A tentative SONA: It didn’t rip off / Armstrong: Super athlete

State of the Nation addresses, like Richard Wagner’s operas, are supposed to quiver, then smoulder, then roar into a blazing ball of fire before soaring into the wild blue yonder. I was waiting for President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s SONA to do just that. It didn’t. It had a brief firecracker burst at the beginning by cleverly mentioning the saga of Angelo de la Cruz. Then it sailed into the air, sailed a little bit more, then stayed there like a kite that lost velocity – dangling from side to side.

First, it lacked the prose. Second, it lacked the fire. Third, the passion wasn’t just there.

Any president, starting her first elected six-year term, would have been expected to hoist her voice to magistral level, then assail the rafters with pledges and promises going through clusters of smoke and fire. GMA didn’t. And maybe she wanted it that way. Maybe she chose the wrong speech-writer. Or maybe, she preferred that action in the future would make up for the lack of spectacular shot and shell in her SONA.

But enough of that. What was her speech all about?

It was all about what she sought to do in the six years she expected to remain in office. Everything was there. The list was that long, a boring replication actually of previous pledges and promises. Previous SONAs. She missed nothing at all except two significant things which she deliberately, I think, avoided. She touched – not at all – on the demographic explosion, 83 million Filipinos growing like rabbits by the day, and possibly reaching the level of 100 million in eight years or less. Who would feed them?

She couldn’t, wouldn’t take on the Church on this issue.

She also studiously avoided what she would do if filthy rich businessmen and corporations did not pay their taxes. I was expecting this. She particularly mentioned they were the biggest thieves and scoundrels in the land. So, no arrests? No trips to the calaboose? No indictments? No arraignments? She should have launched something like the Italian government’s Mano Pulite (Operation Clean Hands) where the most famous and notorious carpetbaggers in politics and business were picked up, exhibited to the public. In shame, some of them committed suicide in detention.

Some of the biggest names hauled in were former prime ministers Aldo Moro and Guilio Andreotti. They lived to tell the tale but their careers had already crashed to the ground.

Somebody should have told the President her targets of six to ten million jobs in six years would simply come to naught if she couldn’t sever the jugular of population explosion. And resorted to rigid, well structured family planning. How can you create wealth and employment if you cannot stop the mass manufacture of babies?

Oh, GMA got her jumbo ovation all right.

She got it when she announced debate and dialogue on the parliamentary form of government would start next year. The whole assembly exploded into cheers and huzzahs, the congressmen bolting like mad from their seats. I wonder how they would have reacted if the president announced that from Day One – if indeed they were patriotic – they would agree to be divested of their pork barrel amounting to about $24 billion annually.

President GMA revealed precious little about foreign policy. The expectation was that after slashing a big wound on America’s underbelly by withdrawing the Philippines’ humanitarian contingent from Iraq, she would go to town on a revitalized or a spanking new foreign policy.

Here, she also avoided the subject except to say that her government would continue to protect the interests of nine million Filipinos working overseas. How? She didn’t say. Foreign policy has never been her strong suit, although her father the late president Diosdado Macapagal was a founder of Maphilindo (Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia) which later was fine-tuned into the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations).

What else to say?

Nothing much really. Judging from the failed rocket booster the SONA was, I would be surprised if GMA staged a coup on herself and emerged a different president, timber-tall, full of Promethean fire and slaying every dragon in her path. That would be a revolution from above.

That thing about the Con-Con gave her away. It was GMA herself who said there would be a year’s moratorium on the Con-Con. I wonder. How much is there really riding on the Con-Con that even GMA couldn’t keep her mouth shut on a very contentious issue.

So the SONA didn’t take off at all.

* * *

On very rare occasions, sporting feats happen and the world stops to watch, to admire, to breathe in the wonder of it all. So it was when America’s Lance Armstrong won his sixth successive Tour de France and spellbound even the French. Five others succeeded in notching five victories in this most prestigious and hazardous of cycling events but came apart in their sixth try. Or didn’t try at all.

The first to win five Tours was the legendary Jacques Anquetil in 1974. He was followed by Eddie Merckx, a Belgian , in 1974, Bernard Hinault a Frenchman in 1985, Miguel Indurain, a Spaniard.

It is the mountains that make the Tour. They rise in succession, sharp, high and rugged earth swells that require nerves of steel to negotiate, stupendous human endurance, and the instincts of a mountain lion. Lance Armstrong simply bolted from the pack when he reached those mountains, striding all alone, a virtual animal snorting the wind with joy, lapping up distance as though he had a hundred lungs. He owned those mountains and nobody came close.

How did he do it? "It’s a full-year commitment," he answered. That’s the secret. The answer is total, full commitment and hard work." Don’t ever forget this man once suffered from testicular cancer, was hospitalized, and everybody said his cycling days were over. Well, they were not over. His world was cycling. And nobody could ever separate him from that world.

Armstrong was a man obsessed. He had to win. He mobilized every nerve, every muscle, every emotion for that purpose. He had to do what no other man could do.

I remember such men as these. I remember Roger Bannister, the Englishman, who ran the first four-minute mile. I remember Jackie Robinson who broke the color bar in baseball. He was insulted and spat upon every inch of the way, was refused entry and service in first-class hotels. Robinson persevered anyway, and got better and better as brickbats rained on his back.

Of course, I remember Muhamad Ali (né Cassius Clay) whose fast fists and limber legs were really something to behold. They resembled ballet patterns in the ring, a black, gleaming physique so stupendously structured to dance and whirl in the ring he looked like Nijinsky. Then he did something else. This something else was to whip out arms and fists that fell like rhythmic cannon shot on an enemy until the latter dropped hobbled or unconscious on the canvas.

Yes, there was Babe Ruth before there was anybody else in power baseball. The Bambino was a child, really a playful, roisterous child until he came to bat for the New York Yankees. In one season, he took dead aim and smashed the ball out of the park 60 times. Oh, the Babe had a lot of fun! He circled the bases, doffing his cap to a massive crowd going mad, his run a mincing run, and all he needed was a lollipop to dramatize the event.

I remember another immortal black, Jesse Owens, winning four medals – I think – in the 1936 Berlin Olympiads. And there in the stands was Der Fuehrer, Adolph Hitler, who believed nobody could beat the blue-eyed Aryan,the race he pampered so Germany could rule the world.Hitler’s moustache would twitch in anger everytime Jesse Owens beat the rest of the world. And, of couse, the time came when Hitler stomped off, unbelieving a lowly Negro could just bop a German’s head into the sand.

I remember Pete Sampras. And who really can forget? He was the best there ever was in men’s tennis. Pistol Pete had a wicked, diabolical serve faster sometimes than the wind. His was a serve and volley game. When he rushed to the net, he owned it, sprinting like a hare. And lo and behold, even André Agassi, who breathed closest to his racket, couldn’t believe what he was seeing. "He’s walkin in the air," Agassi said.

Of such men or women, I write like a journalist possessed, each time glimpsing a diamond twirling in the void.