August 2007 Archives

After Migz Zubiri was proclaimed as the 12th winning senator, my co-blogger and Inquirer colleague Manolo wrote a rather controversial column, asking Zubiri's critics to wish him well.

I believe that those of us who have been his critics, or, to be precise, we who have been highly critical of the circumstances surrounding his election, should take the lead in wishing him well. Regardless of the circumstances under which he has finally come to assume a seat in the Senate, one can only hope he will aspire to statesmanship in the performance of his duties.

Nick of Tingog.com did not share Manolo's view. Positing that performance was entirely different from integrity, he declined to accept Manolo's suggestion.

Manuel seems to be putting more emphasis on the words that come out of our Fake Senator Zubiri rather than the actions that he makes. Talk is good, but a man’s actions is truly the only way we can judge him. And if his actions are for closing his eyes to the obvious cheating in Maguindanao, then how can we even start to trust him in helping lead our country.

(I found Nick's post a day earlier even more cogent. He wrote: "Right now Migz Zubiri is on top of the world but acknowledges that he has an image problem. But screw that self analysis, the real problem with Daya na Zubiri is that he has an integrity problem. How can he redeem himself when he cannot even acknowledge the real problem of benefiting from cheating?") An integrity problem, indeed. Manolo waxed optimistic about Zubiri's potential for growth, seeing the possibility that, perhaps in filing election reform legislation, he "can turn a term of scorn into a badge of pride." What if, precisely in order to turn a term of scorn into a badge of pride, he makes a mockery of the election process itself? That is the substance of my criticism against Zubiri, in my column today. He has filed a cynical counter-protest against Koko Pimentel designed to turn the Senate Electoral Tribunal's recount into the political equivalent of the Energizer bunny: something that will keep going, and going, and going ... Election reform, I think it is safe to say, is not on his mind. The full text of the relevant passage follows:

ON THE EVE OF HIS PROCLAMATION AS THE 12th winning senator in the May elections, Juan Miguel Zubiri declared: “I just want to buckle down to work and redeem myself.” I did not realize it then, but it seems that for the three-term congressman from Bukidnon, that declaration could only have been an either-or proposition. For him, work in the Senate and redemption must be mutually exclusive. That is to say, to keep working in the Senate, he has to do—has in fact done—the irredeemable thing. He has filed an absurd counter-protest against rival candidate Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III before the Senate Electoral Tribunal, contesting the results of a jaw-dropping 73,000 precincts. (That’s one-third of the entire country.) I do not know if the SET will give his counter-protest due course; considering that Pimentel didn’t even have enough campaign funds to show more than a handful of TV spots featuring top celebrity endorser Angel Locsin, the claim that he cheated massively is preposterous. But Zubiri does not need to prove his allegation of election fraud. All he needs to do is tie up the SET in an interminable recount. Pimentel, who believes he was cheated in 2,680 precincts in a total of seven provinces, is confident that the review of election returns he is contesting would be completed in half a year or so. Zubiri’s protest, on the other hand, would take years to resolve. Redemption? More like a ruthless gaming of the system. The “Senator from Maguindanao” has cynically exploited the limitations of our election rules, to hold on to his job.

You cannot go wrong with watching Partition: The Day India Burned, a documentary produced by the BBC to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the independence of India. In 1857 Indians revolted against British rule, and just like our revolt against Spain in 1896 and then our war against the Americans, they, like we, were defeated, with great bloodshed. The last Moghal emperor was exiled; the process began by which the Queen of Great Britain became Empress of India by 1877. The British, as the victors, called the revolt the Indian Mutiny; just as the Americans until quite recently, called the Filipino-American War the Philippine Insurrection. The end result, for Indians and us, seems the same: another way had to be found. The costs of revolt were too great, whether in India in 1857, here at home in 1870, for which the elite was persecuted, and in 1896, for which the new middle class and the masses too up arms, and then, again, for us, from 1899-1903 in our war against the Americans. So the 20th Century would see, for both India and the Philippines, a remarkable, unprecedented development in the history of colonized nations: a generally peaceful, political, struggle for independence. Like the British in India, the Americans set out to create a class of professionals in addition to the established rulers, through whom they ruled; and who would, because they were educated in the ways of the British, instinctively pursue reform by means of the law and not the gun. Just as our peaceful campaign to restore our independence was led by lawyers,  so, too was India’s. All three of it’s greatest independence campaigners, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah: wanted independence, but through peaceful means. Indeed Nehru and Jinnah, left alone, might have pursued matters as Filipinos did, through independence missions. But Gandhi developed something he called Satyagraha — the resistance of tyranny through mass civil disobedience, which firmly founded upon ahimsa or total non-violence. "Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny" (Stanley Wolpert), a fascinating account of that statesman’s life and times, tell us of the unease some of Gandhi’s closest associates, like Nehru, felt with the idea of civil disobedience. The Muslim leader Jinnah simply hated it. The story told in Wolpert’s book reads like our political history from the 20s to the 40s: factions, infighting, debates over independence -the how, when, and even why of it, certainly, the who of it. Their independence struggle, like ours, is a tale of leaders generally from the upper and professional classes that led the independence movement. Their vehicle was a single party, the Congress Party, which dominated politics for generations, just as here at home, the Nacionalista Party dominated the independence movement. Even now, the instinct of our political class is to form a superparty, just as much of India’s modern history has been dominated by the Congress Party. And independence for India, as for us, come, some felt, too soon, but not a moment too soon, because the Americans and the British were finally prepared to recognize independence, after decades of insistence on the part of Filipinos and Indians. America had thought it could use the Philippines, as an entry point to the China market. Britain thought it could reap riches from India. For a time, both nations did well from their colonies’ resources, but eventually, the Philippines proved too much a threat to American sugar and vegetable oils interests, independence was finally promised by 1935. A Russian scholar, Victor Somsky, told me not so long ago, that Carlos P. Romulo once interviewed Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s. Gandhi told Romulo, if he’d been able to secure an independence law from the British the way Filipinos did from the Americans, he would have accepted it with delight. For a Britain exhausted by two world wars, independence for India too, became inevitable. When the British decided on independence, they were in such a rush that after having promised it by 1948, all of a sudden Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, advanced it to 1947. A British lawyer was summoned to draw a line across the map, determining the border between the two countries. Why India had to be divided -and in a rush- when it became independent, is a story told in that documentary I linked to, above. For the details of the sudden, and violent, rush, to Indian independence, watch it -and understand why Indians embraced their independence, with its flaws, and why we should embrace the fact we've been independent about as long as them -despite our own freedom's flaws.

Colleague John Nery asks, Is Ninoy, today, even relevant? Time, has, indeed dulled what for some was a defining point in our nation's life. Juan Mercado delves into this, and ponders the remaining mysteries, chief of which remains: who ordered Ninoy killed? Ninoy Aquino's coming home to die was a fork in the road, for those who'd opposed Ferdinand Marcos thus far. Whether of a moderate or radical persuasion, up to that point they were a minority. Ninoy's death began the transformation, in earnest, of the country. After August 21, 1983, what would become the minority in terms of public opinion, were supporters of the Marcoses. Marcos was rumored to be dying, he hadn't established a mechanism for a transition (one people took seriously, anyway), furthermore, parliamentary elections were expected in 1984. The moderate opposition -which, we forget, had flirted with the idea of armed struggle, too, a few years earlier- was divided between those who opposed participating in elections, and people like Ninoy who'd advocated political participation as far back as the elections of 1978, when Ninoy campaigned from his jail cell. The CPP-NPA, trying to build bridges by means of the NDF, and which had resisted the dictatorship from day one, continued its hard-line stance. Thus began its transformation from a movement that had been on the right side of history through its resistance to martial law, into a movement that missed the bus, historically, morally, and politically, by boycotting the snap elections in 1986. Postcard Headlines reprints a commentary by the late Antonio Zumel, which shows to great effect, I think, how calcified the thinking of the Left had become in 1984, how it is misread, because of ideology, the significance of Ninoy's death, overstated the importance of its own role and its place in the public imagination, and so set itself up to alienate its more moderate allies and sidelined itself when the dictatorship finally fell. I delved into all of this in my article, The Road to Edsa, published during the 10th anniversary of Edsa. I've posted my own thoughts on Ninoy's assassination (August 21, 2006) but in view of the above, it's good to revisit some articles that help explain what went on. In his column today, Conrado de Quiros says he believes Marcos decided on martial law when his NP senatorial slate was massively defeated in the 1971 elections. A contemporary account was written by Teodoro L. Locsin, Jr. when the Free Press made Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. Man of the Year, 1971. Locsin, Jr. revisited his 1971 conversation with Ninoy in Ninoy speaking, August 23, 1986. Surely written by Locsin, Sr. was an editorial titled If, which pointed out what could have been, had the Marcoses merely whisked Ninoy away back to jail, or publicly embraced him: called his bluff, so to speak. And this insight into the ultimate handicap of the late dictator:

So, Marcos was brilliant – at the start. He did not have a gun, then: martial law enforced by the Armed Forces of the Philippines with his Number 1 hood, Ver, as chief-of-staff. Then, martial law! Brilliant he was, okay, or just cunning, unprincipled, a thinking son of bitch? All right, brilliant Marcos was. But the intellect deteriorates not meeting real challenge. The gun makes all challenge ineffectual. The mind becomes dull. Absolute power does not only corrupt absolutely, it stupefies. There is no need for intelligence when the guns serves. The blade of the mind rusts. Absolute power brings absolute stupidity. Such is the lesson of all dictatorships. Except the Communist challenge to contend with, and so remains as sharp as ever. Marcos, if in control when Ninoy was killed, had become just plain stupid.

There are two brilliant -and fierce- meditations by Teodoro M. Locsin, Sr., the first titled The Conscience of the Filipino: The Sacrifice and the second, which took it's cue from Aquino's famous statement, "The Filipino is worth dying for." Locsin, Sr. tartly asked, Is he?

The other day, I had to disapprove two comments, posted by the same writer, because in an attempt to defend his own views he took to calling two co-commenters names. That brings the total number of comments I've disapproved to maybe four or five, all of them (at least in my view) bearing great offense not to me or Manolo personally but to our fellow readers. The disapproved comments were atypical; by and large, as can be seen from a simple review of the hundreds of comments we've already logged, commenters or (my preference) co-bloggers have been generally civil. Oh, to be sure, there is much sarcasm to go around, and insults have been exchanged, but subtly. While there is little evidence that we have actually succeeded in convincing others (much of our exchange consists of opinion firmly stated and, when challenged, even more firmly restated), we have managed to keep talking. The comments of a recent regular poster, completely cynical about all politicians and even the political enterprise itself, have probably tested the patience of other commenters. And yet the discussion continues. That, I would like to think, is no mean feat; merely keeping this small part of the public square open is already a good thing. The limits of our virtual public square, however, are considerable. In a real plaza, we can hold forth on our political or other views----and our audience, plus the occasional passerby, can see our facial expressions, our sometimes unconscious gestures, our body language. See and appreciate. A smile or even an apologetic look can excuse a direct insult; a ridiculous argument can be demolished with a hearty laugh. There are many things we can get away with, in face to face conversation, simply because so-called non-verbal clues are processed too. Much of this "background" is lost in virtual forums like ours. (Heck, we don't even have bottles of beer or cups of coffee to argue with.) This, in part, explains why there is so much incivility in Internet forums. (Thankfully, it bears repeating, not so much in ours.) Some people can be discourteous online because other communication clues they take for granted (the twinkle in the eye, when a well-argued line issues from our mouth; the nodding-in-agreement of others in the audience, which encourages us to pursue an argument) are missing. Of course, other reasons exist for the incivility. The following links suggest some of them. Butch Dalisay, the UP professor who spreads the gospel of Apple when he is not writing some of the country's best fiction, posted "an anti-rant rant" in his blog last week. Apparently, the response has been, well, something to rave about. And sometime ago, Randy David (Inquirer columnist and, yes, another UP professor) led off a column with some choice words on "demonization." He was talking about "the ethic of discontinuity" that marks our politics in general and our political transitions in particular, but I think his remarks can be applied to much of public discourse as well: Too many of us have the tendency to demonize the other side's argument, or the other side itself. Angels, and demons. If we can get beyond these frames of reference, we may actually get somewhere. Now, all that remains to be said is: What do you guys think about including politicians' statements in our forum? We have one pending comment from "Team Gordon." (Hey, they read us!) I don't know whether we should post it. What do you think?

Two weeks after I expressed grave disappointment over Chiz Escudero's first-ever speech on the floor of the Senate, I still get the occasional letter in response. Much of the initial feedback, during the first week, came in the form of text messages; some went straight to the Inquirer's letters section. (One of them, from Marissa Tanangco, sees print tomorrow.) And a few have responded either through this blog, because of this post, or in other blogs. Like Jowana Bueser's comment, most of the responses, especially those defending Escudero, have been thoughtful; I do not mean they are immune to rebuttal, only that obvious care had been taken in articulating their arguments. Some perspectives are skewed by their blind spots; Jowana, for instance, is quick to charge Mar Roxas and Ping Lacson with unbecoming presidential ambitions ---- as though Manny Villar, Escudero's candidate for Senate president, did not share those very same ambitions.  (If my own view is similarly skewed, I would be happy to hear someone point out my own blind spots.) But I appreciate the tone Jowana (and Marissa too) took: Unhysterical, pensive, sober. Jowana even confronted Chiz on the day the column came out (if I know how to count the calendar correctly). I stand by my reading of his first speech, though: It wasn't particularly thought-through, and it misinterpreted that famous passage from Scripture. PS. In case I will be misunderstood: I use the word "impeach" in its non-political sense. Senators, of course, are not impeachable officials. But their rhetoric, their "testimony," can be impeached.

John's entry asking, the best political insult? got me thinking. There was Arsenio Lacson's famous indictment of a then-young Ernesto Maceda: "so young, and so corrupt." In his day, that is, when he was still a columnist and radio commentator and not yet Mayor of Manila, Lacson was famous for his wit. Writing in 1948, Jose A. Quirino (yes, the Joe Quirino for my generation that only knew him for his showbiz commentaries and show) wrote,

The Star Reporter has the versatile Arsenic, I mean Arsenio Lacson. He must have been baptized “Arsenic because he spits venom against those who get his goat. “In This Corner” presented “Kid Arsenic” and “Speed Denoga” in the “slambangest” battle of the century. Denoga took up the cudgels for Ford Wilkins, editor of the Manila Bulletin. When Denoga wrote to Lacson, “As a louse will say to another louse, move over, bud,” Lacson came back telling Denoga to delouse himself with DDT. All of these things happened after Wilkins criticized action of some students who picketed the senators who went on a junket at the expense of the people. To date, Wilkins is still subjected occasionally to Arsenic’s stings. Although Lacson was silenced on the radio for his indictment of the corruptions which infested (still infest) our malodorous government, he continued his heavy barrage  from a moving vehicle rigged with a microphone. “Here,” he hollered, “they cannot gag me.” Personally I admire Arsenic. He has really the guts to voice what is in his mind. Such guys die with their boots on.

There are a few insults that have stuck to mind. One is the description of Raffy Recto, dad of Ralph Recto, when he became a rabid Marcos loyalist: people would say he was "ni claro, ni recto." Another is Ninoy Aquino's description of a Japanese person's inadvertently true comment. Meaning to say how much the dictator loved the country, he pronounced it, "President Marcos robs you very much!" But actually, each generation has its political put-downs, an amusing catalog of them titled Filipino political humor, was published in The Philippines Free Press in February, 1986, including some gems from Lacson, including that joke involving the Black Nazarene, still endlessly-recycled up to now. And of course, there's Miguel Zubiri bragging about getting the rights to use "Boom, Tarat Tarat" as his campaign jingle, only for the lyrics to be mangled -"Boom, korap, korap!"- making the song politically unusable after a while.