The living and the dead August 9, 2006
LAST weekend was the first death anniversary of my good friend Raul Roco. I remember that he died a month after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo apologized for her "lapse of judgment" in helloing Garci. By that time, Raul was already far too ravaged by disease to heed the cares of this world. But in light of everything that has happened since then, I kind of feel a greater sense of loss over his passing today than last year.
At the very least that is so because Raul's case bears directly on the issue of legitimacy. Every time I hear government officials say let's forget Arroyo's illegitimacy, let's just concentrate on her performance (the last time, of course, was during the State of the Nation Address, when every Arroyo minion sounded that call), I remember him.
As competence goes, as efficiency goes, as performance goes, few came better than Raul. Arroyo was, and is, not one of them. How did they fare before the 2004 elections?
Well, Arroyo ruled so badly -- her tenure was characterized by wheeling-and-dealing and corruption (to the bitterness of the Edsa People Power II forces that put her in power) -- she had to lie about her political intentions for after a couple of years, vowing before the grave of Jose Rizal she would not run for election in 2004. At the same time, Raul was doing a sterling job at the Department of Education. A year after he took over as education secretary, he had turned the department from one of the worst offices in this country, home to textbook scams and other atrocities, to one of the best, restoring to education the lofty name befitting it. Recognition of that accomplishment did not come from hangers-on and paid hacks, it came from the World Bank and other international bodies.
If being competent, honest and efficient were a natural claim to being president, Raul Roco would have been our president after 2004. Alas, there is one other thing that's needed to become so, and that is to be voted into power. Before competence comes legitimacy. Roco was not elected president. Neither was Arroyo.
To those who say that better that we have Arroyo because if we had Roco or Fernando Poe Jr. as president, we would have been politically orphaned before the spit could dry on their mouths after their inauguration speeches, I say this: Better a few months of purgatory or heaven than 10 years of hell. Or indeed who says the hell would end after 10 years?
At the very most, I feel Raul's death more keenly today because he answers the question of whether entertainers are better than "trapo" [traditional politicians] or "trapo" are better than entertainers. The answer is neither. Raul was living proof our choice of political leaders need not be confined to them.
He was not an entertainer-turned-politician, he was a lawyer-turned-politician. But he respected entertainers, or indeed artists. He had as much respect for art and artists as for law and lawyers and politics and politicians. He had no respect for the hacks in all ofthem.
And though he rose through politics by the traditional route, he never became a traditional politician, in all the malignant senses of that term, in the sense of being perfectly willing to sell one's mother to get ahead in life. I look at the current traditional politicians in Congress, notably the ones who jumped up and down like chimpanzees in the last State of the Nation Address, or its equivalent in sycophantic histrionics, and Ithink truly that lot wouldn't mind selling their mothers to get by. Never mind spouses and "kabit" [mistresses], they'd give them away free.
I know Raul would never have called "a Comelec [Commission on Elections] official" in the middle of the counting of votes even for the most innocent of reasons. He was a stickler for doing things the right way, the legal way, the moral way, which pissed off a lot of people in the process. Many called him righteous, a word meant to disparage but which has taken on new and louder moral resonance over time. I remember again his meeting with a political party before the elections and how he turned off its members when he lectured them about putting the country above self after they asked what was in it for them. He wasn't a realist in that sense, but in a country where realism has become just another word for opportunism, I don't know that he didn't do well to choose that path. He lost the presidency but gained his soul. What a profit.
He was by no means a saint. The rumors about his "personality flaws" were not all untrue. He could be irascible, impatient, impetuous. We had our own run-ins, particularly over media. He kept demanding that media be this and that, and I kept telling him that was just not how the thing worked, it paid better to woo them than to try to bludgeon them to submission. But looking back, it was a pleasure to have worked with someone who hewed to such high, if often unreasonable, political standards and asked the same thing from everyone around him. Especially in light of his fellow Bicolanos [Bicol region natives] currently pushing and shoving for the pleasure of serving a usurper. Winning and losing are curious words. Some people who lose really win, some people who win really lose.
In these days when the voters are being told to choose merely between "trapo" and entertainers, indeed where the public is being cajoled to prop up the traditional politicians who did not win the elections rather than the entertainers who did, and still indeed where the people are being told to prefer the vicious dictatorship of the traditional politicians to the profligate frivolities of entertainers, it is good to be reminded that we do not lack for other options. There are leaders out there, actual or potential, who are neither the one nor the other. There are leaders out there who are, or can, be plain good public servants. Raul Roco was one of them.
The tragedy of this country is not that seldom has it had choices. It is that seldom has it had the eyes to see them.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=14205
At the very least that is so because Raul's case bears directly on the issue of legitimacy. Every time I hear government officials say let's forget Arroyo's illegitimacy, let's just concentrate on her performance (the last time, of course, was during the State of the Nation Address, when every Arroyo minion sounded that call), I remember him.
As competence goes, as efficiency goes, as performance goes, few came better than Raul. Arroyo was, and is, not one of them. How did they fare before the 2004 elections?
Well, Arroyo ruled so badly -- her tenure was characterized by wheeling-and-dealing and corruption (to the bitterness of the Edsa People Power II forces that put her in power) -- she had to lie about her political intentions for after a couple of years, vowing before the grave of Jose Rizal she would not run for election in 2004. At the same time, Raul was doing a sterling job at the Department of Education. A year after he took over as education secretary, he had turned the department from one of the worst offices in this country, home to textbook scams and other atrocities, to one of the best, restoring to education the lofty name befitting it. Recognition of that accomplishment did not come from hangers-on and paid hacks, it came from the World Bank and other international bodies.
If being competent, honest and efficient were a natural claim to being president, Raul Roco would have been our president after 2004. Alas, there is one other thing that's needed to become so, and that is to be voted into power. Before competence comes legitimacy. Roco was not elected president. Neither was Arroyo.
To those who say that better that we have Arroyo because if we had Roco or Fernando Poe Jr. as president, we would have been politically orphaned before the spit could dry on their mouths after their inauguration speeches, I say this: Better a few months of purgatory or heaven than 10 years of hell. Or indeed who says the hell would end after 10 years?
At the very most, I feel Raul's death more keenly today because he answers the question of whether entertainers are better than "trapo" [traditional politicians] or "trapo" are better than entertainers. The answer is neither. Raul was living proof our choice of political leaders need not be confined to them.
He was not an entertainer-turned-politician, he was a lawyer-turned-politician. But he respected entertainers, or indeed artists. He had as much respect for art and artists as for law and lawyers and politics and politicians. He had no respect for the hacks in all ofthem.
And though he rose through politics by the traditional route, he never became a traditional politician, in all the malignant senses of that term, in the sense of being perfectly willing to sell one's mother to get ahead in life. I look at the current traditional politicians in Congress, notably the ones who jumped up and down like chimpanzees in the last State of the Nation Address, or its equivalent in sycophantic histrionics, and Ithink truly that lot wouldn't mind selling their mothers to get by. Never mind spouses and "kabit" [mistresses], they'd give them away free.
I know Raul would never have called "a Comelec [Commission on Elections] official" in the middle of the counting of votes even for the most innocent of reasons. He was a stickler for doing things the right way, the legal way, the moral way, which pissed off a lot of people in the process. Many called him righteous, a word meant to disparage but which has taken on new and louder moral resonance over time. I remember again his meeting with a political party before the elections and how he turned off its members when he lectured them about putting the country above self after they asked what was in it for them. He wasn't a realist in that sense, but in a country where realism has become just another word for opportunism, I don't know that he didn't do well to choose that path. He lost the presidency but gained his soul. What a profit.
He was by no means a saint. The rumors about his "personality flaws" were not all untrue. He could be irascible, impatient, impetuous. We had our own run-ins, particularly over media. He kept demanding that media be this and that, and I kept telling him that was just not how the thing worked, it paid better to woo them than to try to bludgeon them to submission. But looking back, it was a pleasure to have worked with someone who hewed to such high, if often unreasonable, political standards and asked the same thing from everyone around him. Especially in light of his fellow Bicolanos [Bicol region natives] currently pushing and shoving for the pleasure of serving a usurper. Winning and losing are curious words. Some people who lose really win, some people who win really lose.
In these days when the voters are being told to choose merely between "trapo" and entertainers, indeed where the public is being cajoled to prop up the traditional politicians who did not win the elections rather than the entertainers who did, and still indeed where the people are being told to prefer the vicious dictatorship of the traditional politicians to the profligate frivolities of entertainers, it is good to be reminded that we do not lack for other options. There are leaders out there, actual or potential, who are neither the one nor the other. There are leaders out there who are, or can, be plain good public servants. Raul Roco was one of them.
The tragedy of this country is not that seldom has it had choices. It is that seldom has it had the eyes to see them.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=14205
posted by dqfan06 @ 8:38 AM
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