Threshold December 20, 2006

JOSE ABUEVA, former president of the University of the Philippines and chair of the Constitutional Commission that was pushing for a new charter, has an interesting theory about why Cha-cha failed. It failed, he said, because GMA was unpopular. "Many people would rather focus on personalities. The President has 60 percent unpopularity and she is the symbol of Charter change."

I buy the part about GMA's unpopularity, but I beg to disagree with my friend about this being a reflection of people thinking personality rather than substance. Most Filipinos rejected Cha-cha not because of personality but because of substance. That substance is credibility. It was the lack of credibility of the people espousing Cha-cha and not simply GMA's lack of popularity that doomed it.

Credibility is substance, not form. Who is standing for something matters as much as, if not more than, what he is standing for. It mattered that Ferdinand Marcos wanted a combined presidential and parliamentary form of government that would have him as president and prime minister at the same time. It matters that GMA and Jose de Venecia want a parliamentary system that will either allow GMA to rule forever or De Venecia to finally achieve his dream of occupying Malacañang, a thing he will never get from presidential elections, whichever comes first or at all.

The principle is simple: The devil himself may quote Scripture to suit his purposes. You hear the devil doing that, forget Scripture and start running like hell. Or bringing out your crosses.

I have another theory about why Cha-cha failed, and that is that it finally crossed the Filipinos' threshold of forbearance. That was what drove them to bring out their crosses when they heard the devil quoting Scripture. Indeed, that was what drove the bishops quite literally to the streets, if not in clamorous arms at least in fretful prayer.

I am not being facetious at all when I thank the tongressmen for restoring this nation's capacity for outrage. Almost single-handedly, they did what the opposition, the Church, civil society, business, media and the irate housewives had not been able to do for a long time. Almost overnight, they rallied and united the people--against them.

Ironically, the tongressmen fell into the very trap they had been avoiding studiously. That was giving the public images of intolerable abuse and oppression, which had happened to Joseph Estrada during the impeachment trial. That impeachment trial had turned Erap from hero into heel. That was the reason the tongressmen killed the impeachment bids against GMA: She would never have survived them, and they along with her. The images that would flash on TV in particular would be more than the public could bear. They would have tumbled out like a great flood to cleanse the nation of its dregs.

Yet the tongressmen offered the same fare in their "deliberations" on Cha-cha, the word "deliberations" being in quotation marks because the only thing to suggest it was their deliberate effort to screw the public. More than the killing of the impeachment bids against GMA, the tongressmen's railroading of the Cha-cha against reason, against opposition, and against every shred of decency, unfurled a spectacle of a gangster clique drunk with power. So totally wasted, so totally lost in the embrace of ambition, they could not see or hear or smell or taste or feel the anger swirling around them.

I remember that a friend of mine objected violently to the Inquirer's use of the word "hubris" in an editorial. As far as he can recall his classical education, he said, "hubris" pertained only to tragic heroes. It took heroic stature to fall into hubris, which was overweening pride that went with overachieving. There was nothing heroic or tragic or lofty in what the tongressmen did, he said. They were just a bunch of goons trying to mug the nation. He had a point.

Which brings me to what the Filipino threshold is, to what finally snaps his monumental capacity for forbearance once it is crossed. There is one. It was captured perfectly many years ago in that phrase, "Tama na, sobra na, palitan na." We have a tremendous capacity for patience, as Jose Rizal noted during his time--which is not unlike ours in that it seemed that the oppressed would be content to be oppressed forever. But even that breaks under an intolerable weight. For Rizal, that intolerable weight is insult added to injury.

I confess that when I read this in my youth, I, like many activists, took it with a large grain of salt, if not dismissed it as a lot of romantic tosh. But if there is any large grain there, it is that of truth. The Spaniards, said Rizal, thought they were delivering the coup de grace to the abject indio when they abused him in mind apart from belly, in soul apart from body, reducing him to nothingness, an insignificant object of nature that could be ignored, or obliterated at will if it came to that. The final blow in fact became the cure, like potent medicine injected to the dying. It revived the indio.

GMA and the tongressmen thought too that they were delivering the final blow to an abject race, one that had learned to take abuse with the hope of escaping it only by leaving for Saudi Arabia or embracing it like a penitent murmuring, "Life goes on." That was by adding injustice to poverty, iniquity to oppression. They thought they would stamp out all protest altogether by reducing the citizenry to powerlessness, one whose objections could be ignored, if not overruled, one whose voice could be drowned in the howling of the winds or the cacophony of voices in the Batasan, whichever was louder. The final blow became the cure, like potent medicine administered to the dying. It woke up the nation with a jolt. We began saying again:

Tama na, sobra na, palitan na.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=39321