Black October, really? The crisis is elsewhere

This early and already the air is fraught with rumors of a coup wildfiring over our metropolis. The code-name for this coup is reportedly Black October with a calendar date stamped for the period of October 30-November 4. The target, of course, is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. GMA is hardly ten months into the presidency since People Power II – by the grace of God, if not the grace of the multitudes – handed her the key to Malacañang. We are also informed by Chief Supt. Reynaldo Berroya the coup’s main plotter is nobody else but that "arch villain" – Sen. Panfilo Lacson.

You don’t have to guess who the alleged mastermind is – Joseph Ejercito Estrada.

Well! It’s recent history all over again. We’re back to the years 1999-2000 when Erap Estrada was riding high and mighty in Malacañang, only two years into the presidency. But already the bushes were moving, the streets were beginning to teem with the early left-wing demonstrators, the media were polishing and test-firing their muskets at Malacañang scandals, the Church in high fidgets as the president’s mistresses and mansions hove publicly into view. Soon President Estrada, hurt by a media criticism gathering more venom than a nest of rattlesnakes giving birth to quintuplets, accused the opposition of plotting his ouster. The media was his favorite scapegoat.

Addendum: The El Shaddai group of Brother Mike Velarde will reportedly provide the warm bodies, the "Holy Brother" to "Black October". We are also being told an "armed body" of the poor is now being organized and trained to make sure that this time – unlike the May 1 siege – the "Great Unwashed" will be armed, able to shoot their way into Malacañang possibly with the help of a modest brace of mercenary army and police generals. Get the picture?

I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.

Coups and People Power surges just don’t materialize at the whim and snap of the opposition’s fingers. Many ingredients will have to come together. Like an ocean bracing for turbulence, the rains will have to come, the waves, the high roll of thickening forward currents, thunder and lightning. No such thing prevails today. The nation is in crisis, true – political, social and economic – but it has yet to reach a "critical mass". How define the latter? The critical mass comes when the people, particularly the middle class, start getting really angry, and get to be convinced the powers-that-be are not only scum but thieves, not only thieves, but immoral scumbags, and that tomorrow is Gotterdamerung out to slit their throats.

That was the way the people felt the night of January 26 when the Senate voted 11-9 not to open the second envelope during the impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada.

That in their perception was betrayal. That was treason. That was eleven senators taking off their pants or their panties to defecate in full public view. That was Senators Francisco Tatad and Juan Ponce Erile slapping the blindfolded woman with the balance full in the face. That was Senator Tessie Oreta dancing her obscene and wicked dance. She could have taken it all off. That envelope vote was the event that brought out the critical mass at the EDSA Shrine.

It will be different this time. Hear that still muffled ticking of the clock? That is tick-tock that tells all of us the economy continues to thin out and will break down in the near future. It can’t be helped. And all the more it can’t be helped because President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo doesn’t have it in her political musculature, her moral armor, to guide us to higher ground. She is lost. Or is she? She appoints Rufus Rodriguez ambassador to Germany. She appoints Tony Carpio to the Supreme Court. Yes, the nation is dying and it dies a little more with these two really obnoxious appointments. This proves she is beholden to people who have done her a lot of favors. And not to the Republic whose conscience and searching, selective eye demand only the best.

But even if GMA didn’t appoint Rodriguez and Carpio, hers is a lost and hopeless cause.

The economy since 25-30 years ago broke into measles and never cured itself. Unlike the high-performing economies of East and Southeast Asia, we never found the right formula for high and sustained economic growth. Our political system could have made a difference. It didn’t. All our Congress could regurgitate both in the House and Senate was the spurious aristocratic rhetoric of "Your Honor" in a bacchanalian bathhouse where everything was "honorable". And if a witness forgot to preface a statement with "Your Honor", he or she was clapped into the hoosegow.

Your Honors, all of you should be in jail.

* * *

And so we have all the ills of a society such as ours where democracy has so far dismally failed, where graft and corruption is not just rampant but rapacious, where law and order is contraband quicksilver to slimy and slippery you can never hold it in your hands, where crime vies with garbage and traffic as daily monsters on the loose, where poverty is so many Payatases fouling every neighborhood and dotting the skyline. And oh yes but yes, where shabu and the police and powerful men and women on high rob us of our birthright to have a better tomorrow. And where our courts are about as effective as the rotting tree stumps of a mediaeval age. Just don’t look at the Sandiganbayan for one day, and hesto presto, Joseph Estrada will be back home at Greenhills, contentedly moving his bowels amid scents of all the perfumes of a high-class bordello.

And so this is how the critical mass could emerge in the near future.

Even without the international economic crisis brought off by the Sept. 11 terrorist destruction of Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the Philippines was already mired in deep crisis. Note that the main markets for our exports – America, Japan and Europe – are in recession, close to recession or at the very least badly bleeding. So we could lose 60 to 70 percent of our exports, led by electronic products. That means many more factories here will either close or heavily retrench and the jobless will teem like hungry locusts in search of ripening rice-fields or wheat-fields. There are none. Already we have an unemployment rate of 14-15 percent, underemployment –20-30 percent. Even this early, it’s already a cobra bite.

Christmas and the New Year holidays, our poor will still manage to celebrate although the tables will be very meager. But wait till the economy worsens till the first quarter or the second quarter of 2002. But this time, a continuously plunging economy will raddle the stomachs of the poor like a rake on dry stony ground. Consider this. The population of Metro Manila has burgeoned to about 7-9 million from two million after World War II. The overwhelming majority are poor or very poor. Millions of them have come from the countryside where over the decades and generations, they lived the timelessness of superstitious rural folk, a peasantry strung to the heavens by the immemorial patience of Christians, suffering but still wafted to a serenity boozed by the forest and green foliage and the stars on high, the Holy Cross a tempering icon on their altars.

In the city, in Metro Manila, all this virtually evaporates.

Let’s call it acoustics. All sociologists are one in saying the rural folk transplanted to the city imbibe the smell of all its evils, suck in almost all its sins, realize almost immediately the city is a cesspool, not the paradise they expected, get to live the life of beasts and survive only if they behave like beasts. Once hungry, once driven to the wall, once rendered desperate because their plates are empty, and there’s no milk for the babies, they realize this is not God’s will but the greed and rapacity of the powerful and the rich. They have been plundered and in time they too will plunder, if not destroy and rampage. Even kill. This is the stuff of revolutions, civil wars, violent uprisings.

When I explain the Philippines this way to many of my friends, they are aghast. But the Filipino has always survived, always muddled along, they respond. And I tell them the rot, the evil has festered for such a long time without any respite or surcease. And besides rapid and unfettered urbanization, a modern phenomenon has begun to choke and strangle Metro Manila beyond its capacity to feed, control or absorb.

And so, I conclude, look out for the first or second quarter of next year. By that time, poverty will be a sputtering fuse, and the poor will take the streets. They will loot because that is the only way they can survive. They will take to the rice bins where thousands of sacks of rice are stored and they will take this rice home to feed their families. I do not know if they will hie to the houses of the rich in the gated communities of Makati and elsewhere where milk, meat and fish are stored in giant freezers. Maybe they will. If the police fire on them, if the paid vigilantes of the rich fire on them, then the Philippines will explode. Ferdinand Marcos, wretch and poltroon that he was, warned of this social volcano a long time ago.

That was the only time he told the truth.