The real terrorists: The real, the unreal

For much more than a fortnight, the nation was held hostage by an eerie and slap-dash Congressional canvas. We saw our legislators discuss the votes cast during the May 10 elections with appalling slowness. They quoted the Constitution chapter and verse. There were endless referrals to previous Supreme Court rulings on controversial election issues. There were endless debates and discussions on what to do, what not to do, what could have been done.

But always, always the majority warned time was of the essence. A president had to be proclaimed on or before June 30, again by virtue of constitutional diktat. Not to do so, not to hurry up the canvas, not to rise as one assembly would place the Philippines in jeopardy. The nation had to move on, the healing process must begin. The nation was in danger. That was the favorite majority mantra.

The minority KNP (Koalisyon ng Nagkakaisang Pilipino) didn’t see it that way.

They took advantage of the Congressional canvas to stall, delay and interpellate. They were out to prove that the party in power cheated and "cheated massively". In this, they were partly successful. The obstinate even boneheaded refusal of the majority to open up ERs (election returns) was perceived by many as proof the devil was in those returns. And this added fuel to KNP charges President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s "victory" was trumped up and that therefore she was a "bogus president".

Anyway in the wee hours Thursday morning, GMA and Noli de Castro were proclaimed president and vice president. What do I think of the whole thing?

I agree with many Filipinos who now think our democracy is a seriously flawed system. We are still in the horse-and-buggy stage. Our Comelec counts votes manually, when it could have easily resorted to automated polls which would only take a day or two to know the winner or winners. In fact, billions of pesos were appropriated for the purpose. The Comelec botched the job. Nobody was punished.

The laboriously slow count, the inability this time of Namfrel to stand sentinel over the Comelec count, its perceived bias in favor of GMA, the perverse behavior of our political system particularly in Mindanao, opened a lot of opportunity to cheat for the government and the majority. The opposition, of course, could cheat, but this was measly and mincing. The big coercive weapons were with the government.

But what was utterly shocking during the whole electoral process was this:

There was no discussion on a national level of the major issues that have seriously afflicted and devastated the Philippines for decades. There were no debates among the political parties. The issues were either deliberately ignored by our political elite. Or our politicians themselves didn’t care and gave vent only to their lust for power.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are now highly visible on the landscape. And they are there because we have wasted ourselves as a people, as a republic, as a nation. The national deficit of P5.250 trillion be damned. Mushrooming graft and corruption be damned. Galloping crime and violence be damned. Grinding poverty be damned. Overpopulation be damned. The wildfiring traffic in narcotics be damned. The economic crisis be damned.

Those who give a damn, patriotic groups and societies, columnists like me, are the recipients of brickbats. We are depicted as the pessimists, the negativists, the kill-joys. Why, the question is often asked, can’t we see anything good in our country, anything good, positive, rosy, up-and-coming in our future? Why do we hate GMA so much? Answer: I don’t.

I think there is where our trouble lies.

The lower layers of our society, the poor, the oppressed, the uneducated prefer to be quiescent. That is, I think, a layer of our culture. It is to the interest of the political system, the rich, Big Business, the Establishment, even the Church that they remain quiescent. That way, they command the institutions of our "democracy" more firmly, they penetrate deeply into our Supreme Court, they call the shots. All the moneybags are theirs.

Those who criticize, cavil at all this evil denounce the crooks and criminals upstairs, are lambasted as destabilizers, anarchists, if not revolutionaries who want to bathe our country in blood. Soon we could be arrested for sedition or inciting to sedition.

They have not studied their history. They turn their backs so cavalierly on the great men of history like Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Voltaire, the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King. It was their ideas, their withering blasts at power and the powerful, their refusal to compromise, their holding on to conviction and principle despite prison punishment, exile, persecution that moved and changed the world for the better.

As Voltaire once said, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. As George Santayana said, they who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat history.

Don’t we want our nation to go forward? Don’t we desire that all those at political war in our country reunite and reconcile? Isn’t it to the national good that we support the presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo because this time around she is really determined to succeed? My answer is: Of course, of course, of course.

But there is always that colatilla. Show me. I have grown old in journalism. But let me swerve to another topic – that of political terror. For that is the real issue.

Terrorists are presumed to be here, there, everywhere. These are very bad, evil people working in the shadows, inflicting harm, sowing death and destruction. They are sick, twisted, deformed outcasts of society, and should be ferreted out and killed.

Right. But what I would like to point out is there exists a special brand of terror and its gauleiters are our brand of politicians. If as a country, we are buckled to our knees today, it is the fault of our politicians. If there is so much crime, so much violence, so much graft, so much corruption, blame it on our politicians. If our poverty is stuck deeper in mud and slime, we can look no further. Our politicians are responsible.

If we continue to stagger as a nation, seemingly headed for perdition, blame this, too, on our politicians.

In Europe and much of West, they call this political terrorism. The foremost exponent of political terrorism here was Ferdinand Marcos. Of course, our politicians don’t kill or exterminate people by physical means. In fact, they are gladhanders who press the flesh, who invoke "the people" in their speeches, mouth their concern even affection for the have-nots. And, of course, interminably seek their votes during the elections. Promising the moon, the stars, the heavens.

But this is theatre. Opera bouffe.

The absurdity of it all is that our politicians get richer each year, the poor poorer. It pays to get into politics. The salary isn’t really much. But the pork barrel bestowed by the Establishment on each congressman blows your socks off. Each representative, I am told, receives six million pesos a month, Those occupying important positions in the congessional hierarchy, like key senators, receive huge fortunes in pork barrel. I am also told the legislators pocket at least 25 per cent of their pork barrel allowances. Begorra!

On top of the pork barrel, they receive extravagant allowances of all kinds, more princely sums if they are committee chairmen, perks of almost every category, lavish cuts in business deals particularly franchises. They splurge on junkets galore, travel first class by air and by land all paid for, eat and drink only in first-class restaurants, cafés, leisure and pleasure igloos. They throw their names around, their weight around. They swagger.

So you see? They are a special breed of Filipinos.

Politics for them is the entrée to the Casbah, the life of the rich and the famous. Oh yes, they do work and engage in the legislative traffic of bills. This is the raison d’être of their existence. They are "public servants". They work "to uplift" the citizenry. But the bills they work on, these laws largely benefit only the rich or super-rich of society. If there are any crumbs, bits and pieces of give-away meat and bone, they go to the poor. So our politicians live in gilded mansions. Our poor languish in the slums.

They are two worlds apart. That is our real world. Democracy is illusion.