Saga of Grace Padaca / Who’s inciting the military?

It took many years before I read Kenneth Tynan, corruscating wit, public scold, playwright, inimitable wordsmith, an extraordinary English man of letters who could stand up to the great Ernest Hemingway. He wrote volumes, spoke volumes. But a phrase of his I shall never forget: "Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds." I had been doing that precisely in almost all the years I had been in journalism. Reading Tynan halfway in my career was just what I needed to "Keep fighting!", my slogan as a TV talk show host for nine years.

Of course, I made many enemies. I received death threats along the way, was slammed with libel suits. The worst was when a highly prominent but notorious public figure sent five of his gorillas to my residence at midnight to threaten me within an inch of my life, guns on my temple, a long kitchen knife on my chest. The rest of my family were blindfolded and hogtied, including the household help. I didn’t cringe. That was a narrow escape.

Well, let’s let that pass. That public figure, fortunately or unfortunately, I have never met face to face.

That incident simply came to mind when I read the story of one Gracia Cielo Padaca, who just won the governorship of Isabela in Northern Luzon. By the grace of the Comelec’s First Division (who else?), her proclamation was suspended last May 22 for reasons absolutely abstruse, absolutely stupid, absolutely preposterous.

Reason? The high, mighty but not doughty Dy dynasty in Isabela, in power for 32 years, wants her booted out if not beheaded with the Comelec doing the beheading. Real reason? Faustino Dy Jr., who reminds me of the swarthy, ruthless, macabre Governor Rafael Lacson of Negros Occidental seeks her disqualification. Why? Grace Padaca reportedly won because she was supported by the communist-led New Peoples Army (NPA). Hoo-hah!

The nerve of this sonouvabee!

Look Junior, you lost because the people of Isabela simply have gotten sick and tired of you. They hate your guts, you and the Dy dynasty. I’ve heard a lot about the Dys, as all practising journalists do. They say you Dys have managed to rule for 32 years because like the Lacson camarilla in Negros who killed Moises Padilla, you had mastered ways amd means of spreading political voodoo, the kind that leads to bangungot in the night . We’ve also heard a lot about the Dy boys, wastrels all they say, bullies, wrongoes of the first water.

And whom would you now vent your power and all your accumulated weapons of coercion on?

A lady. A lady who can’t walk. A gentle, soft-spoken and highly educated lady, school valedictorian all the way. A lady afflicted with polio since she was three and can walk only on crutches. How far, how intoxicated with power can you, Dys, go to lay your hirsute hand on this frail and innocent lady? Finally, your xenophobia has ripped off its mask. Finally the Dys are seen for what they really are, unsheathed political gorillas, bawling the language of the jungle to remain in power.

And so what if the NPA guerillas supported her campaign, voted for her? If they were duly registered voters, entitled to vote, and they voted for her, what was wrong?

Grace Padaca was not a communist, never hawked the Communist Manifesto, never read Das Kapital, never advocated armed revolution, never secretly bonded with communists to worship at the feet of Karl Marx and Friederich Engels. In fact her bedside books are spiritually inspirational. They are The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck, Being Happy by Andrew Matthews, The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Balthazar Gracian and the Holy Bible.

You guys who rule Isabela nuts? Did you ever read these books? In your 32 years, have you ever extracted any wisdom from – much less read – the Bible, the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

And so Grace Padaca has retrieved nuggets of wisdom from the books she had read? And so it is her voice that you fear. Her knowledge. Her wisdom. Her daily radio broadcast for dzNC Bombo Radio, later sa Totoo Lang and later Bombo Hanay Bigtime. Her piercing appraisal, probably, of what the Dys have done for 32 years in Isabela, a dynasty once ensconced in a gun-turreted bullet-proof tank, except there are no bullet-proof tanks anymore.

You Dys remind me of that notorious advertising billboard Nakatikim ka na ba ng Kinse? Except that it is the other way round: Nakatikim ka na ba ng Trenta y Dos? Public outrage vanquished that Kinse billboard. Public outrage will also vanquish the Trenta y Dos, meaning the Dy dynasty that has held power in Isabela for 32 years.

Oh baby, baby, you have gall, you members of the Dy Dynasty.Do you really expect you can hold on? Do you really expect the powers-that-be, the odious and hated Comelec particularly, can wrap a protective legal shroud around you? When the Comelec itself is on the run, its tail wrapped inside its hind legs, its chairman Benjamin Abalos No. l in the public’s rogue’s gallery?

And how about you, Mrs. President, yes Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. You’re still president and you can immediately do something to get Grace Padaca out of her terrible predicament. Why can’t you and why don’t you? All the prayers in the world beside the Carmelites in Cebu cannot right the grievous wrong inflicted on Grace Padaca, who walks only by the grace of God because of her crutches. And talks the awful truth only by grace of her divine courage.

She is the heroine of the May 10 elections, and no other.

No, she is not yet the likes of Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma, who stood up to all the rogue generals, and batted not an eyelash as they threw her and her followers into jail. She and her party, the National Democratic Party swept the 1992 elections by a landslide. But instead of taking over power, they were branded as traitors and rebels. Suu Kyi was jailed, maligned as a foreign spy for having married a British doctor, subjected to all the indignities, attacked physically by government rogues many weeks ago, thrown into a cell fit only for the lowliest crooks and criminals.

Go ahead, make my day.

Deprive Grace Padaca of what is her legitimate due, the governorship of Isabela, and I can assure you, certified members of the Dy dynasty, that your political reputations will sprout the worst of political stigmata, unwanted lepers in your own land. Cut your losses, gents and mesdames, and git.

What did Kenneth Tynan say? Raise whirlwinds. Yessir, we’re doing just that.

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In the Reactions section of INBOX Thursday, a Salve Coro of Tanauan, Batangas, wrote: "Teddy Benigno is inciting the military to topple the government. Why, Teddy?" Whaaaat? Me inciting the Armed Forces to stage a coup d’etat. Wherever did M. Coro get that misbegotten gobbledegook?

Precisely this column, these past two years or so, conceptualized first the Freedom Force, and later on BANGON! to steer the Philippines clear of the two extremes hanging like a Sword of Damocles over the citizenry. The first was a violent communist revolution that would have soaked the nation in blood. The second was a military takeover that would have sprung bayonets all over the republic, ruled through the barrel of a gun, and shut us all up.

Neither was acceptable.

Communism had its chance, but muffed it. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where the hammer and sickle flew unchallenged dominion, it failed, and failed miserably. The Berlin Wall collapsed and, voila, the stampede of millions of people was from east to west. In China, Deng Xiao Ping replaced communism with "socialism with a Chinese face". Inevitably, free enteprise capitalism came in under a command economy controlled by Beijing. The result? A stupendous, unprecedented, spectacular economic boom with China breathing on America’s back.

Military rule or dictatorship will not, will never work in the Philippines. It too had its chance in the 70s and 80s in South and Latin America. But the culture of the barracks was a complete stranger to the culture of the political and social sciences. The former was unitarian, the latter protean. The former was a culture for war, the latter variegated scholastic disciplines for peace and governance over multitudes of nations and men.

No, Mr. Coro, you got me wrong, all wrong. What we are trying to do these days is meet with as many military officials as we can, who love this country, so we and other sectors of society, including of course the left, can meet at a certain juncture. This would be the setting up of an alternative government, if the need should arise. This could be in the nature of a provisional government, a government of national unity, a government of national salvation, maybe even a revolutionary government. No bloodshed.

No government, of course, can survive without the support of the military.