Thank God for Alan Peter Cayetano September 14, 2006

I AM protesting discrimination. My good friend Billy Esposo has had a libel case filed against him by Mike Arroyo. My good friend Ellen Tordesillas has had a libel case filed against her by Mike Arroyo. My friend Lito Banayo has had a libel case filed against him by Mike Arroyo. My colleagues Jake Macasaet, Mon Tulfo and the editorial staff of myfavorite newspaper, the Inquirer, have had a libel case filed against them by Mike Arroyo.

I have not had a libel case filed against me by Mike Arroyo. I feel left out. I protest!

What can I say? The people the First Gentleman -- never has that title taken on richer irony, both the "first" and the "gentleman" -- has decided to sue are excellent company. This is truly one case that proves the local saying that when you point a finger at someone, four fingers point right back at you. You can't get along with one journalist, fine, that journalist is probably disagreeable even if he has a good name. You can't get along with two journalists, fine, those journalists are probably disagreeable even if you start raising doubts about yourself. You can't get along with three journalists, still fine, those journalists are probably disagreeable even if you're really pushing your luck.

You can't get along with these many journalists, you are disagreeable.

The monumentally ironic thing here is that the First Gentleman is suing all these people for libel. What does libel really mean but that someone is lying through his teeth willfully and maliciously for no other reason than that it pleases him to do so? Does that practice ring a bell? Or does it ring a phone with the ring-tone "Hello, Garci"? One is tempted to say that the First Gentleman should look closer to home (literally), but that presumes he can recognize the truth if it fell on his head from a tree.

Still, the one case the First Gentleman has filed that's bound to boomerang on him ferociously is not one against a journalist, but against a congressman. He is Alan Peter Cayetano, who has brought the First Gentleman's ire upon his head by claiming that the First Gentleman has carted off a fortune to a Munich bank. Fuming, the First Gentleman flew off to Munich in the company of lawyers to disprove Cayetano's allegation and came back with documents that showed the account Cayetano said belonged to him does not exist. He demanded an apology from Cayetano and, getting none, has since tried to get the full force of the law -- such as passes for it in this country -- to bear on the young man.

Well, Providence does move in mysterious ways. Thank God, Arroyo has the kind of advisers he has. His frenetic attempt at retribution, which includes ousting Cayetano from Congress, is clearly a blunder. If he had ignored Cayetano's allegation to begin with, it would probably have gone away quietly. Scandals in this country have a very short shelf life, aided in no small way by the sheer plenitude of them -- you've got to top one scandal with a bigger scandal to get noticed, a veritable feat in light of the mind-boggling scandals scandalizing us today. But Arroyo had to get back, and so gave (robust) life to the very thing he wanted to kill.

At the very least, he has drawn attention to the fact that he refuses to sign a waiver, as Cayetano demands, allowing a search of the German banks for any accounts by him and kin. Panfilo Lacson, who also calls himself a gentleman, along with officer, did that when by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and company accused him of hiding loot in the United States. He waived any restrictions on disclosure by the US banks of any accounts by him. They didn't find any.

Arroyo says he won't sign a waiver because there is nothing to waive. But if so, why did he fly off to Germany in the company of lawyers to try to prove his innocence? If he was as pure as driven snow, why didn't he just fly off to Vegas in the company of Manny Pacquiao and Lito Atienza and dared Cayetano to do his worst? A waiver easily puts all doubts to rest, proving not just that he is innocent but that Cayetano is a liar.

At the very most the First Gentleman has drawn attention to the vehemence with which he has tried to get back at Cayetano. Which can only suggest to a public (grown cynical from being regaled with fabulously wealthy and fabulously fictitious people like Jose Pidal) that Cayetano has struck gold in more ways than one. Truth has been known to hurt, and get people mad. Very, very mad.

Indeed, all the First Gentleman has done is draw attention to the concept of "gentleman." Gentlemen pride themselves on playing fair. All the First Gentleman has done by trying to disbar Cayetano from everything he holds dear is to show the First Gentleman to be a bully first -- and last. All he has done is to show the double standards at work today -- how impossible it is to oust a non-President who called up Garci and switched ballot boxes, and how easy it is to oust a congressman who called wrongdoing into question and tried to switch decency and honesty for lying and cheating.

In the end, all the First Gentleman has done is to turn Cayetano into a gentleman of the first order. I did say last year I hoped the young men and women, in particular those who rose brilliantly to impeach the usurper in Malacañang despite the hurdles put up by their old and jaded colleagues -- though many of them were still young and sprightly -- would never lose their principles along the way. The way many of their predecessors did: Look at the activists who once fought Ferdinand Marcos, now in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's ranks. I am glad Cayetano has lived up to his promise even if most of his comrades have not. The good thing with people who seem alone in a lonely fight is that they are not really so. The people are with them.

"Hindi ka nag-iisa" [You are not alone], Alan.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=20867

Ground rules September 13, 2006

DON'T look now, but the seemingly charismatic Tony Blair is eyeing oblivion. Last week, pressured by his party and public opinion, he announced that he would resign by next year. It hasn't appeased the unions, the backbone of the Labor Party, which would rather he resign immediately.

The reason for this is that the longer he stays on as prime minister, the worse off the Labor Party becomes. Surveys show that Labor is losing its grip on voters, no small thanks to Blair who, like Margaret Thatcher before him, is seen as the American poodle. I know John Le Carre had much to say about Britain's fall from king to beggar after World War II, but I myself never thought Britain's leaders would allow themselves to look thispathetic: stooping to the level of Reagan and George W whose collective IQ cannot reach the diastolic reading of their individual BPs.

What has proved the wrecking ball in Blair's career apparently is a picture of him stooping down to a seated George W soon after the Israeli bombing of Hezbollah and giving advice to someone who wasn't particularly minding him. A picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, it is worth more than a thousand votes-lost.

I mention the affairs of a country that might as well be located in another planet as far as most Filipinos are concerned simply because they bear directly on something that looms upon us today. Which is a shift to a parliamentary system that Jose de Venecia's Mafia in Congress has been trying to foist on us. Blair's (impending) resignation shows why a parliamentary system works in a country like Britain and why it won't work in a country like ours.

First off, it needs real parties to work. A real party is one that advocates certain principles to which their members subscribe. You don't change principles like you change clothes, you don't switch parties like you switch ballot boxes. I remember the reaction of a Japanese political officer when I asked him if Japanese politicians have been known to switch parties. He was speechless, he could not grasp the concept. All he could say after a while was: "But if he did that, no one would vote for him."

By that definition alone, we do not have any political party, with the possible exception of the Communist Party of the Philippines, which you can desert only at risk of joining your comrades in the "killing fields." In this country, politicians join and leave parties with the ease with which they take up and leave mistresses. The kind of political parties we have is indistinguishable from the riotous parties kids have with the aid of beer and Ecstasy. At least the kids screw only themselves, the politicians screw the nation.

Indeed, in a country like Britain, you have a whole spectrum of political beliefs represented by the political parties. You even have Sinn Fein, a spin-off from the Irish Republican Army among them. Of course, in this country we also have a party-list party like Bayan Muna. But the difference is that Sinn Fein's members are able to campaign freely while Bayan Muna's members are being murdered freely by General Jovito Palparan's hordes.

A parliamentary system will not produce real parties, real parties will produce a parliamentary system. The only parliament non-real parties will produce is the parliament of thieves, or a crime syndicate not unlike the Mafia we now have in Congress. Only worse. Much, much worse.

Second off, a parliamentary system requires sensitivity to public opinion. Blair is not the first prime minister to resign from adverse public opinion, and he won't be the last. Indeed, closer to home, not too long ago, Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin also resigned and called for new elections because of charges of corruption. The system is predicated on "delicadeza," or sense of propriety, not on "pakapalan," or the possessionof a thick hide.

True, in a parliamentary system, you do not need to impeach a prime minister to kick him out, you just need a vote of no confidence. But the opposite is just as true, if not truer: You will have absolutely no way of getting rid of a monstrous prime minister if his allies continue to repose confidence in him notwithstanding that the public has long withdrawn it. Indeed, notwithstanding that the public detests him.

As the recent impeachment bid showed, that is the case in this country. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's allies can always ignore public opinion and move like gangsters to kill any bid to oust her. Thaksin was merely hounded by charges of corruption, Arroyo is hounded by charges of stealing the vote. Blair merely labors from a picture of him literally stooping down to Bush's level, Arroyo labors from a tape that shows her stooping down to Garci's level -- or the other way around (I don't know who between them will find it more unflattering). The surveys say Thaksin and Blair were slipping in public esteem, the surveys say Arroyo never had public esteem. Thaksin resigned and Blair is about to resign, but Arroyo is still there and threatens to rule forever.

A parliamentary system will not produce sensitivity to public opinion, sensitivity to public opinion will produce a parliamentary system. Contempt for public opinion will not produce a parliament, it will produce a tyranny.

Third off, a parliamentary system, like a presidential one, presupposes that votes will be counted. That is the reason real political parties worry that their "bata" [protégé], or "manok" [bet], or prime minister, will drag them down at the polls if he gets too unpopular. But what if votes are not counted in the first place? What if parties, real or unreal, can just steal them in broad daylight?

If that's the case -- which it is today -- who the hell cares whether we have a presidential or parliamentary system? It will be, as the Thais say, "sem-sem."

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=20654

Good and bad September 12, 2006

JOVITO Palparan, says the New People's Army (NPA, is a "dead man walking." That would be so especially after yesterday, the birthday of Ferdinand Marcos, the kamikaze-style razing of the World Trade Center five years ago, and the day of Palparan's retirement. The NPA does not forget, and Palparan's "crimes against the people" do not require the memory of elephants.

Palparan himself is unfazed. He figured -- rightly -- that he would be thrown a bone in the form of another government position as his reward from a government in whose name he has murdered. A position that would keep him safe and in power. He has shrugged off the threat saying -- wrongly -- that the people would protect him.

What can I say? They can play their macho games all they want, but neither of them is going to get any sympathy from the public.

The NPA's knee-jerk reaction to Palparan merely shows why government targeted its members in the first place. Which is that they have a way of alienating the public with their own murderous ways, couched in quasi-judicial and completely injudicious language. Their threat to Palparan, passed off as a revolutionary way of righting wrongs, in fact merely reminds the public of the revolutionary way they massacred their own comrades whom they suspected of being spies (the "killing fields") and the revolutionary way they assassinated their own leaders who had broken from their ranks and whom they presumed to have become counter-revolutionary.

At the very least, what's wrong with their threat is that even if they manage to carry it out, it won't weaken government but strengthen it. I don't know that for all Palparan's willingness to do as Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo bids over and beyond the call of mayhem, Arroyo would be greatly overwrought to see him go. All sending Palparan to the next life would do, quite apart from torment the residents of the next life, is give Arroyo her own 9/11.

Lest we forget, 9/11 did not weaken the imbecile George W. Bush, it gave him a new lease on life, enough to win a second term. Without having to resort to dagdag-bawas, as he did the first time in Florida and as his poodle in that obscure country in the Pacific called the Philippines more blatantly did. Almost overnight, it allowed the worst elements in the American Right to seize power, invade Afghanistan and Iraq and support Israel in its occupation of Lebanon, and terrorize the local populace with the Homeland Security Act. 9/11 did not put fear in the hearts of Americans (the Bush administration did that more effectively), it put anger in them. Instead of scorning Nixon and Kissinger's ideological successors, Bush and Cheney, like the plague, they embraced them.

If the NPA manages to assassinate Palparan, it won't put the brakes on Arroyo's campaign of terror against its members and her critics, who are often indistinguishable, it will release it completely. It will allow the worst elements in the AFP, notably the generals who helped Arroyo cheat, to do pretty much anything they please in the name of fighting a vicious enemy. GMA herself will find in that assassination the moral ground to fulminate against the NPA the way Bush found the moral ground to rail against al-Qaeda, making the world forget the atrocities they themselves wreaked upon the world.

At the very most, for all Palparan's homicidal bent, he is no better and no worse than Raul Gonzalez, a convenient lightning rod to attract lightning, or clown to draw laughter. The policy does not originate from him, even if he is perfectly capable of improvising sanguinely on it or indeed bringing it to its logical -- or bloodthirstily insane -- conclusion. It originates from Arroyo, and ultimately from the near-universal perception of her illegitimacy. Illegitimacy breeds dictatorship -- and madness.

The killings won't go away with Palparan because they have found justification or reinforcement in the ideology or culture of war. Even worse than the killings themselves, as I've repeatedly said, is the ease with which they have been rationalized and met with indifference, if not tacit acceptance, by the public. Even worse than the summary execution of people is the extirpation of the very spirit of democracy. Even worse than the deaths of activists and journalists is the culture of death that is thriving in the national mind and making those deaths possible.

You cannot fight that by assassinating individuals, notwithstanding that those individuals are butchers in their own right, or wrong. The only way to fight force is with force, true, but at the profoundest level what that really means is that the only way to fight brute force is with the force of principle. The only way to kill a bad idea is with a good idea.

You want to stop the killings, you do not show that you are just as capable of killing as the enemy. You show that you are capable of valuing life. You want to stop the rioting of the culture of war, you do not add fuel to the fire by escalating the violence. You wage peace against those who wage war. You want to stop the widespread acceptance of death, you foment the widespread demand for life.

The killings won't be stopped by more killings, they will be stopped by more human rights, or a nation demanding to have them. The deaths won't be stopped by more deaths, they will be stopped by more democracy, or a nation demanding to get it back. The war won't be stopped by more war, it will be stopped by a nation demanding to have peace-not the peace of the dead but the peace of justice. Peace and justice are but two sides of the same coin. They are not two concepts, they are one.

As in Ferdinand Marcos' time, as in any dictator's time, if we want to stop the killings, we have to wage the campaign for justice and peace, human rights and freedom, antiwar and anti-tyranny all over again.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=20414

Five years after September 11, 2006

FIRST, THERE WAS PAUL GREENGRASS’ “UNIT-ed 93,” which told of the passengers of the ill-fated plane who fought off a group of hijackers-suicide bombers during 9/11. Now comes Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” which tells of two firemen who, trying to rescue the people trapped in the rubble of the razed buildings, got themselves pinned underneath it.

I haven’t seen either, even though both have gotten warm reviews—an increasingly rare feat these days with bad Hollywood movies piling up faster than corpses in Iraq and the Philippines. Stone’s piece has, in particular, critics agreeing it is so un-Stone. That is to say, it shows a lot of restraint, something the director is not particularly known for. Indeed, it strives for the human rather than the political, even eschewing moral judgment. If you want a movie that openly reviles terrorism, the critics say, watch something else.

I’ll probably see both movies eventually. But my reticence at doing so at this point is the tremendous ambivalence I feel not at the event itself but at the American attitude toward it. Some reviewers have already noted that at last America is coming to terms with it, finally willing to confront the pain of it, the way it did in the 1970s and 1980s about the Vietnam War, a self-examination or rumination pioneered by directors that included Stone himself. Which should result in something positive, a national catharsis that should help the nation to move on.

That isn’t the problem at all.

One critic, Ty Burr, catches a glimpse of the real problem when he says about “World Trade Center: “One reason ‘World Trade Center’ is such a good, healing cry is that it absolves us of the discomfort of thinking about everything that has happened since.”

That may be good for Americans, but it is not good for the world. The problem has never been when America will come to terms with the pain of 9/11, the problem has always been when America will come to terms with the pain of the 9/11s it has inflicted upon the world. The problem has never been when America will come to confront its pain, the problem has always been when America will come to confront the pain of others.

Doubtless 9/11 was a horrific day, a day that will rank up there in the annals of infamy. The images are burnt in our minds, the planes sailing almost serendipitously into the buildings one fine sunny day, the sudden ball of fire flaring at midsection, the structures collapsing like a set from a Godzilla movie—the Japanese kind where the props look like there were, well, “made in (1950s) Japan.” That is from afar. From the streets, where some people managed to take videos, you saw sights and sounds unimaginable in any American city, not to speak of America’s proudest one, where stands the Statue of Liberty. You saw people leaping to their deaths, you heard the screams of terror.

I have no problems with the dead being laid to rest with wreaths of public homage, their courage extolled in movies and articles, and their lives recalled each time 9/11 rolls in. I have a problem, however, with that being done without the same thing being done for the thousands of Afghans who died as the United States tried to bomb their country back to the Stone Age, the thousands of Iraqis who, like many of the dead in 9/11, choked on the dying air while trapped in the rubble produced by George W’s smart bombs—a monumental contradiction in terms— and the thousands of Lebanese, and not quite incidentally foreign nationals, like Filipino maids, who disappeared from the face of the earth as Israeli bombs howled like the wind in Hezbollah. No, more than this, without their existence even being acknowledged or impaled into reality with name or face.

We see only images from afar, bombs sending off colorful fireworks in the night sky, fuzzy outlines of buildings not unlike the fuzzy images from consoles in arcades that say after a few minutes, “Game Over.” The dead do not carry with them a name or a face, they carry with them, as the line up the wayside, a tag that says “Collateral.”

This unbelievable blindness or deafness does not make the repeated homage to the dead in 9/11 moving, it makes it at best narcissistic. It sends a message as horrific as 9/11 itself, a message expressly articulated by the American leaders who waged the Vietnam War, which is that the death of one American weighs more heavily upon the human conscience than the death of a thousand peasants in Vietnam or a thousand children in Iraq.

Shortly after 9/11, I heard Sting sing “Fragile” to mourn the 3,000 dead in New York, and I felt my hair stand on end. Never had his lines taken on such depth of meaning: “If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one/Drying in the color of the evening sun …/Perhaps this final act was meant/To clinch a lifetime’s argument/That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could/For all those born beneath an angry star/Lest we forget how fragile we are.”

Shortly after 9/11 as well, I heard Billy Joel sing tearfully “New York State of Mind,” his paean to the city he loves, and it took on the aspect of the loss of innocence or the stilling of laughter forever. And I was awed too by the unspeakable pathos of it.

But aren’t we all the same? Aren’t we all—black, white, brown, yellow, red and green—fragile? Aren’t all of us—American and Iraqi, Israeli and Lebanese—devastated by the razing of our New York, Baghdad, Tel Aviv and Beirut states of mind?

* * *

From Lea Salonga: “Hi. Just read Conrado de Quiros’ article today. I got a mention saying I trained at St. Joseph’s College. That is not true. I was a scholar at UP when I was a kid (piano and music).”

My profoundest apologies! I stand corrected.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=20213

Losers, winners September 7, 2006

THERE were a couple of seemingly unrelated stories on our front page last Monday and Tuesday.

The first told of the ordeal of Elmer Jacinto, the topnotcher in the 2004 medical board exams. He dismayed a great many of his compatriots by choosing to work as a nurse in New York instead of as a doctor in Lamitan, Basilan, where he hails from, or any part of this country. New York, however, proved more brown than green for him, or the Big Apple turned out to have a worm in it, courtesy of a recruiting agency which reneged on virtually everything it promised, from comfortable quarters to decent pay. Jacinto and several other Filipino nurses, themselves mostly MD holders in the Philippines, have filed a suit in New York to renounce their contract with the recruiting agency and its US partner.

The second story told of several big businessmen lamenting the absence of a qualified Filipino workforce to meet the needs of local business. "Most graduates are not well-prepared for the realities of the job market," says Alfred Ty, president of Metrobank Foundation. "The needs of industries and college preparation do not match and continue to drift apart."

The problem, says Lance Gokongwei, is that graduates are ill equipped in English and Math. "It's sad that there are many college graduates who now can't even speak a straight sentence in English, much less write one."

And Lucio Tan says the problem is political will. "There was a time in the mid-'50s when the Philippines was in the same league as Japan economically and academics-wise. Fifty years down the road, we are not only lagging behind, we are almost dead last in the Asean region. Our leaders and educators know what went wrong, they just don't have the political will to correct the mistakes of the past."

Well, first off, Tan shouldn't really be drawing too much attention to the mistakes of the past. He contributed mightily to them. Gokongwei is right to say that the problem of the lack of qualified graduates began during martial law when the regime became preoccupied with security rather than education and diverted huge sums to it. He might have added that the economy also went into a tailspin from cronyism, most of the cronies doing nothing with their behest loans but live lives of kitschy ostentation. The practice did not disappear afterward, it became a staple. Tan talks too loudly about correcting the mistakes of the past, Pidal might be sorely tempted to collect his back taxes.

I don't know that poor English is really a problem. You can't have worse English speakers than the Chinese and Thais. You need no further proof of the first than the blurbs in the covers of your favorite pirated DVD. The English there is absolutely atrocious -- not to speak of absolutely droll, the manufacturers of the pirated stuff putting out as blurbs savage commentaries about the movie by critics. Yet China is now poised economically to take over Asia and the rest of the world, to the chagrin of Japan and the United States. And Thailand, which used to send students here to study at University of the Philippines' College of Agriculture in Los Baños, is now a tiger to our lamb or dragon to our mouse. A language exists to allow people to communicate with each other, not merely to findwork. The second in any case is dependent on the first: A people cannot communicate with each other, it will never be able to find work. Or more importantly, create one.

I disagree that current education and jobs do not jibe. In fact, the opposite is true, which is the problem: Current education and jobs do jibe. Lest it escape notice, even the most respectable local universities are turning whole wings into nursing departments. During Sister Mariani's wake last year, I was astounded to learn that St. Joseph College's excellent music department (Lea Salonga developed her talents there as a kid) had become just that, a nursing wing. The entire educational system no longer exists to educate, it exists to find work for students -- abroad. The entire educational system is blindly obeying the law of supply and demand. It's probably true that current education and local jobs do not jibe. But local jobs are no longer the priorities of students.

Which brings me to Jacinto and company. The two stories are only seemingly unrelated, they are in fact related by the surest of links, which is cause and effect. The problem is that the entire country, and not just the educational system, is now geared toward producing people who can work abroad, whatever work is available and whatever sacrifices need to be made. At the very least that translates not just into a huge drain ofscant brain but a huger drain of scanter resources. This country spends a fortune to produce doctors, only to see them work as nurses in foreign hospitals. How lucky can you get, being an American or Brit who has a nurse with the qualifications of a doctor to attend to you!

The problem is that we have lost all sense of ambition altogether, we are willing to settle for crumbs, comfort ourselves that beggars cannot be choosers, and lug around a loser's mentality. No small thanks to a current government that keeps lowering our already horrendously diminished expectations. We're now even willing to settle for a President we did not vote for.

Ironically, the three representatives of big business above by, of, and in themselves show the solution to the problem. They remind us of the non-joke about the difference between the Filipino and the Chinese-Filipino graduate. The Filipino graduate when he sees another Filipino graduate asks, "What job have you landed?" The Chinese-Filipino graduate when he sees another Chinese-Filipino graduate asks, "What business have you put up?"

The question need not always be how to find a job, it can always be how to create one. That is the differeence between loser and winner.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=19445