Today’s heroes of revolution were yesterday’s fools

Even if Malacañang apparently prefers Sen. Manuel Villar to be Senate President much more than outgoing Senate President Franklin Drilon, Palace officials like Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita should not be so lavish in announcing their preference for Manny Villar. Ermita may have sincerely meant his complimentary remarks about Villar, as when he rcalled that when he (Ermita) was a Batangas congressman, he and then Rep. Villar had strong ties, and that Manny "was very good" etc. Such unctuous remarks could prove a Judas kiss, if overdone – I kid thee not.

Save for a few members of the Senate who are certified GMA "Defenders of the Faith" most of the Senators pride themselves on being independent and on being Horatius at the Bridge, a rearguard against the abuse of Presidential power.

Given the vital constitutional issues the two legislative bodies will soon be tackling such as the "constituent assembly issue in which the Senate and the Lower House are at loggerheads, too many complimenary remarks and lavish praises for Manny Villar at this time could be counter-productive for him. The Senators are still poised to vote when Congress opens its session in July. Villar’s ascension to the Senate Presidency is not all too secure yet. No Senate President who comes to be perceived as a "collaborator" with the Palace can last in his seat.

Already, Senator Panfilo Lacson is raising the suspicions that Malacañang may have intruded in Senate internal affairs to secretly push Villar’s assumption to the senate presidency in July. Lacson is probably just griping because, according to him, Villar did not even approach him for support. Sen. Richard Gordon is saying that he is not bound by any "gentleman’s agreement" between Villar and Drilon, claiming that Villar is still treading an uncertain path.

Does Dick want "the offer of a committee chairmanship?" His critics ask. Do they want to be challenged to fisticuffs?

Anyway, if talkative and indiscreet Malacañang officials keep on lauding Manny Villar and citing legislative measures they expect the Senate under Villar to pass – they might yet succeed in making him an "ex-future Senate President" even before he gets the gavel to preside.

In short – shuddup guys! Silence is golden, as they. Speech is dangerous.

* * *

The sage and cynic Ambrose Bierce once wrote these compelling, cynical lines:

"History is an account,
mostly false,
of events,
mostly unimportant,
which are brought about by rulers,
mostly knaves,
and soldiers,
mostly fools."

I hasten to point out that the Bierce poem was written about Europe. Having salved both my conscience and my cowardice by this disclaimer, let me add that the history of all mankind seems to be, alas, full of false accounts. One often wonders when reading fulsome tales of events, whether current or long past, where fact ends and fiction begins. To the victors, too, belong the spoils, the old adage goes. To the victors, too, belong the privilege and advantage of rewriting history.

But there are certain immutable facts about history. The first is that history is seldom fair and, certainly, never complete. Another is that a man’s true worth is not always recognized or appreciated by his peers, or even by his own generation. The image that immediately comes to mind is that of Simon Bolivar, now gloriously and posthumously endowed by grateful millions with the official title of "Libertador" the "Liberator of South America."

All over Latin America you will find Bolivar statues depicting the great warrior, his chest weighed down with medals and ribbons, his eagle-like gaze fixed on eternity, or astride a horse, boldly waving his troops into combat. Everywhere there are provinces named Bolivar, or Bolivar plazas even warships christened "Simon Bolivar." The "Bolivar" is the unit of currency used in Venezuela. The country of Bolivia is evidently named after him.

But what actually happened to Simon Bolivar, the man who fought 200 battles to win freedom from Spain for Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia and Peru? In the end, abandoned by everyone, he was forced to flee to a barrio called San Pedro Alejandrino, three miles outside Santa Marta, the oldest and most backward town in Colombia. On December 17, 1830, he succumbed to heartbreak and tuberculosis. In the remorseless words of Paul Theroux, the unfortunate Bolivar "died penniless in a borrowed shirt."

Santa Marta now boasts a gigantic statue of Bolivar. A resort town, it has pretensions of being Bolivar’s "shrine." But the ill-fated hero had fled to Santa Marta only because he was threatened with assassination in Bogota. In Caracas, Venezuela, where he was born in 1783, he had actually been declared a traitor and an outlaw. In despair, Bolivar complained in a final letter to Flores, one of his few remaining friends: "America is ungovernable. Those who serve the revolution plough the sea. The only thing to do in America is to emigrate." He was, indeed, awaiting an opportunity to escape from South America when he died.

Twenty years after his death, Bolivar’s remains were exhumed and borne in reverence to Caracas, where they lie in the National Pantheon.

* * *

History is replete with such ironies. Christopher Columbus, who discovered the vast lands and immeasurable riches of the New World for Spain, was shipped home in chains after his Third Voyage in 1499 by Francisco Bobadilla who was appointed over his head as governor and judge of Hispaniola. Briefly restored to favor, "The Admiral" and his sons undertook a Fourth Voyage where the Spaniards established more colonies in South America as well as Jamaica. Columbus finally landed at Sanlucar, where his adventures had first begun, on Nov. 7, 1504. Less than two years later, "much oppressed with the gout", he died on May 20, 1506.

One of the few last documents we have of him in the royal archives is a pathetic letter addressed to the king and queen, begging for an adjustment of his meager pension since he was poor and burdened with debts. On the margin of the unanswered petition a notation had been made by an unknown bureaucrat of the court: "No need to reply."

The crowning irony of all is that the continental Cristobal Colon (was he originally Italian or Catalan?) had claimed for Imperial Spain was never named after him, it came to be known as "America" after Amerigo Vespucci, a cartographer – one of the many messengers Columbus had sent to the royal court from Sevilla carrying his letters to the two sovereigns.

Is this why so many kings and presidents hasten to stamp their faces on coins, or immortalize themselves on postage stamps? Are they afraid, perhaps, that history may forget them? This can be dangerous and self defeating. King Louis XVI of France and his extravagant queen, Marie Antoinette, attempted to flee Revolutionary France to safety in shabby "civilian" clothes on June 10, 1791. The peasants and townsfolks at Varennes penetrated his disguise and arrested him – they had recognized the king because his face was minted on every coin. Both Louis and his Austrian queen went to the guillotine in 1793.

Everytime I am asked to speak at a college or high school convocation, the inevitable question comes at me from the audience: "What specific courses should a student undertake to become a good journalist?" Studies in news reporting, magazine and feature writing aside, I always suggest that an aspiring writer major in history. Journalism classes may teach him the rudiments of the trade, but history gives him perspective. History is, after all, a chronicle of the struggles, the weaknesses, the foibles, and the triumphs of human nature. From history comes an understanding of politics, out of which grows economics. In the old days, they used to call "economics" simply "political economy."

It is a more accurate description of the forces that move men. Spanish philosophers have always maintained that the only politics that determines the rise and fall of nations is the "politica del estomago" – the politics of the stomach.

Revolutions may be fought by the masses and the peasantry, but men from the middle class have always inspired and led them. Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, the framers of the US Declaration of Independence, were burgis. Danton, Robespierre, Des moulins – certainly Mirabeau – who set off the Revolution in France, were no poor boys from the sewers and slums of Paris. Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotzky, Stalin, for all the official nonsense that is peddled about them in the Soviet Union, were not peasants or factory hands. Zhou En-lai’s grandfather was an imperial Mandarin, his mother an authority on the Western Classics.

As for Chairman Mao, I once visited his boyhood home in Wuhan. It had two or three bedrooms. His father was no impoverished farmer but a prosperous one.

As for Andres Bonifacio, our Great Plebeian, the boy from Tondo, he must have been as middle class as anyone who files income tax in Metro Manila. He was a "bodegero," a warehouseman, which in those days presumed a knowledge of rudimentary accounting. No peasant or ignorant shanty-dweller could have read as voraciously as he did those book on revolution and the freedom of man or the novels of Alexandre Dumas like The Three Musketeers.

There continue to be serious misconceptions in our country, even among a number of professional historians, about our national heroes. For example, a great many people (when they think about it at all – which is seldom) still believe that Andres Bonifacio was a realist and Jose Rizal was a dreamer. On the contrary, it was the other way around. Rizal was a realist who insisted that Filipinos were not ready for a Revolution and the consequences of it; that we were far too divided in terms of love of country and our own countrymen to win and still too ignorant to make independence work.

Remember, it was JR who refused a direct invitation to lead the Revolution and who declared: "Why freedom when the slaves of today will only be the tyrants of tomorrow?" Again one of history’s ironies is that the execution of this reluctant rebel by the Spaniards is what triggered off the Revolution itself.

Bonifacio in contrast was a dreamer who fervently believed that the Filipino people would rise up, united, and shoulder to shoulder throw the oppressive Spaniards into the sea. It was he who burned his bridges by tearing up his cedula and raising the battle cry of Pugad Lawin. He was so confident of the nobility of the Filipino that, in his naiveté, he even left the security of his native Manila and went over to Cavite, the stronghold of his rival and enemy Emilio Aguinaldo, rashly expecting the Caviteños to support him against their province-mate Aguinaldo. What he got for his pains was violent capture and imprisonment, a swift "kangaroo court" trial by an Aguinaldo-sponsored Military Tribunal, and a death sentence for allegedly being an "agent" of the Spaniards and a traitor to the cause of Philippine freedom. Who but a dreamer would have blundered into such a situation?

As for Aguinaldo (as Bonifacio and the hapless Gen. Antonio Luna discovered – much too late – to their sorrow), he was a politician. And a politician always wins.

* * *

There is, of course, the sacrifice of the Boy General Gregorio del Pilar who fell, along with more than eighty of his soldiers, barely four months earlier at Tirad Pass. This force perished to a man to protect the rearguard of Aguinaldo’s retreat and delay the advance of the Americans.

The battle took place on December 2, and when he died, shot down by a sniper, Del Pilar was only 22 years old. On the dead officer’s body, when they stripped him of everything he wore, the American Major, a fellow named March, found his diary. In it he had written: "The General has given me the pick of at the men that can be spared, and ordered me to defend the pass. I realize what a terrible task is given me. And yet I feel that this is the most glorious moment of my life. What I do is done for my beloved country. No sacrifice can be too great."

Del Pilar, was a dreamer.

Richard Henry Little, a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, was there – and he paid Del Pilar the adoring tribute of a foe in his account of the encounter. Etched in the hearts of all Filipinos should be this foreign journalist’s closing lines about our young hero as he described the Yankee columns marching past Del Pilar’s corpse on their triumphant way up the mountain.

"We carved not a line and we raised not a stone,

But we left him alone in his glory."

What would history be, what would a nation’s story be, where it not for the dreamers? The Computer Age has reduced a man to the size of a micro-chip. Facts and figures, man’s collective memory, can today be entrusted to a single memory chip. But those whirring banks of computers which are capable of reducing everything to logic and equation were never designed to cope with dreamers. The dreamers, those madcap, rash, uncalculating, "foolish" men and women defy both logic and the lowest common denominator. And yet they are the shining lights, illuminating the darkness that surrounds them, in the memory of each race.

It has been said, much too often, that one of our most helpful traits as Filipinos is our sense of humor: the ability to laugh at our predicament: the ability to laugh at ourselves. As our problems escalate, our jokes and our laughter proliferate. Our cafe wits and dimwits, coffeeshop commandos, and our sidewalk philosophers are invariably ready with a quip – half jesting and half bitter – about the state of the nation and the state of the pocketbook.

The truth is that our besetting sin in this country is that we laugh too much, we endure too much, and we forgive too much. It is pleasant and, in its own way, admirable that in our freewheeling society, men and women of diametrically opposed persuasion can meet and exchange jibes and jokes and enjoy themselves together.

But at some point the laughing must stop and serious issues tackled. Injustice cannot be laughed away. Despair cannot be swept under the rug or neatly set aside in some forgotten corner. Battles postponed are battles lost. Nothing is ever decided, reforms are never attained, on this constant evasion of what is unpleasant – or risky.

We Filipinos do not lack courage. In three centuries of Spanish rule there were more than 200 revolts (most of them, to return to my theme, against official or forced labor, such as the "Basi Rebellion.") We fought and won the first Nationalist Revolution in Asia, only to have our victory snatched away from us by our short-term "allies," the Americans.

We gave the Japanese a bloody nose in Bataan and Corregidor. But our courage is a kind of back-to-the-wall syndrome, an amok sort of bravery, a resignation to the need to start punching. In sum, we would rather have fun than fight, disarm our enemies with a fiesta rather than a battle, patiently endure rather than challenge. Somewhere in our inner soul we hope to outlive our foes or oppressors.

Even in our speech we adroitly attempt to pass the responsibility to do: Bahala na (from the word for the deity, "Bathala") In the Ilocos, we even dump in the Lord’s lap our debts of money or gratitude with the expression: "God will reward you"!

When God passes the buck right back to us, or calls in the chits on the "advances" we have asked Him to make for us, what shall we do?

In some way, we are also like the peninsulares from Spain who, in the course of centuries, imparted many of their habits – good or bad – to us. If you have ever been caught up in the fever of a corrida or bullfight you will know what I mean. The aficionados and bloodthirsty fans sit safely in the stands, in the boxes and in the bleachers sol or sombra, and cheer either the torero or the bull to frenzy, depending on which combatant they have placed their money. When the matador falters in his capework, or falls to sight his sword cleanly, the stands erupt into loud condemnation. The bravos in the bleachers shout down raucous insults at the lonely figure in the ring, impugning his manhood, casting aspersion on his mother’s you-know, accusing him of being without . . . er, cojones. (The Spanish language is a picturesque one, indeed.) But nobody will jump into the ring (except an occasional nut) and help him kill the bull. Are we so different? We want to win our battles without shedding our own blood, enjoy our triumphs without pain or effort, celebrate the joy of Easter without passing through the agony of Good Friday.

In the real world, outside the walls of the corrida or the wire fences of the basketball stadium, no such easy victories exist. Someday we shall have to stop laughing – not to begin crying, but to begin to act.