Now you can ‘text’ for help from the police: PNP 2920!

Whoa there! Not yet. Wait till Wednesday – that’s when the new police "texting" service begins. Police Director General Hermogenes E. Ebdane Jr. told this writer yesterday he would launch this innovation from Camp Crame day after tomorrow.

Here’s how it goes whether you’re using a cellphone or accessing the system through a landline: Punch PNP, then text your message, and send it to 2920. This "computerized" set-up will instantly relay your call for assistance, and the police will react or "arrive" within a few minutes. That’s how it is supposed to work in theory, at least. Let’s see what happens on Wednesday and thereafter when the system goes into operation.

Our country is indeed the world capital of "texting". When a girl is exchanging sweet talk with a fellow, he’s never sure that at the same time she isn’t texting somebody else – or vice-versa. That’s the modern version, RP style – of ménage à trois.

Hope nobody in desperate danger texts the police, and the reply comes out: No Answer or Network Busy.

The old telephone numbers are also supposed to be working, such as dial 117. This number is manned by duty officers belonging to the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG). I wonder what the response time is today.

Two other useful numbers, which you might want to note down, are the hot-lines to report a kidnapping: Telephone numbers 724-7338 or 724-7448. We trust you never get to use them.

* * *

During a three-hour discussion on improving police effectiveness and "visibility", General Jun Ebdane admitted that the Philippine National Police is undermanned.

For instance, to protect a population of some 12 million in the National Capital Region (NCR) there are only 14,000 policemen, while Seoul, South Korea’s capital, with a similar population, can field 48,000 policemen.

The total PNP strength in an archipelago of 80 million inhabitants is 114,000, with an additional 2,000 rookies recruited and soon to be assigned.

Ebdane yesterday afternoon directed all PNP regional and district directors to "ensure high visibility of uniformed policemen and mobile units", particularly at churches for Simbang Gabi. Barangay Tanods are also supposed to stand by, as early as midnight, according to PNP headquarters.

The PNP chief agreed that uniformed police visibility would be a deterrent to crime and enhance the public’s feeling of security during the Christmas season, with shoppers and holiday-makers crowding into the shopping malls.

Your chief snoop, Yours Truly, checked out the Glorietta and the surrounding Makati shops and department stores yesterday and they were packed with people. Nothing daunts the Filipino, whatever dismal economic prospects and possible lay-offs may lurk in January. The Pinoy simply won’t be deprived of Christmas cheer.

* * *

Was Armed Forces Chief of Staff, Gen. Dionisio Santiago, quoted correctly when he was reported to have said after a parade and review in his honor in the Philippine Military Academy in Baguio that he had "been in the service for 22 years… in the combat field 16 years (and) maybe these years in service means I am tired of fighting."

There’s no dishonor in a soldier being tired of fighting, but for the top commanding general to admit it goes against the grain of leadership. No matter how weary he personally may be, no matter how sick to the heart he is of combat, he must never admit it. Just as fear is contagious, and more destructive than the anthrax virus, weakness – worse, wimpishness – on the part of the military leader translates immediately into loss of will and demoralization among his men.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a letter to his son, John, on January 22, 1947 (quoted in the well-known military historian Stephen Ambrose’s ‘Eisenhower’, 1983) declared: "An officer should avoid any expression of dissatisfaction or indication of unhappiness because this invariably gives him a bad reputation… Everybody recoils from a whiner."

Ambrose, incidentally, is the same historian who wrote ‘Band of Brothers,’ that remarkable chronicle of courage of the Airborne in Europe which was made into the thrilling HBO television series.

But there you are, General Santiago! Ike went on to become President of the United States, after crushing the Nazis in Europe – with the help of the British, French, the other Allies and the Russians, of course.

So, I fervently hope that the general was misquoted. He was already too talkative at the take-over services, so a word to the wise: Stiff upper lip helps, even if you’re tired of combat. As everyone knows, it’s the army that shows the guts and endurance to fight ten minutes longer than the enemy, that wins the victory.

The immortal Greek poet Homer, in his epic, the Iliad, said: Our business, in the field of fight, is not to question but to prove our might." This dates back to the 9th century Before Christ

And what’s this nonsense about begging the Communist New People’s Army (NPA) for a "Christmas truce"? Why on earth would the NPA agree? They don’t believe in Jesus Christ, in Christmas, or in God Almighty. Right now, with Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and their other tin gods swept into the dustbin of history, their dialectic repudiated, and their "railroad of history" derailed, their only "god" is profit through the collection of "revolutionary taxes".

If they don’t attack during the Christmas period, it’s because they’re tired, too. Or too busy gorging themselves on the goodies of the season.

Many dead civilians, soldiers and policemen are mute testimony, in their graves, of the treachery of rebel promises and pledges. Si vis pacem, pare bellum.

* * *

General Ebdane says that the possibility that the Australian and Canadian governments might have been stampeded into closing down their embassies by getting their hands on a report from PNP Intelligence is being investigated. On the other hand, judging from the "unsigned report" in question, he added that he couldn’t understand how it should have affected the Australians, Canadians, and the European Commission office.

The PNP has "suspended" Lt. Col. George Gaddi pending on inquiry by the Directorate for Intelligence into what really happened. What the Australians and the Canadians seem to have received was an unsigned intelligence report attributed to Colonel Gaddi – but Gaddi says he never gave or leaked this document to them. Who did then? Did they have double agents, or moles within the PNP intelligence establishment? Or people eager to curry favor with or suck up to them?

Ebdane, from his reading of the so-called alarming report, was surprised because the specific threat was directed against the United States Embassy. The Americans, for their part, were not alarmed. They already have adequate protection, from their own security force, their Marines, and from Philippine police and military units. (And, besides, I suppose, the Yanks have grown used to being assaulted, bombed, and targeted all over the planet.) The Brits, for their part, were calm about any possibility, merely requesting beefed up police security.

Perhaps the Australians and the Canadians had a slightly different agenda? This is my question, not Ebdane’s – but I suspect the police, though diplomatically silent on the matter, have the same opinion.

In any event, yesterday afternoon, on their Kumusta, Bayan program on ANC (ABS-CBN), Cito Beltran and Cheryl Cosim conducted an impromptu poll among the viewers. The result: 18 percent thought the Australians and Canadians were right to have closed down their embassies in light of a perceived "threat"; 12 percent said, depende (it depends); while a clear-cut 38 percent declared "they were wrong".

In conclusion (after interviewing a panel which included the very discreet Chief of Protocol – and former Ambassador to Berlin – Jose "Toto" Zaide as well as, by telephone, OFWs in Canada and Australia), Cito Beltran told it like he saw it: The Australians and Canadians wronged us terribly and "damaged" the Philippines by their abrupt and amazing closure of their embassies. Good for Cito – the worthy son of a two-fisted father, the lateLouie "Straight from the Shoulder" Beltran!

It’s sad. Here we are, a struggling nation besieged by a sea of troubles, and two of our "friends" (or so we thought) dragged us down. One of the panelists, a professor, commented that it would have been worse if Australians or Canadian diplomats, if they didn’t close down their embassies, had been killed by terrorists. Of course, death is "worse". But speculating about the "possibility" of death is what saps civilized people of their courage and strength, and encourages the barbarians to more brazen and outrageous acts of terrorism. Perhaps, for all their follies and occasional fits of arrogance, what makes the Americans (Yanks, Gringos, Norteamericanos, or whatever you choose to call them) strong is because they’re brave, even when they’re wrong. Especially, some might say, when they’re wrong.

* * *

I’ve just read a book entitled, Made in Texas, with a cowboy-hatted George W. Bush on its cover. It was written by a fellow Texan, Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation.

No, that opus doesn’t praise Dubya Bush. It attacks him The subheadline of the tome expresses the nature of the critique: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics.

In his own way, the brilliant dissenter Lind (who authored such books as The Next American Nation, Up from Conservatism, Vietnam and poems like The Alamo and Bluebonnet Girl, and also owns a small ranch in Texas) explains what makes Dubya tick. (Basic Books, New America Books, 2003).

Yes. Cheekily, he dates his own book, 2003.

Writes Lind: "Between 1964 and 2000, the state of Texas was home to three elected presidents (Lyndon Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush), two vice-presidential candidates (George H.W. Bush and Lloyd Bentsen), and one independent presidential candidate (H. Ross Perot), who in 1992 received 19 percent of the vote – more than any third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. The Lone Star State, having long been known for its exports of cotton, oil, and cattle, was now exporting presidents and would-be presidents.

"Other states have produced presidential dynasties. There was a Virginia dynasty in the early 1800s, and an Ohio dynasty in the late nineteenth century, followed by a California dynasty made up of Nixon and Reagan. The Texans, however, have been not only remarkably diverse but also incompatible – and in some cases, mutually hostile. In less than three decades, Texas gaves the country the most liberal president in American history – and two of the most conservative. Ignore Lyndon Johnson for the moment: George H. W. Bush and Ross Perot – whose independent presidential bid probably cost the elder Bush the election in 1992 – might have come from different states, if not different countries, so dissimilar were their values and programs. In 1993, Americans in other parts of the country, along with foreign observers, could have been forgiven for thinking that a civil war in Texas had spilled over into national politics.

"It had. There is indeed a civil war in Texas, and it has been going on for generations."

I’ll say no more – just go read Lind’s book.

As for me, as a kid I was brought up on paperback Western novels (along with Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers, which was a Western with swordplay).

If you doubt that Dubya will attack Iraq, remember the Alamo. The way I see it, Texans, who can be irritating, also cast themselves in a heroic mold. As the Lone Star State implies, Texas didn’t join the United States of America. The US joined Texas. Or was annexed by it.