Believe it or not December 21, 2006

WE HAVE a situation today that is truly one for the books. We have a situation today that knocks at the door of Ripley's "Believe It Or Not." That situation is: Come January next year, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will be the longest-serving president in this country since 1986.

GMA will have occupied Malacañang longer than Corazon Aquino, the Filipino leader who was loved apart from respected, at least by the elite and middle class and by the foreign community, until her rule wore on. But notwithstanding the criticism against her, which became strident toward the end of her term, particularly on the issues of corruption and human rights (vigilantes, anti-communist cults, paramilitary groups), she could have gotten a second term if she wanted it. Easiest thing in this country to bend the law to suit clamor, and there was a strong residual clamor for her. It is to her everlasting credit that she willingly stepped down, thereby ending, as she began, on a high moral note.

GMA will have occupied Malacañang longer than Fidel Ramos, the president who oversaw the salad days of post-Edsa Philippine economy. Much of it of course was by luck, though he or his propagandists made it out to be by his genius. It was the heyday of Triumphant Capitalism after the fall of the communist world, given graphic form by the very literal fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Philippines was caught up in the economic boom that rippled across the world in its wake. Until the 1997 financial crisis came to burst its bubble and reduce to tatters the flag of unbridled laissez-faire. Whatever hopes Ramos might have had of staying on--he contemplated amending the Constitution too to allow him to run again--were razed to rubble by the tectonic financial upheaval.

And GMA will have occupied Malacañang longer than Joseph Estrada, arguably the most popular postwar president this country ever had. Probably more than Ramon Magsaysay. Short of not counting the votes at all, Joe de Venecia could never have beaten Erap--so overwhelming was his lead. Indeed short of not having elections (at large) at all, Joe de V can never beat anyone, which has driven him to embark on Cha-cha as though the devil was flailing at his back. Which it is.

Erap's rule was short-lived through his own fault. I do not know what might have happened if he had only half lived up to his vow of being "Erap para sa mahirap (Estrada for the masses)." But he turned out to be more "Erap parusa sa mahirap (Estrada punishment for the masses)," courtesy of a cabal of hoodlums dedicated to ripping off this country. I recall that that was a time when I could not imagine how much lower this country could sink. It seemed like the utter pits, the end of the line, rock bottom. I did not figure on his successor.

But that is not what makes our situation one for the books. That is not what makes our situation an entry in Ripley's "Believe it Or Not." What does is this: Come January next year, GMA will be the longest occupier of Malacañang--"longest-serving president" is correct only in "longest"--and she was never voted into office.

She came to power the first time around by the very route she, or her truly appropriate alter ego (if only because of sheer ugliness), Raul Gonzalez, now wants to stamp off the face of the earth: People Power. She clung to power after May 2004 by calling up Garci and demanding to win by a million votes over FPJ, which she did. Either way--though the first is legitimate while the second is not--she was never voted president of this country.

There's more for Ripley: Come January next year, GMA will have been the longest occupant of Malacañang since 1986 despite being neither loved nor respected. Indeed, despite being reviled and ridiculed. Forget the surveys that show that. Mind only that neither Cory nor Ramos nor Erap was ever heckled by a student while addressing a graduating class. No, not even Erap despite his English. Indeed, GMA was stressing the importance of English when it happened, which only shows that there's more to communication than a facility in that language.

Come January next year, GMA will have been the longest occupant of Malacañang since 1986 despite overseeing only the biggest exodus of Filipinos abroad. As of the last survey, fully a third of the population wants to leave this country--which probably indicates only the number of Filipinos with the means to do it. If you count those without means but would like to, you would probably be counting nearly the entire population. With good reason: The dawning of the 21st century, which was largely GMA's term, has also been the sinking of many Filipinos into the twilight of hunger. Literally. For the first time in decades, hunger is spreading throughout the land with only the OFW billions to slow it down.

Come January next year, GMA will be the longest occupant of Malacañang without Erap's charm or roguishness. Indeed, with an approval rating that is inversely proportional to Erap's popularity. No other Filipino leader has drawn such popular anger and distrust, consternation and disgust.

Indeed, come January next year, GMA will be the longest occupant of Malacañang despite: turning lying and cheating into acceptable behavior, or one worthy of emulation, which some nurses have tried to emulate, as witness their conduct in their last licensure exams; turning murder and mayhem into national policy, as witness the alarming number of political activists and journalists in the provinces who have been gunned down, but which seems to be alarming only the global community and not the national one; returning the country back to the arms of dictatorship, even the thugs in Congress now want to impose their will on the people, who the hell cares if they like it or not. Despite all this, or maybe because of all this.

Believe it or not.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=39435

Threshold December 20, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tama na, sobra na, palitan na.

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

Reaping the whirlwind December 19, 2006

THE latest casualties are Rep. Luis Bersamin of Abra province and his bodyguard. Bersamin had just emerged from the womb of Mt. Carmel Church and was about to board his car in the churchyard when a couple of men walked up to him and his bodyguard from behind and shot them dead. The assassins gunned down his bodyguard first before they shot him in the head as he whirled around. He died on the spot.

This murder occurred only days after the attempted murder of Rep. Robert “Dodot” Jaworski of Pasig City. Jaworski had every reason to fume and cry out, “Shame on you!” at those saying he had done this to himself as an election gimmick. The state of his car ruled out the idea, unless he was the kind of devil-may-care, winner-take-all, risk-taker who would cheat death by the skin of his teeth just to improve his chances at the polls. His car was reduced to a blackened pile of junk. But for the fact that the explosive tucked under the hood of his car emitted smoke before exploding, giving him time to scramble out, Jaworski would now be playing the harp with Bersamin in the ethereal regions.

Before this, the son of a mayor in Pampanga province was also shot dead a couple of weeks ago. I forget the details now, but I heard the mayor being interviewed on TV, his voice quaking with grief. He went on to issue veiled warnings at “whoever did this,” but whose identities he seemed to know very well, or deeply suspected.

I do not know what specific motives impelled these slayings. Abra politics has always been a little murderous, and Jaworski himself points to drugs as the cause of the attempt on his life. He has apparently been at odds with the drug lords of Pasig.

I do not know what specific motives impelled these slayings, or near-slayings, but I do know why they have happened, and why they will happen again and again and more brazenly over the next few months. Indeed, well past the May elections. They have happened and will happen because we have failed to stop the killings. Or more specifically, they have happened and will happen because we have failed to stop the killings of political activists and journalists in the provinces. The one is to the other as cause and effect. Very direct cause and very direct effect.

Not quite incidentally, the killings of activists and journalists continue unabated to this day. At the same time that Jaworski’s car was bombed, a human rights lawyer and a Bayan Muna party-list group member were murdered in Sorsogon. The way they were murdered made even the phrase “culture of impunity” sound almost tame. Lawyer Gil Gojol had just left the court after a hearing when he was gunned down in his van by motorcycle-riding gunmen. Bayan Muna’s Cisanto Frivaldo was right in his home when two men burst into it and shot him dead. Even home and hearth no longer offer protection to potential victims in this country.

I did warn in a column only a couple of weeks ago that we would be idiots to imagine that these killings would be confined to political activists and journalists in the provinces. The likelihood that they would spill over to other groups, notably politicians in light of the impending elections, I said, wasn’t just strong but inevitable. I said that with these killings left unsolved and unchecked, the party-list candidates in particular stood to be an endangered species. Or on a larger plane the opposition candidates.

That remains a very real threat. Not least in light of that banana-eating homicidal maniac Norberto Gonzales proposing to paint the party-list candidates red. He said in a radio interview: “There will be plenty who will run in the party lists in the coming elections. As national security adviser, it is important for me to show soldiers and police what groups are being used by the communists to continue their bad intentions on the public.” If he had thought to sign their death warrants, he could not have been more bloodthirsty.

But as has clearly turned out, the bloodletting won’t just go the party-list or opposition candidates’ way. Barely had the spit dried on my mouth, or the ink from my pen, when the slayings and/or near-slayings above took place with chilling rapidity. And with the same brazenness or utter contempt of law or decency that makes “impunity” such a pale description. Even churches no longer offer refuge from the death merchants.

The murder of Bersamin, in particular, throws us back to the pre-martial-law days when warlords walked this earth and Floro Crisologo was gunned down in church as he knelt on a pew to receive Holy Communion.

Frankly, I don’t know why we are so dense we cannot see that when we tolerate the killing of one group of people, we tolerate the killing of all groups of people. That when we incite the murder of other people, we invite the murder of ourselves. History does not lack for lessons there. You agree to the pogrom of the Jews, you agree to the slaughter of yourself.

We do not stop the killings of journalists and political activists right now, we assure that the coming elections will become one of the bloodiest in our postwar history, if not the bloodiest. We do not stop the killings of journalists and political activists right now, we raise a culture that says it is perfectly acceptable to dispatch your enemies to the next life, there is nothing in heaven or earth to deter you from it. That is a culture that like toxic rain, or an Arab curse, will befall all of us, and our children’s children. The bullet that finds the brains of other people will not lodge there permanently. It will find yours, too.

If I recall right, there’s something in the Bible that says as you sow, so shall you reap. It’s true, whether you believe the Bible or the Koran.

You sow death, you will reap death.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=39060

Cheek December 18, 2006

THAT WAS ONE EYE-POPPING PICTURE I saw on the front page of the Inquirer last Friday. It featured Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as part of the traditional Belen, which features the Nativity scene. She is laughing gaily beside the figures of St. Joseph, St. Mary and the Christ child.

It’s a testament to Lupita Kashiwahara’s growing alienation from the real world—this is apparently her brainchild—that she can think of this. I mean, you must be a little out of this world, if not out of your mind, to imagine peace on earth and goodwill to men is the sentiment that will invade the minds of most Filipinos upon seeing this.

I can imagine that most Filipinos would think the current resident of Malacañang more properly belongs to a life-sized tableau of the Garden of Eden, as the third character there after Adam and Eve, the one slithering in the branches of the apple tree. Who knows? Maybe Kashiwahara thought her master and commander looked sufficiently doll-like to blend with the figurines. Or maybe she thought that her boss and employer by her actual life size could be made to resonate with the aura of the Santo Niño. If she did, she is wrong. The only thing the alien figure in the Nativity scene is likely to suggest to most Filipinos this Christmas, particularly the folk of Albay, is El Niño and/or La Niña.

Maybe, that is a horrendously un-Christmas-y thing to say, but truly all that Kashiwahara’s idea of a Christmas gift to the nation gives is a study in contrast. It is no more and no less than the study in contrast her subject gives every time she tries to associate herself with Jose Rizal. Which GMA has a bizarre and rather cruel way of doing. It’s cruel because the first she did it was on Rizal Day 2002 when she vowed she would not run for president. She has since made it a point to go to the Rizal Shrine every time she goes abroad, and to Rizal activities, such as the unveiling of the first-edition copies of the “Noli” and “Fili.” Poor Rizal. Like I keep saying, the only thing they have in common is height.

Ditto with the Christ-child.

Rizal was above all about generosity and altruism. Mythically, he proved that—by throwing his other slipper into the river after he had lost his first one so that whoever got them would have a pair. Historically, he proved that—by dying for his beliefs in the fields of Bagumbayan, now called the Luneta, where Pagcor, milking cow of corrupt officials notably for elections, just held one an activity. Though he was easily the best and brightest indio God put on this spot of earth, he gave up his life for his countrymen.

If GMA is generous, only Mike and Mikey Arroyo know about it. If she is altruistic, only Joe de Venecia and his minions in the House of Representatives, chiefly the Bicolanos and the Mindanaoans—like the two Prosperos—know about it. At least until she did an about-face, when she realized their project was so unpopular she left all of them in a lurch. If any or all of them are the best and brightest that God has put on this spot of earth, only the third character in the Garden-of-Eden scene knows about it.

The Nativity is above all about honesty and authenticity. What is the Nativity story, as a recent movie about it reminds us? It is that God came to earth not as a powerful Roman emperor or an influential Jewish Pharisee but as a lowly son of a carpenter who kept the company of the dregs of the earth—lepers, prostitutes and plebeians. It is that God was born under circumstances not unlike the one in Infanta a couple of Christmases ago and the one in Albay today, in the vise of winter, fleeing from the murderousness of a paranoid king and left out in the cold by the contempt of innkeepers, in the bosom of a barn made for animals. It is that Three Kings journeyed from far away bearing gifts and following a burning star which really lay not in the sky but in their hearts, which was the star of discernment, which enabled them to espy divinity in that desolation.

The Nativity story is above all a story about the all-powerful and the all-bountiful relinquishing power and wealth to give the world to understand what power and wealth really mean. Namely, that power is not what you wield with your hand, it is what you yield to in your conscience. Namely, that wealth is not what you fling before the world like scraps of meat to snarling dogs, it is what you cherish in your heart like friends or lovers. The Nativity story is not about pomp and circumstance and the external trappings of glory, it is about swaddling clothes and mangers—grand words for the impoverished articles to be found in places God forgot—and the truth and beauty to be found in that deceptive repulsiveness.

The Nativity story is about what is real and what is fake, it is about what is true and what is false, it is about what is sublime and what is petty—and the divine spark in our souls that gives us the power to tell the one from the other.

If the “as-herself” character in Kashiwahara’s version of the new Jerusalem tells a story about someone willing to give up power to teach the world the real meaning of power, only they know about it. If the as-herself character in Kashiwahara’s version of the new Nativity tells a story about someone stripping herself of all worldly possessions to show the world the true meaning of wealth, only they know about it. If the as-herself character in Kashiwahara’s version of the new Incarnation tells a story about the divine light that enables us to separate the gold from the dross, the original from the pirated version, the authentic from the fake, only they know about it.

If I recall right, Christ’s remark was, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” It wasn’t “The cheek shall do so.”

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=38870