Sodom and Gomorrah in the Pacific

Everytime we pick up the daily newspapers or switch on the radio-TV news, don’t we get the sinking feeling that we’re living in Sodom and Gomorrah?

Rape, murder, kidnapping, and other violent crimes are our daily bread. People accuse each other of being crooks. Finger-pointing has become the national pastime. (The idea, probably, is that if you’re the accuser you’re the innocent and heroic one, while the other is guilty). Senators want Customs men fired or else they’ll bolt the majority party and make it the minority party. What nursery-school attitudes. Sure, those Customs guys might be black as sin, and smugglers galore. But the ancient Greek title of honor, "solon" has once more been degraded. The President et hubby are constantly being attacked for making corrupt deals, but where’s the proof? Loud and noisy windbags, male and female, representing organizations and NGOs with weird names and even weirder intentions pollute the air with their hysterics.

We in the media are far from blameless in this welter of recriminations, prurient news gathering, "investigative" baloney, White Papers, Black Propaganda – anything to grab the limelight or a headline. Contrary to public misimpression, the idea is not to sell newspapers but to appear the crusading variety, righting every wrong (real or imagined) with a shining sword.

Hypocrisy, cynicism, greed, anarchy, lust, despair, vengefulness (in the name of "justice," naturally) befoul our society. This is no longer the "human condition", as sociologists loved to say, but a bestial situation where the law of the jungle and lex talionis prevail.

It’s time we snapped back to our senses. God’s up there in heaven. Wrongdoers can be punished and wrong redressed. Sinners can be reformed or scourged at the pillar. Deep down in everyone lies the germ of goodness and generosity. The Filipino people have courage, fortitude, talent – and, above all, an abiding faith. But we have to give ourselves a chance. We must turn our backs on the Sodom and Gomorrah we are in mortal peril of becoming.

Everyone knows what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah without being reminded by the Holy Bible (Gen. xii, xiv, xix). After the Lord, in His anger, rained "fire and brimstone" on the two cities, all that was left was the Dead Sea.

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I miss saying something on Bonifacio Day, but I have to play catch-up and make this assertion which may offend some folk in Caloocan. I believe that the Bonifacio monument is in the wrong place. This doesn’t mean that Gat Andres, the Great Plebeian, didn’t shout his war "cry" and tear up his cedula at Balintawak or Pugad Lawin. What I deplore is the utter waste of marooning one of our most beautiful and stirring monuments in a traffic circle, wreathed in fumes of pollution, bombarded with a cacophony of vulgar car-horns and jeepney-beeps, and disregarded by motorists and pedestrians alike.

If we honestly wish to pay homage to the boy from Tondo who launched our Revolution, we must relocate that wonderful frieze of statues, including Gomburza, to a green and leafy public park (which, alas, may not exist anymore – another anomaly) where it can be admired for its patriotic genius and heroic grace. Tolentino’s sculpture of our tragic founding father (felled by his own compatriots) is, in my book, one of the most moving in the world. But it is traffic, instead, that moves around it.

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Jose Rizal was the idol of our family. But it was Andres Bonifacio who most vividly captured my childhood memories and passionate admiration. Rizal couldn’t help being a hero: He had everything, even the elegance of an opportunity to marry his mistress on the eve of his brave execution. He remains the stuff of the very novels he wrote. Bonifacio, on the other hand, had all the odds stacked against him. He didn’t have the financial resources to go to school among the Indios Bravos of the upper set. Yet he read books voraciously – of the French revolution, of Voltaire and the other thinkers of Europe of his day. (He would even have enjoyed Harry Potter.) Not bad for a brat from the esteros. The jury will always be out on whether Bonifacio was true masa or came from the struggling middle class, but who cares? What mattered was that he loved his country and people, had pride in his race – and in his rights.

It was my late father who fostered our love for Gat Andres. When I was a little boy, he would drive us up to that far-away place now called Monumento. And there he stood, bolo in hand, revolver in the other. And from his face shone a light which has forever transfigured me, and I’m certain many others.

Bonifacio was a lousy general. He lost every engagement with the Spanish military and the Guardia Civil. He had, however, the power to inspire men to do reckless, even impossible things. Near where I live is the famous Pinaglabanan (The Place Where They Fought). That’s where Bonifacio and his Katipuneros (the "Minute Men" of our nation, by American historical comparison) tried to overwhelm and capture the Spanish garrison of the polverin, and seize their weapons and ammunition. Would you believe? Those Filipino rebels were armed only with bolos and bamboo spears! They were mowed down like ducks in a shooting gallery.

Bonifacio’s romantic view of the greatness of the Filipino, not his lack of faith, proved his undoing. It’s preached that Jose Rizal was a dreamer, while Bonifacio was a realist. It was the other way around. It was Rizal who saw his fellow Filipinos for what they were: Squabbling and contentious, often avaricious and consumed with envy, servile in the face of naked power, hypocritical and strutting at the top of the ladder, ignorant and superstitious at the bottom.

It didn’t detract from his being truly our national hero that Rizal was a marginal men: Torn between his Spanish upbringing, his affection for the ties of Hispanidad, and his hatred of Spanish tyranny and friar misrule. Most painful of all to Rizal was his frustration that his fellow Filipinos did not appear strong or united enough to snap and shake off the chains that bound them.

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Bonifacio had no such hesitations. He felt the people would rise up and shoulder to shoulder, throw the oppressive Spaniards into the sea.

He was so confident of the nobility of the Filipino that, in his naiveté, he even left the security of his native Manila and went over to Cavite, the stronghold of his rival and enemy, Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, rashly expecting the Caviteños to join his nationalist cause and support him instead of their provincemate Aguinaldo.

What he got for his pains were sneers, followed by violent capture and imprisonment. He was tried by an Aguinaldo-created military tribunal, and sentenced to death as an "agent" of the Spaniards and a traitor to the cause of Philippine freedom. Who but a dreamer could have blundered into such a situation?

Behind my desk for many years has hung a painting of Gat Andres overseeing the list-up of rebels in the secret movement of the Katipunan. The early Katipuneros are depicted writing their names in the roster in their own blood. This beloved portrait is history come full cycle. When the Spaniards first came under Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 and Miguel de Legaspi in 1565, they used the strategem of attracting our local kings, rajahs and datus by calling them "brothers" under the Cross, and signing pactos de sangre (blood compacts) with them. The fraternity was gone virtually before the blood on the treaties was dry and the usefulness of the native warriors enlisted to their banner expired.

Bonifacio and his brave few of the KKK, which soon swelled into an army of the Revolution, risked all to make their own blood compact with destiny. You know the rest.