Prostituted

It’s tough trying to explain to a foreign audience that circus pulled by Antonio Trillianes and his funny cabal of crackpots.

I was out of town when the Peninsula Hotel incident happened. In this age of real-time news, the whole world was immediately in on the unfolding comedy in Makati. Foreigners were grabbing every Filipino by the arm to ask what was happening.

The international news organizations were careful not to call the incident a coup attempt. From the first minute, apart from the media groupies who closed in around the crackpots, hampering police operations against the troublemakers, it was clear that the hilarious declaration of a “revolutionary government” enjoyed no public support whatsoever.

The news organizations chose the more sensible phrase “hotel standoff” to describe the incident. That might, from the standpoint of trying to illustrate a bizarre incident to an international audience, be sufficient. It is a bit too complicated to try and describe this event as the outcome of the perilous combination of extreme megalomania, serious alcoholism and debilitating senility — although that sums up the outstanding traits of the clowns populating this circus.

Every Filipino expatriate I met last Thursday was Janus-faced about the incident. Among ourselves, they were indignant that these clowns were doing what they did. In mixed company, with curious foreigners, they were apologetic: we are a funny people, they said, and the funniest among us are all in that hotel.

Every text message I received from Manila through that dog-day afternoon was, at the same instance, dismissive and sarcastic.

One colleague from the UP said the whole thing was merely a cover for former university president Francisco Nemenzo to raid the sumptuous Peninsula bar for expensive scotch. Another offered the theory that former vice-president Tito Guingona was manic-depressive — and this was his manic day. Yet another surmised that since “running priest” Robert Reyes was back in town from his place of exile teaching the English language to Chinese people, he wanted all of us to know about it.

I sent out very concerned questions through my phone and all I got was a thick stream of jokes.

That is all very funny, but none funnier than the event itself.

As Trillianes declared a “revolutionary government” before the world’s media, so full of himself as he usually is, a fidgety man with an atrocious wig stood behind him. When he found the teargas unbearable, Trillianes declared he was surrendering for the sake of keeping those in the hotel safe. How kind, indeed. He should have thought about that when they walked to the hotel earlier in the day.

The maniacs who joined him did not go the hotel because they were incontinent, although that too might be a consideration. It is clear they were there because of some deranged plan these desperados thought would work.

The plan itself is a crude rehash of an earlier one that failed at the Oakwood: take a strong point, put in enough armed men with red armbands, and the masses will turn up in their millions to mount an insurrection.

The original Oakwood plan was itself a prostituted version of the two previous Edsa uprisings, conceived by megalomaniacs who convinced themselves the people will surely rally around them. It is a plan driven by delusion rather than serious political analysis.

The only people who could possibly buy into such a stupid plan all turned up on that ugly day: marginalized Marxist factions in frantic search for a role to play, old politicians who need to pull stunts to win any media attention, clergymen who want to step into the large shoes of the late Cardinal Sin and disgraced soldiers whose careers are dead in the water under the present arrangement.

In their condition of extreme despair, and absolute obsolescence, it should hardly be surprising that they venture way beyond the realm of the sane.

But that should be no excuse to prostitute the sacred idea of people power. That should be no excuse to renege on the need to do painstaking public education, careful political organization and exposition on the justness of a cause — in a word, all the things that real revolutionaries need to do to prepare a insurrectionary conspiracy worth its salt.

And worth the inconvenience disturbances like the one that happened last Thursday inflicts on all of us.

On May 1, 2001, drug-reinforced mobs went on a riot to restore a deposed and disgraced presidency. They thought they were exercising people power. In fact, they found the gall to call their street orgy “Edsa Tres.”

More than anything else, all they succeeded in doing was to corrupt the ideal of people power, abuse the notion to serve the ends of a corrupt political faction and induce profound popular distrust for engagement based on mass movement.

Trillianes and his cabal of clowns did even worse. They imagined people power would be servile to an anti-democratic agenda. In their irrational despair, they have conveniently overlooked the fact that the essence of people power is democratic popular engagement.

Too bad, Trillianes and his gang were too cowardly to stand their ground and inscribe their message on our political history with their blood. They were too vain and too stupid to have any real conviction that might animate the masses.

If they had any real courage, any real conviction, they might have stood their ground and died with a bullet in the head. Or, in the case of Trillianes, in the mouth — which seems to be the only functioning part of his body.