Opposition January 25, 2007

THAT was a very nice picture that appeared on our front page last Saturday, during the sixth anniversary of Edsa People Power II. It featured Patsy Abad today and (in the inset) yesterday, or specifically six years ago. Patsy is the daughter of Butch and Dina Abad. The inset shows her as a kid during the inauguration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo: She is standing on the stage beside Arroyo, holding a Bible. Everybody else, including Arroyo, has their hands on their hearts, vowing eternal fealty to God, country and People Power.

The picture in the foreground shows Abad as she is now. She is 17 and has grown much, much bigger, and certainly much, much taller, than Arroyo who dwarfed her in the earlier picture. But she has grown in more ways than one. She is no longer at the Edsa Shrine, she is at University of the Philippines in Diliman, marching in front of its Hall of Shame. And she is no longer holding the Bible, she is holding a placard that says “Itakwil ang mga taksil sa diwa ng Edsa 2!” (Down with the betrayers of the spirit of Edsa II!) A reference to the person beside her six years ago, the person who went on to trash People Power. Holding the Bible and holding that placard have one thing in common: It’s holding on to the truth.

The significance of that picture to me—quite apart from the fact that there’s hope for this country yet, particularly to come from the young—is that it encapsulates the essence of a word that has been bandied about in this country, without people stopping to wonder what it means. That word is “opposition.” What does opposition, or more formidably, Opposition with a capital “O,” really mean?

Well, it means many things to many people. But there is really only one true or real opposition, or Opposition, in this country, one that is sanctioned by history. That—as Patsy Abad articulates with the dazzling simplicity of the uncluttered mind—is opposing the beneficiary of Edsa II for betraying Edsa II.

I say this in light of the growing debate about an emerging “Third Force,” which Erap’s people who have set themselves up as the “Opposition,” namely the characters in UNO, seem unhappy about. I myself am unhappy about it only in that it calls itself “the Third Force.” You talk of “Third Force” and you conjure images of Rogelio de la Rosa and Raul Manglapus and all the other candidates that rose to challenge the Liberal Party and Nacionalista Party candidates before martial law, and who -- unlike Bernardo Carpio who managed to push back the two mountains that were trying to crush him -- were cut to pieces ere they began. You talk of Third Force, and you talk of token, or "saling pusa," or, as that Bicol word puts it so well with all its connotations of nuisance, “sawong-sawong.”

You talk of “Third Force” and you grant that there is already an Opposition in this country represented by the people associated with Joseph Estrada. I know Estrada has the financial resources, but he does not have the moral one. Indeed, the vastness of the first is matched only by the paucity of the second. That is not an opposition, that is a restoration. That is not a step forward, that is a step backward.

In fact, they are the one and only reason an Edsa III or People Power III has not taken off in this country, notwithstanding that everyone knows that Arroyo conspired with that snake, Garci, to steal the apple from Eden; or completely secularly and viciously, to kidnap a public school teacher-cum-poll watcher who wanted to testify on the cheating. People Power requires as its most essential element the contention of Good and Evil, the undiluted venom of the Evil matched only by the pure magnificence of the Good. The Evil sparking outrage in the mind, and the Good, or the glimpse of it, driving people out into the streets.

You have Evil, however unparalleled, without Good, however dimly espied, and you produce only cynicism. You have a people burning in anger but unable, or unwilling, to do a thing about it. Which is what we have now. Which is why despite survey after survey showing that Arroyo is the most detested person in this country, we have spectacle after spectacle of attempts to rouse the citizens falling on deaf ears. There is no Good flailing unceasingly at people, enough to tear them away from the siren’s call of the NBA and storm the gates of Hell, or Malacañang.

What we need today is not a Third Force, what we need is a real Opposition. What we need is a force that rejects, refutes, or indeed, opposes, all that Arroyo stands for. What we need is a project that moves the country forward and not merely grinds it to a halt.

That, too, is why I am unhappy about the “Third Force” that is currently being forged by the Liberal Party, Nacionalista Party, Aksyon Demokratiko and other small political groups. I have no problem with its smallness: Great oaks come from small seeds. What I have a problem with is its identity. It is more defined by what it is not than by what it is. The “Third Force is not for Arroyo or for Estrada, it is not for the Administration or the Opposition. That is a location, that is not an affirmation. That is a geography, that is not an identity.

You want an identity, take it from Patsy Abad, take it from the desperate souls sending out their lamentations to the heavens from the pit of this land: Enough of the betrayers of the dreams of Edsa People Power II. Let their heads roll. It is opposing Arroyo not because she thwarted Estrada but because she thwarted People Power. Not because she cut short Estrada’s term but because she cut People Power in the fullness of its flower. Not because she substituted herself for Estrada but because she substituted personal ambition for national aspiration, scraggly greed for epic heroism, boundless spite for boundless gratitude.

That is real Opposition. All the rest is just masturbation.

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The last word January 24, 2007

ART Buchwald had a very interesting announcement last week. “Hi,” he said on an obituary video, “I’m Art Buchwald and I just died.”

Buchwald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, bit the dust at 81 last Thursday in the United States, after accomplishing his mission in life, which was “to make people laugh.” He did that while writing a humor-filled column for five decades. He ended as he had begun.

While at this though, my favorite American columnist of that generation isn’t Buchwald, it is Russell Baker. Thank God he remains with us, even if his hold on this earth is slowly slipping. He’s a year older than Buchwald and a veritable font of wit and wisdom, the one often indistinguishable from the other. His funniest statements contain gems of insight, such as, “Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all but just terrible things.”

To go back: Buchwald’s announcement made me recall some pretty slick deathbed utterances, and I went on to look them up in the world library, also called the Internet. I was astonished by the sheer abundance of them. We can all do with laughing in the face of adversity today -- in lieu of heckling a non-president, which the audience of El Divo already brilliantly did last weekend -- and we can’t do better than to laugh in the face of death.

The utterances I picked out are outstanding in that regard. I disregarded the more serious ones, like Jesus Christ’s “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,” or Julius Caesar’s “Et tu, Brute?” in favor of the more outrageous ones. John Donne did say, “Death, be not proud,” and Dylan Thomas did declare, “Death shall have no dominion.” But somehow the lines below seem to say it better, helped in no small way by the fact that their authors put their bodies where their mouths were. You get to have the image of the swashbuckling Errol Flynn, sword in hand and grin on mouth, daring death catch up with him, or do its worst.

Or you get to have a sense of people fighting to have the last word.

• P. T. Barnum, entrepreneur, d. 1891: “How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?”

• John Barrymore, actor, d. May 29, 1942: “Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.”

• Ludwig van Beethoven, d. March 26, 1827: “Friends applaud, the comedy is over.”

• Humphrey Bogart, d. Jan. 14, 1957: “I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.”
• Elizabeth I, Queen of England, d. 1603: “All my possessions for a moment of time.”

• Ernesto “Che” Guevara, d. Oct. 9, 1967 (while facing his assassin): “I know you have come to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.”

• Edmund Gwenn, actor, d. Sept. 6, 1959 (asked if dying was tough): “Yes, it’s tough, but not as tough as doing comedy.”

• Timothy Leary, d. May 31, 1996: “Why not? Yeah.”

• Karl Marx, d. 1883 (to a housekeeper who wanted to know if he had any last words): “Go on, get out, last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”

• Eugene O’Neill, d. Nov. 27, 1953: “I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room -- and God damn it -- died in a hotel room.”

• Anna Pavlova, ballerina, d. 1931: “Get my swan costume ready.”

• Dylan Thomas, d. 1953: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies, I think that’s the record . . .”

• Anton Chekhov, d. 1904 (from TB): “It’s been a long time since I’ve had champagne.”

• Oscar Wilde, writer, d. Nov. 30, 1900: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”

• Marie Antoinette, after accidentally stepping on the foot of her executioner on the way to the guillotine: “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur.” ["Pardon me, sir."]

• John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world, while about to board a lifeboat with his family during the sinking of the Titanic, to his wife (his second and his great love, Madeleine) upon seeing a desperate female passenger: “The ladies have to go first.... Get in the lifeboat, to please me.... Goodbye, dearie. I’ll see you later.”

• Lord Chesterfield, an absolute gentleman, to a servant when his godson visited him as he lay dying: “Give Dayrolles a chair.”

• Archimedes, to a Roman soldier who was arresting him during the Roman invasion of Carthage, while working out a mathematical problem on the ground: “Don’t step on my equation!” (The soldier killed him.)

• Charlie Chaplin, after being told by a priest, “May the Lord have mercy on your soul”: “Why not? After all, it belongs to him.”

• General John Sedgwick, Union commander, shot dead in 1864 while surveying the field of battle: “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist.…"

• Dominique Bouhours, French grammarian, d. 1702: “I am about to -- or I am going to -- die. Either expression is correct.”

• Marquis de Favras, on his way to the guillotine, after being shown his official death sentence by the clerk of court: “I see that you have made three spelling mistakes.”

• John Fields, musician, asked on his deathbed if he was a Papist or a Calvinist: “I am a pianist.”

• Joe Hill, legendary unionist, while about to be executed for murder: “Don’t mourn for me. Organize!”

• Saint Lawrence, martyr, while burning at the stake: “Turn me. I am roasted on one side.”

• James French, plain murderer, while about to be electrocuted in 1966: “How about this for a headline: ‘French fries’?”

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The greatest 01/23/2007

I CAUGHT the Ali-Foreman fight again on ESPN late last Thursday night, which made me sleep late again, but it was worth it. That fight in October 1974 in Zaire, billed “The Rumble in the Jungle,” is my absolute favorite. I like it even better than the “Thrilla in Manila,” which took place a year later.

I can still remember the air of electricity generated by the Ali-Foreman fight in this country. Ali had become very popular by then and had legions of diehard fans here. I was one of them. I am not a betting man and have never betted money on fights. (I’ve betted life and limb only on causes, but that’s another story.) But I kept telling friends that if I were to put my money on that fight, I’d put it on Foreman. I loved Ali, but, alas, Foreman was just going to kill him.

Foreman was the Mike Tyson of his time. Frazier, who had beaten Ali during his comeback, hadn’t just lost to Foreman, he had been pulverized. I saw the fight, and I swear Frazier lifted up an inch or two as Foreman caught him with an upper hook, which sent him to dreamland. I hoped for the best and feared for the worst. The best being that Ali would be floored instantly, the worst being that he would be maimed permanently. As it turned out, that was what Ali’s people were thinking, too, as the documentaries revealed. They very literally feared for his life.

I won’t go into the fight but urge the reader instead to look it up with that background in mind. You can imagine the frenzy that followed its result. It was Edsa People Power I and II combined, with the breathtaking ecstasy coming from the future downfall of this government thrown in. For Ali did not only do the improbable, which was to win the fight, he did the impossible, which was to knock out Foreman. Hercules could not have done a more Herculean deed. For days afterward, the jeepneys I took home during late nights reeked of alcohol and resonated with loud conversations about the fight. It also echoed with lamentations from people who lost big from betting on the "llamado" [favored].

The fight was shown on ESPN because it was Ali’s 65th birthday last week. One he had wanted to celebrate quietly but which the world would not let him. For good reason: Ali is more than a boxer, he is a freedom fighter. His arena isn’t the ring, it is the world. He isn’t just a sports hero, he is a hero in the epic sense of the word. As observers have observed, he doesn’t belong to the company of Joe Louis, he belongs to the company of Nelson Mandela.

Looking back, incredible as Ali’s triumph was over Foreman, it wasn’t the most incredible. For Foreman wasn’t Ali’s greatest challenge, the one foe that loomed invincible, that threatened to crush anyone and anything in his path. Nor was it Sonny Liston, the ex-con whom you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley and whose brute strength made him the most fearsome fighter a decade before Foreman. Ali’s greatest enemy was the US government.

Or more specifically the Racist and Imperial America that that government represented. The martial law babies will probably not be able to fully appreciate it, but it’s almost mind-boggling how Ali defied the draft during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He was at the height of his career and stood to lose everything by it. He stood to lose his title, his money and his fame. Far more than that, he stood to earn the revulsion, the spite and the condemnation of the country he lived in.

And did: He was stripped of his title, he fell into penury, settling for what little he could lecturing in colleges, his erstwhile friends disappearing faster than his bank deposits, and he became one of the most hated men in America. To this day, even his kids are astonished that he lived to be 65 -- and metamorphosed from pariah to icon, from leper to legend. Ali was far more hated than Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and they killed King and Kennedy. Yet for the strangest reason (Ali always claimed Allah was his shield), no one lifted a murderous hand against him.

Why did he refuse to go to war? Because, as he put it: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home, and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No, I am not going 10,000 miles from home to murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.”

Later, he would add, “No Vietcong ever called me a nigger.” Somehow that seemed more poetic than saying, “Healer, heal thyself.”

Those words take on particular resonance today in light of what George W. Bush is doing to America. Except that there is no Ali to say: Why should I go 10,000 miles from home to free a people when right here in the home of the free and brave freedom is being extirpated everywhere and bravery replaced by fearful acquiescence?

No, Foreman was not Ali’s greatest enemy, and much as I delight watching that fight again and again, I revel even more running in my mind again and again Ali’s even greater fight against Lyndon B. Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s America. Ali didn’t do the rope-a-dope there, he just slugged it out toe to toe, armed with the fists of conviction and the fury of belief. And showed the world that he couldn’t just land a flurry of punches on his opponents, he could also take a haymaker—and remain standing.

Ali won that fight, in more ways than one. Richard Harris would sum it up beautifully: Other fighters would have given up their souls to gain the championship of the world, Ali gave up being champion of the world to gain his soul.

The greatest? You bet he is.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=44975

Six years and two days 01/22/2007

TODAY IS NOT A RED-LETTER DATE IN THE calendar, but it is a red-letter date in the mind. Today, Jan. 22, 2007, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will have been in Malacañang for six years and two days. She was sworn into office by Hilario Davide on Jan. 20, 2001.

The only one who has served longer than GMA since 1986 is Corazon Aquino. Cory was president from Feb. 25 1986 to end of May 1992, a total of six years and three months. Since you can safely bet your life and those of your children and children’s children that GMA will not be hit by a thunderbolt of enlightenment and give up power willingly three months from now, by end of April this year, GMA will have occupied Malacañang the longest since Ferdinand Marcos. Don’t worry, I’ll remind you of it this April. But for the nonce, today, Jan. 22, GMA has occupied Malacañang longer than any of the elected presidents of this country.

As I said last December, that is one for Ripley’s. GMA will have been president of this country longer than any elected president of this country since 1986 without having been elected president of this country.

Cory herself wasn’t. Or at least it’s debatable whether she won the snap elections or not. In any case, the snap elections were the dirtiest in local politics up to that time, which voided them completely. The record would be broken only in 2004 when the incumbent would steal the votes wholesale. But quite apart from that, Cory’s legitimacy did not owe to the elections. It owed to a far more direct and elemental expression of the sovereign will. That was People Power.

Throughout her term, Cory would never be bothered by widespread—or near-universal—perception, of being an illegitimate ruler. Other than from completely delusional military upstarts and one Ponce Enrile who imagined themselves the true authors of Edsa. On the contrary, Cory would have both the moral and legal right to be president. Morally, she was the one who inspired, gave shape to and led the struggle that resulted in People Power. She was the heart of People Power, a fact the coup plotters could challenge only by arms and not by principle. Legally, well, it was more than that she was proclaimed president of this country at Club Filipino following all the protocols of law; it was that she was recognized so by all the world, a fact that would be upheld by the conscience of the human race, specifically by other peoples’ efforts to duplicate People Power elsewhere.

If GMA’s legitimacy is less than tenuous, never mind ironclad, only Raul Gonzalez knows about it. Throughout her term—whose expiry date lapsed long, long ago—she would never be seen as having the moral and legal right to rule. She was not a leader of Edsa II, she was a side effect of Edsa II—one that would completely reverse its curative powers. Morally, well, the very word would be anathema to her rule. Legally, she would proclaim herself president while the country slept, only to be slapped in the face a year later by the sound of two words. Those two words would ring—quite literally in cell phones—deafeningly across the land. They were “Hello” and “Garci.”

Different folks, different strokes; different natures, different futures. For those who think legitimacy is a small matter, one that should be superseded by more important ones, think again.

Because Cory was legitimate, she went about restoring the foundations of democracy, or at least the kind of democracy we paradoxically, though quite accurately, call “elite democracy.” Though her rule was marred by humongous corruption and human rights violations, she gave the democratic institutions the space and nourishment they needed to assert themselves. And affirming in the end that it was those institutions—and not any savior, real or self-advertised—that assured this country of a future, she willingly gave up power in 1992.

Because GMA is fake, she has restored the foundations of dictatorship, the barbed wire rolled out across the country now showing visibly amid the cover of elections. What’s the point of elections where, as in Marcos’ time, the results will be counted by people who do not know how to count? Indeed, what’s the point of elections when elected officials can be booted out later on some pretext or another? Force is the handmaiden of illegitimacy, coercion the natural reflex of usurpation.

There’s a difference even in the corruption. The corruption during Cory’s, Ramos’ and Erap’s time merely meant the theft of the nation’s body. The corruption during Marcos’ and GMA’s time meant the theft of the nation’s soul. The latter is corruption in the deepest sense of the word—in the sense of things decaying and rotting. We are not just seeing the plunder of the nation’s wealth, we are seeing the plunder of the nation’s values. As in Marcos’ time, we now live in a world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where evil is rewarded and good punished, where honesty is a crime and lying a claim to the crown.

The story is told that when Cory went to Ramos’ inauguration in June 1992, she insisted on riding on the family-owned Toyota Crown instead of the Malacañang-issued Mercedes-Benz and stopping on red in intersections notwithstanding that it was a security nightmare, to show the world that she was now just Citizen Cory. I don’t know about you, but I can’t see that the official Mercedes-Benz will be the only thing GMA will be loath to part with in June 2010. You’ve been president longer than any other president of this country since 1986 without ever having been elected president, what’s to prevent you from wanting—and having—more?

Today, thanks to the stupidity of Filipinos, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has been in Malacañang for six years and two days. And counting….

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