless enough to do the unthinkable? The country found out too late Marcos was one.
We’re finding out too late Arroyo is one.

The normal expectation when Arroyo came to power was that she would be beholden to the people who put her there, especially as she had done little to earn it. A few months later, courtesy of 9/11, she dared tell the citizens they were either with her or against her. The normal expectation when Arroyo said she would not run again because of public disgust over her rule was that she wouldn’t. Less than a year later, she dared run again, she dared bankrupt the treasury to campaign, and she dared steal the vote to win. She even dared say later God put her in Malacañang, as though God would be so mysterious as to try to sound like Garcillano.

The normal expectation when the “Hello, Garci” tape surfaced and when Cory and some of her own people abandoned her was that she would resign. Instead she dared call the crime “a lapse in judgment” and clung to her position. The normal expectation when her approval plunged to unprecedented lows, the surveys saying 65 percent of the population wanted her ousted, was for her to go on the defensive. Instead she dared issue Executive Order 464, the “calibrated preemptive response police” and Presidential Proclamation 1017, which plunged the country into de facto dictatorship. The normal expectation when the killings of journalists and activists had reached slaughterhouse proportions and were being decried here and abroad was that she would rein in her murderous legions if only to score minor points. Instead, she has dared unleash a war that would not only sanction it but pile up the body count.

During Marcos’ time, this was a country of one asshole and 65 million cowards. The only thing that’s changed today is that we’ve become 88 million cowards.

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