Irony July 12, 2006

THE FUNNY THING IS THAT ARCHBISHOP Angel Lagdameo, head of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, prefaced his organization's stand by saying, "We wish to make the CBCP position clear and unambiguous on the present impeachment plans." The last thing the wording of that position is is clear and unambiguous. It is in fact so cloudy and ambiguous it has given rise to all sorts of misinterpretations.

Malacañang, in the form of Ignacio Bunye, immediately spun Lagdameo's statement by saying: "On the matter of impeachment, we concur with the bishops that impeachment is not the current way toward change and resolution in our current political concerns."

The announcers of ANC also said something along those lines immediately after Lagdameo read the CBCP position: "The CBCP," said one, "does not support impeachment as a way of establishing truth."

I myself got a lot of calls and text messages from dumbfounded friends wondering how the CBCP, given that its leadership has been wrested by progressive minds from reactionary ones, settled for this. I myself suspect the wording of the position, if not the position itself, is the product of much compromise, reflecting the continuing divisions within that body. And I myself believe the revelations of Archbishop Oscar Cruz that Malacañang tried to buy off the bishops and think they succeeded (in)famously with some of them.

But what is the CBCP really saying, or suggesting, in this confused and confusing way? The two paragraphs relating to impeachment go:

"We are undoubtedly for the search for truth. Therefore ... we respect the position of individuals or groups that wish to continue using the impeachment to arrive at the truth.

"But as Bishops, reflecting and acting together as a body in plenary assembly, in the light of previous circumstances, we are not inclined at the present moment to favor the impeachment process as a means for establishing the truth. For unless the process and its rules as well as the mind-sets of all the participating parties, pro and con, are guided by no other motive than genuine concern for the common good, impeachment will once again serve as an unproductive political exercise, dismaying every citizen, and deepening the citizen's negative perception of politicians."

Well, the CBCP's reaffirmation of its commitment to the quest for the truth--which can't mean anything else in the context of impeachment than the truth about the 2004 elections--indicates at least that the issue about Arroyo's legitimacy has not been settled in the bishops' minds. The CBCP continues to support every effort to ferret out that truth, not least by citizens' initiatives, such as those taken by Bishop Deogracias Iñiguez et al. to impeach Arroyo.

The operative phrase in the second paragraph is "in the light of previous circumstances." What the CBCP rejects is not impeachment per se but the kind of travesty we have been treated to in the past and we are bound to be treated to in the future. That is Congress overseeing impeachment with the expected results. That process won't establish the truth. That process can only be an unproductive political exercise, which will deepen the public's already deep distrust of politicians.

Lagdameo himself made that clear afterward: "The CBCP will not support an impeachment process if it will be done in the same way as it was done before." In short, what the CBCP is indicting is not impeachment, it is Congress, albeit, for quite understandable reasons, in a veiled way.

Having said this, however, the CBCP may not altogether be exculpated from dereliction of duty. At the very least, at a time when a confused flock is looking to it for guidance, the least it can do is not confuse it some more. A clearer and more emphatic reaffirmation of the importance of morality in public life was due them. If not indeed a clear and more emphatic statement about the need to resolve the legitimacy of government.

But more than that, as friends of mine have argued, couldn't the bishops have helped to guide the mind-sets of the participating parties toward a genuine concern for the common good, or at least a fear of God or the faithful in next elections, precisely by supporting an impeachment bid in Congress? Couldn't the collective voice of the bishops have been brought to bear on the congressmen to rethink their allegiance to Mammon rather than to God by suggesting that God will not look kindly on those who help themselves to the ballot boxes? The bishops' support for impeachment might not guarantee a change of heart among congressmen, not least because many of them have no hearts to change, but life offers no guarantees, only struggle.

And still more than this, if the CBCP is not supporting the kind of impeachment process we have to establish the truth, what efforts is it supporting by way of accomplishing that? Of course, answering that question invites questions about the separation of Church and State, but if you're going to talk about matters of faith and morals in public life anyway, why not hang for a sheep as for a lamb? It cannot be unknown to the bishops that the one burning issue in the minds of the faithful is: What do we do about someone who stole the vote? The way the CBCP has answered it opens itself up to charges that it's basically saying, "Bahala na kayo diyan. We ourselves can't do a thing about it." Or worse, "Pasensya na, we just want to play safe."

That is the richest irony of all. The bishops worry that by going through another unproductive political exercise we will only encourage the public to distrust politicians some more? They should worry that by taking the wishy-washy position that they have, they will only encourage the (un)faithful to distrust the clergy some more.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=9333

Original sin July 11, 2006

Jamby Madrigal, of course, is perfectly capable of defending herself from the irascibly silly Raul Gonzalez who means to pin her down on charges of treason. But frankly, I don't know why she shouldn't just say: "What crime have I committed? It's not as though I called up a Comelec commissioner during the counting of votes and excused that as a lapse in judgment."

Indeed, I don't know why that shouldn't be the standard answer of everyone the Newspeak Department of Justice and Newspeak justice secretary means to hale to court on any charge, trumped-up or not.

I don't know why Bishop Deogracias Iñiguez shouldn't say: "What crime have I committed in filing an impeachment rap against Arroyo? It's not as if I called up Garci, demanding that he make me win by a million votes, and called it a lapse in judgment."

I don't know why the Batasan 5 shouldn't say: "What crime have we committed in showing solidarity with the soldiers who wanted to withdraw support from Arroyo? It's not as if we called up a Comelec commissioner known for telling the world he learned the tricks of his trade from Leonardo Perez, Marcos' Comelec chief who did not know how to count, wanting to know how he was making 'pagpapataas sa inyo Ma'am.' And called that a lapse in judgment."

I don't know why Gen. Francisco Gudani and Col. Alexander Balutan shouldn't say: "What crime have we committed in appearing before the Senate to tell the world what we know about the conduct of elections in the south? It's not as if we pestered Garci, who seemed harassed and peeved at some point by the sheer persistence or kakulitan of the calls, demanding to know if there was any danger of the cheating being found out and being grateful to be told that 'Namfrel ho sympathetic na sa atin.' And called that a lapse in judgment."

I don't know why everyone, Right, Left, Center, or Nowhere, accused of subversion, rebellion, sedition, desertion, treason, or whatever "on" the irascibly silly Newspeak justice secretary can think of, shouldn't say: "What crime have we committed in trying to oust someone pretending to be the president? It's not as if we called up the Father of all Liars, to complement our own Mother of all Liars, and agreed that he should kidnap an impoverished public school teacher, or hold his family hostage, just so she could not tell the world of the cheating that she saw and thereby teach that world a thing or two about honesty. It's not as if we did that and said, ah, I lapsed in judgment, I...am...sorry."

I'm still waiting for the irascibly silly and Newspeak justice secretary to charge me with something, anything, because that is what I'd love to say to him.

In this month when we mark the first anniversary of Arroyo's "lapse in judgment apology" to the nation, it is good to remember that there is an unforgivable crime in this country that remains unpunished. The "Hello Garci" episode is the Original Sin. The "Hello Garci" episode is the sin to eclipse all sins. Thenceforth, anything and everything become permissible. You have someone caught on tape cheating the hell out of an election, and indeed being culpable for a host of other sins, among them conspiracy to kidnap, and that is paraded as a lapse in judgment, then every other crime in this country becomes a lapse in judgment.

Of course Madrigal et al. have every reason not to justify their actions as a lapse in judgment because what they have done is no crime at all. What they have done is a service to the people. Seeking the path of peace instead of war is not a crime, particularly when the war has "wag the dog," written all over it. Filing an impeachment charge against a usurper is not a crime at all, particularly if you are a bishop and you believe that it's a sin to tell a lie, or be governed by one. Appearing before the Senate, in contravention of an illegal, immoral and totally venomous order to cease and desist, in order to make the truth known, is not a crime, particularly if you are a soldier who believes in duty, honor, and all the things soldiering at its best stands for.

My advice therefore more properly applies to people who are accused of evading taxes, notably the entertainers, whose pictures are splashed all over the front pages of newspapers to embarrass them because they are still capable of being embarrassed. I don't know why they shouldn't say: "What crime have we committed in not declaring our income? It's not as if we called up the Serpent who speaks with a forked tongue or a thick accent and suggested that he throw away the ballot boxes where the voters have declared their preferences."

My advice more properly applies to the forgers and con men and the petty hustlers that congregate in the fringes of city hall and every other government office offering their dark and shadowy services. If they are caught, I don't know why they shouldn't say: "What crime have we committed? It's not as if we called up the Beast that goes by many names and many faces and asked that he manipulate and falsify and deceive and otherwise unleash lies and untruth upon the earth."

My advice more properly applies to rapists who, until government made a show of abolishing the death penalty in time for Arroyo's audience with the Pope, were first in line to have poison flow in their veins. I don't know why they shouldn't say: "What crime have we committed? We just raped one person, we did not rape a nation."

If you are a Christian, you believe that being born with original sin, you will go to hell or purgatory (I forget which) when you die unless you are baptized. In soul as in body, in religion as in politics, in heaven as in earth, there is no end of ways to get baptized. How to expunge the original sin called "Hello Garci"?

Get angry. Go figure.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=9095

Criminals July 10, 2006

PRAY, WHAT CRIME HAS DANILO LIM COMMITTED?

Malacañang says it is variously plotting to oust Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, plotting to mutiny against GMA, plotting to coup-curucu-coup GMA. Take your pick.

Well, what Lim did say, as the video shows, was a “withdrawal of support.” Is that any different from the withdrawal of support of Angelo Reyes, or indeed GMA herself, from Erap?

Ah, but it is. For reasons that indict not Lim but the people he plotted to withdraw support from.
Reyes’—and GMA’s—withdrawal of support from Erap (former President Joseph Estrada) was a withdrawal of support from an elected president. At the time Erap was ousted, the impeachment proceedings against him hadn’t finished. Half the senators had merely walked out of the impeachment court. They had done so because their colleagues, who were the majority, had tried to block the truth from being known, the truth in the form of the so-called “Second Envelope,” which they voted not to open. To this day, that remains the fundamental moral justification for Erap’s ouster: He had betrayed the public trust; his supporters in the Senate-cum-impeachment-court had merely tried to prevent the truth from coming out.

By contrast, Lim’s withdrawal of support was a withdrawal of support from an unelected president. There is the “Hello Garci” to prove that beyond a shadow of doubt. That isn’t just a moral justification for ousting GMA, that is a legal justification for jailing her. GMA hadn’t just betrayed the public trust, she had screwed the voters’ votes. The only reason she remains in power is that her supporters act as though the “Hello Garci” does not exist, and she has prevented witnesses, like Gen. Francisco Gudani and Col. Alexander Balutan from showing her to have robbed the voters of Tawi-Tawi and environs of their votes.

Now, tell me, how is the desperate effort of Erap’s friends to prevent the Second Envelope from being opened different from GMA’s desperate effort to prevent Gudani and Balutan from opening their mouths? Well, the second is worse. Far, far, worse. Yet Erap is in jail and GMA is in Malacañang.

If Lim committed any crime, it is only in trying to talk his superiors, who were the top brass of the AFP, into joining his cause. He seems to have been confident he had done so when he agreed to give that interview. To this day, I cannot comprehend how he could have possibly thought that his superiors, who had corruption charges hanging on their heads and were even then being fattened off the fat of the land by their commander-in-theft, could have been persuaded to bite the hand that fed them.

Indeed, if Lim committed any crime, it is only the crime of idealism, or optimism, of believing that his superiors could be capable of finally thinking of country before self, of being satiated at some point, of being alarmed at the hellish pass their country had been plunged into, enough to say, “Tama na, sobra na, abuso na.” If Lim committed any crime, it is only the crime of wanting to avoid bloodshed, which was what made him want to talk to his superiors to begin with, the younger officers already incensed at the way the AFP had been utterly perverted and used like petty riffraff to steal the vote in Muslim Mindanao; and ready to storm the gates of Hell or Malacañang, whichever held more demons.

Truly, those are heinous crimes in this country today. To continue to believe in the decency of other people, including generals, and the wisdom of bloodless uprisings—that is deserving of the firing squad.

Indeed, even if Lim’s actions constitute a coup plot and not just a mere withdrawal of support, what of it? If it were so, then it would have been a coup to end a coup. Indeed it would have been a popular coup to end a widely detested coup. For make no mistake about it, the GMA regime is the product of a coup. It is a coup regime. It is a junta held by a few people. It is a seizure of power, no more and no less than Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law was a seizure of power, albeit one done through the ballot rather than the bullet, by Garci rather than by goons, by farce rather than by force. It is no less vicious and murderous for being so, the usurpation now currently being propped up by the thuggish ways of dictatorship. Illegitimacy is the handmaiden of dictatorship. So it was in Marcos’ time, so it is in GMA’s time.

The real crime isn’t Lim plotting to oust GMA and attempting to get his fellows in uniform to go along with him, it is GMA actually ousting democracy, whose cornerstone is that the people may be ruled only by the leaders they voted for, and conscripting the very sectors of society that once ousted a president who had betrayed the public trust to go along with her.

The real accessories to the crime are not the civilians and military officers who did go along to end a vicious farce; it is the bishops who thought to lend a halo to a usurper, shown by the “Hello Garci” tape to be willing to agree to kidnapping to silence a witness; the businessmen who kept asking, “But who do we replace her with?” as though an illegitimate leader can ever be better than a dog; the pillars of civil society who proved that they were hollower than the prop pillars Hollywood used for “Samson and Delilah”; the congressmen whose only heroic act was to look at the faces of the heroes in the peso bills that flooded the Batasan during the impeachment bid; the lawyers who argued that there could possibly be any shred of sanity, not to speak of legality, in preventing Gudani and Balutan from telling the world GMA was a cheat apart from a liar; the tired, cynical and resignation-filled Filipinos who kept saying, “Sige na lang, let’s move on,” as though life could ever move a muscle while being pinned down by a rubble called Injustice. Look at them:

Criminals all.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=8943

Cheap thrills July 6, 2006

I WISH we’d have some sense of proportion.

I mean I’m all for Manny Pacquiao trying to pick up another million dollars, which translates into P53 million (or haven’t you noticed that the peso has climbed back to P53 to $1, something government has been keeping silent about as earnestly as it crowed about its getting to P51 to $1 some months ago?). Who wouldn’t, particularly if it’s easy money? We all can do with the extra dough, even if some of us are no longer poor. Indeed, even if some of us can’t seem to have enough products to endorse.

Even the great Muhammad Ali wasn’t beyond it, putting up a string of fights with nobodies, the better to pocket some loose change in the form of millions of dollars and showcase his skills without risk of soiling his pretty face. That was after his spectacular win over the invincible George Foreman the year before in Zaire. I remember in particular his fight with Chuck Wepner in 1975. Wepner was a patsy who rose through the ranks in the 1960s, fell into obscurity after losing several fights and racked up a string of wins and went up again. He got a crack at good money to fight Ali, but no one expected him to be anything more than meat for the meat grinder.

He surprised everyone by punishing Ali, who hadn’t taken the fight seriously, sending him down on the canvas in the ninth. Wepner lost eventually, the fight being stopped in the 15th and ruled a technical knockout, but not after giving the champion a scare. Sylvester Stallone was among those who watched it, which inspired him to make “Rocky.” The movie did far more magnificently than the fight, spawning several sequels. Ali himself would go on to rise again after this, indeed to greater heights with his bloody encounter with Joe Frazier, called the “Thrilla in Manila,” which many consider to be the greatest boxing match of all time.

I was “thrill-ahed” when Pacquiao gave Marco Antonio Barrera a boxing lesson -- so complete was his domination of him -- some years back. I wasn’t so sure he plucked out a draw from Juan Manuel Marquez, but thought to myself, well, maybe there’s something to be said for decking a guy three times in one round even if you lose the rest of the fight. I felt pain when he lost to Erik Morales the first time around, Morales giving him a boxing lesson in turn. And I felt boundless joy, along with 84 million Filipinos, at his victory over Morales in the rematch, the ecstasy all the sweeter for the previous agony.

But Pacquiao-Larios? I felt embarrassed. I felt even more embarrassed by the aftermath.
Like I said, I don’t mind that Pacquiao decided to pick up some cash, but I do mind that his fight with Larios would be billed as another “Thrilla in Manila.” It was just another “Wasteland in Cleveland” without the surprise Wepner sprung on his audience, quite apart from his opponent. I do mind that Pacquiao keeps saying he is dedicating his victory to the Filipino people. If a diva dedicated “My Way” to me during my birthday, I’d feel sore too. I deserve better. She deserves better. A deciding match between Pacquiao and Morales, that would be another “Thrilla in Manila,” or in whichever “la” it is held. Or a Pacquaio-Marquez rematch: That should put to rest doubts about the epithet, “Mexican-Destroyer,” one way or the other.

It’s not just ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. to blame for making a mountain out of a molehill. Though, speaking of mountains, ABS-CBN it was, too, that tried to turn our mountain-climbers’ ascent onto Mt. Everest into an achievement of epic proportions. I mean, I’m proud of it too, and the accomplishment is epic in the sense that our mountain climbers have done so amid the utter dispossession of support, moral and material, that they’ve always been heir to. But let’s not squeeze from it more than it can yield. The path to the top of the world is not an unexplored one, it is a beaten one. We thump ourselves in the chest for it, we do not parade ourselves before the world, we embarrass ourselves before the world.

But ABS-CBN aside, what was that parade all over Manila, with Mayor Lito Atienza hanging on the coattails, or boxing shorts, of Pacquiao for dear life, all about? What the hell does “Champion for Life,” which Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who would not be outdone, promptly conferred on Pacquiao, mean? For what? For beating an 11th-ranked journeyman desperately trying to make a buck in the ring and even more desperately eyeing an alternative career as a karaoke singer?
This sound-and-fury does not signify that the Filipino can do, it signifies that the Filipino can make do. It does not signify that the Filipino can make a saga of himself, it signifies that the Filipino can make a spectacle of himself. It does not signify that the Filipino has finally been filled by the spirit of aspiration, it signifies that the Filipino has finally been felled by the weight of desperation.

The last is particularly worth noting. The way we’re going about it, we seem to have invented two new responses to life’s challenges. Either we set for ourselves servile ambitions, and crow like roosters at the crack of dawn when we have achieved them. That isn’t just seen in the way we celebrate Pacquiao’s victory over Larios, calling ourselves champions. That is seen in the way we celebrate our doctors becoming nurses and invading the hospitals of England, calling ourselves “global.” Or from the opposite end, like King Canute or Queen Gloria, we bid the waves to hold still, banishing all obstacles with the wave of the hand, proclaiming, “basta lang” [just like that], we will become an Enchanted Kingdom or First World country in 20 years, proclaiming, “basta rin lang” [also just like that], that we have more than enough classrooms for the kids; and who is the education secretary to say otherwise?

Cheap thrills. And I’m not so sure they’re cheap.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=8340

Jail them July 5, 2006

ONE of the funniest things I’ve read over the past weeks was our news item last Sunday. It said Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez opposed the idea of Election Commissioner Resurreccion Borra or, heaven forbid, his fellow commissioners being impeached. Should that happen, Gonzalez warned, it would greatly affect the 2007 elections. The public, he said, would not trust an electoral body that will have its attention divided between preparing for those elections and attending to the legal case against its top officials.

But of course, filing impeachment charges against Borra and company will greatly affect the 2007 elections. It will make them honest. What on earth makes Gonzalez think the public trusts the Commission on Elections (Comelec) now? For that matter, what makes him think the public trusts him? What makes him think he and the word “justice” have any connection whatsoever? What makes him think his utterances are of any consequence to any Filipino in his or her right mind?

If anything, the public is bound to trust more, and not less, a Comelec that is distracted by an impeachment suit against its current commissioners. At the very least that is so because its commissioners being scrutinized, or hounded by the Furies, for wrongdoing is going to make them a little more reluctant to join the ranks of the defendants if they are their replacements, or to add to the charges if they are the commissioners themselves. It is no guarantee of course -- there are no longer any limits to the brazenness with which this country’s officials screw the law, taking their cue from their boss -- but it is better than nothing.

At the very most having their attention divided between attending to their duties and attending to their impeachment, the commissioners won’t be able to devote their entire energies to screwing the voters, which is how they’ve interpreted their duty since Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo came along. To this day, they remain innumerate, unable to count anything except peso bills. My apologies to the employees in that office who remain reasonably honest, who are probably the clerks and janitors.

But Aquilino Pimentel is right: Why only Borra and why impeachment? The Mega Pacific scandal, which consisted of the Comelec awarding the bid to computerize canvassing to a patently unqualified bidder, one that had just been put together thereby grossly violating the first criterion which was that the bidder should have been around for several years, was approved by the commission en banc.

If the argument is that the other commissioners did it in good faith, then they are monumentally incompetent, or downright stupid, signing things they have not scrutinized or understood. Their good faith can only represent a bad fate for the voters, and the country at large. Indeed why impeachment when there is a simpler, more direct and complete solution to the problem, which is to file criminal charges against the commissioners? That is how it’s done in the United States, where the officials of electoral bodies are not regarded as being in the same league as the president and chief justice and deserving of impeachment.

In this case the criminal charges are more than richly deserved. The crime is exorbitant, as I’ve been saying since that scandal began, and to this day I do not know why we have not only not done anything to punish the wrongdoers but do not even appreciate the scale of the wrongdoing. What did the commissioners do when they awarded the bid to Mega Pacific?

At the very least, they set back more than one decade of hard work and harder expense to computerize voting, something that has taken several presidents, Comelecs and Congresses and many billions of pesos to trail-blaze. When it was finally there, they decided to take the wrong path, completely willingly. Computerization remains the easiest way to curb fraud. The longer counting takes, the easier it gets to mess around with, as happened massively in the Muslim South in the last elections, ballot-switching being the order of the day. Tawi-Tawi and environs never voted: Their votes were made and counted beforehand by other hands. Computerization -- in the hands of a reputable firm, which has proven safeguards, which has a track record for competence, and which stands to lose a lot from the slightest whiff of irregularity. Not Mega Pacific.

At the very most, the commissioners made it possible, if that wasn’t their intention to begin with, for electoral manipulation of epic proportions to happen in this country. If they had gotten Mega Pacific to count the votes, well, the people who should prosecute them should look into that fly-by-night’s patron and see if he isn’t the biggest crook in this country, one who knows only how to count peso bills, although he has never been penalized (or “pidalized”). As it is, by being found out to have given the award to the wrong bidder, the commissioners threw us back four years into the new millennium into the Dark Ages of ballot boxes, where goons, generals, Garcis and Comelec commissioners, who are often interchangeable, are absolutely and omnipotently free to decide who should rule this country.

Corruption is the last of the commissioners’ crimes. Engineering a fake president is first.
The public won’t trust a Comelec whose commissioners are reeling from criminal charges? It is the only way it will trust it. Indeed more than filing charges against them, make them go on leave, preferably permanently. I’ve always said the conditions for “snap elections,” which we should have well before next year’s regular one, are two. One is to dredge the Comelec as you would a canal; two is to computerize the elections. That is the only way we can have a real President, not one whose very smile is fake.

Even better, just jail them.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=8171

Commonalities July 4, 2006

I DON’T greatly mind that they’ve made it appear as though Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has conquered the hearts and minds of the Italians and Spaniards. If they want to delude the Filipino people along with themselves, well, that has always been their favorite sport. Though while at that, clearly the bright boys in Malacañang did not do their homework. Nobody seems to have wondered if going to Europe at this time wasn’t a thoroughly stupid idea. The reason for it being that a monumentally earthshaking event, one that has been known to stop wars and time itself, was even then taking place up north in Germany. An event called the World Cup.

Had George W. Bush called on the Pope and Jose Luis Zapatero, he himself would have met with rulers of heaven and earth in the throes of distraction. Oh, yes, the Pope watches the World Cup, too, and might have found a visitation from a worldly vassal an ungodly intrusion into a divine preoccupation. Certainly, the media of both countries would have been at best marginally aware that the president of the most powerful country on earth had landed on their shores.

As for the visit of a fake president from a country called Lilliput, well, only the Lilliputians could be made to believe it actually created ripples. But like I said, I don’t mind that greatly. What I do mind is that Arroyo actually visited the monument of Jose Rizal in Madrid, images from which were splashed in newspapers and TV last weekend. Prospero Nograles was just proposing last week that a strict separation be made between Church and State. I myself am proposing that a strict separation be made between Rizal and Gloria Arroyo. Or that an injunction be made preventing Arroyo from coming within 100 yards of any monument, street or bakery that has the word “Rizal” on it.

The only two things Arroyo and Rizal have in common are their height and their fluency in Spanish. Everything ends there. By his works and deeds, Rizal showed he stood 10 feet taller than all of his countrymen, with the possible exception of Andres Bonifacio. By her works and deeds, Arroyo shows she stands four feet shorter than all of her countrymen, with the possible exception of her husband. As to being able to speak Spanish, well, Rizal spoke a host of other languages, but the one that he was truly proud of was the language of truth, quite apart from the language of love. He paid dearly for the language of truth as much as he gained sublimely for the language of love.

At the very least, my proposal for the separation of Rizal and Gloria comes from the fact that she has done him a horribly ill turn already. Forever engraved the mind of this country will be the image of her in Baguio City in December 2002, on the day devoted to recalling the heroism of Rizal, which was the day he was shot to death in Bagumbayan, vowing not to torment this country some more by attempting to lead it one second longer than the remainder of Joseph Estrada’s term. Because, as she said presciently there, to do so would to be to plunge this country into “never-ending divisiveness.” That was the last time she would tell the truth. Rizal is still waiting for her to apologize.

At the very most, my proposal for the separation of Rizal and Gloria comes from the fact that the latter is the very antithesis of the former. Gloria is the very opposite of what Rizal was and is. Rizal loved this country so much he was willing to die for it. Gloria loves power so much she is willing to kill activists and journalists for it.
As I wrote during Rizal’s birthday last month, Rizal was an exceptionally gifted man, a jack of all trades and master of all. He was a doctor, ophthalmologist, novelist, poet, essayist, botanist, linguist, sportsman (excelling in fencing and shooting), a veritable Renaissance man. He could have taken the safe path, living the salon life in Barcelona, tolerated, if not entirely accepted as peer by his colonial masters, content to earn a living doing marginal OFW work if he could not earn a license to practice his art or craft. Instead he chose to risk life and limb by exposing the tyrannical rule of the friars in particular (they were a temporal power as much as a spiritual one, and ruled in both respects viciously) and came back to his “patria adorada” [beloved country] despite the importuning of his friends not to, and paid the ultimate price for telling the truth.

If Arroyo has any bone in her body inducing a capacity for self-sacrifice, only she knows about it. The only self-sacrifice she has taken before and after she was accidentally thrust into power by Edsa People Power II was exiling her husband to Las Vegas during the height of the “Hello, Garci” scandal. That was a sacrifice? That was a reward -- for both of them. And for a crime the likes of which has not been seen in this country before. In any case, it made about as much sense as Charter change: Arroyo has stolen the vote? The solution is to exile her husband. Arroyo is not the rightful president of this country? The solution is to change the Charter.

I don’t know which is worst: Arroyo acting as though she is president of this country, as though she is in constant communication with God, or as though she is the repository of the legacy of this country’s heroes. Rizal did dream of Filipinos being proud and free. Yet today, we see a nation where people, especially journalists, are murdered for telling the truth, where selfishness and ruthlessness and lust for power are paraded as virtues, where the youth, who are the hope of the motherland, are pilloried as upstarts for heckling impostors, and we do nothing. Well, we send text jokes.

I myself wish Arroyo would have a third thing in common with Rizal, which is that she would be shot at Bagumbayan. I can at least safely say she will not go on to become a hero, national or “barangay” [village].

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=8003

Still, snap Gloria June 29, 2006

MEMBERS of the Black and White Movement should really stop muddling things by being there all the time and making it appear as though the citizens’ initiative to impeach Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is their initiative. You would imagine from the way they keep invading the activities devoted to it that it is their brainchild. They should stop usurping things. It makes them look like their former boss.

The issue, in any case, is black-and-white, they shouldn’t make it gray. The one thing I’m still waiting for Dinky Soliman and company to say is that Arroyo should resign or be ousted because she cheated in the elections. They’ve said a mouthful of things about why she should resign, but they have yet to say that.

When they left Arroyo’s government last year, all they said was that Arroyo had lost the trust of the people. All they said was that Arroyo was no longer accepted by the people. That is opinion. Why on earth should Arroyo resign because of their opinion? When in fact the clearest and most obdurately compelling reason for why Arroyo should resign was staring them right in the face: that is, that she cheated in the elections. That is not opinion, that is fact. That is truth etched in tablet, or in the obdurately compelling form of Arroyo’s DNA-imprinted languorously raspy voice saying “Hello, Garci.”

Dinky and company continue to say a mouthful about why Arroyo should resign -- or be impeached -- but they have yet to say because she stole the vote. I leave them to say why they cannot say that.

I’m all for the citizens’ initiative for impeaching Arroyo. The lawyers and politicians, who are often one and the same and to be found plentifully in the camp that pays money will, of course, scoff at it and say it has weak legal and legislative legs to stand on, if any. But clearly the matter has gone beyond the court of law (or of Congress) and landed squarely in the court of public opinion. The first has a “buy-able” judge, notably the congressmen, who stand to rule on the merit of impeachment; while the second has an incorruptible one, notably the public whose will has been known to move mountains and remove molehills.

I do wish, however, that the citizens-impeachers would emphasize one thing above all others. I do wish that the citizens-impeachers would put in black-and-white ahead of all items in their charge sheet one thing. That is the fact that Arroyo cheated in the elections. It is not that she has lost the public trust, it is not that she has become a dictator, it is not that she has caused the slaughter of the innocents or committed crimes against humanity. It is that she stole the vote, it is that she is not the rightful president, it is that she is ruling this country without the voters’ mandate.

That is the fountainhead of the iniquity. Everything flows from there. The loss of public trust comes from it, the recourse to dictatorial methods comes from it, the murderousness and viciousness come from it. Everything else is subordinate to it.

I do wish, as my one other caveat, that the citizens-impeachers would launch an accompanying campaign for snap elections. The one goes with the other. In the past, calls for the impeachment of Arroyo have run up against the question, trotted out by her supporters, “But whom do we replace her with?” A ridiculous question doubtless -- proposing as it does that anyone may seize the reins of government and keep them for as long as there is no immediate “alternative” -- but unfortunately one that has not fallen on deaf ears. Arroyo herself is the best argument for it, demonstrating as she does that removing a bad leader can produce worse. Noli de Castro is second.

The answer is snap elections. It preempts or voids the question “But whom do we replace her with?” that’s bound to be raised again against impeachment. The answer to illegitimacy is legitimacy. The answer to a leader who did not win the elections is a President who won an election. The answer to who to replace Arroyo with is who the voters want to replace her with. That’s what democracy is. As I’ve argued repeatedly, the most obvious legal argument for snap elections rather than for succession is that the presidency isn’t being vacated by illness or incapacity, it has never been occupied. An impeachment initiative that says first and foremost that Arroyo stole the vote presumes that.

As I’ve learned over time, however, what makes the wisdom of snap elections hard to grasp for many people is the misconception that they can happen only once Arroyo resigns or is ousted. That isn’t so at all, and that has to be said again and again.

A snap election does not happen after Arroyo leaves, it happens before Arroyo leaves. It is not the effect of Arroyo leaving, it is the cause of Arroyo leaving. It is a way, a means, an instrument, a tool, a weapon, a crowbar to pry Arroyo loose from a position she is clinging to like glue, or like Ate Glue, illegally. Or at the least the call for a snap election is. That call by itself, particularly where it is made by the most representative sectors of society, by the most credible representatives of those representative sectors of society -- Cory Aquino, Archbishop Lagdameo and Cardinal Rosales, business leaders other than the equally fake Donald Duck (he has a reversible jacket, one side saying “Estrada” and the other “Arroyo”), civil society stalwarts or the ones other than those who still have to return the Peace Bonds, and so on—will be as Joshua’s trumpets tearing down the walls of tyranny like the cardboard façade of a B-movie.

Impeach Arroyo, hold snap elections to fill in the blank. The first can’t prosper without the second. Both really need just one idea to get it across to the public, and that is “Snap Gloria.” Still:

Say No to A Phony.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=7137

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.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=6968

Acquired tastes June 27, 2006

FOOTBALL is bad for the health. Well, sometimes, when it takes the form of the World Cup, and when the World Cup is held in a country that airs at ungodly hours in these parts.

The one held in Korea four years ago at least had me only getting soused in bright sunny afternoons, which was when the games beamed here. Today’s Cup, which is being hosted by Germany, has me spending sleepless nights, even if I no longer get soused these days, or nights, from the tempering effect of gout. A week or so ago, the games played at 9 p.m., 12 midnight and 3 a.m. The best games are naturally reserved for last, which means that if you want the best, you’ll have to pay the price of hitting the sack at 5 a.m. Now, with the round of 16, the games have gone down to two a day but still air at 11 and 3 a.m. I’ll leave the football gods to spare me the ravages of long waking hours.

I didn’t become a World Cup fan until a couple of World Cups ago. I caught a bit of the 1998 one, cheering in particular for underdog Croatia, who went on to win third place. Host France won that year -- playing at home does seem to work; Germany seems headed in that direction this year, which bodes ill for a bet I made in favor of Brazil—which sparked celebrations of exceptional abandon.

That’s what turned me into a fan. The description by various media of the post-game celebrations was mind-boggling: The French danced in the streets, drank till morning and threw themselves into fountains, an orgy of revelry not seen since D-Day. It was the first time I caught a glimpse of what they meant when they said football isn’t just a game, it is a religion. Or for the more secular, if it is a game at all, it is the game of life.
I confess I haven’t been as religious in following the football matches regularly being aired on Star Sports particularly, but I have been so at least about the last two World Cups. The World Cup is always special, which is when the real transformation takes place, which is when making a goal takes on the aspect of winning a war. No, more than that, of discovering the Fountain of Youth. Since the Word Cup started early this month, I completely forgot that Miami was battling Dallas for the NBA crown. Suddenly, the bragging rights there became just, well, bragging, the rights being more debatable. I don’t know what kind of coverage it got in the world media. I do know that some years ago, while I was in Kuala Lampur and the NBA finals were being played alongside a UEFA match, I was at pains to find news about the first while the second was splashed all over the sports pages of newspapers. And that wasn’t the World Cup.

I do know that in this country eyebrows are still raised at the seemingly inexplicable fuss about people acting as though they had no hands and frenetically kicking a ball from one side of a field to another. I do know that in this country, people still say, “What a boring game,” and “How can people be excited by a game that ends up 0-0?” (or nil-nil, as the Brits say).

What can I say? What game is really exciting from that perspective? What’s so exciting about a bunch of people trying to shoot a ball through a hoop? What’s so exciting about a bunch of people trying to hit a ball with something so ridiculous as a wooden bat? What’s so exciting about a bunch of people pushing and shoving and banging each other’s brains out with ferocious tackles? The excitement lies in people struggling to overcome adversity in as graceful and artistic a manner as possible. I leave others to argue for plunging a knife into a bull’s head as a supreme example of grace under pressure. But it’s much like life itself.

Football, like basketball, or indeed, like wine and jazz, is an acquired taste. Every game offers its own excitement, for those with the (developed) sensibility for it. Tell a Japanese that sumo wrestling and Go are boring. While at that, tell the Russians that chess is boring. I used to play chess reasonably well and followed the titanic battle between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky ages ago (that’s what got me into the game) with rapturous attention. There’s gripping drama that unravels on the board and on the field that isn’t captured by the score or “bottom line.” A draw, or score of 0-0, no more tells the story of a chess or football match than it does about a person’s life. The bottom line of life is death, but that isn’t quite the story. You want instant gratification, go to a video arcade, or to the john.

I had wished the United States would go farther than it did the last World Cup to generate more interest in football in that country. Can you imagine if the African-Americans (to be PC about it) in particular, who have pretty much dominated every other sport, got into it big time? But, alas, the US did even worse than last time, though I thought too that that free kick awarded to Ghana which gave them the win and booted the US out was horrendously unfair.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to thrill to the sight of former enemies and colonial masters and slaves boringly coming together in less murderous but equally ferocious confrontations. I’ll continue to revel in the sight of people, castes and classes and races boringly calling a truce on their deadly games of wars and strife to foment this deathly silly and beautiful war and strife. I’ll continue to feel along with the players and their fans and their nations and the peoples of this planet the boringly crushing pain of those who fall in the field of battle and the boringly bursting joy of those who see all over again the miracle of their liberation at the beaches of Normandy.

The World Cup is an acquired taste. But then living itself is an acquired taste.

* * *

Correction: I meant Norberto Gonzales in yesterday’s column but somehow wrote Raul Gonzalez. Not much difference but for accuracy’s sake.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=6766

Seeing Red June 26, 2006

LAST TIME AROUND, I SAID THE REASON Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has launched a war against the Reds—notwithstanding that the Reds are no longer the force they were during Marcos’ and Cory’s time, indeed notwithstanding that they have become a pale shadow of it—is that she needs a scapegoat, no more and no less than Marcos and Hitler did, to channel the people’s resentments toward a manufactured threat and divert their attention from a very real one. That remains the primary reason we have a war whose justifications are worlds flimsier than the so-called “war against terror” which GMA also launched shortly after 9/11 with nothing to show for it.

But there are a couple of other reasons why she has done so.

The first is to solidify her hold on the military. At the very least, a war against the New People’s Army enables her to reward her favorite generals with largesse for services rendered in the past and to be rendered in the future. GMA bribes her generals under conditions of peace, it will be seen as a bribe. She bribes her generals under conditions of war, it will be seen as resolutely prosecuting a campaign—especially as the war is being advertised as achieving victory in two years’ time.

Will she be embarrassed if she fails to do as promised? Well, she did say she wasn’t going to run for president and did. Was she embarrassed? And in any case, however the war ends, even if her efforts to butcher the enemy succeeds only in swelling its ranks and strengthens its resolve to fight back, Mike Defensor, Ignacio Bunye and the two Prosperos (Nograles and Pichay) can always be counted upon to call it a smashing victory. These are people who are not particularly constrained by reality.

You have a war, nobody will look too closely at the budget and the emergency allocations thrown at the generals like scraps of meat to dogs. Or one can do so only on pain of being called a communist or a sympathizer, with nasty consequences. That is no longer facetious in these times.

At the most, GMA solidifies her hold on the military by pushing back the reformist-minded junior officers in favor of the reactionary and corrupt—and, therefore, “buy-able” senior officers. Lest we forget, Malacañang, with the consent or connivance of the AFP brass, has already tried to link some of the Magdalo officers to the communist cause, a thing the officers naturally and rightly have denied furiously.

For years the restive officers have been saying that the real problem in the AFP is that the top brass is staggeringly corrupt, stripping the rank-and-file of their sustenance and the combat soldiers in Mindanao, in particular, quite literally of their boots. For years, the officers have been saying that the real problem in society is not the insurgency but the roots of the insurgency, which are poverty and oppression; it makes no sense to shoot down people who are merely desperately seeking rescue or respite from them. For years the officers have been saying that the real problem in this country is not those who are hungry for power and are trying to grab it with force, but the one person who craves power like breath itself she has grabbed it by farce—and now keeps it by force.

But you declare a war against the Reds, and, voila, the disease becomes the cure, the problem becomes the solution, the bane becomes the boon. Suddenly, the same corrupt generals whose contribution to humanity consists of continuing to foist a usurper upon a hapless people become knights in shining armor ready to slay the dragon. Suddenly, the largely idealistic young men and women in uniform who take duty and honor seriously become allied with the enemy by opposing a corrupt and illegitimate regime. Suddenly, the one person who has brought plague and ruination on this country, such as has not been seen since the days of Marcos—and probably not even then—becomes the savior who will rid this country of its scourge.

The second, and more frightening, additional reason for the war is that it gives a legal or psychological mantle to the killings. As George W. Bush, has shown, you have a war, notably one propagandized as life-and-death, you can justify anything, including the mugging of civil rights with a Homeland Security Act and the invasion of a country that poses the threat not of harboring weapons of mass destruction but of withdrawing oil of gigantic proportions. GMA has lost her claim to fighting terror, not least with The New York Times suggesting she is its best recruiter the way the US Congress then suggested Marcos was the NPA’s best recruiter. GMA needs another war to justify the murderous consequences of illegitimacy and dictatorship, and has manufactured one against the Reds.

Without that war, the killings would remain a source of outrage here and abroad. They have already been singled out by the human rights groups, local and international, as a crime against humanity. And even a public grown tired and cynical is being roused to anger and protest by the sheer plethora of the dead and the brazenness of their murder.

You have a war against the Reds and suddenly the dead become “collateral damage,” a concept Raul Gonzalez has already explicitly advanced. You are tempted to say you wish he would end up one, except that if he did he would not be around to change his mind. But I don’t mind. His mind is already collaterally damaged as it is. You have a war against the Reds, and every dead turns up Red, activists and journalists alike.

But this is the part that takes my breath away. You have GMA relentlessly tearing down every fabric of decency—never mind democracy—in this country, and what are we doing about it?

Well, the opposition is still trying to stop the Cha-cha.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=6603

Mirrors June 22, 2006

I READ Amalia Cullarin Rosales’ essay on Jose Rizal last Monday, June 19, the national hero’s 145th birthday, and found the part where she talks about the reaction of her students to reading Rizal for the first time fascinating. Among them:

“The course opened my eyes to the greatness of Filipinos.”

“This course is for all time. Rizal’s writings are comparable to the Bible.”

“I discovered the defects of our people during Rizal’s time -- the same defects are still in existence until now.”

“The messages of Rizal are still very relevant today -- for the youth to love their country and defend it and their rights as a people against any foreigner.”

You get the drift.

It would help though to think of Rizal’s writings not as gospel truth but as great literature -- which the Bible also is. The teaching of Rizal has also suffered in the past from his works being turned into sacred text. In fact, it is full of wit and humor, Rizal being past master at satire. Some of his essays are utterly droll, as when he apologizes for the lowly Filipinos taking a bath every day as opposed to the aristocratic Spanish who regaled the world only with perfumed bodies.

As to our defending our rights against any foreigner, substitute the word “tyrant” for “foreigner,” and I’m with you wholeheartedly. Rizal wasn’t just a bitter critic of foreign rule, he was a bitter critic of tyranny in whatever way it showed itself. He excoriated the bad side of the indio as much as that of his ruler, and demanded that he live with pride and dignity. He would not have stood for a local tyranny any more than a foreign one.

But I do appreciate the things Rosales’ students have said for one reason. I too felt that way reading Philippine history for the first time -- in my case that was the product of becoming an activist more than attending class -- and Rizal’s works in particular. The “Noli” and “Fili” truly were eye-openers, turning Rizal from statue to flesh-and-blood, a singular Filipino who struggled to understand and articulate the vicissitudes of his time. Indeed, turning the past into a beacon for us who were floundering in the stormy seas of history to follow.
Rosales herself says Rizal’s characters continue to live among us. We still have Señor Pasta, who seeks only personal advancement; we still have Capitan Tiago, who is subservient to higher-ups; we still have Kabesang Tales, who is driven to rebellion by hardship and oppression; we still have Doña Victorina, who takes on the airs of the masters with buffoonish results. If I remember right, Doña Victorina, believed that the “de” after a surname guaranteed aristocracy, so she had not just one but two “de’s” after her name: Doña Victorina de de Espadaña. Rizal was funny, even if he was also deadly serious.

Well, Rizal did say one very important thing -- which is twin brother to Santayana’s famous aphorism -- that people who do not read their history are condemned to repeat it. Rizal said those who do not see where they came from will never get to where they are going. That has become a very prophetic warning for us.

If Rizal’s characters continue to live today, it is because we have failed to read history, or indeed read him. Our world today is not unlike the one he lived in, the superficial differences in technology aside. Rizal’s world was one where lies and hypocrisy held sway, upheld viciously by the liberal application of the sword. It was a world where spiritual and physical growth was stunted by a culture that militated against it. It was a world where the indios were reduced to despair and indifference, the intelligentsia opting to live abroad if not acquiescing to the tyranny at home. So it was then, so it is now.

Rizal’s writings truly have much to say to our own time. But more than his writings, his life itself has much to say to our time, and that is probably the greatest legacy he bequeathed to us. The guy was monumentally brilliant, a Renaissance man through and through. He was a poet, a novelist, a painter, a sculptor, an ophthalmologist, a botanist, and God knows what else. He even excelled in fencing and pistol shooting. He lived in many places in Europe and knew several Western languages, including a bit of English. By rights, he could have joined the ranks of the elite, the social circles in which they moved not being closed to him, notwithstanding that he came from modest origins.

Instead, he chose not to be oblivious to the plight of his land and people and brought it to light in novel and polemic and whatever else he did. Instead, he chose to come home despite having a reasonably good life as an exile abroad and despite the entreaties of his friends not to, because the Spanish authorities could not abide truth and criticism, which were often one and the same. Instead, he chose to rebel against the injustice and folly of his time -- however he remained of two minds till the end about the wisdom of an armed uprising -- trying to push back the limits of the possible with all the genius and generosity he could muster, embracing the fate that went along with it with grace and fortitude.

More than anything he wrote, it was what Rizal did that has much to teach us. His life was his greatest work, a story continues to unfold to this day but whose meaning continues to elude us. I can understand the blasts of illumination and bursts of admiration Rosales’ students have experienced and strain to express. I’ve felt them too, not the least at the realization we, too, have a man for all seasons, a Filipino we can be proud of and want to emulate.

Read history. You will find, as the most thrilling and frightening sensation of all, that you are not looking at the yellowed pages of a book, you are looking at a mirror.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=5937

Scourge June 21, 2006

I SAW the BBC documentary “History of World War II,” a magnificent 25-disc work, some months ago, and found its first three parts in particular, entitled “The Nazis: A Warning from History” not just completely fascinating but completely relevant to our times. Of course, nothing can ever compare with the evil that was Hitler or Nazism, which caused the wholesale slaughter of peoples, all the more chilling for its sheer cold-bloodedness. Nothing can compare with it, but you can find parallels with its methodology at least in Ferdinand Marcos’s declared martial law and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s undeclared one.

Nowhere is the parallel more patent than in the use of scapegoats to justify the regime or indeed advance its cause. Almost inexplicably from the 20-20 vision of hindsight, Hitler managed to drive home the contention to a tired and cynical German public that the Jews and communists were actually conniving to bring down the whole world.

He was, of course, aided in this respect by the brilliantly demented Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, who unleashed the “Big Lie” theory of information, which said that the bigger the lie, the more likely it was going to be believed. To the end of his days, Hilter maintained that the Jews were behind the communist threat, financing it and even espousing it. A batty notion, but history is full of batty notions and people, which and who produce not very batty consequences.

Marcos, of course, was the original proponent of the “Left-Right” conspiracy in this country, which he advanced to justify martial law. The Left was the communists, whom he depicted as near to overrunning the country in 1972 and was at least fomenting anarchy and strife. The Right was the “oligarchy,” given a face in particular by the Lopezes (Eugenio Lopez Sr. obliged unwittingly by holding his 40th wedding anniversary with much opulence, according to news reports, champagne flowing like fountains and some guests lighting cigars with peso bills), who were funding the communists to prevent Marcos from working his reforms. A batty notion from hindsight, but one too with murderous consequences.

Comes now Arroyo with her own Left-Right conspiracy, which she first articulated when she issued Presidential Proclamation 1017. It is a virtual rehash of the martial law justification and little wonder because PP 1017 was meant to be that. The idea was amplified by the government propaganda machine -- shades of Goebbels and Marcos’ Greg Cendaña -- particularly in the form of the so-called documentary “Sagot sa Kataksilan: 1017,” which conjured a conspiracy by communists and rightist military officers, aided by the rich, notably the Cojuangcos who stood to have Hacienda Luisita land-reformed. The lie hasn’t sold well, ironically because it still retained a small grain of truth to it, so the Arroyo regime has gone whole hog and unleashed the Big Lie with the hope it would produce better results.

That Big Lie is that the communists are today’s scourge of the land and must be wiped out posthaste.
People have been asking me of late why Arroyo seems to have the hots for the Reds when they seem largely marginal to today’s equation. The reason is simple: She needs a scapegoat, just as Marcos did. And well before them, the way their role model, Hitler, did.

When Marcos trotted out the Reds as a scapegoat, he at least had a few things going for him. Though the Reds were not responsible for the bombings in Greater Manila (as it was called then) -- he was, just as Arroyo probably is, by way of Norberto Gonzales -- they had at least become a force to reckon with. And though they were not strong enough to overrun the country at the time, they had at least the potential to do so in time, their numbers swelling like a flood by the day.

None of that is there today. What has laid the communist movement low, as I’ve always contended, is not the military defeats they have suffered over time, it is the ideological and moral debacles they have suffered along the way. The potential of the movement to grow has been halted since the late 1990s by the Fall of the Wall, a modern metaphor for Humpty Dumpty, whose own fall precluded reconstitution, and the revelation of the “killing fields,” both of which dulled the sheen it radiated in the past. If the movement continues to exist today, it is simply because of the hunger and misery of the poor. It is no longer the capacity of the movement to inspire the youth that swells its ranks, it is its capacity to give succor, if not hope, to the desperate.

As Gen. Raymundo Jarque asked in the past and as the Magdalo officers are asking in the present, where is the sense in shooting down people whose only crime is to want to fend off the ravages of poverty and oppression?
The sense, as far as Arroyo is concerned, is survival. Hitler at least fanatically loathed the Jews and believed till the end of his days they had to be obliterated from the face of the earth as a matter of necessity. The current attempt to wreak a minor holocaust upon the Reds merely reeks of cynicism -- like Mt. Everest, they just happen to be there. The public can be counted on not to mind their slaughter. The expected result of all this being to divert attention from the illegitimacy of Arroyo’s rule.

Arroyo has already tried to show that the scourge of this country is the political system, which can be solved by Charter change, and that hasn’t sold. She has already tried to show that the scourge of this country is the Senate, which can be solved by abolishing it, and that hasn’t sold. Now she is trying to show that the scourge of this country is the Reds, which can be solved by exterminating them. That too won’t sell, even if it will leave a mountain of corpses along the way. For a simple reason:

The public knows who the real scourge of this country is.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=5568

Street life June 20, 2006

I DON’T know if you’ve noticed, but the streets of Metro Manila today are full of tricycles, motorcycles and bicycles. I used to see them only at odd hours, the bicycles and tricycles in particular venturing into the main thoroughfares to the unseeing or unmindful eyes of cops and traffic enforcers only when traffic was light. But today they’re there at all hours, not just turning nightmarish traffic during rush hour into absolute torment but threatening to cause a host of mayhem, accidental or deliberate, on the streets.

That is so particularly because the tricycles, motorcycles and bicycles no longer bother to keep to the sides of the streets. They overrun them on all sides, weaving through and dodging motor vehicles as though they were in a video game. For some reason, none of the drivers or riders appears to think he is governed by traffic rules. Who knows? Maybe there’s a perverse logic that says that if you shouldn’t be driving a tricycle or riding a bicycle on Quezon Avenue or the Edsa highway in the first place, then you are ipso facto exempted from traffic rules.

The solution to this is not to banish motorcycles, tricycles and bicycles from the face of the earth, or the streets of Metro Manila. My irritation at encountering these things in the main thoroughfares has long given way to an appreciation of the fact that gasoline today may now qualify as a prize in contests. It’s a fortune in itself. And I am not a little dismayed that the oil companies should continue to advertise their product without a thought to this. Some of the ads are plain indulgent. They offend sensibilities, if not rub salt on wound. Obviously the reason the motorcycles, tricycles and bicycles are advancing like Attila’s horde today is that gasoline prices bore a hole in the pocket. My sympathies go to bicycles in particular, which don’t use any.

The solution is to put bicycle lanes in the main streets. That’s for bicycles and motorbikes; tricycles should clearly be kept to the side streets. It’s a cause some of my friends, who believe, completely rightly, that bicycles are healthier physically and financially, have been fighting for many years. Now more than ever, they have reason to push it vigorously.

Put bicycle lanes on the main streets. Cars, buses and jeepneys found poaching on them should be stopped and their drivers given a ticket, fined, or extorted from, whichever puts a bigger chill in their hearts.
It should help to improve health, the individual’s and the nation’s. The individual stands to enjoy more exercise, or at least suffer fewer accidents, and the nation stands to conserve more fuel. Some small things have a way of producing big results.

* * *

“I think that I shall never see/ A billboard lovely as a tree/ Perhaps unless the billboards fall/ I’ll never see a tree at all.”

That’s Ogden Nash’s famous parody of Joyce Kilmer’s famous poem, and it’s hard not to be taken in by its spirit, particularly in these times. There’s a raging debate going on about billboards, with some of my friends on the side of those bitterly opposing them. My sympathies are with them.

My concern, however, is not moral. I have no beef with the sight of men and women in the throes of suggestive poses clad only in the near-pristine state God made them. Who on earth doesn’t like that -- other of course than people who believe sensuality, not to speak of sexuality, is the serpent’s invention? I wouldn’t mind falling in Hieronymus Bosch’s garden of earthly delights. My beef is people being given to feast on these sights when their eyes should be riveted only to the road.

The billboards are a road hazard. The big one in Guadalupe in particular poses the added hazard of blinding drivers with its ferocious light. Given that motorcycles and bicycles are currently swarming like locusts on the streets, well, you’d almost think the hospitals and funeral parlors were paying the perpetrators of this atrocity to improve their business.

My sympathies go as well to my friends who have been complaining about the environmental and aesthetic degradations or depredations being wrought by the billboards. I know the Edsa highway does not offer the most pleasant view in the world (I laughed my head off many years ago when the people opposing the building of the overhead Metro Rail Transit argued that it was an aesthetic outrage to Edsa), but do we really need to uglify it for no other reason than to advertise clothes, or the lack of them?

As to the environment, well, I’ll go along with Pareng Ogden. Perhaps unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.

* * *

I saw it in the twilight years of Ferdinand Marcos’ rule: Quezon Avenue teeming with ladies of the night at night, and indeed at one point, in the daytime. I see it again today. Past midnight, in particular, the place starts accumulating women and men in drag who vigorously hail cars the way commuters hail cabs in furious rain. It used to be that they were just content to wait for the desperate to stop by them.

Sign of the times. The last years of martial law also saw resolute efforts to hide reality with billboards, metaphorical and literal, the regime saying life had never been better. A thing even more resolutely refuted by those who braved rain, cops and shady characters, the last two often being one and the same, selling body to keep body and soul together. Roxanne sounds romantic only in song, not in real life. You can’t get a more vivid, if poignant, indicator of today’s quality of life than the sudden increase of late of the tribe of fallen Eves on the streets. Street life, street death.

Shortly after Quezon Avenue became that in the twilight years of Marcos’ rule, the sun set on Marcos’ rule. Truly, sign of the times.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=5757

Put up or shut up June 19, 2006

THE ADMINISTRATION CONGRESSMEN were quick to pounce on Rodolfo Biazon who told this newspaper last week that the conclusion of his committee was that the last elections were indeed tainted with massive fraud and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was its beneficiary.

Biazon’s statement, Prospero Pichay complained, was just “speculative assessment,” having no evidence to back it up. “These people are just after publicity. If Senator Biazon has nothing sensible to say, he should just shut up.” Exequiel Javier and Marcelino Libanan accused Biazon of practicing “voodoo politics.” And Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye opined: “The good senator is clearly reviving an issue that the public is tired of and wants to leave behind.” And the other congressman who has gotten just as prosperous as Pichay under GMA, Prospero Nograles, demanded to know if Biazon has produced “any piece of legislation” from tenaciously inquiring into the integrity of the last elections.

It’s enough to make you wonder if these people own mirrors, or at least hold one up to their faces. Though I wouldn’t blame them if they did not—the reflection cannot be very flattering, inside and out. They really shouldn’t be addressing these concerns to Biazon, they should be addressing them to themselves.

As credibility goes, who is Biazon and who are variously Pichay, Javier, Libanan, Bunye and Nograles? Biazon is the guy who during Cory’s time—while Pichay was still busy grooming his Elvis Presley hair—got to be known as Mr. Constitutionalist for defending the Constitution against those who very seriously tried to threaten it, specifically the coup plotters who mounted very real coup attempts against the government. Biazon is the guy who, during Erap’s time—while Nograles et al. were busy doing whatever obscure or petty things they were doing then—shone as a senator-cum-impeachment-court-member, never once giving in to outburst or loony-tunes antics (he left that to Miriam Santiago) while asking some pretty astute questions.
I particularly got impressed with him during that trial, and praised him on several occasions. Though not a lawyer, he was at par, if not better, than most of the lawyers in attendance there. He was completely level-headed and proved that no legal gobbledygook would ever put the wool over his eyes. For Pichay et al. to now accuse him of being publicity-hungry for revealing what everyone in this country—except Pichay et al.—already knows, well, it merely draws our attention to who really is so kulang sa pansin in this country. Indeed, more than that, it draws our attention to one profoundly Filipino quality GMA and her cohorts sorely lack, which is the quality of gratefulness. If Biazon had not opened his mouth during the impeachment trial and not been as “publicity hungry” as Pichay accuses him of now, Pichay would still be busy grooming his Elvis Presley hair instead of tormenting the public with his ululations. Erap would never have been ousted and GMA would never have come along to show she could be far worse.

If the issue of GMA’s illegitimacy is something the public is “clearly” already tired of and wants to leave behind, why is Bunye so bothered by it? Why should his colleagues be so incensed by it they want Biazon to shut up? Surely an issue the public is “clearly” already tired of can be safely ignored and left to die a natural death? Surely trying to revive an issue the public is “clearly” already tired of is nothing more than flogging a dead horse?

In fact, as Bunye himself probably knows—although medical history is full of cases where people who keep repeating a lie eventually get to believe it—the only thing that is clear, as borne out by the surveys, is that most Filipinos do not believe GMA is the President. The only thing that is clear, as borne out by the evidence offered by the senses, is that if the public is tired of anyone, it is merely of the current squatter in Malacañang. The only thing that is clear is that if the public is tired of anything, it is that it has not yet found a way to evict her.

What is voodoo, whence “voodoo politics” derives from? In popular mythology at least, it is the first cousin of mumbo jumbo, or the attempt to give falsity truth, fakeness validity, and malevolence normality. Can anything be more voodooistic or “mumbo jumbo-ish” than preventing Brig. Gen. Francisco Gudani and Lt. Col. Alex Balutan from appearing in Biazon’s committee and then saying Biazon has no proof? Can anything be more voodooistic or mumbo jumbo-ish than bashing the heads of the people who march in the streets and then saying that unlike Thailand, whose prime minister resigned, we do not have people loudly protesting against GMA in the streets? Can anything be more voodooistic or mumbo jumbo-ish than saying, “God put me here,” when the God referred to speaks with a Visayan accent and keeps saying, “Pipilitin po natin Ma’am”?
Voodoo is also the other name for undiluted evil. Ask the kin of today’s dead if it’s Biazon who practices that kind of politics.

And finally, that idiocy again about congressional inquiries of the sort Biazon has zealously pursued not being “in aid of legislation.” What, truth does not aid legislation? Justice does not aid legislation? Knowing who actually won the last elections and should be governing this country does not aid legislation? Pray, what does aid legislation? But never mind. Just look at the faces of Pichay and company and ask yourself if there is anything in them that can remotely evoke the memory of Solon, the wise Greek leader who bequeathed a system of laws to his nation, or can remotely conjure the hallowed title, “lawmaker.”

One is tempted to tell them, “Put up or shut up.” But just “Shut up” will do. We’ve put up with them too long already.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=5405

Lobotomized nation June 15, 2006

I REMEMBER again something Oliver Sachs wrote. Sachs is the famous neurologist whose writings have inspired a number of movies, including “Awakenings,” “At First Sight,” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.” His case that I remember reading about had to do with an ex-hippie who could not remember anything after a few minutes. He was living completely in the present, having no memory of things that had just happened to him.

The man was diagnosed to have suffered a trauma in his frontal lobe -- possibly the result of psychotropic drugs -- and was exhibiting the same symptoms as patients who had undergone lobotomy, or the removal of the frontal lobe of the brain. In the past, lobotomy had been prescribed for excessively violent criminals, which succeeded in pacifying them. But only at the equally criminal price of robbing them of their memories. The reason they became pacific was because of that -- they had no past, they had no future. They had nothing to bother them, they had nothing to look forward to.

I did say in a couple of columns in the past that I thought we were a lobotomized nation, a nation that lived pretty much in the present. It’s as if we too had the frontal lobes of our brain removed, rendering us unable to remember even more recent events. We have no past and no future. We merely drift by in the present.

Last Monday offered fresh evidence of it. Interviewed by reporters after the flag-waving ceremonies in Kawit, Cavite, several kids who participated in the pageantry of Independence Day were at a loss to answer questions the reporters posed to them. One knew what the symbols in the flag represented but did not quite know what the importance of Kawit, Cavite was. Another knew June 12 marked the day when the Philippines declared its independence from Spain but did not know when that happened. Still another said they were just required to be part of the celebrations.

The mayor who appeared quite embarrassed lamented that, true enough, many Caviteños were not greatly aware of the history of Cavite. But God in heaven, this wasn’t just the history of Cavite, this was the history of the Philippines. I myself wasn’t entirely surprised by it. Many Filipinos can’t even remember the two Edsas anymore. The martial law babies can’t remember martial law, or want to know about it. And heaven knows if we still remember the War.

I suspect that even if the reporters had posed their questions to our public officials, elected and non-elected, including the non-elected holding elective office, many of them might not have been able to answer. If we have declared independence at all, it would seem to be only from our past.

Of course, like morality or the sense of right and wrong, history or the sense of continuity is bound to be dismissed in these cynical times, particularly by a cynical government, as of little practical importance to the nation. “You can’t eat sovereignty,” as the people who demanded the retention of the US bases said then. They eventually ate their words.

The consequences of being a lobotomized nation are pretty much the same as the consequences of being a lobotomized individual. You have no past, you have no future. You have nothing to bother you, you have nothing to look forward to. “Let’s move on” is today’s equivalent of “You can’t eat sovereignty.” What it really means is, let’s drift aimlessly.

I’ve repeatedly written about the importance of emphasizing History in classrooms. Its practical value is immediate and immense. The reason we have a poor sense of country is that we have a poor sense of history, if we have one at all. We have no sense of belonging, we have no sense of rooted-ness, we have no sense of home. It’s not true that we are no better or worse than other Asian countries which also have a great number of their people leaving for other shores. Quite apart from the sheer difference in scale, there is the difference in attitude. Other people leave the land of their birth as a last resort, we do so as a first resort. Where is the sense in raising the quality of local education -- even if that were possible in these corrupt and inflationary times -- if you will only produce graduates who metamorphose into caregivers and hop on to the next plane to Canada?

But history has an even more immense practical value, even it isn’t as immediate and patent as the one above -- that is, you have no past, you have no present. You won’t be able to make sense of the present, having no signposts or landmarks to recognize the surroundings and know where you are -- which is often just back where you started.

June 12, 1898 isn’t unlike where we are now, for those with the eyes to see it, or the frontal lobe to remember it. It was the hiatus between Spanish colonial rule and the American one, between an old and moribund tyrannical rule and a new and resurgent one. A couple of months later, Intramuros would fall, but the Spanish would surrender not to the Philippine insurrectionary forces but to the nascent American occupational forces led by Admiral Dewey. By February the following year, the Filipinos would be waging another revolution, against what would prove to be a worse, if subtler, tyranny.

Not unlike what we’ve just gone through in the last five years or so, toppling an old and decaying tyranny only to fall under a new and far more vicious one.

Talk of the importance of history and most everyone will quote George Santayana’s famous aphorism -- that those who do not read their history are bound to repeat it. That is not a blithe platitude, that is a shrill warning. Repeating history isn’t just bad karma, which will condemn us to endless reincarnations as insects.

Repeating history is, well, having Marcos and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for life.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=4925

Games people play June 14, 2006

ONE prime minister warned that he expected an epidemic of illnesses to suddenly hit his country, or at least people saying they had developed all sorts of afflictions and could not go to work. The government and rebels of the Ivory Coast have laid down their arms temporarily after being exposed to it. And the candidates of Mexico have scrapped their campaign plans for the July 2 elections over the next weeks for fear no one will watch them.

Is it a virus more deadly than Ebola? Is it a pathological mania that has suddenly beset the world? Is it an alien invasion?

It’s worse, it’s the World Cup.

Largely unbeknownst in these parts, the world has ground to a halt. It has done so because of a crazy sport -- he “beautiful game,” as the Brazilians call it -- or fanatical religion called football. Yes, football. It is not soccer, as a reader corrected me once, which is what the Americans insist on calling it, reserving the term “football” for their Super Bowl version of it, which has as much to do with the foot (my reader said) as chess does to the hand.

Contrary to rumor, the World Cup, and not the World Series -- which is what the US calls its baseball finals, and which too has much to do with the world as George W. Bush has to intelligence -- is the greatest show on earth. Michael Jordan’s monumental contributions to thrusting basketball onto the world stage notwithstanding, it’s Pele’s favorite game that continues to fire the world’s imagination. For half the world’s athletes, the ultimate goal in life -- the word “goal” itself comes from it -- is to be able to play in the World Cup. To win it, well, it isn’t just the next best thing to heaven, it is heaven.

To talk about it in these gloriously metaphysical terms is by no means an exaggeration. It truly has caused heaven and hell on earth: wars and economic disasters on one hand and truces and moral rejuvenation on the other. Honduras and El Salvador fell into war in 1969 because the three-game elimination match for the World Cup between their countries proved troublesome. That war claimed 2,000 lives and rendered thousands homeless. Germany itself, the current host of the Cup, has the “miracle of Berne” writ in its history, which was when it won the World Cup in Berne, Switzerland, 1954. The feat did not just revive the German economy, it revived the German spirit which had fallen to the pits after Hitler.

In at least half of the world, including the most powerful and influential part of it, excepting the US, everything has been pushed to the background. The results of the World Cup games are the news, relegating all others down the line. “Has the whole country gone mad?” asked a letter-writer in a British newspaper, sparking a debate about the true significance of football in society or indeed in world affairs. In Britain, it was enough to throw the Kashmir crisis to the government’s back burner, Tony Blair preferring to send off the “lads” than to attend to his diplomatic duties. For one dazzling moment, governments have suspended politics, wars, and time itself and gone fishing. Or better still, to watch the games.

I personally am thrilled no end by it. There is something almost biblical about it, specifically the part where Jesus Christ says we will need to become a child again to enter the kingdom of heaven. This is humankind collectively becoming a child again, looking at the world with the awe and wonder of a child’s eyes, and barging into the gates of heaven with the force of it. This is humankind stripping down to short pants, or girl skirts, again and thrashing about in the mud in wild abandon, the shouts of playful glee and carefree-ness thundering across the earth. It is magic.

Certainly, it is awesome in humankind abandoning at least for one fleeting moment its other games, the more churlishly childish ones as opposed to this wondrously childlike one, the ones that produce hell where the later produces heaven. The churlishly childish games of acquiring wealth and power by whatever means, those means now taking on the truly frightening aspect of a video game: The Iraq invasion was carried out that way, with no flaming bodies hurtling to their deaths -- such as assailed the horrified eyes of Americans during 9/11 -- to strain conscience, only bleeps in consoles and the flashing sign, “Game Over,” to strain the eyes.
By contrast, in the childlike game that is the World Cup, everybody wins. Even the so-called losers, the ones who get defeated in the field of battle by stronger opponents, never really lose at all, lifting as they do the spirits of their bedraggled countrymen, the better to soar on their wings through the tempests of life. Nations win, even if the governments of the teams that lose tend to flounder in the wave of frustration that beset their land, their mere appearance in the game of games, in the game of life, being a boundless joy enough in itself. Certainly humanity wins, in one blink of the eye of eternity showing once again the best that it can be, showing once again the angel that resides, or is held prisoner, in its beastly form.

What is football really but the seemingly ridiculous activity of frenetically trying to bring a ball from one side of a field to another without using one’s arms and attempting to kick it to a net while others equally frenetically try to prevent it? But then what is life itself but the seemingly ridiculous activity of making the best of one’s sojourn on earth as though one’s deeds could possibly matter while Fate or Improvidence tries laughingly to thwart it?

For one dazzling moment at least, humankind is trying to make sense of the absurd, give a goal to the pointless, triumph magnificently in the game called football, also called life.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=4788

‘Salamat’ Poe June 13, 2006

I DISAGREE strenuously with those who criticize the Poe family for spurning the National Artist Award for Fernando Poe Jr. I disagree even more strenuously with those who lament the injection of “politics” in art, accusing the Poes of the crime.

The people who say those things forget their history, specifically the history of the National Artist Award itself. That Award has been steeped in politics, and I do not mean by that, simply the intramurals that go into its choice of artists. I leave that to the people in the arts to debate, as they have done so furiously over the decades. All awards will always be fraught with politics in that respect. I know because I have been a judge in various writing competitions for many years. Decisions are an engraved invitation to controversy, some more than others.

But far than that, when it first arose, the National Artist Award had both a laudable and un-laudable function. The laudable one was to give artists the importance due them, and not quite incidentally the wherewithal to pursue their Muse without having to worry where the next rent money would come from, a vexation artists are especially prone to.

The un-laudable one was to legitimize an illegitimate government. Though the Award was established months before martial law, in April 1972, it wasn’t until May the following year that the Cultural Center of the Philippines Board of Trustees was constituted by a Marcos proclamation and mandated to administer the Award.

The Award wasn’t just meant to make the artist look good, an intention writ in elegant language; it was also meant to make martial law look good, a motive left unarticulated but was plain for everyone to see. Certainly, that motive wasn’t lost on Nick Joaquin, who was the obvious and unanimous choice for National Artist for Literature from the start. As people would later recall, it was a unique situation where the Award was desperately seeking the awardee and not the awardee the Award. For years, despite the intercession of fellow artists who had joined the regime, Joaquin stood pat on his refusal to accept the Award.

He finally relented in 1976, in an act that gave the public new insights into the meaning of art and life. He agreed to accept the Award on the condition that writer-activist Pete Lacaba was released from Bicutan. Aware of Joaquin’s stature and the gaping hole left in the Award by his absence in it, the regime conceded to his demand. Later, at a ceremony in Mt. Makiling that had former first lady Imelda Marcos for guest, Joaquin delivered a speech about the inseparable connection between art and freedom. He was never invited to any official function after that. You can’t get more political than that. You can’t get more artistic than that.

That was pretty much the same situation last Friday. The Defender of the Faith, Mike Defensor, said before the awarding ceremonies that it was unfortunate that the Award should be tainted by politics. He should have told that to his boss. Clearly, as in martial law days, the citing of FPJ (Poe’s initials) as National Artist wasn’t just meant to make FPJ look good, it was meant to make President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo look good. It wasn’t just meant to recognize FPJ’s contributions to film, it was meant to recognize Arroyo’s claim to the presidency. It wasn’t just meant to legitimize FPJ as a genuine artist, it was meant to legitimize Arroyo as a genuine president.

None of this is to say that the others shouldn’t also have accepted their awards. Why in hell, or heaven, shouldn’t they? The Award also had the completely meritorious function of recognizing their work and reminding this country -- especially the “Material Girl” who handed out the awards -- that (wo)man does not live by bread alone. All this is merely to say that FPJ’s kin had special and compelling reasons to reject it.
At the very least, why should they have agreed to receive the award from the one person who not only robbed the awardee of another award -- though a much inferior one compared to being National Artist -- which was to be President of the Philippines, but also did her very best to cast doubt on FPJ’s nationality? Lest we forget, that was the issue Arroyo or her minions first raised against Poe to scare off his possible backers -- that he was not a Filipino. Which, as I said then, was monumentally ironic given that, for good or ill, Poe had helped mightily to define what being Filipino -- or at least being a Filipino male -- was. He was the quintessential hero a whole generation of Filipinos tried to emulate. For him to have been cast off from his tribe would have voided an entire chapter of Philippine cultural history.

For him now to have been proclaimed National Artist by the one person who sought to becloud his being a national, if not his being an artist, that was consuelo de bobo (fool’s consolation) of bubonic proportions, and Poe’s kin are anything but bobos, bubonic or otherwise.

At the very most, what is the essence of art really but the true, the good and the beautiful? That phrase, of course, was Imelda’s favorite, a thing she raised to a battle cry in her time, which was memorable only for being a satirical commentary on her and her husband’s rule. The Poes had every reason to see in it the same ironic commentary on Arroyo’s rule -- the proposition that the current occupant of Malacañang had any right to preside over an activity dedicated to the true, the good and the beautiful rubbing salt on their wounds. Truth was the last thing they could possibly associate with her. Goodness, well, Susan Roces did say she had looked into Arroyo’s eyes and found no contrition there. And as to beauty, you could not blame them if they found her very existence an aesthetic assault to body and soul.

I personally would like to thank them for reminding us of some of the things that matter in life, love and art. Salamat Poe.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=4672