Contrast, irony, paradox October 26, 2006

WALKING side by side down the red-carpeted aisle leading to Malacañang, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Surayud Chulanont looked like a study in contrast. Surayud, of course, is the prime minister of Thailand. At first blush, or on the face of it, the contrast was this:

Surayud has just been benefited by a coup, having been installed as prime minister by the generals who seized power from Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Arroyo has just survived a coup that never took place, or a "withdrawal of support" by several generals from her government. Surayud was never elected as head of his government, Arroyo was elected head of her government. Surayud presides over a dictatorship, one that has been mounted against the sovereign will of the Thais. Arroyo presides over a democracy, one that enjoys the mandate of the Filipino voters. By rights, Surayud should be reviled by his people, and by rights Arroyo should be beloved by hers. By rights, Surayud should be held accountable by the civilized world and regarded as a pariah in it. By rights, Arroyo should be embraced by the civilized world and given pride of place in its councils.

In fact, the opposite is true. It is a study in contrast, but one with the most supremely ironic twists.

Or pretty much most of it. The only thing in fact that's not a contrast is that both of them are the product of a coup. And here the ironies get thicker and richer. Arroyo was not the product of a coup in 2001, however Joseph Estrada's followers still argue the point, saying the impeachment case against Estrada, the duly -- indeed formidably – elected president was never concluded. Well, the impeachment trial might not have concluded in the court of law but it had concluded in the court of public opinion, which is supreme a court as you can get, more supreme than the one Hilario Davide headed. Arroyo came to power in 2001 legally, constitutionally, morally. Alas, also tragically, at least for the nation.

Arroyo came to power as a result of a coup only in May 2004. The importance of that fact can never be sufficiently belabored. There is no other way to describe the theft of the vote in those elections, particularly given garish face or voice by the "Hello, Garci" tape. It was just as violent and forcible a seizure of power as that done with arms, and has been defended as violently and forcibly ever since. Indeed, bloodily: Congressman Edcel Lagman was right to use the metaphor of a corpse for the impeachment bid, "It was dead on arrival," "It was a cadaver," etc. Guess who made it so. The metaphor would not long remain a metaphor after the impeachment bid failed. Real corpses began piling up all over the country.

Both Surayud and Arroyo are the products of a coup. But there the similarities end. Surayud may have been the product of a coup, but he is widely accepted -- and respected -- by his people. The Thais did not moan and groan when the generals ousted Thaksin, they breathed a sigh of relief, thanks in no small way to the endorsement of the coup by King Bhumibol himself. Surayud is so secure in his position he feels free to travel without fear of embarrassing himself, or being met by protests, for being an illegitimate ruler.

Arroyo is the ostensible winner of the elections, but nobody believes it, including the congressmen who defend her at all costs. Or at least, as in the case of Jose de Venecia, at costs other than his own ambition to become prime minister of this country. The Filipinos did not moan and groan when her government kept warning that "destabilizers" were out to destabilize her, they danced for joy. It was not a warning, it was a glad tiding; it was not a threat, it was a promise of deliverance. The Filipinos did moan and groan when the "withdrawal of support" by Danny Lim et al. met only with a withdrawal of support from Hermogenes Esperon and the other generals who helped Arroyo cheat the hell out of the voters of Muslim Mindanao, as proclaimed by the "Hello, Garci" tape. Some wept openly, and cried, "What a hapless country we are!"

Thailand under Surayud remains a working democracy, the Philippines under Arroyo has become a working dictatorship.

Although the new Thai government was mounted by the generals, the generals themselves did not take power, they gave up power, with the King's blessings, to a former military commander-turned near-Buddhist monk- turned environmentalist after retirement. Not quite incidentally, Surayud's father, Phayom, was the Thai version of Gen. Raymundo Jarque, and more: A member of the Thai Royal Military, he left his post to become a central committee member of the Communist Party of Thailand. Obviously, the Thai military has not taken that against Surayud. He is still alive.

Although the new Philippine government was mounted by a civilian coup plotter, with the aid of a "certain Comelec official," she soon turned over power to the military, notably the generals who helped her to "Garci" (verb, meaning _____ -- well, feel free to supply it) the voters. Increasingly so, after they helped her survive Lim's withdrawal of support last February. The logic of survival under a shroud of illegitimacy has compelled Arroyo to employ measures that fall little short of martial law. Malacañang's attempt to unseat the duly elected mayor of Makati City on charges it is guiltier of -- namely, hiring ghosts -- is ironclad proof of it. If the Palace failed, it wasn't for lack of trying. It was for much of the victim's defying.

In Thailand, long-standing institutions bend the country to their will; in the Philippines an overstaying usurper bends the country to her will. In Thailand, the dog wags the tail; in the Philippines the tail wags the dog.

It's a contrast wrapped in an irony locked in a paradox.

What can I say? Let's still import some Thai generals.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=28749

Insults October 25, 2006

I CAUGHT snatches of "Philippine Idol" on the television channel ABC 5 last weekend, and I was astonished far less by the performances, though some of them were quite impressive (this country is truly a bottomless well for musical talent), but by the comments of the judges. The feedback that they had been too charitable in the past seemed to have bit, and they decided to turn in a new leaf -- of the more poisonous sort. To a man, and woman (Ryan Cayabyab, Pilita Corrales, Wency Cornejo), they lookeddetermined to act the new part.

Cayabyab more than the others. His comments were rich, or wickedly delicious. He told one contestant (or words to this effect -- I'm quoting from memory): "Your voice has never been your greatest asset. You've always paled in comparison to the others. Over the past weeks, you've only proven that more and more: You've gone from bad to worse. Your journey with 'Philippine Idol' should have ended much earlier."

It wasn't quite Simon Cowell in venomous relish, but it caught a bit of the spirit. Since then, I've heard the same tack in other musical programs with a similar format, judges or (musical school) headmasters trying to put contestants away, or down, with acerbic wit. Sometimes it comes off with aplomb. Most of the time, it sounds just a little cruel.

A word of advice to those planning to embark on the enterprise: It takes wit to carry off something like that. Without the wit, which is what makes it palatable despite the toxicity, all it leaves is a bad taste in the mouth. Cowell does have wit. Savageness alone doesn't quite hack it, or all it does is hack savagely. Savage wit is what does the trick. Insult is an art, which rises to magnificence with people like Oscar Wilde. It doesn't quite do to say that America hasn't entirely transcended its wilderness stage. Much better Wilde's "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decencies without civilization in between."

I do know another Simon who far surpasses Cowell in venom but who is a joy to listen to, or read. He was theater and movie critic John Simon who turned insult to a darkly lofty craft. A sample of his wit or cruelty: "(Barbra Streisand) a horse face centering on a nose that looks like Brancusi's Rooster cast in liverwurst." "Miss (Judy) Garland's figureresembles the giant-economy size tube of toothpaste in girls' bathrooms. Squeezed intemperately at all points, it acquires a shape that defies definition by the most resourceful solid geometrician." "Roger Daltrey (in 'Lisztomania') performed with a face as long as a mule and a talent considerably shorter."

The humor, of course, comes at somebody's expense, but what the hell, it's bloody hilarious.

Indeed, where the putdown is done verbally, it takes flair to carry it off. Cayabyab doesn't do badly in that department. I must confess I was taken aback by what he said about the contestant (I didn't expect something like that from a local show), but I must confess as well that I found myself exulting after my initial surprise. No point in filing up people with false hopes, particularly aspiring singers or musicians in a country crawling with talent. Who knows? Maybe it's good to challenge them that way because they can always prove the judgment wrong. If I recall right, Albert Einstein's teacher said he'd never get very far in the sciences because he wasn't very good at math. Boy, did he show him some numbers (and letters) -- e=mc² -- that spun this planet off its axis. You never know if a contestant might be moved enough in this way to move heaven and earth to prove he or she has a claim, if not a birthright, to stardom.

But to go back to what I was saying, Cayabyab didn't come across as crabby at all. He's the type who can say, "Don't give up your day job," without sounding offensive. The one who used to have flair, too, or even savoir faire, and could hold his own with the best of them was Edu Manzano. I really think he should go back and devote his energies to fighting boredom rather than fighting "pirates," but that's another story. In his case though, particularly as host of "The Weakest Link," the putdown was a ritual of sorts. All the guests knew they were up for some barb about their apparent ignorance and were up to it. But Manzano still did it breezily, turning his peculiar way of saying "Goodbye," done with outsized, self-mocking, curtness, into quite literally a household word.

The local term is "taray," but it doesn't quite capture the soul of it. I've seen and heard a lot of taray in reel and real life, and I can't say I find any redeeming virtue in much of it. It is neither witty nor wise. Nor is it kind to the ears, the taray invariably being delivered with a shrillness defying forbearance. It just makes you want to believe that God periodically sends boils, plagues and people like that your way to remind you, like Job, that life is pain.

The wittily crafted putdown, or death sentence -- which is how it comes across from judges of contests in particular, who are not unlike judges of Death Row cases -- is not like that at all. It leaves the audience at least, if not the subject of the barb, in a state of pleasurable amusement. A guilty pleasure no doubt, and a most un-Christian one, but a pleasure nonetheless. It takes talent to do that.

Some have it, some don't. Richard Nixon always wondered why when Harry S. Truman cursed, it sounded homespun, like it came from the village wag, while when he cursed it sounded obscene, like it came from a dockside thug. Quite simply, as people pointed out to him, he didn't know how to curse.

Ditto here. Some people know how to insult, some others just don't.

* * *

Don't forget, tonight the Stop the Killings bar tour moves on to Makati. Saguijo Bar @ 7612 Guijo St., San Antonio Village, with Parokya ni Edgar, Paramita, Giniling Fest, Salindiwa, and Spy, at 9:30.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=28509

Politics October 24, 2006

"WE CAN become a modern Philippines only by slaying the dragon of 'politics as usual.' Politics dominates our lives way out of proportion to the real needs of the people and a change in politics must be accompanied by a change in our system of government. To that end, we seek to amend the Constitution."

So Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo told a group of local and foreign legal luminaries at the Global Forum on Liberty and Prosperity. The title of that forum alone was no small satirical barb on the state of things under her rule. Liberty and prosperity are the two things this country does not have, thanks to her. But as satire goes, nothing beats her observation that this country is so besieged by politics it can do with a respite from it. What makes it satirical is she herself.

That statement comes from someone who came to prominence on the wings of politics of the worst sort. Which was by way of show biz, the one thing she would deign to frown upon later on. She ran for senator as an economist in 1992 and ended up at the bottom of the ladder. She ran as the "Nora Aunor of Philippine politics," complete with [expensive] posters and calendars in full-color Regal Films poses and topped the field.

That statement comes from someone who became president on the wings of politics. Of the most intense and lofty kind, which was people power, though her own participation in it constituted politics of the worst sort. She never risked life, limb or career to fight Joseph Estrada, she materialized only when the fight was nearly won in the company of Cory Aquino and Jaime Cardinal Sin, striking prayerful poses. She would later bite the hand that fed her, savaging Cory for opposing her.

That statement comes from someone who substituted politics for principle almost as soon as she swore her oath as a people-powered president. She thanked the generals first for coming to her aid, though they did so last; civil society was first. Challenged by "Edsa III," she spent her next three years trying to appease the Joseph Estrada loyalists rather than living up to the ideals that shoved her to Malacañang.

That tack made her the most unpopular president since Ferdinand Marcos. She solved that by adding whole new dimensions to "trapo politics" [traditional politics]. Namely, by lying barefacedly, or as the local phrase goes, "harap-harapan." To appease an angry nation, she swore on the grave of its national hero she would not run again but instead devote her remaining time to paving the way for her successor. She did nothing of the kind, of course.

That statement comes from someone who ransacked the treasury to campaign. Who's guilty of harboring a billboard complex? Who littered the highways from Aparri to Jolo with outsized billboards assaulting an impoverished people with her grinning face? That is not to speak of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office's and Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp.'s running ads hourly on TV proclaiming her virtues and the Department of Agriculture giving fertilizer funds to congressmen who needed only to have their minds fertilized. Joc-joc Bolante is living proof of it, and it is the United, not the Philippines, that is prosecuting him. With no taint of politics.

That statement comes from someone who spoke with then-commission of elections Virgilio Garcillano, demanding to win by one million votes.

That statement comes from someone who became president a second time on the wings of politics of the most vicious sort. That was by way of a coup -- a coup wrought not by God but by Garci, not by bullet but by ballot, not by people power but by trapo power. It was not at Edsa People Power II that Arroyo mounted a putsch, it was at Elections 2004.

That statement comes from someone who turned her back on the very thing that brought her to power. What brought her to power was Estrada's impeachment, a luminous exercise in transparency, and the massing of people at the Edsa highway, a more luminous exercise in democracy. What kept her in power was Executive Order 464 preventing witnesses like Gudani and Balutan from testifying against her, a malicious exercise in opacity, and "calibrated preemptive response," a carte-blanche order to scuttle protest rallies, preferably violently, which was a vicious exercise in tyranny.

That order comes from someone whose answer to a "withdrawal of support" by military officers was to plunge the country into martial law.

That statement comes from someone who has added still new meanings to political expedience by murdering people. Today, close to 100 journalists have been killed and a whole barangay of political activists has been "salvaged" or made to disappear. At one point, the killings were happening at one a day. And just when we thought it was tapering off because Aroyo was embarrassed on her last trip abroad, Makati City Mayor Jejomar Binay's security chief was shot to death in broad daylight and a couple of Aglipayan Church ministers, one of them its former "maximo Obispo" [highest bishop], were murdered. Can there be a worse sort of politics than the murderous sort?

That statement comes from someone who tried to oust a duly elected official while not being one herself. By Local Government Secretary Ronaldo Puno's own avowal, he wasn't the one who signed the papers suspending Binay; Eduardo Ermita did, and by extension Arroyo herself. If the suspension hadn't been defied and protested frenetically by Binay, his followers, the folk of Makati, businessmen and bishops, civil society and uncivil media, Arroyo might have gotten away with showing that right here right now, she can do pretty much as she pleases. I grant that's not "politics as usual." That is politics most unusual.

I agree completely: "Politics dominates our lives way out of proportion to the real needs of the people." The real needs of the people are to have a president they voted for, to have the officials they did vote for not worry about being suspended, and, never mind even all that, just not to be murdered. That can't be gotten by changing the Constitution.

Guess what change will do the trick.

* * *

Tomorrow, Wednesday, Oct. 25, the Stop the Killings bar tour stops by Saguijo Bar, 7612 Guijo St., San Antonio Village, Makati. Featured artists: Parokya ni Edgar, Paramita, Giniling Fest, Salindiwa, and Spy. Show starts at 9:30. Stop inventing excuses, go there.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=28298

Shameless in Manila October 23, 2006

RAUL GONZALEZ IS LIVID (WHAT ELSE IS new?). The Court of Appeals, he says, exceeded its authority when it ruled to lift Jejomar Binay off the hook. “The TRO was supposed to only suspend the suspension. But it also ordered that we should stop the investigation. Binay was only asking for a TRO to suspend the suspension.”

That statement comes from a justice secretary who thought he wasn’t exceeding the bounds of justice, not to speak of common decency, when he was practically lawyering for the accused Americans in the Nicole rape case. I myself will suspend judgment (in the spirit of suspensions) about that case, but I will not suspend judgment about the way Gonzalez comported himself in it, which was, to put it mildly, absolutely shameless. Indeed, the above statement comes from a justice secretary who continues to think, along with Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita, that he is not exceeding his authority, or what passes for it, by agreeing to prevent public officials from appearing in the Senate notwithstanding that the Supreme Court has trashed EO 464.

Indeed that statement comes in the face of an initiative (to muscle out a duly elected public official) that goes past the bounds not just of decency but of sanity itself. I heard the exchange between Binay and Interior Secretary Ronaldo Puno last Tuesday night, during the first day of Binay’s suspension, and nothing could be more damning for government. To say that Binay reduced Puno to fumbling inarticulateness is to say Gonzalez is not always in the full possession of his senses: It is the understatement of the year. After Binay repeatedly challenged Puno to show proof of a ghost employee under his watch, indeed after demanding to know what kind of investigation was conducted for Puno to conclude wrongdoing on Binay’s part, Puno tried to exculpate himself by blaming his bosses for the crime. He wasn’t the one who fired Binay, he said at length, Malacañang did.

This was after one public official after another had been reciting like a mantra that there was nothing “political” about the suspension of Binay. The dismissal of a local official signed by the executive secretary and not by the secretary of the DILG—an astonishing usurpation of authority—is not political? The attempt to dismiss a duly elected official who happens to be a thorn in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s side by GMA herself—by Puno’s own suggestion—is not political?

In fact, all that is accomplished by Gonzalez et al.’s continuing effort to hound Binay notwithstanding the Court of Appeals’ rebuff is to etch the contrast between Binay’s and GMA’s cases even more sharply. The ease with which elected officials can be yanked out today for any offense, real or imagined, is matched only by the impossibility of doing the same thing to an unelected one, whose very “unelected-ness,” implying as it does the theft of vote, by itself constitutes treason. The zealousness with which public officials entrusted with enforcing law and justice try to see wrongdoing where there is none, or little, is matched only by the zealousness with which those institutions entrusted with safeguarding reason and morality undertake to see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil where evil riots more savagely than the drunken istambays in the narrow alleys of this benighted metropolis.

What was Puno suggesting during that confrontation with Binay last Tuesday? Binay was being suspended prior to investigation to prevent him from signing checks as a precaution just in case he turned out to be guilty of paying off ghost employees. What happened during both times that this country tried to impeach GMA? Her allies in Congress said they could not suspend her from being President because the Garci tape was inadmissible as evidence—as though it was all right to allow a terrorist caught on tape planning to bomb churches and schoolhouses in Metro Manila to become the country’s national security chief because he was taped clandestinely.

In the first, there is a monstrous willingness to take utmost precaution against a threat that is at least negligible and at best has yet to be proven. In the second, there is an even more monstrous willingness to allow the country to be razed by a threat that is at least lethal and at most has been proven by words that come straight from the horse’s mouth—my profoundest apologies to horses.

I am glad Binay and company have defied the suspension for the iniquity that it is. I am glad the business community has not acted opportunistically to endorse an act that adds whole new dimensions to the meaning of opportunism. Who knows? Maybe the businessmen saw that, as with Marcos, absolute power corrupts absolutely: leaders who have absolute power do not only persecute their enemies, they persecute everyone.

I am glad the Court of Appeals has shown the public can still appeal to its sense of justice. I am glad that the NGOs, Church elements, the opposition and various personalities, not the least of them Cory Aquino and Susan Roces, and Eddie Villanueva, trekked to Makati to show their sympathy and support for Binay. You do not have to like Binay to do something like that, you need only to love fairness. I am glad the residents of Makati gathered around their mayor the way village folk flock around their pregnant women with burning torches during manananggal sightings to ward off evil. And I am glad the media and the public expressed their detestation of that foul deed. If they hadn’t, it truly would have been time to go abroad or to the hills—this country would no longer be capable of offering justice.

Gonzalez and company say this thing is by no means over. They are right. But, of course, this thing is by no means over:

This country has just begun to fight.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=28115