Alarm bell

Alarm bell

Updated 11:43pm (Mla time) Sept 29, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the September 30, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


THE THING was a subject of much (heated) discussion in the Internet some years ago, and for some reason has gotten a new lease on life of late. That is the apparent anti-Filipino remarks of Art Bell, an American talk-show host. Filipinos and Americans alike were up in arms over his commentaries some years ago and tried to get him fired from his radio station. They are so as well today, to go by the irate expostulations I've gotten in my e-mail.

There's only one problem here: Art Bell never said those things. His supposed remarks were a hoax, as the Inquirer found out a couple of years ago. And Bell, a completely respectable talk-show host, has been protesting it since it came out on the Internet. The hoax has him saying:

"In the past few decades, Filipinos have begun to infest the United States like some sort of disease.... Nothing respectable has ever been created by the Filipino people.... Young Filipino men in America... have an enormously perverted affection for Japanese cars... In their minds, they somehow believe they are Asian...." [In fact], in Japan, Filipinos are heavily discriminated against. The only Filipinos that can live successfully in Japan are the prostitutes.... Nothing in Filipino Culture can be seen as Asian. They have no architectural, artistic, or cultural influence, which is in any way, Asian. Thinking of the great countries in Asia such as Japan, Korea, and China there is no way you can possibly connect the Philippine Islands."

There's a lot more, but you get the drift. What can I say? The Web crawls with spiders. It is as much home to nasty pranksters as to software sharers. While at this, to this day I keep getting e-mail that has apparently bounced back to me. "Apparently" because I never sent those e-mails to begin with. Clearly, the characters who kept sending people e-mails purportedly from me during the height of the Iraq War (someone wrote me to say he got pornographic material; I asked him to send it "back" but unhappily got no answer) are still alive and crawling in the woodwork.

What has given the Art Bell hoax a life of its own however is that it is perfectly believable. It is perfectly believable that an American radio host would say it. Howard Stern comes to mind. And only recently Jay Leno had some funny things to say about the size of the Filipino contingent in Iraq and its capacity to win the 100-meter dash. Their remarks, of course, are not of the order of wholesale Filipino-bashing, but it is not inconceivable that someone should up the ante.

What makes the hoax credible moreover is that there is a grain of truth in it. It's a trick mirror, but a trick mirror does reflect something even if it presents it in grotesque form. Whoever put the words in Bell's mouth knew a thing or two about Filipinos.

True enough, compared to the other Asian countries, we seem to be utterly without accomplishment. More so now than ever. We have no culture comparable to that of any of the East Asian countries, or indeed even the Southeast Asian ones. Thailand has every reason to draw in the tourists (it has 10 times more than we do) and that isn't only because of the pleasures of the flesh it offers (we supply it equally abundantly).

Of course, we can always argue that the United States, quite apart from Spain and Japan, had a great deal to do with creating the cultural wasteland. I remember saying exactly that some months ago when US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone lamented the culture of corruption that was ravaging these islands. Pray, what is colonialism but an object -- or abject -- lesson in it? Close to four centuries of colonial rule does take its toll on a people.

But it is cold comfort. True enough, too, it's not just that we have no identity to be proud of, unlike other Asians, it's that we have no identity, period. We do tend to poach on other people's identities in lieu of brandishing our own. The only thing wrong about the hoax in fact is that it accuses Filipinos of usurping an Asian identity. That is not so at all. Filipinos do not like to usurp an Asian identity, they like to usurp a Western identity. Or more specifically an American identity. That is true not just with Filipinos in America but with Filipinos in the Philippines. The alienation of the Filipino does not begin in America, it begins right at home.

The colonial label, "little brown brother," has become the post-colonial label, American citizen, or green card holder. That is the great Filipino dream, and that is the great Filipino tragedy.

Nothing has driven that home to me more than something a Filipino advertiser in America once told me. During an advertising conference, he said, he was astonished to see that American advertisers had special ads for various ethnic communities -- Mexicans, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. but none for Filipinos. He learned soon enough why. Filipinos were considered a subset of the American market, they did not need a different pitch. A reasonable assumption, to go by the very ads we have right here. Filipinos are not assimilated, they are subsumed-and the subsumption begins right at home.

And true enough, finally, we have been tumbling into the world like a flood, though the United States remains the preferred country of exile, if not infesting it like a virus. That, along with leaving behind a country that is going nowhere and having a reputation for seizing other people's identities, a la "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers," opens us up to all sorts of parodies, nasty remarks, and well, hoaxes like this.

I am glad this hoax persists, even if we have to remove Bell from its shadow once and for all. It forces us to look at ourselves. We truly are becoming a people with no history, no identity, and the way things are, no home.
Someone should be ringing that Alarm Bell.

Foresight

Foresight

Updated 10:21pm (Mla time) Sept 28, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 29, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I'M glad "Fahrenheit 9/11" will finally be shown in Philippine movie houses. Better late than never. The (pirated) DVD, of course, has been around for some time now, something I hope Michael Moore, whose website has had the most visitors for some time, will condone. I do know folk who are deep into the Web are possessed of the spirit of freeware and shareware. I can attest to that: the best video and audio software out there is free. In any case, Moore has always professed a desire to spread the Bad News about George W. Bush.

Nowhere should that have a more missionary effect than in this country, bastion of pro-Americanism in Asia. No, in all the world: you cannot find a people more in love with their former colonial master, as witness the witless coverage of Bush's visit to this country last year. You can't have a bigger exercise in obsequiousness, on the part of Malacanang, the media and the public.

I personally would be curious to see how "Fahrenheit" fares locally. It enjoyed a tremendous run in the United States, the documentary crashing into the Top 10 Movies list for several weeks, holding its own among big-budgeted blockbusters. Truly, truth is stranger than fiction, or more dramatic. I wrote about "Fahrenheit" a couple of months ago, suggesting that Congress make it required viewing in aid not just of legislation but of improving its members' minds. The suggestion, I understand, was received well: I learned that several senators and congressmen were looking for a copy of the documentary. (So much for Edu Manzano's crusade.) I still think the foreign relations committee of the House and Senate should watch it en banc. Preferably in the movie house, to give Moore some income.

Its showing could not have come at a better time, though any time would always be a good time in this country for things that disabuse it of its illusions. It comes not just on the eve of the US elections but at a time when we are groping for a policy to replace the disastrous one mounted by Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo over the last three years since 9/11, which brought Angelo de la Cruz close to losing his head. It is a sublime irony, a government losing its head and nearly causing one of the governed to lose his. There is a lesson to be learned there, for those willing to heed it.

As "Fahrenheit" shows (which has been obvious to most of the world all this time but will probably still come as a surprise to many Filipinos), George W. Bush is to the war against terror as the Colombian cartel is to the war against cocaine. He is not its biggest prosecutor, he is its biggest obstacle. Bush owes his fortune, if not his fame, to the very family that bred Osama bin Laden, which is the Bin Ladens of Saudi Arabia. That explains in part his eagerness to turn his gaze away from Osama bin Laden and shift it to Saddam Hussein, even if the latter had nothing to do with 9/11 or with al-Qaida. As Bush's campaign to justify the war on Iraq further shows, he isn't just the biggest obstacle to the war against terror, he is the biggest contributor to terror. To carry out that war, he terrorized the American public, he terrorized the United Nations, and he terrorized the world.

A few days ago, I heard Roilo Golez being interviewed on TV. He was asked at one point if recent developments in Iraq were not a reason for him as former national security adviser, and the other members of Arroyo's war council, to admit they were wrong to have ardently supported that war. Golez answered that we could not afford to make judgments from hindsight, everyone was always right in hindsight. Where we were last year, he said, we had no choice but to support that war. We based our position on US intelligence reports, and "we had no reason not to believe them."

Why so? Why did we have no reason not to believe the lies issuing from the bowels of the Pentagon and the White House? Except for a few countries that formed the so-called "coalition of the willing" (Moore has some truly funny things to say about them in "Fahrenheit"), the whole world was against it. The UN was against it. Even the very UN inspectors of weapons of mass destruction were against it; they found no evidence of those weapons in Iraq. All we had to go on was the weird logic of George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that if the UN couldn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it must be because Saddam had managed to hide them!

Why did we have no choice but to support the occupation of Iraq? What is this--in the event of doubt, "sugod mga kapatid" [forward my brothers]? No, this isn't a matter of making judgments from hindsight, this is a matter of looking at things with foresight. Or never mind foresight, just using common sense.

"Fahrenheit" should help drive home the folly of that tack, for those who still haven't seen it. It should also remind us of why De la Cruz was abducted to begin with, something we seem to have forgotten in the blaze of government's self-congratulatory, rescue-mode, chest-thumping afterward. I heard in the news some days ago that the government still refuses to send OFWs to Iraq on the ground that what happened to De la Cruz could still happen again. Well, we continue to defend that war, it will happen again. We condemn it as the immoral occupation it is, it won't.

I wish they would show "Bowling for Columbine" along with "Fahrenheit 9/11." The first is just as insightful, if not more so, and should have something to say about the deeper sources of the war in Iraq. But that can wait, maybe until "Fahrenheit" proves commercially successful.

But, no, a great deal of what is right and wrong we can see not just from hindsight, we can espy it from foresight.
Or never mind foresight, from just using common sense.

Equations

Equations

Updated 09:27pm (Mla time) Sept 27, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the September 28, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


IT'S a reminder that needs to be made again and again. Recovering ill-gotten wealth is not the end in itself, it is the means to an end. The point is to use it for the public good. Specifically, to promote justice, the one thing martial law obliterated. Recovering the wealth the crooks stole from the people is just the first part of business. The second part is giving it back to them.

That hasn't happened, least of all under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, as a group called Partnership for Agrarian Reform (PAR) revealed. Last week, during the 32nd anniversary of martial law, it showed how exactly the Ms Arroyo government has been using the money it has gotten back from Ferdinand Marcos.

That money stood at P38 billion early this year. That was to be divided into P8 billion for the martial law victims and P30 billion for land reform. A meritorious arrangement. Of course, all Filipinos, except the Marcos cronies, were victims of martial law. But some were more victims than others. Indeed, what made the torture victims exceptionally deserving of compensation was not just that they suffered the most, but that they did the most to free this country from its chains. That was why they suffered the most, because they raised a hand against tyranny, often when there was no one else to do it.

That the rest of the money would go to land reform made sense just as well. The "people" are preponderantly the poor, and the poor, who are to be found particularly among tenants and sharecroppers, have had one burning cry throughout the ages--to own the land they till.

The compensation of the martial law victims has not happened. The martial law victims may have won the battle of the court, but they have not won the battle of the count. To this day, they have not gotten their due, and only God, or Ms Arroyo, knows when they will get it. The wheels of justice have been known to grind slowly, but in this case they do not grind at all.

The second--the portion that should go to land reform--has been used sparingly for land reform. The Presidential Agrarian Reform Council Agreement of August 2003 stipulates that 70 percent of the P30 billion would go to acquire and distribute lands and 30 percent to "high-impact interventions that will reach a greater number of beneficiaries." The Arroyo government has already used P6 billion and allocated another P6 billion.

Of the first P6 billion, P2.7 billion has been given to Land Bank in partial payment of its land acquisition activities, P2.2 billion for support services, P544 million for Ms Arroyo Rice program, P544 for irrigation projects of the NIA, P30 million for coconut processing. Of the second P6 billion, P3 billion has been set for land acquisition and distribution, P1 billion for net cash allotment, and P2 billion for automatic payment of bonds.

Three things are wrong with this use of the Marcos money.

First, of the P12 billion that has been spent or allocated, only the P2.7 billion and P3 billion for land acquisition and distribution clearly follow the PARC agreement. The others go beyond the 30 percent ceiling for support services and most of them do not qualify as high-impact interventions anyway. Certainly, giving P30 million to a private firm to process coconut is entirely unjustifiable.

Second, the P12 billion, which is 40 percent of the P38 billion recovered Marcos loot, has been spent or allocated in a record eight months, from February to September this year. At this rate, nothing will be left of the money by the end of next year. Indeed, the way Ms Arroyo has been using the Marcos money, the torture victims may seriously wonder if they will get compensated at all. Agreements do not seem to have a binding effect on their President.

This raises a related issue, which is: The use of the Marcos money has been left nearly entirely to the President's discretion. She may or may not follow the PARC agreement as she pleases. Indeed, she may or may not follow the law as she pleases. There is no transparency, or accounting, in the uses of the funds. That is particularly worrisome in light of one important thing. Which is the PCGG's disclosure that from 1986 to 2003, the government has recovered an additional P22 billion from the Marcoses. This money has not been accounted for to this day. Malacanang has yet to show which agency, or pocket, or quicksand it has gone to.

That brings us to the most important issue of all, which is, whether the billions of pesos that have already been spent have actually gone to where they appear on paper. PAR does not suggest a reason for the speed with which Ms Arroyo used up the bulk of the recovered Marcos wealth, but we know that the period from February to first week of May was the campaign period. And we know that the period afterward was one where debts, of the political rather than financial kind, had to be paid.

We have at least Frank Chavez to give evidence about how a portion of that money went to finance Ms Arroyo's campaign. He may be entirely right when he says, that is but the tip of the iceberg. Ms Arroyo spared no government agency to raise a sum with which to pay a king's ransom, or in this case to buy a queen's continued stay on a throne. It is inconceivable she did not think of the Marcos loot first.

Recovering ill-gotten wealth is not unlike raising taxes or making suggestions of pooling scant resources to avert economic disaster. That is all very well, but raising money is just the first part of the equation. Spending it wisely is the second.

In this country, the second is clearly the harder thing to do.

What's wrong with the picture?

What's wrong with the picture?

Updated 11:43pm (Mla time) Sept 26, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 27, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


PRESS Secretary Ignacio Bunye defends the Oakwood mutineers' act of contrition thus: "It takes courage to admit one's fault and come to the mainstream of public interest." What exactly he means by "come to the mainstream of public interest," I leave him to explain. But he is right to say admitting one's fault and apologizing for it are an act of courage. Neither is easy to do.

You need not go farther than President Macapagal-Arroyo herself to see that. To this day, she has not apologized to Acsa Ramirez.

Ramirez, we may recall, was the whistleblower whom she mistook for one of the whistle-blown and identified as such in a press conference, to Ramirez's chagrin and shame. Rather than admit her mistake, GMA stuck by it. Reynaldo Wycoco, apparently construing an admission of presidential fallibility as a breach of national security, thence took it upon himself to hound Ramirez and pin the rap on her. The ruse failed and eventually he gave it up. But he never apologized. He just asked everyone to forget about it and move on.

Well, Ramirez hasn't forgotten. And the reason this country has never moved on-or has moved only backward-is that it keeps trying to forget iniquity.

So is the Oakwood mutineers' apology to their commander in chief, therefore, an act of courage?

Not at all.

This is so not because they compromised their principles, as their lawyer, Homobono Adaza, said: "I have been taken for a ride. I thought they were willing to stand for what they believed in and what they saw was happening to the country." As he further pointed out, the apology was gratuitous. The cases against 290 of the mutineers have been dismissed by a Makati court and 28 of the remaining 31 soldiers are out on bail.

What would have made their show of contrition and apology an act of courage was if they had issued it not just to the AFP (and by extension to the commander in chief), but to the Filipino people. Their crime was not first and last against the AFP and the commander in chief, it was first and last against the people.

Their statement acknowledges it tacitly: "Last 27 July 2003... we went to Oakwood Hotel to vent our grievances. This we did in our honest, though naive, desire for change. However, as succeeding events have shown, the Filipino people did not agree with our means of expression."

They are right: We did not agree with their "means of expression" even if-as one of Pepe Miranda's surveys shortly after the event showed-most of us agreed with their premises. Those premises included corruption in the AFP and Malacanang, a corruption that went past pillage and took on the aspect of monumental deceit. The pillage had to do with their commander in chief and their generals pocketing the money that should have gone to the foot soldiers, particularly those stationed in Mindanao. I would learn later that it had to do with the P3 billion or so Erap set aside for the Cafgu and other elements that would pacify Muslim Mindanao after the soldiers pulled out. The money disappeared, compelling the soldiers to extend their duties under adverse conditions. The foot soldiers were almost literally on foot: their boots had given out on them.

The deception had to do with Malacanang wagging the dog, or inventing a war against terror in Muslim Mindanao for its own reasons. The mutineers went on to charge GMA and Angelo Reyes with engineering the bombing of a Davao wharf.

Their premises may be right, but none of it is solved by a mutiny or coup. I myself wrote several columns condemning the Oakwood takeover despite refusing to join the ex-civil society leaders who kept calling on us to throng to the Edsa Shrine to fly to the aid of their favorite president while it was happening. The mutineers' charges might be true, but the mutiny did not solve them, it merely made them worse. And it added insult to injury, a group of military officers, well-meaning or not, presuming to speak on behalf of the people without any mandate.

Their apology is owed us first and last, not GMA or the AFP. What makes their decision to prostrate themselves before their superiors a farce rather than an act of courage is that it turns governance and its challenges into something played out only by a few men and women. It turns a crime against the people into a crime against a person, even if that person is the President, reposing the judgment to forgive or prosecute, to forget or punish, solely in her hands.

It does one other thing, which is to free GMA from apologizing herself to a people she has deeply wronged. More than ever, I am convinced that what made the mutiny ultimately possible was not that GMA was an unelected President, but that she had militarized the country through her "war against terror." That was what stoked the fires of military restiveness after more than a decade of relative calm. Grievances alone, however deep, do not make mutinies or coup attempts feasible. Only a militarized culture does. Only the expectation that the people-and not quite incidentally the American government-would accept the outcome does. It is not dire finances alone that have driven the mutineers to discover the virtue of humility, it is the complete disappearance of GMA's war rhetoric, most especially after she too was given a lesson in humility by Angelo de la Cruz's captors. But GMA has not apologized for all of this. Nor is it likely she ever will.

What's wrong with the picture of the mutineers saluting their commander in chief in demonstration of renewed loyalty is what has always been wrong with the bigger picture called "Philippine democracy." It is a democracy without the people.

Carless

Carless

Updated 00:41am (Mla time) Sept 23, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



[* breaking_text *] Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 23, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I SAW my friend Jack Yabut on the ANC television channel last Monday. He was plugging for the World Carless Day, which is tomorrow. Like Earth Day and No Smoking Day, World Carless Day means to draw attention to a bane, in this case smog and traffic caused by motor vehicles, and to find ways to lessen it.

Jack himself had several suggestions -- organizing car pools, taking public transport (chief of them the overhead Metro Rail Transit and Light Rail Transit), biking, and walking to the office or home if they are not too far off. The trick is to take things one step at a time, he said, but to do them with some regularity. Maybe you can take public transport once a week, quite apart from your car-ban day. You do that regularly, it becomes a habit, and habits make for attitudinal changes.

Asked what inspired him to take up this crusade, Jack said that honestly it wasn't lofty heroism but plain self-interest. He wants to breathe reasonably clean air, a fact that has become less and less possible in Metro Manila today.

His concern is not exaggerated. I myself have a graphic image of Metro Manila's pollution in my head. I was on an out-of-town trip one summer's day some years ago, and as usual I took the dawn flight. I do that because I can no longer tolerate traffic, it wastes my time and frays my nerves. The plane had just taken off and I could see gray light breaking in the east. Then to my surprise, I saw a line streaking across the horizon just above the sleeping city. Everything below it was dark as soot and everything above it was clear as sky. It took some moments for me to realize what that line was. It was where the smog began, or rose up to. It startled me to realize I lived in the very depths of that dark soot. I was glad I was leaving it, if only temporarily.

The biggest contributor there are, of course, the motor vehicles. And private cars -- however more efficient their exhausts are compared to those of buses and jeepneys -- are the main culprit. That is so because of their sheer inefficiency in ferrying one or two persons from Point A to Point B at any given time compared to buses and jeepneys and trains that haul a horde of bedraggled carcasses over the same time and space. Private cars are also easily the biggest contributor to traffic by the same token. Too much space, too few people.

I myself drive, but I feel no small pangs of conscience when I see tricycles and buses groaning with human cargo. I still get pissed off when the tricycles ply the main roads, holding up traffic for the faster vehicles, and the buses block my path, particularly in the part of the SM mall that leads out to EDSA highway (a simple problem the half dozen or so traffic aides there can't seem to solve); but the recognition I am lugging my sole carcass over some distance while they are doing so hundreds of them gives me pause.

I do take the MRT, as I've said in an earlier column, going to Makati, at least on the occasions I am persuaded to go there. It is not my favorite part of the metropolis; Manila is, for reasons that have nothing to do with Atienza. It is not merely that I manage to escape the huge parking lot known as Edsa-one of the joys of taking the Metro Rail Transit is looking down at all the cars not moving below and knowing you are not there -- it is that I manage to escape the cares of finding a place to park in the huge non-parking lot known as Makati City. Jack is right: Sometimes, enlightened self-interest does the trick.

I know the arguments that have been raised against public transport. Mainly, that it sucks. It is crowded, it is slow and it is a pickpocket's or holdup man's paradise. The argument is not without merit, although, like the issue of leaving the country and working abroad, it is a chicken-and-egg tangle. The solution is itself the problem. We leave the country, the country gets worse, others find more reason to leave it. We buy more and more cars, public transport is left to the dogs or the poor, we buy more and more cars. And kill ourselves -- and our children -- with lung problems.

Or cancer: Haven't you noticed that's been on the rise over the years? But that's another story.

Clearly, government must do its job of improving public transport. Chief of them by running more trains. Omar Lopez had an interesting letter the other day (Inquirer, Sept. 21, 2004) saying we are the only country on Earth that doesn't have a decent train system and enumerating the many merits of having one. Chief of them making travel easier to and from the provinces, thereby decongesting Metro Manila.

I've said the same thing a number of times. The problem isn't the demonstrable lack of merit of trains, it is the demonstrable lack of will of government. The one thing that stands formidably in its way is the car lobby, which includes the sellers of cars, gasoline, tires and other car-related products as well as the public officials, elective or appointive, who corner funds with which to build substandard, or even non-existent, roads and bridges.

Government must do its job, but we have to do ours, too. Cars aren't just a means of transport in this country, they are a state of mind. They carry with them a culture -- a "car culture" -- that has our urban dwellers agog over Ford's invention. Jack is right, too about taking things one step at a time. Literally, in the case of walking. That is something by the way you learn when you visit Europe and other countries: though their dwellers live far more luxuriously than we do, they have not forgotten how to walk. Their own car culture has not wrecked their walking culture. A fellow Filipino once complained to me in one such sojourn: "Don't they ever think of having tricycles here?" No, my dear, they don't. Which is why they live far more luxuriously than we do.

Carless is not the end of the world. It's just the start of it.

Never again? (2)

Never again?

Updated 01:34am (Mla time) Sept 22, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 22, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


(Conclusion)

UP UNTIL several years ago, I was also confident the public would never allow martial law to happen again. The prospect of martial rule replacing a democratic one seemed ages removed.

The difference between then and now, I said then, was that then people had not experienced martial law-it was an unknown quantity, they were willing to give it a try. Now, they know what martial law can do, they know that things can always get worse than they are. They know authoritarian rule gives neither bread nor freedom, and they are not suckers for punishment. The people themselves, I said, would never allow martial law, or whatever guise it took, to happen again.

Besides, we had just had two EDSA People Power uprisings. You can't have any clearer proof about the extent to which people would bestir themselves to end tyranny than that. Both ended the rule of a thug, even if the first rule had arisen by design and the second by accident. Or indeed, as the "Eraptions" showed, by Joseph Estrada bungling into it with blissful ignorance.

I said, too, in several columns that the people were no longer as docile as they were when Marcos declared martial law. The two EDSA People Power revolts proved they were capable of exploding after being stoked to rage; the second EDSA People Power uprising, in particular, which showed a public capable of spontaneous action. EDSA People Power II had no definite leader, though the usual suspects -- Cory Aquino, Jaime Cardinal Sin and Fidel Ramos -- subsequently made a strenuous bid to claim it as their own.

I am not so sure that is the case today. 9/11 demonstrated how brittle the foundations of people power really are. The problem is not stoking the populace to heroism, it is sustaining it. Indeed, the problem is that it is easier to stoke the flames of bigotry than the fires of heroism among the populace. That was what 9/11 did -- or what a non-elected president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo --
did with it. She stoked the flames of this country's most deep-seated biases, which were its love for Americans and hatred of Moros [Filipino Muslims], to justify importing George W. Bush's idiotic version of "war against terror" into these shores.

Overnight, democracy disappeared. One is tempted to say, ironically, because the entire enterprise unfurled the banners of freedom and defense of the democratic way of life. But that in fact was how Marcos justified martial law, too: as a defense of freedom and the democratic way of life. Only the concept of whom they were presumably being defended from changed. Then it was communists, now it was terrorists. But overnight after 9/11, democracy was replaced by the rule of the generals, or at least the militarists. Overnight, the people in charge of the country were no longer the President and her Cabinet, they were the commander in chief and her National Security Council.

How martial the whole country became, I've written about countless times in the past -- and got a lot of flak for it. The people who dished out the flak are silent now, in the wake of their idol Bush's monumental blunder in Iraq. Only a year ago, they were shouting their heads off about defending God and flag by bombing the Iraqis to kingdom come.

How martial this country became, you saw in movie and TV fare that extolled martial virtues and even turned the CIA, author of the massacre of Allende et al., into a misunderstood hero. Indeed, how martial this country became you saw in Ms Arroyo, Roilo Golez, Angelo Reyes and their ilk beside themselves with glee at the US donation of surplus planes and weapons in reward for our joining the "coalition of the willing" like boys with newfound toys.

Nobody protested it. Least of all civil society, which stopped being civil and became thoroughly martial with what truly ironically was called "Peace Bonds."

Finally, up until a few years, I was confident we would not see another man who had the same appetite for power or would be as wiling to raise the stakes to have it as Marcos. Cory had given up power, though she could easily have held on to it. Law has never deterred this country from deeds good and bad; it has lawyers precisely to help people skirt it. Ramos wanted to, but gave it up after being felled by the Asian crisis of 1997. His moral authority plunged as swiftly as the peso. And though Estrada was a thug, he did not have the same scale of ruthlessness, quite apart from astuteness, as Marcos. He left woefully on a barge on Pasig River bound for his San Juan hometown.

Well, true enough no man came along possessing the same ambition and resolve as Marcos. A woman has. And sublimely ironically one birthed by an act of people power. A woman who has recklessly thrown this country itself, quite apart from the OFWs in the Gulf, into the path of harm by an aggressive posture of war, a woman who has unleashed a reign of terror in the name of fighting it, a woman who has shown no compunction for telling the country one thing and doing another.

There are in fact only two things standing in the way of authoritarian rule as a possibility in future. The first is minor, and has to do with Charter change, which would allow the president to stay in power as prime minister. The second is major, which is the only real deterrent against it, and that is the control of the military. That was what Marcos had that nobody else, man or woman, has had since, a complete control of the military. He didn't just have the loyalty of the generals out of gratitude, he had it out of fear. Nobody dared defy him, until much later when he was ravaged by disease. And the wonder of it was that he wasn't a general himself; he was a lawyer. Easy to unleash the rule of the generals, the question is: How do you prevent a general from ruling himself?

But the way things are, with dire and uncertain times having us in their grip, you never know.

Never again?

Guess again.

Never again? (1)

Never again?

Updated 10:03pm (Mla time) Sept 20, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the September 21, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


CAN it happen again?

Well, let's look again at some of the things that made martial law possible on Sept. 21, 1972.

First, there was someone who was willing to up the ante on rule-breaking and take enormous risks to make a bid for absolute power. That was Ferdinand Marcos who showed his true colors when he was still a young man by assassinating his father's political enemy, Julio Nalundasan, with a sniper's bullet. And who showed he would not be deterred by scruples by lying through his teeth at every opportunity. Chief of them was opposing Philippine involvement in Vietnam while he was still senator (and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's father, Diosdado Macapagal, was president), and promptly doing so when he came into Malacanang in 1965.

Second, there was American support for martial law. Independence in 1946 notwithstanding, this is a country whose political future has been shaped by the American will. At least it cannot go far astray of its political parameters without White House consent. The consent, or indeed active support, for martial law was given by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the US president and secretary of state, respectively, architects of US support for iron-fisted rule in the Third World. Several months after they propped up Marcos, they engineered a coup in Chile, which led to the murder of its democratic president, Salvador Allende, and his replacement by a thug named Augusto Pinochet.

Third, there was tacit public acceptance, if not embrace, of martial law. The business community, chief of them foreign investors, certainly applauded it, alarmed by the rallies that were getting more strident by the day and finding in dictatorial rule the ideal conditions for making business, namely one that guaranteed low wages and high profit. The only time they would complain was when Marcos started stealing from them.

Neither did the public generally resist it. This was a country that teemed with poverty in 1972, no small thanks to a procession of leaders that perpetuated plutocracy, or "oligarchy," as Marcos himself referred to it, forgetting his own contribution to entrenching it. "Sakada" was more than a word, it was the epitome of destitution. Rightly so: The sugarcane workers lived in conditions that evoked a time other than the 20th century. It was a throwback to the days of feudal servitude, where the lords of the manor did not just own land, they owned people. There was at least little public resistance to martial law, which greatly embittered the opposition, chief of them Ninoy Aquino, who had expected the populace to erupt in rage at the rape of democracy. Quite simply, the poor were willing to pay to see whether things would not turn out the better for them, getting food in lieu of freedom. Pay they did, and dearly.

Lastly, there was tremendous instability and uncertainty. This was a time of ferment, groups and ideologies competing for power, amid a bleak economic horizon. This was also a time of unparalleled political violence. More than a year before September 1972, on Aug. 21, 1971, the opposition was decimated by a bomb that exploded in a campaign rally. A couple of months before martial law, the nation saw a flood of biblical proportions, which lasted for nearly a couple of months, and turned Central Luzon, the country's rice bowl, into a watery waste. Then a month or so before Marcos declared martial law, Greater Manila (as it was called then) was gripped by a series of bombings, much of it attributed to Marcos himself.

Five or so years ago, I was confident these conditions would never be replicated. Certainly not nearly enough to make another round of martial law, or authoritarian rule whatever guise it took, possible. I am not so sure today.

The one thing I had not counted on coming back, and so soon, was American support for iron-fisted rule in the globe. This was especially so after the US went on a staunch pro-democracy binge that not only rid the Philippines of Marcos--Ronald Reagan found himself increasingly isolated in his position that Marcos was not just part of the problem, he was part of the solution; his aides, particularly in the State Department, argued that Marcos was just the problem, period--but the world pretty much of communism. The late 1980s and early 1990s in particular were halcyon days in this respect, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

With rugged capitalism triumphant in the mid-1990s--enough for Fidel Ramos, a staunch believer, to exhort the public to forget politics entirely and think Philippines 2000--I thought the final nail on US support for openly tyrannical rule had been driven into the coffin.

Not by a mile, as it turned out. 9/11 merely gave George W. Bush the excuse to restore it, and with a vengeance. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are the modern-day versions of Nixon and Kissinger. They are equally vicious and ruthless, if not more so. They have certainly raised the stakes on carving the world after their image, opting for direct intervention, or outright invasion, rather than supporting tyrants who would stamp the imperial will upon their societies. Completely uncannily, they even have their own Vietnam to match that of Nixon and Kissinger. That is Iraq, where the US body bag has been mounting: A couple of weeks ago, it went past the 1,000th mark.

I am not a very superstitious man, but it's enough to make you believe Bush will be reelected, too. Nixon was, only to lose the presidency by impeachment some years later.

But if Arroyo should contemplate draconian rule, she will not find Bush and Rumsfeld deaf to entreaty. Assuming of course they are still around after November. And assuming they do not find an outright military cabal more preferable. (To be concluded.)

Never again

Never again

Updated 11:47pm (Mla time) Sept 19, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 20, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I'M glad that there seems to be renewed interest in what happened 32 years ago. Several networks called me up asking to interview me for something they were doing on martial law, whose anniversary falls tomorrow.

I worry, however, about a question I've heard a couple of times, which apparently many people, particularly the generation that went through martial law, are asking today. Namely, whether we were not better off then than now. Marcos at least built roads and bridges, they say, which has not happened to any comparable extent since. And prices were stable throughout the 1970s, if not the early 1980s, which has happened even less afterward. Then, wages went a long way toward putting food on the table.

Well, you can't blame people entirely for thinking this way. These are hard times, and hard times are always an invitation to looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses. But it's also a most dangerous way of doing so, the next step being to pine for iron-fisted rule which presumed to accomplish things democracy cannot. The latter I have heard intermittently since 1986, people wondering-not least Fidel Ramos and his cabal of ex and not-so- ex-generals-if authoritarian government, with a Lee Kuan Yew rather than a Ferdinand Marcos at the helm, were not the cure to our plight.

Nothing is more delusional. True enough, prices were stable throughout the 1970s. The price of rice, balut and beer did not stray much from one another. I'm not so sure now how much a case of beer went then. I do know it didn't go up by much before the 1980s. As well as most goods. But there was a time bomb ticking underneath this.

That time bomb was the debts Marcos incurred throughout this time. The early part of the 1970s was the period when the Western banks groaned with petrodollars, which were the deposits the oil producing countries were dumping on them. The banks in turn dumped the petrodollars on the Third World countries-many of which were ruled by tyrants, courtesy of America's support for them-which guaranteed that the loans would be paid whatever happened to them or their countries. To this day, we continue to reel from that guarantee in the form of "automatic appropriation," the sum automatically deducted from our national budget-even if the poor have no food on their tables-to pay for our debts.

The roads and bridges Marcos built may look impressive when you compare them to those put up by his successors, but they are pathetic when you compare them to the resources he had and to the infrastructure put up by the other Southeast Asian leaders from their own loans. I get depressed every time I leave the country and am greeted by the stark contrast between the Ninoy Aquino International Airport and the airports of other Southeast Asian countries. Transparency International lists Marcos as the second most corrupt tyrant in the world, next only to Suharto; he stole some $15 billion-compared to Suharto's $35 billion-which we are paying for to this day. And though Suharto was the bigger crook, he was at least the more patriotic one. Unlike Marcos, he did not stash his loot outside but plunked it in various businesses in Indonesia. That is a
monumental difference.

The point is simple: It is simply not true that Marcos supplied bread in lieu of freedom. He supplied neither. The seeming economic stability of the 1970s was just that, seeming. It was a surface placidity that rested on roiling waters. Or for those who do not like metaphors, it was a temporary stability bought at the price of a great catastrophe in the future. The future came in the early 1980s when the banks began to collect and cronies like Dewey Dee ran off with their own loot to pleasure capitals of the world.

Someone asked me why we continue to blame Marcos for our woes today. My answer is: Why the hell shouldn't we? Of course, subsequent leaders have made a mess of things, but why shouldn't we blame the fellow who made the worst mess of all? Marcos' tyranny ran deep and continues to ravage the country to this day. It's my same answer to the question why we continue to blame colonialism for our servile mentality today. Of course, we've messed up our minds, too, but why shouldn't we blame those who messed them up most of all? Colonial tyranny ran even deeper and continues to ravage our thinking to this day. Look at President
Macapagal-Arroyo.

None of this includes the horrors martial law wreaked on the nation-the loss of freedom was the more patent. What Marcos did to Julio Nalundasan, his father's bitter enemy, decades earlier-which was to fell him with a sniper's bullet while he brushed his teeth- Marcos did to Philippine democracy decades after-which was to waylay it with dictatorship while it slumbered. The deaths are too plentiful to recount, most of them buried in the not very shallow graves of national forgetfulness. Particularly decimated was the youth, many of them the best and brightest in the country.

Someone asked me if Marcos did not at least replace freedom with discipline during martial law. Well, he did have all those slogans on TV that said, "Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan (To achieve progress, a nation has to have discipline)." And in later years, we had Asyong Aksaya to teach the public by negative example to shun the ways of profligacy. The problem though was that Marcos wanted only the public, and not himself and his cronies, to practice discipline and austerity. The best teacher, of course, is example: Asyong Aksaya can no more teach frugality to others than Asyong Pasista can teach responsibility to them.

One is tempted to say "Never again" to all these things. But some, if not all, of them are happening even as we speak. And few are raising their voices to stop it.

Giant steps

Giant steps

Updated 01:29am (Mla time) Sept 16, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the September 16, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


THERE'S a play that's taken the United Kingdom and the United States by storm. It's called "Guantanamo: Honour-Bound To Defend Freedom." It was written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, based on the accounts of 11 British inmates of Guantanamo Detention Center in Cuba. The 11 are Muslims, picked up in various parts of the world and detained without charges, without evidence and for most of them, without hope of being released.

They are among 600 prisoners, all Muslims, being held in Guantanamo. The play tells of the terror wreaked upon the suspects, which is the biggest secret that lies at the heart of America today. It is also its "biggest issue of injustice," as Brittain puts it. She adds: "The outrage of Guantanamo is so overwhelming that when people actually began to hear about it they couldn't believe it."

"There is no law here," one of the jailers says in the play. "It doesn't apply." When the play opened in the United States recently, several newspapers asked if the same question might not apply to America itself today.

"Guantanamo" was one of the things Mary Ann Wright mentioned last Monday when she breezed into Manila and spoke before a group of Americans living in this country, who are of course also overseas voters. She was here to campaign for John Kerry, or more specifically to campaign against George W. Bush. Wright may be a familiar name to some Filipinos. She was a spark of light amid the near-total darkness in the days prior to the US invasion of Iraq.

A career diplomat for 15 years, Wright resigned her post in March 2003 over differences with the US government's policies toward the world. This was a time when Bush had terrorized his country enough to coerce bipartisan support for his war and stifle nearly all dissent in his country. Wright had served in several hardship posts, or diplomatic flashpoints, over the last decade and a half: Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Somalia, Grenada and Nicaragua. In 1997, she received the State Department's Award for Heroism for her role in evacuating 2,500 persons during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Before that she served in the US Army for 26 years, earning the rank of colonel.

Her letter to Colin Powell on March 19, 2003 set out her reasons for resigning. "This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an administration of the US. I disagree with the administration's policies on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korea, and the curtailment of civil liberties in the US." She amplified the last in this wise: "Solitary confinement without access to legal counsel cuts at the heart of the legal foundations upon which our country stands. Additionally, I believe the administration's secrecy in the judicial process has created an atmosphere of fear to speak out against the gutting or protections on which America was built and the protections we encourage other countries to provide to their citizens."

Guantanamo stands first among those that cut at the heart of the legal foundations of America--no, more than legal, the moral foundations of that country. As Wright says, it took the United Kingdom two years of dogged legal effort to get three of its nationals released. Their stories became the basis of the play "Guantanamo." Soon after the three were repatriated to the United Kingdom, they were released for lack of evidence. The United Kingdom, said Wright, was America's chief ally in its invasion of Iraq. "Can you imagine what other countries would have to go through to get their nationals out of that prison?"

She can understand, Wright says, why Bush bitterly opposes the International Criminal Court. (The United States is not a signatory to it, even while regaling the world with the trial of Saddam Hussein.) "Some of what the US government has done easily qualify as war crimes."

Two things Wright worries about in particular as a result of the terrorism Bush is wreaking upon the world and his own country: The first is that it will fan terrorism and encourage America's enemies to do to American nationals what America is doing to its detainees in Guantanamo. "If I were a soldier today stationed abroad, I'd be very scared."

The second is that it isn't just fomenting ill-will against Americans abroad, it is subverting America's moral standing completely. Unfortunately, she says, most Americans do not realize this. "Unlike you," she said, the American public does not get to see Al Jazeera or be exposed to other points of view." (I did not get the chance to say we do not get to see Al Jazeera either, and that more than the Americans, Filipinos subscribe to the viewpoint of Fox Network.) It's time the soiling of the American image abroad stopped, she said. That was why she was supporting Kerry.

Well, I myself do not share her optimism about the great changes Kerry will work for if he wins the elections. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president for eight years and he implemented the embargo on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. And he was much intimidated by the US military. But I am truly glad there are people, Wright at the forefront of them, who are fighting the real war against terrorism, which is not just to be found in the deserts of Afghanistan but in the redoubts of Washington. The changes in American policy may prove far slower in a Kerry government than Wright supposes (alongside America's libertarian traditions, which have stood for 200 years, are its expansionist drives, which have been advanced and defended not least by its Hearsts and Foxes), but right now anyone or anything other than Bush should represent a vast improvement in and from America.

No, more than a vast improvement, a giant step for humankind.

Don't look outside

Don't look outside

Updated 10:50pm (Mla time) Sept 14, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 15, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


BEFORE MICHAEL Moore did "Fahrenheit 9/11," he did "Bowling for Columbine." Though "Fahrenheit" is by far the more popular because of its quite literally incendiary subject and its open indictment of George W. Bush, "Bowling," at least in my book, is the more penetrating. It was no accident that it won the Oscar last year for best documentary. It deserved it.

People tend to think it's just a brief against guns, Nandy Pacheco's favorite crusade. Well, yes, it is, but it is more than that. It asks how Columbine happened-which was where a couple of boys went on a shooting spree, killing 12 students, a teacher and themselves -- and discovers a pretty disturbing answer. Which is that it was an accident waiting to happen. The culture of violence that has permeated America over the centuries made it possible. Guns are both the effects and causes of that violence. The violence, or the paranoia associated with it, has driven citizens to own guns, and the guns themselves have raised the ante on violence. A violence that is ravaging as much the schools of America as the dwelling places of the peoples of the world.

At one point in "Bowling," Moore interviews an official of Lockheed Martin, the biggest weapons-maker in America, whose plant in Littleton is the town's main employer and whose logo is "We are Columbine." The official expresses shock that the Columbine shooting could happen in America, asking, "Why would kids do this?"

Moore asks him if it is not possible that the kids who see their parents go to work building missiles at Lockheed do not think there's any difference between the mass destruction those weapons wreak and the one that happened at Columbine High School. The official is aghast. The missiles they make, he says, are made for defense. "We don't get irritated with somebody, and just 'cause we're mad at them drop a bomb, shoot at them, or fire a missile at them."

Next follows (to the tune of "What a Wonderful World," sung by Louis Armstrong) a long list of what America does when it "gets irritated with somebody." Among the more recent ones:

"1981: Reagan administration trains and funds 'Contras,' 30,000 Nicaraguans die; 1982: US gives millions in aid to Saddam Hussein for weapons to kill Iranians; 1983: White House secretly gives Iran weapons to kill Iraqis; 1989: Manuel Noriega, Panama president and CIA agent, disobeys orders from Washington, US invades Panama and removes Noriega, 3,000 Panamanians die; 1991 till Iraq war: American planes bomb Iraq on a weekly basis, UN estimates 500,000 Iraqi children die from bombing and sanctions; 2000-2001: US gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan $245 million in 'aid'; 9/11: Bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to murder 3,000 Americans."

Americans were at least more introspective during the third anniversary of 9/11, mourning their dead with less strident calls for their government to bomb their tormentors back to the Stone Age. But there were those, notably America's leaders, who continued to talk about the threat posed by those who hate the American way of life. Pray, who are those who hate the American way of life? As Arundrathi Roy put it in an essay shortly after 9/11, who can possibly hate the American athletes who have shown such dazzling feats of physical striving? Who can possibly hate the American novelists and poets who have shown the world such dazzling feats of the imagination? Who can possibly hate America itself, which has bequeathed to the world the democratic ideal, or the unrelenting quest for it?

You ask those same questions and you are bound to get only one answer: George W. Bush and company themselves. They hate the American way of life, if by that is meant the way of life proposed by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Martin Luther King. The way of life that is resolutely libertarian and dedicated to freedom -- other people's as much as one's own.

Americans may look all they want for the causes of 9/11 in the mountains of Afghanistan and the sands of Iraq, but they will not find the answers there. The causes of 9/11 are not outside, they are within. At the very least, that is because 9/11 is the inevitable consequence of policies that have wreaked more 9/11s upon the world -- i.e., the partial list above -- before even that date, or epithet, or incantation, was invented. Chalmers Johnson used the word "blowback" to describe it (that is the title of his book), the consequences, often unwitting, of America's global policies on America itself. Which are not unlike something blowing up in one's face. 9/11 easily qualifies as a "blowback," the direct effect of American policies toward the Middle East. There's a simpler way to put it, one most people, including Americans, will understand: What goes around comes around.

At the very most, that is so because the causes of 9/11 are the same as the causes of Columbine. They reside in the culture of violence that has America in its grip, a culture of violence that is absent in neighboring Canada for example. The residents of a Canadian city just across the river from Detroit do not even lock their doors and windows when they leave the house. Certainly, they do not build arsenals to defend their homes and property. It is a culture that has grown out of paranoia about strangers coming to rape and pillage, which has spawned more paranoia about outsiders coming to extirpate and annihilate. It is a culture that says it's all right when you get irritated with somebody to just drop a bomb at him, or shoot at him, or fire a missile at him.

Kids who bowl at Columbine tend to learn that lesson pretty quick. So do terrorists who howl in Palestine.

9/11 happened in the American heartland. That is so in more ways than one.

'Social volcano'

'Social volcano'

Updated 09:05pm (Mla time) Sept 13, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the September 14, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I REMEMBER again that in the last few years before martial law, many politicians were warning about the "social volcano." Much of it was rhetoric--the times called for strident language and reformist, if not revolutionary, posturing. This was a time of great ferment. Activism was sweeping the campuses like "a prairie fire," to use a phrase much favored by the activists.

But this was also a time of great uncertainty. The elections of 1969, the one that saw Ferdinand Marcos reelected (the first time a postwar Filipino president had gotten so) had depleted the national coffers and sent the peso on a tailspin. Three months after the elections, the peso devalued almost by half, from P2 to one dollar to close to P4 to a dollar. Prices zoomed, including those of oil, which precipitated rallies, some of them violent ones. The ensuing hardships highlighted the gap between rich and poor, a condition politicians described as a simmering social volcano about to explode.

"Here is a land," Ninoy Aquino said, "in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. Gleaming suburbia clashes with the squalor of the slums.... Here is a land of privilege and rank, a republic dedicated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste."

Everyone predicted a revolution was in the offing. The masses could not take more of this, opposition politicians and radicals alike warned. The maMs Arroyo was building up, the volcano would soon explode.

But there were others who foresaw a different turn of events. Poverty and uncertainty, they said, did not necessarily lead to revolution, they often led to iron-fisted rule. All over Southeast Asia, they said, authoritarianism had become the norm. It was just a question of time before the idea took root in this country, too. It may not be long, they warned, before the man on horseback came to pick up the crown from the mud with the point of his sword.

On Sept. 21, 1972, he did. Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law.

I remember these things not just because the 32nd anniversary of martial law is just a week away but because I have a powerful feeling of deja vu. There's an uncanny parallel between then and now.

This may not be a time of great ferment, but this is a time of great uncertainty, anxiety, if not activism, sweeping through the length and breadth of the country like a prairie fire. Though you never know about the activism, it can always blow into a prairie fire at a moment's notice. I recall that it grew to epic proportions more than three decades ago only after the elections of 1969, specifically two months later, in January 1970 (elections then were held in November), when the First Quarter Storm first howled. Uncertain times have a way of fanning dissent, or gathering angry voices into a chorus.

But as it was then, this is a time of great hardship coming off elections. As it was then, this is a time when the public coffers have been depleted by a President who was determined, by hook or by crook, by Cebu and by Comelec, to win a second term. As it was then, this is a time of skyrocketing prices, notably those of oil, which have sparked earnest protests, if not violent rallies. As it was then, this is a time at least of threatened currency devaluation, if not an actual one, though the actual one may not be very far behind. More so than then, this is a time of gloom and anxiety, with economists warning of an oncoming economic collapse as a result of a gaping budget deficit.

And as it was then, this is a time when the public cannot trust its government to pluck it out of the crisis, believing its government to be the very source of the crisis. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is nearly exactly in the same position Marcos was before martial law: She lacks credibility and is hugely unpopular. Uncannily she is burdened as well by a spouse who puts a face on profligacy. She has Mike Arroyo to Marcos' Imelda, and Imelda was so much prettier. Indeed, unlike Marcos who was believed to have won the elections even if he used inordinate amounts of force and farce, Ms Arroyo is thought by 55 percent of Filipinos not to have won the elections at all.

That is heady brew. The tempting thing is to imagine that this will midwife a revolt as the masses reach their threshold of tolerance for pain. That is possible. Even now you hear cries and whispers from various sectors, from the aggrieved candidates in the last elections as well as from the NGOs who were not compromised with the Peace Bonds, about the possibility of ousting the government if things get out of hand.

But there is another possibility. Which is that as the crisis deepens, Ms Arroyo will be tempted to take the option of mounting iron-fisted rule. It need not take the form of an outright declaration of martial law, though that can't be entirely dismissed. It could always take the form of a de facto martial law, using the instruments of martial law. I remember that when I suggested this some months ago, several Ms Arroyo supporters wrote me angrily to say Ms Arroyo was not Marcos.

But why so? The same scale of ambition is there, the same recklessness, the same capacity to lie, cheat and steal. More to the point, we do not lack for proof of her capacity to do so: that was what her "war against terror" was all about. It was disguised martial law. And desperate times are always an engraved invitation to curtailing rights. As it is, we do not lack for fools, in the form of fawning supporters, who have been asking her to call for a state of emergency to deal with a crisis of her own making.

There is another George, apart from Bush, named Santayana, whose wise counsel has been repeated to triteness but which remains apt for us:

Those who do not heed their history are bound to repeat it.

'Necessary Evil'

'Necessary evil'

Updated 10:26pm (Mla time) Sept 12, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 13, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I REMEMBER that Bobi Tiglao dismissed the Ibon version of that finding by saying the group never published its methodology. As though the other survey organizations-Social Weather Stations and Pulse Asia in particular-did. But comes now the SWS corroborating Ibon's finding:

Most Filipinos believe Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo won the elections by cheating.

Specifically, 23 percent of SWS' respondents said they believed Fernando Poe Jr. and Loren Legarda were "definitely cheated" and 32 percent said they believed the two were "probably cheated." That makes 55 percent of the population believing GMA (and Noli de Castro) cheated in the elections, to the extent that the SWS' sample represents the population reasonably accurately.

The SWS itself admitted a couple of months or so ago to making some very wrong predictions about the elections, which is at least a B+ for honesty. Those mistakes, of course, are more than a matter of passing academic interest since pre-election surveys do more than just predict outcomes, they influence them. Surveys have become the biggest advertising gimmick for candidates, something that's bound to get worse in the future. Some rules are needed there. But that's another story.

Ignacio Bunye bristles at this revelation and says: "The polls on cheating are a throwback to the past. The Presidential Electoral Tribunal has already taken jurisdiction over the issues. We have to shed off these perceptions and get on with the difficult task at hand."

Pray, why is ferreting out the public's perception about whether we have the right president or not a thing of the past? Unless, of course, Bunye means to suggest that honesty or the search for the truth is now dead and buried. He himself says we face a difficult task at hand, which is dealing with an impending collapse of the economy. Now surely, it helps in facing a difficult task at hand that we know we have the president we voted for? Indeed, surely it helps in facing the wilderness that we know the person who is leading us out of it is not chronically given to lying and cheating?

I myself have no doubt GMA cheated in the elections. That is patent. The only question in my mind is the extent to which it affected the elections. That is the only thing that remains arguable. But the fact that she cheated in them must make the entire exercise suspect, with disastrous consequences for the future.

You do not have to dig deeply for signs of cheating, the thing was done barefacedly. Four of them easily leap to mind: Benjamin Abalos (he didn't just bungle the mandate to computerize canvassing through ineptitude, he did so through criminal complicity, yet he was retained); the use of government funds to put up billboards and ads (on election day itself Honeygirl de Leon was on TV relentlessly pitching for her boss); the statistical improbability that was the Cebu tally (giving GMA a bigger margin over FPJ than in her own province of Pampanga); and Raul Gonzalez's and Francis Pangilinan's railroading of the Senate counting (the word "noted" will never be the same again; no wonder Gonzalez got an instant promotion).

No, I am not amazed that the SWS has confirmed Ibon's revelation. You can fool all Filipinos some of the time and some Filipinos all the time, but you can't fool all Filipinos all the time.

I am amazed, however, by one thing. That is the equanimity with which we are taking all this. Elsewhere, news like this would be greeted with angry editorials and calls for the President to resign. Or at least for a full-blown investigation to be made. Here, we've met the news with a shrug of the shoulders and mutterings of "what else is new?" Truly, every day raises the bar in our capacity to tolerate iniquity.

What is especially frightening here is that our lack of outrage does not come from ignorance but from tolerance. GMA has gotten away with murder in several instances because of public complicity, particularly of the more influential sectors of society, including the businessmen and the intelligentsia. The cheating in the elections happened in the first place because those sectors agreed that it was all right for GMA to cheat to prevent a "greater evil," which was FPJ becoming president. The intelligentsia-a most ironic word-was willing to turn a blind eye to the rape of sovereign will for expedience's sake.

The same appeal to expedience is bound to be used again to stymie any public protest against the cheating in the elections, if at all that protest erupts. Bunye's argument indicate so: "We have to shed off these perceptions and get on with the difficult task at hand." That is going to be the official line: Let's forget about the cheating, what's done is done. Let's concentrate on the coming storm and rally around our president. That is the logical continuation of the previous line, though never articulated, which was: "We have to shed off our inhibitions about screwing the vote and get on with the difficult task of preventing FPJ from winning." Both trot out the bogey of a "greater evil" to justify a clear and present one.

In fact, the only way we can deal with the difficult task at hand is for us to stop shedding our scruples about wrongdoing. The concept of a "necessary evil" is the most dangerous thing in the world. The only thing worse than financial bankruptcy is moral bankruptcy. We already have the second, the first is waiting round the corner.

We want to deal with the difficult task at hand, we need a leader who is honest, upright, and forthright, not one who lies, cheats and steals. We want to survive the crisis, we need a necessary good, not a necessary evil.

Even if that has to take the form of another Edsa.

Still, Isle of Tortuga

Still, Isle of Tortuga

Updated 00:41am (Mla time) Sept 09, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the September 9, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I DID see one unpleasant thing in the stalls that sold pirated DVDs in Quiapo last weekend. That was the presence among them of local titles. In the past, I used to see only movies starring Sharon Cuneta, Judy Ann Santos (I think) and various action ones. This time I saw Gil Portes' "A Beautiful Life" and Joel Lamangan's "Mano Po" and "Pamilya." "Imelda" was there as well, except that, as the vendors tipped, "it wasn't DVD yet, just a clear copy." I don't know what other Filipino movies are sold there. They weren't in all the stalls, only in some of them.

I draw the line at buying local stuff. That has been my policy all this time, and that has been the policy I've recommended to government all this time. That was the advice I gave Tito Sotto a couple of years ago when he asked to meet with me on the subject. He was then head of the Senate committee on intellectual property rights, which covered piracy. I said the only rational policy was to stop the pirating of local movies and CDs. You cannot stop piracy completely, that is a hopeless cause. The technology is there. You can no more bind the explosion in productive capabilities to old property rights than you can cage King Kong in the zoo. But you can at least curb, if not stop, the pirating of local movies and CDs.

You can do that by running only after those who sell pirated local movies and CDs. I'm sure you can appeal to the public's patriotic sentiments to not buy the pirated local stuff. I'm just as sure you won't find resistance, or cynical reaction, to cops swooping down on the pirates' lair and carting off bundles of pirated local movies and CDs. The public might even applaud them.

The justification for such a policy should be national interest and not moral scruple. The reason is simple: You make moral scruple the basis for running after people selling, or buying, pirated movies and music CDs, you have to run as well after those selling, or buying, pirated software. It's the same principle.

But you do the latter and the country will grind to a halt. The educational system will grind to a halt, the banks and courts will grind to a halt, the entire government will grind to a halt. That is because easily 99 percent of the computers in this country use pirated operating systems and pirated programs.

That includes the computers of the entertainers who are fulminating against piracy. That includes the computers of Bong Revilla, ex-Videogram Regulatory Board head and current senator, and Edu Manzano, ex-TV host and current board head. The day they are able to show their press statements are written on licensed Microsoft Word from computers booted with licensed Windows XP is the day I join their crusade without reservation. Otherwise, they're just being hypocrites.

Sotto's office did call me a couple of years ago to say a bill incorporating my suggestions (making the pirating of local movies and CDs, on ground of national interest, illegal and punishable by law) was being prepared. I don't know if it was ever finished, if it got to the floor of the Senate, or if it met with furious opposition from various lobbies. But clearly it hasn't been enacted, freeing Manzano to mount his movie antics in real life.

It is the only reasonable policy toward "piracy"--which I put in quotation marks because the GATT-WTO concept of intellectual property rights is itself piratical; at least the pirates of Tortuga stole from the rich, this one steals from the poor. More so now than ever. There are two new and compelling reasons why this is so.

The first is that the selling of pirated DVDs gives livelihood to the ragged urban denizens who might otherwise take to crime--this is not so, to anticipate the snide remarks of Bill Gates' representatives on earth--to bring food to the table. That is no mean feat particularly in these days of great want, and coming days of even greater want. The last thing we need is to add more unemployment to the country, particularly among the ranks of the Muslim poor in Metro Manila, who for some reason seem to have monopolized the retail trade in pirated DVDs. It's not a matter of preference, it's a matter of survival.

In fact, the last thing we need is government using our taxes to keep an office that exists to protect foreign interests. I don't mind that the portion of my pay I am forced to part with goes to supporting local artists, I do mind that it goes to protecting Paramount and 20th Century Fox.

The second is that, well, do you want to keep this country ignorant? Education is its own justification. The United States itself did not mind pirating British books to enlighten its nationals before 1776. If it hadn't done so, it might still be a British colony. I personally do not mind being reproduced all over the place (which I am), if that will improve people's minds. I'm shareware entirely, the spirit that happily still rules the Internet.

The explosion in DVD titles, which now include Hollywood classics as well as movies from other countries, is particularly welcome. My own take there is that this should help the more serious makers of local movies by enlarging the scope of their market. Currently, they have to cater to a market whose taste has been molded by Hollywood "blockbusters" and B action movies. The availability of the classic movies should raise the Filipino taste several notches higher, which should boost the chances of the Lino Brockas and Ishmael Bernals of this country peddling their wares.

Bong Revilla was just lucky, there is no political future in raiding the lost ark. Edu Manzano should really stop to think before he makes his next move. Or he may end up at the receiving end of his favorite barb in "Weakest Link." Which is: "Goodbye."

Isle of Tortuga

Isle of Tortuga

Updated 10:05pm (Mla time) Sept 07, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 8, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


A COUPLE of things have happened over the last couple of months. The first is that Edu Manzano has taken the place of Bong Revilla as head of the Optical Media Board and has been just as resolute, and unenlightened, about ridding this part of the world of pirates. I read about his misadventure in Virra Mall a couple of weeks ago in the Business section of the Inquirer. The editors had the good sense to keep it small, out of a very good sense of proportion, though I don't know how it fared in the entertainment pages.

What happened apparently was that he stormed into Virra Mall in the company of cops and confiscated the DVDs sundry vendors were selling there. I know the place; I've been there. Though not as a customer of DVD, the reason for that being financial judgment rather than moral scruple: the Muslims in Quiapo sell the stuff much cheaper. But I have been to Virra Mall, at one point quite frequently, for the software and the MP3 discs. The only reason I am no longer going there frequently is that I've shifted to DSL, the broadband Internet service, and can now procure both without having to brave Metro Manila's traffic. That is through the wonders of downloading. I'll get to that point later.

Anyway, Manzano stormed into Virra Mall and began carting off the DVDs for sale on the stalls there and earned for his pains a lot of boos and hisses and catcalls. He apparently took them all in stride, figuring sticks and stones might break his bones but not boos and hisses and catcalls. But the latter took the equivalent of sticks and stones at one point in the form of crumpled pieces of paper and fruits which flew his way while he and company were climbing down the stairs.

That brought out the action star in him. He swiftly ran up the stairs, drew out a gun, and pointed it at his tormentors, while passersby screamed and scampered for safety. His tormentors appeared to be cowed, until he proceeded to descend the stairs again, when one of them shouted with wry glee, "Idol, makakaganti rin ako sa yo (Idol, I'll get back at you someday)."

The second thing that happened over the last couple of months is the remarkable explosion of (pirated) DVD titles. They now include not just Hollywood classics but classics from other countries as well, or at least movies from other countries that have reaped numerous awards. I remember saying in a column a year or so ago that my only misgiving about the pirated DVDs circulating in our midst was their quality. By that I did not mean technical quality, though some of the stuff was absolutely wretched in that respect--even the ones that were already copied from DVDs and not ripped off from promotional copies or from screenings in movie theaters. It had to do with the extent of compression, but never mind that, leave that to the techies. What I meant by it was that the titles were largely an action-movie-lover's paradise. Occasionally, you found a "Cinema Paradiso" among the Steven Seagal movies, but it was just that, occasionally. I said then that the day the "Pirates of Carriedo" (as a T-shirt I got for Christmas puts it) realized there was a huge market out there for serious movies--indeed the day they began improving the public taste by putting out movie classics instead of movie rejects--was the day their claim to existence became more ironclad.

That day has come. These days you will not just find Seagal and Stallone and Van Damme in the stalls, you will find John Ford, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock there. You will even find Sergei Eisenstein and D.W. Griffith, whose "Battleship Potemkin" and "Birth of a Nation" spawned the birth of movies on this battleship earth. Astonishingly, Akira Kurosawa's works are amply represented. I've seen variously "Dreams," "Rashomon," "The Seven Samurai," "Red Beard," "The Hidden Fortress," "Throne of Blood" and "The Idiot." I don't know what others there are. I've been looking for his "High and Low" but haven't found it yet.
More importantly, you'll find movies from France, Spain and Germany, along with those from China, Taiwan, Iran, Greece and Thailand. You'll find such exotic titles as Santosh Sivan's "Asoka," Bahman Ghobadi's "Marooned in Iraq," Emir Kusturica's "Underground," Abbas Kiarostami's "Ten," and Sadigh Barmak's "Osama." The last has nothing to do with Bin Laden, it has to do with a girl who passes herself as a boy to find work in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The old Hollywood classics are there in profusion as well, including those movies I thrilled to as a kid: "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Scaramouche" and "The Three Musketeers." The last starred Gene Kelly who makes up for not being able to dance in the movie with a lot of friskiness: never has D'Artagnan been more frenetically kinetic.

The black-and-whites are there, and I'm personally curious how they fare. They include "Citizen Kane," "How Green Was My Valley," and "Casablanca," Oscar winners all. The old John Wayne movies are there as well, though I ceased to be a fan of his in my college days when I found his politics far too reactionary for my taste. It wasn't just his hawkish views on Vietnam, it was also his justification of blacks having inferior roles in Hollywood movies.

I used to see only a handful of people patronizing the pirated DVDs three years ago when they first appeared in Quiapo, Virra Mall and other places. Now there's always a crowd there, especially on weekends, including the well-heeled. In fact, I have yet to know any movie lover, resident or visitor, who hasn't bought a pirated DVD in his or her life. Show me one, and I'll show you a saint or a fool.

What to do in the face of this? What rational policy to pursue?

I leave that for tomorrow.

Desperate

Desperate

Updated 11:29pm (Mla time) Sept 06, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the September 7, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

SOMEONE put it so well on radio. She was a working mother, the caller said, and had no problems scrimping and saving and even donating cash and kind to help pluck out the country from the jaws of death. She was scared of the warnings about the economy collapsing, she said, which she knew would affect the next generation most of all, including her children. She could see from her forays to the market how the prices of goods were rising. Eggs, which used to cost P3 not too long ago, now cost P4 or more. The same was true of medicine: Alaxan had risen by P1 in the neighborhood store. She was willing to do her bit for flag and country, but she had a problem: Whom does she give her cash and kind to? She didn't trust government officials. They were a bunch of crooks, she said.

That was by no means the first time I heard that thought expressed, nor would it be the last, though nowhere else would I hear it said as directly or forcefully. People were not unwilling to help stave off an Argentina-type crisis. But they were unwilling to entrust their money to the congressmen or to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

It's a dilemma of epic proportions, made no less so by the urgency of the situation. The problem is not that it is the hardest thing to get this country to come together to solve a problem of this magnitude. Nobody wants to cut off his nose to spite his face. The problem is getting the country to rally around their leaders to solve a problem of this magnitude. Those are two different things. Quite simply, the people do not see their current leaders as part of the cure, they see them as part of the disease.I cannot say I blame them. The first time I heard Bishop Fernando Capalla propose that the faithful give up P1 each to their beloved President, I reacted the same way, too. I have no problems giving up P1 or more, if that is what it would take to tide the country over the next few years. But why should I want to give it to Ms Arroyo and her cabal? Why should I believe they will use my money for the national good and not merely their own?

There is little to suggest so. At the very least, I go back to Ms Arroyo's use of taxpayers' money--which is my and my neighbors' money--during the last elections to put up billboards and posters with her face on it grinning at the world. Other Filipinos may be willing to forget it but I'm not. Though while at this, it is a testament to the perversity of our situation that the GNP (gross national product) actually recorded an increase during the second quarter of the year, which was when this prodigal and profligate use of scarce national resources took place. The paradox is easily explained by the unreliability, no, deceptiveness, of GNP as an indicator of the true state of economic affairs. The GNP can actually rise during disasters and calamities, which are situations that give rise to the production of various products and services as government rushes to relieve the affected areas. What is not glimpsed there is the real values that are lost to the community.

In the case of the second quarter, the GNP rose because of massive campaign spending, chiefly by Ms Arroyo. Very little of this spending represented a real utility to the community. Possibly with the exception of the Ms Arroyo billboards that went on to become the walls and roofs of shanties and the Ms Arroyo T-shirts that now shield the backs of tricycle drivers from the lash of wind and rain.

That is only the most visible part of Ms Arroyo's cavalier attitude toward public funds. Less visibly, but which Joker Arroyo has recently revealed, there is the fact that Ms Arroyo borrowed more in three and a half years than Fidel Ramos and Joseph Estrada borrowed in eight years. None of her borrowings has translated into more infrastructure and education, the two things that assure the foundation for future growth. In fact, expenditures for both infrastructure and education have fallen during her term, as her government uses 42 percent of its budget to pay for the interest alone of her debts.

Frankly, I don't know how Ms Arroyo passed Economics 101. Let alone pass herself as an expert in the field.

Which brings us back to the question that spells life and death for the nation: How do we save ourselves when we cannot rely on our leaders to do the job? How can we cure the nation when our leaders are not the medicine but the virus that attacks it?

I don't know the answer to that question. But I hope others do. Or will propose one soon. Time is not on our side.

I myself am tempted to suggest that the national budget, and whatever savings can be made from voluntary and involuntary contributions from Filipinos, resident or overseas, be held in escrow until the Ms Arroyo government can show proof of its integrity, or capacity to use the money as it was intended for. Or until we can devise an independent auditing system that will ensure the money will go to what it was intended for. Until then we should place the money under the supervision of a Council of Elders, representing the best and brightest and least venal in society--the Jovito Salonga and Sixto Roxas-types--or under a coalesced civil society authority that excludes all the NGOs that profited from the Peace Bonds.

Desperate ideas? Yes, but these are desperate times that call for desperate solutions. Maybe it's time we came up with suggestions unheard of before. What we face is a fate unheard of before. Unlike the First Couple who can always move to San Francisco, we have to stay here and bear the brunt of a catastrophe of their making. What else have we got? The current arrangement, which is putting the means for our recovery in the hands of Ms Arroyo et al., is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.

Or, to use a more current and apt metaphor, putting Benjamin Abalos in charge of clean elections.

Jokers

Jokers

Updated 11:08pm (Mla time) Sept 05, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 6, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


THE IDEA, of course, is to show that they are people possessed of much nobility and spirit of self-sacrifice. That is the congressmen's offer to part with some of their money for the good of the country. But it reeks of irony.

Jose de Venecia has already offered to donate a million pesos to the survival kitty. And last I heard, he managed to inveigle, or coerce, the passengers of PAL PR 001, composed of the First Couple and their friends who were winging their way to China, to cough up as well P350 million to the cause. Most of them from their own pockets. One businessman was heard to complain, "This has been my most expensive foreign trip ever."

Not to be outdone, several congressmen have offered to donate their salaries to the nation. This was their way of pitching in to help the country stave off disaster, they said.

In fact, what all this shows is not a group of self-sacrificing heroes but a bunch of self-aggrandizing con men. Alfredo Lim is right to retort in response to De Venecia's public display of beneficence, "Buti pa siya, maraming pera (Good for him he has a lot of money)."

As to the congressmen's willingness to part with their salaries, what all this does is to show their salaries are the least of the things congressmen bother with. That is because their salaries are the least of their sources of income, their pork barrel is first. The contracts for the designated projects in their pork barrel have a way of being cornered by friends, relatives and themselves. I recall that before martial law, candidates routinely promised not to accept any pay if they won and to donate the money instead to their favorite charities. The voters, who were smarter in those days and knew a con when they saw one, routinely rejected them. Especially since the candidates who were promising this were the ones massively employing guns, goons and gold to get elected. The voters could not imagine how people who went to this trouble did so only to make noble sacrifices afterward.

The same is true of the businessmen who complain of being fleeced by De Venecia. Commiseration is not my first instinct when I hear their complaint, apprehension is. Apprehension was what I felt as well when Mike Arroyo's guests during his birthday bash complained about being separated from hundreds of thousands of pesos of their money to finance Arroyo's favorite charity. It is not merely that Arroyo fanatically subscribes to the motto, "Charity begins at home," it is that businessmen who are fleeced in this way invariably find ways to recover their wool, with interest-that is, by fleecing others in turn, namely the public.

But it's scary how government officials, elective and appointive, seem to be taking the fiscal crisis as an opportunity for one-upmanship or PR, or worse a joke. Joker Arroyo, who is one of the few non-jokers in government, is not joking when he warns of the severity of the oncoming storm and what it would take to avert it. That is not by token "gestures of serving coffee only during meetings, which will amount only to a few thousand pesos [in savings]."

What will avert the crisis is for GMA (President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) first of all to admit her part in making it, which is the only way she can reclaim any right to propose to rescue us from it. No contrition, no forgiveness. Certainly, no credibility. GMA is the chief cause of the budget deficit. As Joker points out: "President Arroyo's borrowing binge for three years, 2001 to 2003, was more than the combined borrowings of Presidents Ramos and Estrada for eight years, 1992 to 2000 (italics mine), data for which is available in Sen. Ralph Recto's Ways and Means Committee." Napocor alone has incurred losses amounting to P60 billion.

GMA did manage in the case of Angelo de la Cruz to portray herself as his savior-no small thanks to a people who could not remember how she became the spokesperson for George W. Bush's war in Iraq, thereby turning Filipino OFWs in the Gulf into fair game for Arab terrorists. She may not do the same thing here- free herself from blame, or make the country forget about it-at the very least because the stakes are high (it is not just the survival of one Filipino at stake, it is that of the nation). At the very most because we do not understand the origins of this problem, we will be nowhere near to solving it.

Which brings us to the second part of the equation: What will avert this crisis is GMA herself leading by example, which is not just giving up her own pork barrel in the form of billions in contingency funds but in putting a lid on her borrowings. As Joker reminds us, Napocor incurred its debts "in compliance of the directive of President Arroyo." Badgering congressmen to give up their salaries, or even their pork barrel, while allowing government corporations to continue to borrow and government financial institutions to give out corporate loans to cronies, is like putting out a pail to catch drops of water from a leaky faucet in the kitchen while doing nothing about a busted pipe in the bathroom.

The crisis won't disappear with GMA and De Venecia soliciting voluntary or involuntary contributions from congressmen and businessmen, or token scrimping and saving. Though while at this, it won't hurt if GMA did as she preached even at this superficial level. How can you be believed when you issue stern warnings against government officials who waste public funds while bringing your family and friends with you on an official trip to China? Surely, this country does not lack for Chinese restaurants, specializing in Peking duck, to bring them to?

What will avert the crisis is nothing less than a wholesale change of government's lifestyle- before the people decide to make a wholesale change in their government again.

Essentials

Essentials

Updated 00:13am (Mla time) Sept 02, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the September 2, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


JONATHAN Velasco, a Filipino conductor, has a good point. A perennial judge in international choral competitions, he has seen Filipino choral groups do immensely well abroad. Many of them have won prizes in prestigious competitions in Asia and Europe.

What he cannot understand, he says, is why government officials keep proposing to give huge cash rewards to Filipino athletes who will do the country proud. Such as they did only recently during the Olympics, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself promising a million bucks to the Filipino athlete who will bring the country its first gold. When, Velasco said, Filipino musicians have been doing exactly that for a long time. They've been winning big in the Olympics of music. Music remains the country's forte, the one thing Filipinos naturally excel at and the one thing Filipinos have been reaping plaudits for the world over. Why not give them the money instead?

I did not remark when Velasco said at a press conference to announce Manila Philharmonic's offerings in the coming months that the reason government officials probably make that offer is that they know their money is safe. The probability a Filipino athlete will bring home the gold in these days of diminished expectations is practically nil. By contrast, Filipino musicians are more than likely to separate fools from their money, or officials from their pork.

But levity aside, I don't know that we shouldn't take Velasco's complaint seriously. That is particularly so in the light of one thing, which is that in these days not just of diminished expectations but horrendous ones (economists have been warning of an economic collapse unless we curb the budget deficit--music is likely to be one of the first casualties). It is not just that musicians are not bound to be rewarded as they should, it is that they are bound to be punished as they shouldn't. The normal instinct in times of economic trouble is to cut out what is not essential. And for some reason, in this country, music--and the arts generally--are first to qualify as non-essential.

I remember saying this, too, to Francisco Feliciano a few months ago when he held a press conference to drum up interest in his project, which is the national youth summer music camp. Last April and May, they held their sixth. The summer camp recruits musical prodigies and trains them intensively in various musical instruments. Feliciano had several kids play before us (trombone, trumpet, violin, cello), and it was easy to see why Filipinos routinely wow audiences wherever they go. This was shortly before the elections, and Feliciano was complaining about the dumbing of Filipino musicality, as seen-or heard-in the tasteless campaign jingles, which were rip-offs from popular noontime dance ditties. That was the disease, he said, the kids playing classical (local and foreign) music was the cure.

Like Rodel Colmenar, founder and music director of Manila Philharmonic, and indeed like the other people involved with serious musical effort in this country, Feliciano was banking on the private sector to support his effort. But he wasn't loath to get government help where he could get it, given that his initiative was likely to fall on many deaf ears, literally, in this age of MTV. It's not easy getting the public, the youth in particular, to appreciate San Pedro and Mozart, Buencamino and Bach, in the days of Incubus and Maroon 5, Matchbox 20 and Blink 182. So it wouldn't hurt to get government to lend a hand.

I said that might not be so easy. In these lean years in particular, government wasn't likely to look kindly upon the arts. An Arroyo government above all which even then looked headed for a second term: Culture, or plain civilization, was not its strongest suit. With Arroyo's wanton electoral spending moreover, it didn't look likely the economy would improve. It looked likely runaway inflation and currency devaluation would soon hit the nation.

At the time, an impending economic collapse was only being whispered in corners. It is now being shouted openly. So, are we likely to see musicians encouraged by public-sector support for their Olympian achievements or will they be the first to be sacrificed by the current calls for austerity?

I myself, from a completely pragmatic viewpoint, can't understand why music--and the arts--should be the first to go in dire economic times. At the very least, as Velasco and Feliciano point out, music is the country's comparative advantage, the one thing that is giving the country not just a flood of medals but a flood of dollars. The country's biggest export is not fruits, it is people, musicians at the head of them. Other countries, not least Southeast Asian ones, give substantial subsidies to their arts, why shouldn't we? You do not allow your competitive edge to dull, you hone it. Certainly, you do not kill the goose that lays golden eggs.

Quite apart from that, music--and the arts--promote a lifestyle that is acquisitive only in spirit, not in body. People who are literate and appreciate aesthetics are not naturally given to keeping mistresses, buying cars and shopping till they drop, though some of them have been known to make love till they do. We want to encourage people to live simpler lifestyles, or more austere ones, we should encourage learning, reading and listening. They cost very little, certainly far less than cell phones and Pajeros. If Mike Arroyo and company were to improve their minds, they would immediately improve the budget--by wanting less of it. If only from this perspective, dire times should make the arts the priority, not the sacrificial lamb.

The things of the body we can do much without. The things of the soul, ah, there we can never really have enough.