A giant crosses over / Can GMA recover and win?

You could hardly hear the roar of his cannon. It was muffled. His two major publications didn’t have the mass circulation that would have bothered the dictatorship. What President Ferdinand Marcos didn’t know or realize was the power of his ideas, the intellectual breadth of Raul Locsin who converted first BusinessDay, then BusinessWorld into partly deft political attack weapons that drew blood. The dictator tolerated both papers because he did not see them in the streets and figured they could do him no harm.

Well, he was mistaken. Raul Locsin’s papers were devoured by the middle and upper classes, the same classes that turned against Mr. Marcos. They read BusinessDay and after it BusinessWorld. The two papers not only propagated normally staid and sedate business news but political stories and commentaries that clawed and stung. And they stung because – in good prose – they told much of the truth about a president who pretended he was playing a political violin when in truth he was banging on a bass drum with uncommon greed and viciousness.

Much of the critical stuff was written by Manila-based foreign correspondents whom the dictator dared not persecute. And thanks to Raul, my critical reporting as an AFP foreign correspondent on the martial law regime of Mr. Marcos often found its way into the pages of his newspapers. In retrospect, I would like to think Raul Locsin’s courage and the reinvigorating editorial originality of his publications eventually helped light the faggots that led to People Power in February 1986.

If I know Raul, he must have celebrated the collapse of the dictatorship with his favorite libation, Chateau Margaux.

That he was – an aristocrat in his habits and a commoner in his views. Whenever we went out mostly for lunch, he, Hermie Rivera and myself indulged great food and great wine. He was, after all, a Locsin of the Visayan clan who grew up under the tutelage of parents and grandparents who not only enjoyed life, but highly appreciated literature and the arts, the power that good wine and good food have to invade the well-victualed mind and set if off on rhapsodies of stimulating conversation on Victor Hugo, Shakespeare and the writings and poetry of Jose Rizal.

It was also in that sense, and on the urgings of Hermie Rivera, the sports buff, that every now and then we watched boxing brawls indulged in by only the best Filipino fist-fighters. Raul was as keen on the intricacies of the left hook and the right straight as he was on the existentialist effusions of Ernest Hemingway, particularly in his great opus, The Old Man and the Sea.

I do not know if Raul Locsin’s kind exists anymore.

He was fun to be with, if by fun you mean sizzling intellectual discourse laced with breathless stanzas of poetry we would seize on the fly and then recite with fervor. His sense of humor was on the same level. Baron de Rothschild, who owned the vineyards that produced his famous Chateau wines, often used to distinguish between grapes that grew on Rothschild’s side of the fence and other wines grown on the other side. Asked why his wines were much better, the Baron, as we follow Raul’s story, explained they were grown and cultivated meticulously up front. Those grown on the backside were inferior because they had a certain smell. Ah, that was devastating.

Raul was no ideologue, certainly no fire-breathing Marxist. He was too much in love with the classics to espouse dialectical materialism. But he had an emotional affinity with educated Left-leaning of Left-breathing members who were caught by the military, tortured, and then freed for lack of material evidence. Or a promise to reform. He took them in, gave them jobs in his papers, trained them, disciplined their minds in the ways of professional business reporting. In this regard, Raul was a Prussian drillmaster always at the editorial desk hectoring, counselling, correcting, berating, encouraging until they learned his journalistic manual by heart.

It turned out after the years that the best business writers and reporters in the land were those trained and harnessed by Raul.

As the years passed, my friend’s health began to suffer. Before he received the Magsaysay award for journalism, we dined again, with Hermie in tow. Hermie was a great listener. And he egged us on as, getting more mellow with wine, we got into the literary intestines of George Bernard Shaw. But as Raul stood up to go to the men’s room, it was with an effort. And as he walked, it was with a gnarled stoop and a slight shuffling of the legs. It hurt us who knew him a lot. Raul was an unusually tall Locsin, a ramrod straight man you would say who walked the lobbies of five-star hotels like an aristocrat. All that was lacking was a bowler hat and a black umbrella.

It was like looking at the later Muhammad Ali emerging from the shadows into the light during the Atlanta Olympiads and seeing his hands quiver forlornly with Parkinson’s disease. Or a retired Babe Ruth clawing at the air and striking out, his big belly getting in the way, a lifetime of eating and carousing. But Raul’s mind never gave out. Nor the voice. Nor the sense of alertness, or humor.

That was the last time I saw Raul Locsin.

Now that he has passed away, you feel, you realize on the instant how great a journalist he was, a titan in almost every sense, a part-time epicure ensconsed in a great intellect and greater integrity, worthy of all his peers. It is doubtful his kind will ever come again for it popped out of social and cultural circumstances peculiar to his life, a love of great books and food, a love of journalistic adventure, a love perhaps of destiny that never lost its way to the end of the rainbow.

Goodbye, my dear friend.

* * *

Coffee shops continue to rattle with speculation as to whether President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will run for president in 2004, and if she does, can she win. There are those who say she won’t since she has given her sworn word, gospel strong, she has renounced all presidential ambition. There are those who say she will, if her approval ratings improve substantially in the next three or four months. And she will run, it is additionally argued, because she has American backing for a US-Philippines partnership (she and George W. Bush) designed to rescue Asia from the travails of international terror.

I believe – a belief that reinforces itself by the day – that GMA will run.

Not that America is smitten about her in a political love affair that has taken on the fervor of Romeo and Juliet. It’s all very simple really. GMA is the only Filipino leader Washington trusts implicitly and explicitly at a time the US relaunches itself in Asia in what could be the last great fight of Pax Americana. The US figures they have GMA securely in its pocket, ready, willing and able to do its biding. And what’s more, strategically speaking, the Philippines has burgeoned into the ideal geographic catapult to project American military might into the world’s last remaining continent that refuses to kowtow to US power.

What’s even more, the bloom may be on again for US-Philippines post-Cold War relations after it was scuttled by the eviction of Clark and Subic by our Senate in 1990-91. But not to worry too much. The Americans have done their homework and find that Filipinos in the mass have great affection for the US, the US "way of life", and almost every Filipino’s dream is to be able to migrate to America. And so with American goodies in two (did anybody mention $2 billion?), GMA’s popular approval is expected to rise and perhaps even soar. She is doing the "right things" – get really tough on MILF terrorism in Mindanao, renounce peace talks with the separatist rebels, put P25 million in bounties on their "terrorist" heads.

Notice how the word "terror" has now embedded itself securely in government and media language? The Americans love that.

Anyway, if GMA runs, will she win in 2004? In a fair fight, I don’t think she will. It’s just too late to catch up and streak to the frontline in surveys. But hardly anybody expects the 2004 elections to be fair honest and orderly. If the Americans should support GMA, that will be a big plus. If GMA on election day trails not really far behind who leads the survey at that time, all the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men can be expected to rally the needed votes to win – by hook and by crook. Already, I hear she will have the support of the military and the police not to mention the Comelec.

That’s a terrific battering ram.

The question is: Will civil society accept the returns of an election it strongly believes has been massively rigged to favor GMA? Will the Left? Will the nationalists whose ranks grow by the day? And if civil strife should pour tens of thousands of protesters into the streets, can the government hold? Will the military seize or attempt to seize power? Would the Americans intervene? And if they intervene, wouldn’t that pour more fuel into social turbulence? Wouldn’t that engage American troops into the kind of combat that would be condemned by the entire world? After all, the Philippines is not Iraq.

GMA will be well advised to walk away from 2004.