JDV's revolution

“EVERYONE SEES the need for a moral revolution... This is a good cause. I believe the country needs this kind of revolution to effect changes.”
So said Senate President Manuel Villar at the launch of the Council for Moral Revolution on February 17 at the palatial home of ousted Speaker Jose de Venecia, its proponent.
On February 20, three short days after, Villar declined to be part of the Council thus: “While I support the moral revolution movement which is in line with the advocacy to weed out rampant corruption, I cannot take on an active role in the council in deference to the ongoing Senate investigations.” Good enough reason.
But is that all there is to it?
Villar could have had in his mind: “In deference to the still-standing Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration which I still need in aid of my presidential ambition in 2010.”
Next, the man elected in absentia by the Council as interim chair, Chief Justice Reynato Puno, -- unarguably the best, if not the only choice to lead any moral reformation hereabouts – also declined.
“While I agree with the need for moral transformation of all of us, I regret to decline the position in view of the inhibitions of my office as Chief Justice.” Puno wrote De Venecia.
Good enough reason. And that is all there is to it. Given the respect everyone has for the Chief Justice.
So what gives?
De Venecia’s reason for his moral revolution was what he called the inaction of the President on his three-month-old call for her to lead the movement for moral revolution.
“I am deeply disappointed.” So was De Venecia quoted as saying, and laid partial blame on his call as cause for the President to have “moved for my removal” as House Speaker.
From where we sit, De Venecia could not have been more wrong.
Yes, the President heeded De Venecia’s call for her to lead a moral revolution. GMA started that revolution with De Venecia’s very ouster from the speakership.
Revolution is change. The old order has to give way to the new. What better way to dramatize that than at the House where the trapo of all trapos is most ceremoniously deposed!
If at all, De Venecia’s moral revolution – coming as it is after his ouster – is no more than a counter-revolution. A grasp at straws to bring him back to power.
So who would join him? There are enough clowns and jokers, political has-beens and never-bes who, for want of something to do, will be there by De Venecia’s side.
As for the people? Well, there are enough that can be trucked to any cause so long as it pays. Sometimes even at just P200 and a free lunch.
In passing, I am reminded here of a passage in Will and Ariel Durant’s Caesar and Christ , Volume III of their monumental epic The Story of Civilization: “Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; few rulers have dared to attempt it; most have left it to hypocrites and saints.”
As De Venecia is not a saint, so he is…Touchè!

No EDSA miracle

JUST LIKE Camelot. A brief shining moment. Mythic and magical, mystical and mystifying. But fleeting, ephemeral, momentary. But-once-and-never-again.
That sums up the EDSA Revolt.
No. The EDSA Revolt was not, and is not, the defining moment of the Filipino.
No matter the worldwide accolades the nation received for stopping tanks in their tracks with no more than flowers and prayers.
No matter the near-bloodless revolution that sent the Great Dictator fleeing like a sick, maddened mongrel.
No matter it being the pattern of peaceful upheavals from Prague to Berlin, from Bucharest to Beijing.
No. The EDSA Revolt was not a reflection of the Filipino character. It was more of an aberration. Constancy and consistency are basic character ingredients. The very antithesis to the very Filipino ningas cogon. Which EDSA is.
No. The EDSA Revolt was not a revolution. In the sophomoric verses of an aktibista:
“Wala. Walang himagsikan sa EDSA.
Kumaripas ng takbo, lahi ni Hudas,
Pumalit nama’y lipi ni Barabbas.
Ano ang nagbago? Mukha, hindi prinsipyo.
Adhika ng liderato, palawigin, pagyamanin ang status quo.
Burgis ang naghahari. Masa, alipin sa araw at gabi.
Wala. Walang himagsikan sa EDSA.”
Change is the essence of revolution. What socio-economic and political variance – from the Marcos mold – find significance in the post-EDSA Aquino and Ramos administrations?
In other countries, ousted dictators and their families are routinely assassinated and banished for decades. Only a few short years after EDSA, Bongbong Marcos was congressman, Imelda Marcos is congresswoman, Imee Marcos lords it over a film company.
Change? What change? The way things are now going, the threat of a Constitutional coup a-borning, EDSA’s hero Fidel Ramos is seemingly on track to do – and be – a Marcos.
No. The EDSA Revolt was no liberation. The poor did not remain poor. They became more, and poorer. The rich became fewer. And enormously richer. The great divide between the have-all and the have-none became even wider.
Liberation lifts the greatest number to a level of existence higher than their pre-revolution state. Post-EDSA state of the nation remains Third World average.
Outside the corporate boardrooms and Malacanang, what relevance does this so-called tiger economy hold? To the urban poor in the squatter colonies being bloodily demolished? To the rural folk yet to see a road connect their barrio to the poblacion? To the underpaid and overworked laborers in the sweatshops? To those poverty prodded to mortgage their souls and pawn their bodies in the sands of Saudi Arabia, in the flatsof Hong Kong and Singapore, in the karaokes of Japan, and the brothels of Greece and Cyprus?
No. EDSA is no miracle. Yes. EDSA is a mirage.

THEN THERE was EDSA Dos in January 2001. Further reinforcing the position in the above piece that came out in my Golpe de Sulat column in Sun-Star Clark, February 24, 1997. That there was neither a miracle nor a revolt, much less a liberation of the people at EDSA Uno.
Then there was EDSA Tres and the siege of Malacanang in May 2001.
Now we here again calls for people power to oust the Gloria Macapagal administration.
No, this could not be what Marxists call the “continuing revolution” or the “perpetual struggle.” That is taking it to the max.
Ours – from the time of Bonifacio – has always been an “unfinished revolution.” So when will we ever see our liberation?

Of a martyr and a messiah

‘I ONLY thought of saving my soul. Now I think I saved my country’s soul.”
Hallelujah! Good tidings of great joy, the birthing of a new messiah at that bastion of elitism that is La Salle (Greenhills) during the weekend was hailed by both the high and the lowly, led by the once-sainted President Cory.
Now-better-known as Kris Aquino’s mother, Cory was quick to appropriate the oh-so-hallowed “Hindi ka nag-iisa” mantle of martyrdom the Filipino people bestowed upon her husband Ninoy Aquino and passed it on, as though a family heirloom, to Rodolfo Lozada, Jr.
In one fell swoop, the celebrity of the hour just past his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame has assumed the fullness of life of a martyr. Ah, to what lengths could we deceive, nay, delude ourselves.
Ninoy’s was a life of struggle for the liberation of his people, from ignorance and want, in his early years from mayor to governor, from the scourges of graft and corruption, as a crusading senator , from tyranny, as a prisoner of conscience in Marcos’ gulags of Laur and Fort Bonifacio.
Even in exile, Ninoy did not let up in his struggle to free his country, telling America and the world of the oppression of his people – even at the time the US President was entrancingly waltzing with the home-grown dictator.
To his last breath, Ninoy lived his article of faith: “The Filipino is worth dying for.”
Thus, Ninoy assumed the phenomenon of martyrdom. That which William James observed in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as:
“No matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this way or that, if yet we cling to life, and he is able “to fling it away like a flower,” as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.”
As martyrs go, Ninoy “escaped the need to live,” so to speak.
How fares Lozada beside Ninoy?
Ninoy did not even aspire to be a martyr. Martyrdom claimed him.
Lozada, by professing he has “saved his country’s soul” had laid full claim to being a messiah. Nay, he had anointed himself the messiah. Christ Jesus!
The crying probinsiyanong Intsik got us all emotionally involved when he revealed himself – in the holy company of nuns and priests at that! – as the light of Truth in the darkness of lies of the ZTE-NBN scandal. Emotions we mistook for some stirrings of our very soul that in Lozada’s epiphany we so believed that we came to witness in it Saul’s very own conversion at Damascus’ Gate!
Faithful suckers as we are – remember the national ecstasy over the La Union apparitions produced by one Joedel some years back? – we get so blinded as to discern Truth from the Lozada hearsays.
Thus the most unreliable “narinig ko po” and the most astounding “sa palagay ko po” that Lozada’s so-called testimonies (?) are punctuated with, we take for Gospel Truth. St. Augustine’s “Seek not to understand in order to believe. But believe in order to understand” we have stretched to incredulity here.
The Christ’s own warning about false prophets we disregard here.
A matter of opinion easily contested has become for us a dogma of faith that cannot be questioned, that can only be believed. This is Lozada’s chronicles.
Even as Lozada unravels – with more chinks and cracks in his “moral” armor showing: the expensive Wack-Wack golf playing rights; wheelings, dealings and nepotism at his Philippine Forest Corp., flashy cars, etc.; even as his once-persecuted posture has morphed to that of an avenging aggressor, still we invest all our faith in his Truth.
Really now, where has our reason gone?
A self-proclaimed messiah? Lozada is -- to me -- more like that which Horace referred to in his Ars Poetica as “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.” The mountains are in labour, a ridiculous mouse is born.
A mouse for a messiah? You believe this? Suck.

People Power and the Filipino

EDSA 1 gifted the world with “people power.” The phrase was readily accredited to Cardinal Sin after he went on air to call on the nation “to use your power as a people” initially to “save” the embattled mutineers led by Enrile and Ramos from sure annihilation by the Marcos forces.
I do not mean to pull the rug from under the now lamented Sin. In the April 8-14, 1984 issue of The Voice – two months short of two years before EDSA 1, the phrase already appeared in my column, thus titled:

People Power and the Filipino

IN THE annals of political struggles, war included, people power has long claimed its rightful place as the major determining factor in the outcome.
This power received its utmost glorification in the social philosophies of Marx as embodied in his Communist Manifesto and put to empirical application in the Soviet and Chinese revolutions and countless other uprisings in those moulds, as well as in the failed Allende experiment in Chile.
That great Asian, Mao Tse-tung summed up the potency of people power in various quotations in his Little Red Book, most prominent of which was: “The people are the ocean, we are the fish that swim in that ocean.” There too was his stratagem of marshalling the people from the countrysides toward the encirclement of the cities.
With all these leftward tendencies of people power harnessing, populism has come to be identified with the communist prescription of wresting power from the ruling circle.
In its essence however, any move, be it parliamentary or revolutionary, has to mobilize people power to reach its successful or liberating end.
While we have seen people power in the collective anguish and indignation over Ninoy Aquino’s assassination, we have yet to see it in terms of concrete moves directed at our socio-economic and political liberation.
Our history as a people is so replete with the kisses of Judas that they have become part and parcel of the Filipino psyche.
The betrayal of the Katipunan, Vicos to Diego Silang, the Macabebe scoutsin Tirad Pass and Palanan, the Makapili during the Japanese Occupation, not to mention the American boys and unconscionable cronies, are glaring examples of the quislings who have always sold their country and their people in exchange for personal gains.
More glaring even are the current events related to the coming Batasan polls.
The Opposition is united only in name – the first term in its acronym UNIDO. Beyond that, there is not even the finest thread that holds them together.
True, they all have an aversion to Marcos. Truer yet, they all draw “strength and inspiration” from the martyred Ninoy Aquino. Truest tough, there is no clear-cut, selfless and nationalistic ideological basis for all their actions.
Rather, it is a case of everyone to his own selfish motive and ambition.
Invoking guidance from the sacrifice of Ninoy, they aspire – conspire may be the apt word – to move the people to exercise their potency for change. Not for the people’s own welfare, in the ultimate analysis, but for the advancement of their personal political ambitions.
It is Robespierre and his manipulation of the French masses in the 1790s all over again. Nearer home, it is the Tejeros debacle re-staged in a not-totally dissimilar setting.
The fault however does not solely lie in these opportunists. Much of the blame is traceable to the people themselves.
The people, in all naivete and perhaps due to their fatalism bred by colonizers, foreign and home-grown, have been so accustomed to their hapless state that they could not see a power greater than the gun or the peso, even the devalued one. Bonifacio’s walis tingting has yet to form from the countless coconut ribs lying for the picking.
For a mere pittance, even those who wailed the most at Aquino’s wake and funeral found themselves like sheep herded to provide an audience to some ruler’s folly.
We will see more of these idiocies until May 14. To impress the greater mass of voters, politicians would pay for every shout of “Mabuhay!” , for every wearer of a vote T-shirt, for every trumped-up attestation of love for a candidate.
People power? In many a Third World country, this is the new order of things. In the Philippines, it is seen more in the powerlessness of the people to rise, stomp their feet, and state that enough is enough.
Ah, yes, despite all these, there is people power in this nation of cowards, to quote Mansfield. To us that power is the people’s strength in crying out in pain for years, and their power to bear all sorts of insults and injustice. And their powerful refusal too to transform anguish into a fiery zeal for their own liberation.
Ninoy, you may have been wrong. It seems the Filipino is not worth dying for.

Beyond Marcos

THE MORE things change. The more they look the same. So it is clichéd. In this the month we celebrate yet another EDSA 1 anniversary, here’s a look back to that Marcosian past tense with unease. This piece bylined Carlos El. Guerrero, yet another nom de plume I used, appeared in the October 30-November 5, 1983 issue of The Voice.

HISTORY and political science have always referred to authoritarian regimes and dictatorships as one-man rules. The fact however is far from that historical given.
An authoritarian regime does not emanate from one, single individual alone. Rather, an interplay of some structures woven by that individual around himself gives life to his being a dictator.
It is from that point of reference that I deem current events in the country should be viewed.
The “Oust Marcos” campaigners are only half-right in seeking their end. And those who have made that cry the be-all and end-all of their movement; those who entertain thoughts that the ouster of Marcos would effect beautiful changes to the country – that everything would fall in its proper place as though by Divine Order, are as deluded as some mebers of the regime who still insist that all these mass actions are nothing but plain, simple, even childish, gimmickry.
Simple driving Marcos out of the presidency will not solve the problem. It may even compound it. Another Marcos, not necessarily a kin but just one with Marcosian tendencies or even worse, can just fill the vacant slot. Personalities may come and go. But the dictator’s throne stays. So long as the structures that prop it up remain.
So it is of prime necessity to dismantle all structures that support the dictatorship, either as a prelude or an afterlude to the ouster of Marcos. This will guarantee that there won’t be any Second Coming for the Marcos regime or any regime in such mould.
First to do perhaps is to forget all about the Constitution of ’73 which we unwittingly ratified. Or were gypped to ratify. A return to the ’35 vintage would be alright but forging a new one more responsive to the times would even be better. What matters is that the concentration of powers in one man without the necessary checks and balances should be totally eradicated from any page of the Supreme Law of the land.
A totally different Supreme Court – in composition, in temperament, in bent – should likewise evolve. What we have now is something that caters first, foremost, and only to the Supreme Ruler of the land.
At least in one count, the nomenclature is fitting – the High Tribunal is the supreme court of the absolute ruler where jesters, pretenders, and other courtiers abound.
The military has to revert to being an apolitical entity. The uniformed man’s loyalty to his commander-in-chief must end where his loyalty to the Republic begins. And he must be made to understand that the chief is not always the Republic he represents. To effect this would need the resignation of all the top brass in the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
Then too must be put to a final and definitive stop the multi-titled government men – the concurrent governors and ministers, ambassadors and ministers, ministers and corporate board members, etc. Aren’t they tired of such schizophrenic dichotomies? The Filipino nation has never wanted of intellectuals in all fields of endeavor. So why not dispose of some posts to equally more deserving souls?
The cronies and dollar salters must be made to pay for their crimes. Their assets salted in some foreign banks and investment houses be frozen. A possible re-infusion of these into our economy will do wonders as dialysis does to someone with a malfunctioning kidney.
Lest we forget, to have a complete and thorough regeneration, foreign intervention must be resisted in all forms, at all costs. Thus the need to dismantle the US bases in the country.
It has been categorically stated that the bases serve only Sam’s – he ain’t our uncle – interests, never ours. We wonder why every Philippine president, despite protestations to the contrary, always played up to American interests.
Aren’t we fed up yet with US intervention in our affairs? Will we never learn from Dewey’s betrayal of our founding fathers? From Tirad Pass? Balangiga? Sacay? The mile-long convoy that never was in Bataan? The “wild boars” of Clark?
We are a patient people, yes. But is there no end to that? The masses are up in arms, so to speak, yes. But conscientization has not yet set in them. A full appreciation of the issues has not yet cascaded to the mass level.
Anger is a necessary ingredient, yes. But peaceful, non-violent revolutions – or for that matter, even the Jacobin prescription – cannot be launched, much less won, by anger alone.
Oust the dictator, that we must. But let us not in our mass personal anger forget to dismantle all that helped propped him up.

Loving Levi

HOW CAN I not love Levi Laus? Let me count the ways. (And no apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning there.)
On Christmas, he sends me gifts – in tinseled monogrammed wrappings yet, this aside from the cellophaned basket of goodies doled by his CDC’s public affairs.
On my birthday – so long as Jun Sula remembers – something from Levi always find its way to me.
Really, if only for these, how can I not love Levi? Still, there are even far greater things not only for me, but for all of us, to love Levi.
So who was it who saved my home, nooo, make that the whole of San Fernando, from the threats of rampaging lahar?
Why, it was the Save San Fernando Movement! Okay, but who was the heart, soul, brains – verily, who was the SSFM? You’re a clueless dummy if you did not think of Levi.
Who was it who moved heaven and earth – El Tabako too – to build the megadike that stemmed Mount Pinatubo’s devastating fury and saved not only San Fernando but the whole of Pampanga?
Why, it was Levi, incarnated in the SSFM. Go, ask Virgilio Sanchez. Err, sorry, I just realized the former mayor is now addressed as the late, lamented “Baby of the Masses.” Just go, ask the San Fernando bankers.
Who was it who blazed the trail to the Mount Pinatubo crater? In an adventurous quest to show our people there was something good that could be drawn from nature’s devastation?
You’re wrong if you think it was the DOT’s Ronnie Tiotuico. The tourism director did not have even a battered 4X4. Only Levi had the truck worthiest of a terrain so rugged. You don’t believe me? Go, ask the Angeles City Four-Wheelers’ Noel Castro, err, make that the Off-Roaders’ Marni Castro. Yeah, he of the controversial MOKA fame.
If only for these, how can we not love Levi?
So it was Cong Oca Rodriguez that fathered the City of San Fernando. But who gave the city its cosmopolitan value, if not its essential urbanity?
To find the answer, stand at the GSO Road, err, Jose Abad Santos Avenue. Feel the rush of modernity, of prosperity in all their shibboleths – Germany’s BMW, America’s Ford, GM and Chevrolet, Korea’s Kia and Japan’s Mitsubishi and Suzuki. And all thoughts invariably settle on nobody but Levi.
So who brought too to San Fernando the urban amenities of ready information and entertainment? So who holds sway at dwRW 95.1 FM, at CLTV 36, at Sun-Star Pampanga? The Laus Group of Companies, who else?
If only for these, how can we not love Levi?
(Stop your whining Editor Ashley, the Pampanga News had to close down through no fault of Levi. How could he when he always referred to you as his favorite editor?)
Steeped in civic consciousness, steeled in proactive advocacies, stunning in entrepreneurship, who else but Levi could make Clark soar to the highest firmaments of First Worldness?
So who convinced the Senate to declare Clark a Freeport zone?
Why, it was Levi. Or were you so blind to see all those streamers congratulating him for that signal accomplishment? If you were, go, ask Rene Romero as it was his PamCham that put those up.
So who brought the employment level at the Clark Freeport to an unprecedented height of 52,000 workers?
It was Levi. Go, but don’t ask Frankie Villanueva. Ask the Clark Investors and Locators Association instead.
Who pursued that gem of an idea that was the central business district near the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport?
It was Levi. Too bad “parochial minds” got so blinded by its brilliance that they closed their eyes to it. Levi should have impacted his CDC corporate slogan on them: “The future of Clark is so bright you have to wear sunglasses (to see it.)”
Ah, that slogan. So original, so inspiring. If only for it, how can we not love Levi?
So who was principal proponent of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway? It could only be Levi. Or did you not see those towering tarpaulin billboards hailing the SCTex at the initial phase of its construction: one near the Friendship Gate with a full-bodied smiling Levi with three unknown faces, the other by the Mabalacat-Bamban junction with a solo Levi smiling so benignly? GMA’s tarpaulin only came so much later.
Won’t that prove the SCTex was indubitably Levi’s? Unconvinced? Go, read that column of Que Sio Que Tal making a record of Levi’s deeds and be convinced.
I stop here. Else I run out of space. So, with all that oh-so-glorious a litany, how can we not love Levi? But even without it, simply with his beloved Tess -- whom we in the Society of Pampanga Columnists have been privileged to have as Muse – how can we not love Levi?
We, at Punto!, do. Believe me. Really, we do.

Growing old

NO, it does not have anything to do with graying hair. Our good friend Lincoln Baluyut, once The Voice publisher now Canada resident , had a shockful of silver streaks in his early twenties.
Nor does it concern an expanding forehead. Sun Star photographer Boy Sagad had always had that shining pate since time immemorial.
Yes, the physiological changes become more pronounced. The second or third chin and the mid-section bulge become great sources of jokes for the kids. The specs get either thicker or duo-fold – doble vista, that is. Tiredness comes easy. Sleep, even at mid-morning, even easier.
But the greatest changes that come with ageing are on the emotional plane. It simply is very difficult to let go. And grow gracefully and act graciously old.
Holding on to the last vestiges of youth, you still treat your prep-school kid as an infant and your junior high daughter as a baby. To their consternation both.
You start growing your thinning hair long. Vainly trying to recapture your flower-power psychedelic rage. At one point, you even consider reviving your horticultural talent with the beloved herb of your youth, the five-fingered cannabis sativa.
Finding no solace there, you turn into a curmudgeon. Fixed one-track mind. Fast in judgment. Faster in forgetting. Slow to forgiveness. Easy to resentment. Hard and obstinate in opinion of others. The kids grimacing every time you shout “Stupid monkey!” at just about every driver on the road.
A digression. No gender discrimination here. But one point has to be cited on the great divide between men and women growing old.
An ageing woman finding herself unattractive to men turns to God. See the number of manangs going to early morning Mass?
An ageing man finding his ageing wife unattractive turns to young sweet things. See the world full of DOMs with willing YDGs, that’s young golddiggers, dummy. In the States, they call them trophy wives.
In recent years though, the gender chasm has narrowed. The ballroom dancing craze and its resident DIs or “attorneys” serving as the equalizers. Wrinkled matrons tripping the light fantastic with dashing swains. Toupeed chaps swinging, sashaying with succulent young things.
Back to track. Shucks, if this is any way of growing old, who would not want to die young?
I remember an essay I wrote in college – more than 20 years back – on my greatest obsession in life. To die at an early age, I penned. So that I could taste the ultimate in greatness: To be young, gifted, and dead.
I am not young anymore. I have wasted a lot of talents. And I am not even dead. But only coming to grips with ageing.
It is not all bitterness there is to growing old though. So long as one also grows up. As that clichéd birthday wish says, “May you grow in grace, as you grow in age.”
Despite the years, I still greet myself a happy birthday then. Thanks to those who remembered. And find me still one chap to be happy with.
* * * *
WOW. Seems only yesterday, but that piece was written 11 years ago, appearing in my Golpe de Sulat column in the Sun Star Clark issue of February 12, 1997.
God, I did not grow old. Alas, I just stayed old.

People power mocked

CREATOR and sustainer – politically – of Gov. Eddie T. Panlilio, the country’s number one newspaper has naturally taken as its prime duty his preservation in power, at whatever cost.
So it came to pass that Wednesday last week, the Comelec en banc denied Panlilio’s motion for reconsideration to junk the second division’s August 1, 2007 resolution on the electoral protest of former Board Member Lilia Pineda, and allowed the inventory and transmittal of the contested ballot boxes from Pampanga to Manila.
“Unseating of Panlilio as gov starts.” So cried the headline in Sunday’s nation section: the simple, factual “recount” subsumed in the malice-tinged “unseating” there.
“People power to keep Panlilio urged.” Blared yet another headline of the same section on Monday.
“Two Catholic priests and a Christian pastor on Sunday have called on the Kapampangan to mount another “people power” against the move by losing gubernatorial candidate Lilia Pineda to unseat Gov. Eddie Panlilio through a recount of votes.” So went the lead paragraph.
I don’t know if these people recognize the ramifications of their call. As a good Christian though, I could only look at the Christ on His cross, and reflect on the first of his seven last words – what a timely coincidence, this being the season of Lent: “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.”
So, what are they afraid of in a recount? To find Pineda as the duly elected governor of Pampanga? If that be the truth, then they should even rejoice. They supposedly being the ordained advocates of the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
“Losing bet” Pineda is within her constitutional right to lodge an electoral protest. Pineda subscribed to the rule of law in filing that protest. Pineda invested her respect in the integrity of the Comelec when she – and her supporters – did not call for “people power” to question the proclamation of Panlilio as elected governor.
A recount of votes is a legal recourse. It is a moral exercise. To thwart it with “people power” is illegal. It negates whatever moral ascendancy, pretensions would be more like it, those callers have arrogated unto themselves. It corrupts the very essence of “people power” and reduces, nay, dishonors it to the gutter level of the mob.
And I can only agree with that wit who said of the mob as “many heads with no brains.”
“People power” is enshrined in our democratic praxis as a revolutionary means. Its nobility of purpose akin to the opening premise of the Declaration of Independence , to wit: “When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another…” Let us leave it at that. Stop making a mockery of it.
Thus, if – as Marx said – history repeats itself, the first time as a tragedy and the second as a farce, how will it be in its third, fourth, fifth, nth outing? Comedy, inanity, idiocy?
Come to think of it, this is not the first time that Panlilio’s rabid fanatics called on “people power.”
After the sangguniang panlalawigan approved Ordinance 176, Panlilio’s (un)civil society of a hundred composed of Kapampangan Marangal, Inc., Abak na Balen, and some such other two insipid monikers, threatened to unleash “people power” on the SP with a signature campaign.
It would take only a thousand signers to initiate a recall of Ordinance 176, so they bannered in, where else, the nation section of Panlilio’s creator.
That was in October last year yet. It is now February and apparently, they have not yet gotten to the thousandth signer. And this is “people power”?
Then there is that priest who mixed his local papers and called on his parishioners to boycott the paper critical of Panlilio, only to realize he uttered the name of the friendly paper. Shame.
It is all too easy to call on “people power.” The question: Will the people listen?
The Bard of Avon’s Henry IV has this interesting exchange.
The Welsh seer, Owen Glendower, proudly claims: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”
To which Hotspur nonchalantly answered: “Why, so can I, or so can anyone. But will they come when you do call them?”
It is not the noblest call that gets answered, but the answerable call. So we quote, verbatim, the Pulitzer-Prize winner Gary Wills in his treatise Certain Trumpets: The Nature of Leadership.
Call “people power” then at your peril, to your utter shame. Pathetic.

Vanity unfair

AESOP made a fable of it: “The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot wheel, and said, ‘What a cloud of dust do I raise.’”
The taga-ilog crafted a proverb out of it: “Langaw na dumapo sa likod ng kalabaw, pakiwari’y malaki pa sa tinuntungan.”
The taga-pampang, never to be outdone by their neighbors, witticised it thus: “Soga ing penako na, katayid damulag ya.”
“So there are some vain persons, that, whatsoever goeth alone or moveth upon greater means, if they have never so little hand in it, they think it is they that carry it.” So wrote the great English essayist Francis Bacon on the subject.
Yeah, it’s vainglory we are talking about here, dummy.
As in basking in reflected glory, like the moon boasting of its light that is no more than that reflected upon it by the sun.
So common in sons of not necessarily illustrious, but even merely popular, fathers. Some even get to be governors totally clueless in the art of governance.
As in huffing and puffing to look heftier and mightier than one’s real puny, sorry self.
Paper tigers, the activists of the ‘60s call them. Menacing but totally harmless. Like some soldier-boys you and I know.
As in a mere foot soldier claiming full credit for victory in war.
Come to think of it, wasn’t the great 1st Lt. Ferdinand E. Marcos of USAFFE cited for single-handedly delaying the fall of Bataan and Corregidor for one month? Only, the citation came nearly 20 years after the fact, err, the lie.
There is one writer, Michael Korda in his book Power, if I am not mistaken, who pricked the vainglorious bubble thus: “Only a weakling will endeavor to display power at every turn.”
So there, form over substance. Clanging cymbals signifying nothing, the Apostle Paul preached of vanities.
So beware of him that blows his own trumpet. For there is nothing there but hot, always fetid, air. And he too that follows him.
Take heed of Bacon: “(Vain)Glorious men are the scorn of wise men; the admiration of fools; the idols of parasites; and the slaves of their own vaunts.”
Lofty, lofty classical thoughts there we have to translate to current times. So vainglory goes from the sublime to the, err, clinical. Yeah, to the child psychologist’s ADHD -- attention deficiency hyperactive disorder.
And from the clinical to the sublimely ridiculous, KSP – kulang sa pansin.
So have you noticed those bloated tarpaulined egos lately?
Truly pathetic.

Vanity unfair

AESOP made a fable of it: “The fly sat upon the axle-tree of the chariot wheel, and said, ‘What a cloud of dust do I raise.’”
The taga-ilog crafted a proverb out of it: “Langaw na dumapo sa likod ng kalabaw, pakiwari’y malaki pa sa tinuntungan.”
The taga-pampang, never to be outdone by their neighbors, witticised it thus: “Soga ing penako na, katayid damulag ya.”
“So there are some vain persons, that, whatsoever goeth alone or moveth upon greater means, if they have never so little hand in it, they think it is they that carry it.” So wrote the great English essayist Francis Bacon on the subject.
Yeah, it’s vainglory we are talking about here, dummy.
As in basking in reflected glory, like the moon boasting of its light that is no more than that reflected upon it by the sun.
So common in sons of not necessarily illustrious, but even merely popular, fathers. Some even get to be governors totally clueless in the art of governance.
As in huffing and puffing to look heftier and mightier than one’s real puny, sorry self.
Paper tigers, the activists of the ‘60s call them. Menacing but totally harmless. Like some soldier-boys you and I know.
As in a mere foot soldier claiming full credit for victory in war.
Come to think of it, wasn’t the great 1st Lt. Ferdinand E. Marcos of USAFFE cited for single-handedly delaying the fall of Bataan and Corregidor for one month? Only, the citation came nearly 20 years after the fact, err, the lie.
There is one writer, Michael Korda in his book Power, if I am not mistaken, who pricked the vainglorious bubble thus: “Only a weakling will endeavor to display power at every turn.”
So there, form over substance. Clanging cymbals signifying nothing, the Apostle Paul preached of vanities.
So beware of him that blows his own trumpet. For there is nothing there but hot, always fetid, air. And he too that follows him.
Take heed of Bacon: “(Vain)Glorious men are the scorn of wise men; the admiration of fools; the idols of parasites; and the slaves of their own vaunts.”
Lofty, lofty classical thoughts there we have to translate to current times. So vainglory goes from the sublime to the, err, clinical. Yeah, to the child psychologist’s ADHD -- attention deficiency hyperactive disorder.
And from the clinical to the sublimely ridiculous, KSP – kulang sa pansin.
So have you noticed those bloated tarpaulined egos lately?
Truly pathetic.

Learned ignorance

“…YET POLITICS and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement…The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.”
No, Bong Lacson, a sophister at best, can never come up with such brilliant gems of thought. He can only look them up in the works of the masters. That was Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Anyone who has had but a cursory look at the current of events at the capitol would have most surely found agreement with Burke’s thesis.
Ignorance of the character he left – okay, he was suspended from – showed in Eddie T. Panlilio’s very reason for running – “a higher duty to serve the people.”
No less than a number of priests, Canon lawyers included, reminded him then: “What duty can be higher than the priesthood?”
The first definition of a priest impacted upon me when I entered the seminary: “A priest is a gift of God to men. A priest is a gift of men to God.” Mediator between God and His people. An alter Christus. What calling, indeed, can be higher than that?
Ignorance of the character he assumed is most manifest in Panlilio’s abject misappreciation, if not total misunderstanding, of his being governor.
Roll the drums now:
Panlilio calling “caretaker administration” Vice Gov. Yeng Guiao’s taking over the helm after Gov. Mark Lapid retreated to America to lick his political wounds. Ignorance of the law of succession surfacing there.
Panlilio asking the sangguniang panlalawigan for “blanket authority” to enter into memoranda, contracts, donations, etcetera. Ignorance of the democratic principle of check and balance shown there.
Panlilio thrusting his two lady lawyers to the SP as already confirmed on the basis of a mere letter. Ignorance, if not disrespect, of inter-departmental courtesy displayed there.
Panlilio accepting the P500,000 saying that it was not bribe money and then asking where it came from. Ignorance of the law on bribery most blatantly displayed in the Senate yet, with the erudite Johnny Enrile and the snappy Chiz Escudero cutting Panlilio’s moral armor to pieces.
Panlilio claiming “executive privilege” in creating the Balas office, hiring personnel without going through the SP and then asking the SP to appropriate money for their salaries, differentials and overtime. A clear case of the cart-before-the-horse. Ignorance of basic governmental procedures there.
Panlilio telling the SP “I confirmed them” of his putative administrator and legal counsel. If not ignorance, this is usurpation of the functions of the SP. It is the SP – not the governor – that confirms provincial chiefs of offices.
Panlilio telling the SP “I did not receive it. I did not see it” on the invitation for him to attend the hearings on Ordinance 176, despite Guiao showing him the invitation letter duly stamped “Received” by the Office of the Governor. Sheer ignorance of the governor on what is going on in his very office.
Panlilio visiting Fr. Robert Reyes at Camp Bagong Diwa and then making him speaker at the capitol’s flag ceremony where he blasted at the Macapagal-Arroyo administration. No, there is no ignorance there. Only insensitivity to the sentiments of a still clear majority of Kapampangans in love, if not in awe, of their cabalen in Malacanang.
Panlilio though has still enough humility to accept his utter lack of knowledge in things political.
“You know naman that I came from a totally different background. This is all a learning process to me.” So he whispered over lunch after that mess of a dialog he had with the SP.
Then, at the multi-sectoral assembly in celebration of San Fernando’s cityhood, it was announced by Jess Estanislao that his Institute for Solidarity in Asia – the entity that helped the city achieved so much – would initiate Pampanga – the first province ever – into the ISA fold.
Now, there is much promise there. First things first though. To fast track his learning curve, Panlilio has to unlearn his Ateneo crash course on governance. To many observers here, it was that very course from the loftier-than-all academe that crashed him to gross ignorance of real governance.

The party line

LOYALTY CHECK. That was how Sergio Apostol, Lakas-CMD chair for the Visayas – yes, he of the “your wetness” fame during the Erap impeachment proceedings – termed the party’s national directorate assembly scheduled today, February 7.
Those who want to leave Lakas – the President’s chief legal counsel counseled – “…are free to go. The problem is there are persons who cling to the party for their own personal interests. The change in the House speakership is one of the ways to cleanse Lakas of erring individuals.”
Events unraveled in the wee hours of February 5 and Jose de Venecia, the very face of Lakas-CMD, lost the Speakership.
Of parties and personalities. The summation of Philippine political reality. Here’s an old column finding currency anew.

THE PRIMACY of party platform over the cult of personality is one warranty of the parliamentary system. As practiced everywhere else. Thus Israel’s Likud and Labor, Great Britain’s Tories and Labour too, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, Germany’s Christian Democrats, and for sometime, even Italy’s Communist Party.
The state of high development of the named countries makes the greatest argument for the parliamentary system. Conversely, the state of underdevelopment of this country makes an irrefutable damnation on the personality-centered presidential system.
So we go parliamentary, so we go irreversibly full blast in economic development. So Cha-cha, hallelujah! Let’s party!
Something in the Filipino psyche has to be lobotomized though, for party politics to even set root hereabouts.
The master of politics himself, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos, knew this by heart. Thus his immortal take on Philippine politics as “personalist, populist and individualist” upon which he founded his fuehrership, and, with his beloved Imeldific, propagated their Malakas at Maganda apotheosis.
All Filipino politicians come from the Marcosian mold of personal, popular, individual. All pretensions to party advocacy are, well, pretensions.
So Manuel Luis Quezon ranted: “My loyalty to my party ends where my loyalty to my country begins.” God bless him.
Party loyalty is a contradiction in terms here; loyalty to the country is as true as Judas’ devotion to Christ. Where politicos are concerned.
The pre-eminence of the individual politician over his party is inherent in Philippine political history. Thus, Nacionalista Party-Roy Wing, Liberal Party-Kalaw Wing, Liberal Party-Salonga Wing in the not-too-distant past.
Thus, a Liberal Party sundered by anti-GMA and pro-GMA flanks winging to Lito Atienza on the right and Frank Drilon on the left. Venerable old Jovy Salonga tottering at the fulcrum.
On another plane, witness how political parties here are hitched on the tides and fortunes of their founders.
The Kilusang Bagong Lipunan was an invincible monolith at the time of the Marcos dictatorship only to crumble to dust after EDSA Uno.
The sainted Cory Aquino took Ramon Mitra’s Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino to the promised land, then pulled the rug from under him and emerged with Fidel V. Ramos’ Lakas-Tao that evolved into Lakas-NUCD-UMDP and then to Lakas-CMD.
Now, where is Joseph Estrada’s Partido ng Masang Pilipino , Lito Osmena’s Promdi, Miriam Defensor’s Reform Party, and Raul Roco’s Aksyon Demokratiko?
The Philippine political experience has made a mockery of party politics. So a change to the parliamentary system is bruited about as the harbinger of political maturity, and consequently, the supremacy of a party’s platform of governance as the dominant factor in the choice of national leaders.
Good luck. It is not bad to dream. But then, kung mangarap ka’t magising na ikaw ay ikaw pa rin, para anupa’t ika’y patulugin? Baka ka pa bangungutin.
Change the presidential system to parliamentary?
Yes, we need systems change. What we need more though is a change of men. What we need most is a change in men.

Ululating Joe de V

SOUR, INDEED, are the grapes of wrath.
On the eleventh hour, when the inevitable is all but come, Jose de Venecia, clutching at straws to hold on vainly to the Speakership, gasped – not his last – but breathed fire, spewing an acerbic mouthful at Malacanang.
Joe de V could have been a courageous Custer making his last stand, or a heroic Bowie defiantly dignified at the Alamo. Instead, he chose to be a whimpering wimp, straight out of the cartoon channel in the person of Daffy Duck. Yeah, that character defined by his saliva splattering “Despicable” ejaculations.
So, what could be Joe de V’s finest moment – his privilege speech before his impending ouster – morphed into a pathetic ululation of ad hominems, ad misericordiams, and non-sequiturs befouling the air of reason in that inappropriately named august chamber. (And as any student of logic knows, those Latin terms make some of the (ir)rationalizations that comprise the body of Material Fallacies of Reasoning.)
Short of directly calling the President ingratitude herself, Joe de V lamented how he picked her as his vice presidential bet in 1998, nurtured her politically through the Lakas-UMDP, backstopped her through EDSA 2 and the 2004 elections, stood unflinchingly by her through the impeachment and coup attempts.
“I was there” by the side of the President. So Joe de V punched his lamentations. And in return for this dogged loyalty, what did he get? Straight in his gut, GMA’s alleged collusion with the cabal to oust him from power. Truly, the unkindest cut comes from the one you give yourself to most. So implied the “betrayed” Joe de V.
“Corruption, perfidy, and double cross and triple cross,” maledicted Joe at Malacanang opening a Pandora’s box of the broadband deal with China which – echoing his son’s allegations – he claimed was overpriced by $200 million, of siblings Mikey and Dato Arroyo holding the tap of the pork barrel, the road user’s tax and other largesse for the congressmen with Malacanang-provided contractors for the projects.
Noble, heroic, stirring even, was the call of Joe de V for the members of the House to form “a new majority, not beholden as beggars to the sons of the President.”
But who would heed his call? Alack and alas, Joe de V’s celebrated “rainbow coalition” is long gone. The congressmen having found the gold at rainbow’s end, in the hands – not of leprechauns – but of the presidential sons’.
Still slugging at Malacanang, Joe de V warned he would resurrect the spectre of the elections of 2004.
Said he: “I wish I could discuss it at another time. But I know of many attempts to tamper with the results of the 2004 elections.”
Well, Joe de V had all the time during the impeachment hearings. He squandered it all. And now he wants a second time?
Smugly complacent in his high perch at the House, confident of his Torrens Title to it, Joe de V forgot there is a greater power than himself. And he paid a price for this lapse.
No, impassioned arguments and all, Joe de V did not end up fighting. He simply ended pathetic.