EDSA: AN ALTERNATE VIEW

“PEOPLE POWER” FAIRY TALE by Herman Tiu Laurel

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys. Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys. One gray night it happened, Jackie Piper came no more. And Puff the mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar. – (Puff the Magic Dragon -Gregory Isaacs)

The Edsa I “people power” fairy tale was once a mighty dragon that mesmerized the world, supposedly vanquishing a dictatorship. Its wake followed democracy and “empowerment”, as Ceres Doyo of the Inquirer describes its supposed boon to the Filipino people. The same newspaper had the young reporter Volt Contreras dramatize the fall of Marcos and hail the power of Cory Aquino, that in 15 hours the regime of 20 years fell. For about a decade this fairy tale held the Filipino people’s imagination captive, but then life continued to get harder and harder, impoverishment grew, and little Juan Pepito (the Filipino Jackie Piper) didn’t come to the Edsa I celebrations anymore.

Three creatures came to the Edsa I celebration this year. A tobacco chomping leprechaun, his trusted gargoyle, and a pot bellied troll. They jumped up and down to rejoice. No one else jumped in joy. Even the little Imp didn’t come to the party. The golden bacchanalian statue at the corner of Edsa and Ortigas stood forlorn, dourly looking down on the crossroads that saw better times of cheering throngs. Now only cursing motorists jammed Edsa which was closed off to make way for the celebration.

What is not fairy tale is that Pulse Asia will announce soon results of a “best president” survey, that on a scale of zero, the worse, to 10 the best President of the Philippines, Marcos got seven, President Estrada (victims of the Edsa I replay, Edsa II) rated six besting Cory and Ramos, and Gloria got the worst at 3.4. History has judged that Marcos and Erap were better for the nation than the Philippine mainstream media are willing to admit. I am not surprised by the Inquirer’s continued glorification of the two “people power” coups d’ etat despite this, its owners are among those who benefited by the/from the two fairy tales. Of course the mainstream TV is the same, breathtaking billions in the past 21 years. People who have no vested interest in keeping the fairy tale alive can see clearly those still dancing to the “Magkaisa” tune have no clothes.

I take issue with Ceres Doyo’s claim of  “empowerment” of the people by Edsa I. Pray, show me where that empowerment can be seen? In the right of suffrage of the people? Historical and Comelec facts established by the extensive research of former UP professor and Comelec Commissioner Luzviminda Tancangco lay out all the statistics on how the Edsa I Comelec chairmen started the padding of the voter’s list which to this day has not been cleaned up. What about economic empowerment? Can that be found in the growing hunger ratings that afflict over 50 percent of the population now? As for Volt Contreras’ report, he should read more widely and dig into the real stories behind Edsa I, such as this quote from Foreign Policy magazine:  “In his Heritage speech Wolfowitz (former US Secretary of State) also took credit for the downfall of Marcos. The “private and public pressure on Marcos to reform,”‘ he asserted, “contributed in no small measure to emboldening the Philippine people to take their fate in their own hands and to produce what eventually became the first great democratic transformation in Asia in the 1980s.” “

More historical truths now revealed how the now bankrupt AIG’s boss Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg and Bechtel’s George Schultz, secretary of state at that time destabilized the Philippine Republic. I also have the confession from one ATOM member, Butz Aquino’s group, who attests that the Ayalas opened up Shell’s spigot for all their vehicles to do their nationwide motorcades and protests.

Marcos laid out a national economic development-industrialization program which Cory replaced with a trade liberalization and de-industrialization campaign. Estrada had the heart for the masses and reversed FVR’s liberal issuances of sovereign guarantees and big business bias. The foreign and Philippine oligarchy-controlled media with corrupt military and police generals by Gloria Arroyo deposed Estrada who was an obstacle to their plot to plunder through public utility privatization, price-gouging, outright looting of the National Treasury, and eventually the separation of the richest parts of Mindanao for US oil companies.

Residual Edsa fairy tales continue to obfuscate the Filipino nation’s view and delay their self-realization, emancipation and revolution. Some naive Filipinos still cling to those myths out of a sense of lack for something good to say about their beloved Philippines; but there has never been a dearth of Filipino assets: The first Asian anti-colonial revolution, the richest lands and seas in the region, a resourceful and creative people, and nation-buildings leaders such as Marcos, Estrada, Gen. Danilo Lim, Senator Trillanes and a host of other outstanding Filipino leaders.

Learning the hard lessons from their hard life, the hardy Filipino masa and middle class (also hardened after the pre-need corporate swindles and spectacles of Arroyo corruption) the Filipino is older and wiser. Although there is concern that the impressionable youth, targeted by “civil society’s” “I am Ninoy” ads, may still fall for the fairy tales. To ensure that they are not fooled like the generation before them, we must go to them in the schools and concerts, to speak and sing the historical truth. Fairy tales must be replaced with historical insight and empirical reflection with the question: “Is life better today after the Edsa I and II events? If worse (as it undoubtedly is): Why?”

EDSA PEOPLE POWER CELEBRATION and GMA

What’s a President doing saluting an event, proclaiming it momentous and glorious, yet warning of  world condemnation if mounted yet again?

Events do gain a way of mocking us back after sometime– and how.  A President thrust into the centerstage a crazed tangle of starkly irreconcilable points of view is not a pretty sight.

MIRIAM

You do not argue with this woman. Ever.

Of course, we throw them too at stray dogs that shit on our front lawns!

DANIEL SMITH IS GOING TO JAIL

Daniel Smith, convicted rapist of a woman named Nicole,  is going to jail.  Poor guy, one quick sex in a backseat and he gets a life sentence in the calaboose.

Was it rape?  Nicole says it so;  she’s a woman, and a woman has absolutely no reason to lie about her being raped, or so goes the verdict.

In the case at bar, I go with my gut feel and raw experience…

Here was a young man and a young woman looking for adventure,  as any would be in one’s youth.  They went exploring the field, met in a bar, flirted with one another, downed bottles of beer and got drunk.  As it often happens in young people overflowing in libido, inhibitions gradually overcome by alcohol, they soon found themselves surrendering willingly to lustful moments.   Just one of those regular trysts between consenting adults having the hots for each other taking place nightly in these parts, this was.

Only something  went wrong somewhere…

The morning after, Nicole woke up to a news she was raped, dumped in a sidewalk.    Having drunk one too many, her recollections of the night before was fuzzy.  Was she raped, she could not say for sure.  As the details were pieced together, the picture started looking ugly.   You admit it’s one wild night having kinky sex with a good-looking stranger,  an object of derision and contempt you will be  all your life.  And in this land of sweet and proper Maria Clara, this simply is unacceptable; such vulgar indiscretion, so it goes, reflects on all who is Filipina.  So how the hell do you salvage the wreckage?

It’s our double standards.  A man or a boy gives in and dives into the temptation of the moment, he’s a hot-blooded male, macho, lalakeng-lalake, pride of the community and the entire male specie.  A woman or a girl does the same, she’s a  sex maniac, a whore, babaeng pakawala, shame of the community and the entire sisterhood of Maria Clara.  Conversely, you find a man or a boy running away from the temptation, he’s fucking gay, a contemptible one for his being fake.  A woman or a girl does the same, she’s a paragon of virtue,  a woman of substance, pride of the community and the entire race.

It is not rape.  If anything at all, it is dumping Nicole in one of the side streets in her unkempt state to the view of everyone tearing apart all of her dignity— that’s your sin, Smith.   You do not allow that to happen to a lady for whatever reason, even beating a curfew.  Fuck her all you want but deliver her home properly, okay?

Meanwhile, there is a Filipina image to redeem,  kaya sorry ka na lang, Daniel, baby. But wait, your US of A will never let this thing ever happen to one of its fighting soldiers, right? And we will not go to war because of Nicole’s lost honor,  right?

And as a lesson for you, guys: if you wanna get laid with a drunk lady, get yourselves videoed, just in case…

St. LUKE’S HOSPITAL AS REFUGE FOR CRIME SUSPECTS

The St. Luke’s Hospital and Medical Center is fast turning into a five-star refuge of criminal suspects.  Jaime Paule, wanted by the Senate for contempt over a multimillion peso fertilizer fund scam investigation, has just checked in for a blocked carotid.  Another, Jocelyn Bolante, suspected principal of the same scandal, also checked in there months before  supposedly due to a cardiac problem before surrendering to the Senate later.  We should not be surprised if one big fat man, suspected of being the chief architect of all known grand scams in the last eight years, will check in too in the next few days.

Nakakatuwa.

But there are lessons to learn.  In this country, it helps to have a disease of the heart or a life-threatening ailment if you want a piece of the underground action.   No one here is ever immune to soap opera.  Cry a river, oh cry persecution, hold on to your breast like you are about to die of heart attack anytime and everybody’s compassion is surely going to be aroused, yes, even if you have committed a crime worth a hundred years in jail.

Diarrhea, too, but too filthy to buy sympathy, it sure could buy time.

Laugh, ladies and gentlemen, laugh…

IRONY

AN EDITORIAL NOT SO BRIGHT

The Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial today argues that the proposal to revive the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant is not so bright an idea at all.   Why so, here goes:

…this proposal to revive the BNPP has only revived bitter memories about a project that turned out into not only the country’s biggest debt burden but also its biggest monument to corruption.

Started in 1975 at an estimated cost of $600 million, the plant was completed in 1984 at a cost of $2.3 billion, its price bloated by commissions paid to middlemen, like Ferdinand Marcos’ golfing crony Herminio Disini, and kickbacks and payoffs to top government officials. At one point, it was estimated that the government was paying $300,000 a day on interest alone for the loan that funded the plant’s construction. The debt was not fully paid until 2007, and by then the government had shelled out a total of P64.7 billion, a third of it in interest payments alone. And for all the billions taken out of their pockets, the Filipino people have yet to enjoy one single watt of electricity.

As to its being the biggest debt burden and a biggest monument to corruption— here, we offer no argument.  That it did not deliver a single watt of electricity—  same thing (though it bears asking whose fault was it because it was ready for operation, was it not?).  But as an argument to leave the plant alone, all of P64.7B, to rot and waste— why, because it revives bitter memories– are we fucking serious?!   All the airports and the bridges, all  the highways and the dams,  practically all infras, taken together as one, would render BNPP puny as a debt burden and as monument to corruption, if at all size and price be the sole issues.  Yet do we hear anyone saying, “hey,  people, let’s stop using all these highways and bridges and dams and airports because they were attended by corruption and debts and we do not want to ignite rancor!”   Stupid!  You run after the highway robbers with the full might of the law till the end of the earth— that’s the thing to do.  But forsake any use of these because  they remind us of some peoples’ venality?—  such foolish sentimentalism!   It was bad enough that hungry vultures helped their way into the project, you don’t make it worse by throwing it all away.  The taxpayers– they who paid for the facility– deserve to make the most out of it and we do not do them fair by watching decay and rust turn the whole thing into useless piles of scraps.

If anything, let me ask, haven’t those who fought hard to have the BNPP mothballed by default lost their case and their moral standing yet for failing to withhold and stop payment in the billions of pesos soon after?  You mothball and pay, you do not win any which way; you lose twice over, indeed many more times over,  counting other costs,  past and future.   Worse, you mothball betting on a major disaster to end all debates, yet years and decades later, there it remains standing proudly unscathed in mocking defiance, you lose.  Sorry, folks, but that’s how the cookie crumbles.

To be sure, safety is a legitimate issue.   On this matter, let us defer to science.  In any case, technology is never one hundred percent safe– none ever is.  The electric current powering our homes providing us daily comfort could,  by a slight malfunction in switches, smother properties and lives of an entire neighborhood of thousands into ashes— but should we hear a group calling itself Coalition for the De-installation of Electricity in our Homes, we’d be calling them nuts, right?   If safety be the matter here, nuke power seems to compare quite favorably.  Is the Bataan nuke plant safe in an earthquake belt like the Philippines?  Not entirely, of course, but if we are waiting for good arguments—  where words need not be spoken for each side will run out of breath but never of words–  we need only look at Japan or South Korea, and the rest of the world similarly situated.

The list of disasters involving technology is a long long one but the day innovation stops is on the day humanity loses its sense of daring and starts invoking safety every inch of the way.    Likewise, a nation always at the tail-end fearing doom is as contemptible as the spineless soldier who is always on the rear hiding behind his comrades cowering in fear.

If the Inquirer had its way, such shame, the BNPP will remain standing there among bushes and trees  as a monument to our generation’s technophobia.