Remembering Tony Zumel / SSS: Not People Power

I do remember him vividly, nostalgically and even fondly. I refer to Antonio Zumel, who died this 13th of August, a month whose guns roar more ominously than any other month in our history. Tony Zumel at 69 passed away in The Hague of a long, lingering illness. The fact that he died in the Netherlands, far, far away from his native and beloved Ilocandia is the stirring story of his life as a communist rebel. Tony Zumel never gave up the cause, however much it ate up his life bit by bit. Particularly when he had to live and fight in the hills and mountains in pursuit of the magic rainbow that always eluded him and his revolutionary cause.

Yes, many of us intermittently live and swear by a chalice, a Holy Grail we often forget when we descend from the mountains and walk the plateau. And remember again when we scale another mountain.

Shortly before his death when after what seemed like ages, Tony returned to the Philippines with his comrades based in The Hague for a brief sojourn. Tony mentioned my name as one of the "crackerjack editors" he worked under, among them Joe Lansang, Osi Abad Santos, Caring Nuguid, Teodoro Valencia and Chitang Nakpil. How times have passed! This was grosso modo 50 years ago when Tony Zumel worked in the postwar Philippines Herald as a copy boy. He had a voracity for learning and even then his elders knew this lean, thin-boned, gentle, soft-voiced newsroom apprentice would go places in journalism.

Tony Zumel did go places. He worked a number of reportorial domains, turned out to be a crackerjack beat journalist, and would have gone all the way up had he not seen a vision on his own road to Damascus.

This vision was a vision I saw myself earlier in my mid-20s as sports editor of the Philippines Herald. It was a vision that danced and crackled like a blue flame in the Communist Manifesto, lit by the genius of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ignited by a post-World War II world that saw Europe devastated by war, Hiroshima and Nagasaki devoured and decapitated by the horrors of a split atom, the Philippines still reeling from four years of ruthless occupation by the Japanese Imperial Army.

It was in such a world that Tony Zumel grew up as a stripling. He had a sensitivity to oppression and exploitation even if he came from a well-known bourgeois family in Laoag, Ilocos Norte. His younger brother was Gen. Jose Zumel, a trusted aide of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, his elder sister Nena a sultry bewitching beauty of the Ilocos on whom I had once a terrific crush.

Tony eventually lived in a world apart. And then I knew, instinctively knew he had entered the "movement" as he engaged himself in trade unionism while still a newsman, became twice president of the National Press Club when this was a haven for rebels of all kinds, angry non-conformists, extreme nationalists, even anarchists, leftists and leftist causes. By that time, I had already discarded my Marxist-Leninist-Maoist baggage and was into international journalism whirling my way all over the world, covering international events and conferences, Olympic and Asian Games.

But Tony never got unstuck.

He never belabored or criticized me for having left "the cause." Instead, he came to me often for advice and counsel in the field of journalism, of course. He told me I remained his idol, and that I was greatly respected by his "revolutionary" colleagues. How could Tony have embraced "the cause" with such unyielding idealism, a silent ferocity that knew no bounds, the face always gentle, always that boyish smile, but beneath a sword of ideology that had his entire mind and body for a scabbard, beneath the fires of revolution, beneath a "dialectical" sweep of history he would ride to the very end.

One would have thought the end of the Cold War in 1989-91 would have made a difference. One would have thought glasnosts and perestroika espoused by Mikhail Gorbachev who turned the Soviet Union upside down would have shivered the hinges of Tony’s revolutionary fervor. One would have thought Mao Ze-dong’s death and that of his faithful disciple Chou En-lai and their replacement by Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin would have burst an ideological artery or two in Tony’s cardiac gospel. One would have thought the fall of the Berlin wall and in its wake the crumbling and destruction of Stalin’s statues in what used to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would have cast a spell that an old world had gone and new world had emerged from its sulphuric ashes.

But sick as he was, Tony Zumel held on. His body was endlessly wracked by pain which I think had begun with ulcers which worsened after he had gone underground when Marcos proclaimed martial rule in 1972. News would trickle in from the hills that Tony was bedridden. But in between bouts of convulsion, he would soldier on, the revolutionary torch held high, the face pale and withered but the eyes fixed turrets of courage and determination. No wonder when he came back several months ago with The Hague delegation, Tony in his wheelchair looked like a broken sparrow. He was shrunken, a misshapen shell of what he used to be when he happily roamed the editorial byways of the Philippines Herald where many of those he mentioned started their journalistic careers.

He looked like Mahatma Gandhi during a hunger strike. And even when he was not on a fast, the ascetic Gandhi was a lean, bony sprout of a human being, his loin cloth fastened around him like an enlarged G-string.

What then can we say of Tony Zumel now that the Eternal Footman has brought him to the valley beyond? That he is one of the bravest of men, who believed in the revolutionary cause and never faltered, a figure I have etched on my own mental Mount Rushmore, a hero, yes a patriot who may have loved his cause perhaps too passionately and too long. And yet, who are we to judge? We the living, who may have had a longer look but a lesser fervor. As Joseph Campbell said: "The last act in the biography of a hero is that of his death or departure."

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Now it’s getting obvious that the SSS was a "milch cow with 125 million teats", to use H.L. Mencken’s famous expression. This would explain why its employees and top executives hijacked "People Power" to protect what could be the biggest cash cow in Philippine bureaucracy. It’s just amazing how a number of citizens were gulled, particularly the so-called progressive Left which rallied round the SSS demonstrators with their red flags, their strident slogans, their screams against "government perfidy." And now a Left spokesman calls that silly and preposterous root-toot-a-toot roister, honestly and truly, People Power.

Baloney to all that.

People Power is People Power only when it emerges from a critical mass of society faring forth to the barricades after enduring a years-long train of abuses, scandals, wrongdoing on the part of a government leadership that has lost all its excuse for being. That happened to the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos February 22-25, 1986. That happened to the corrupt and scandal-ridden presidency of Joseph Estrada January 16-20 this year when hundreds of thousands swarmed to the EDSA Shrine, and a huge throng proceeded to Malacañang Palace to make sure Erap would flee like a whipped cur. Which he did.

But the two-month SSS outpouring was just a clambake of spoiled brats and spoiled executives who never had it so good. The sorry excuse of course was the "management style" of then president and CEO Vitaliano Nanagas II. He was described as "tyrannical" and "despotic." Pastrami.

Well, now we know the truth. Nanagas was into a shameful web of looting the government’s candy jar. The lowest paid assistant vice president cadges P120,000 monthly in salary and allowances. The executive vice president, identified as Horacio Templo, hauls in P314,416 monthly, an abominably princely sum, if you ask me in these days when the poor can hardly eat one meal a day. The Commission on Audit (COA) reported that last year alone, the bonuses showered on officials and employees totaled P235.1 million while incentives aggregated P211 million.

Now it is also known that under the Joseph Estrada regime, the SSS purchased 250 million shares of Belle Corporation for P784 million, and if that amount doesn’t boggle your eyes, nothing will. These are extraordinary stud fees. The Estrada regime pocketed P284 million in profits, with P189 million – by god and begorra! – going to commissions. You know whose. We understand the deal got the okay of former SSS president Carlos Arellano and, of course, Horacio Templo. The latter now faces the public with a straight face, claiming he is entitled to every pay envelope he brings home monthly, an envelop that has the bulge of a Mafia gunslinger’s grubstake.

After 36 years working for the private sector remorselessly dunned by the SSS, as I reported earlier, I only get a little more than P3000 a month. A measly, measly cheque which you can blow in one meal at a five-star hotel.