A dead giveaway

In one of Lee Kuan Yew’s books he writes about talking with Marcos. As the conversation went on he had an uneasy feeling that the Philippine leader was unable to distinguish what he thought he would do and what he had done.

It’s a trait most Filipino politicians suffer from. They think that saying it is the same as doing it. It is an unexamined notion that affects our politics and governance. The focus is misplaced. Something happens to the human mind, or more accurately the human being when its energies are used solely to please the public with words. There is no more room left for the will or energy to actually do what is desired.

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Take the case of banal statements about stopping corruption or helping the poor, two themes that dominated the last campaign. For example, the very catchy phrase, “kung walang corrupt, walang mahirap” sounds good. We are then informed that the Philippines is one of the most corrupt countries, the third, behind India that comes first and Indonesia, second.

Some people will differ about saying that India is poor. There are still many who are poor in India. But it would not be accurate or helpful to say that because it is corrupt, it is poor. On the contrary, India is now competing with China as a powerhouse in Asia. More appropriate is to improve its economic programs so it helps the poor.

Like the Philippines, Indonesia has had its share of political mishaps and can’t seem to get its act together whether governed by military or civilian. It was not exempted from outside intervention from Western powers that have decided it know better what is good for it.

What the West thinks is good for it does not always work in a country with its own culture and a history. Political reforms and economic directions are more likely to succeed when it is done by the natives themselves whether Indonesians or Filipinos. The solutions are rooted in its culture and history. 

In all this, colonialist history in both countries has contributed largely to its problems. This is not to blame the colonizers alone but also the natives. It is the relationship that has spawned a unique culture and politics from their colonial history.

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Here I would cite the brilliant analysis of Palestinian writer Edward Said in his book, Culture and Imperialism.

“However it is read, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo offers a profoundly unforgiving view, and its had quite literally enabled the equally severe view of Western imperialist illusions in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American or V.S. Naipul’s A Bend in the River, novels with very different agendas.

Few readers today, after Vietnam, Iran, the Philippines, Algeria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq would disagree that it is precisely the fervent innocence of Greene’s Pyle or Naipul’s Father Huismans, men for whom the native can be educated into “our” civilization, that turns out to produce the murder, subversion, and endless instability of “primitive” societies.

A similar anger pervades films like Oliver Stone’s Salvador, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and Constantin Costa-Gravas Missing in which unscrupulous CIA operatives and power mad officers manipulate natives and well-intentioned Americans alike.”

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Said’s analysis can be applied to recent political events in the Philippines, primarily the May 10 elections. The last election’s contest was not about Noynoy vs. Gloria but it was made to look that way. There were other candidates superior to Noynoy Aquino but they were non-existent as far as some Americans’ and their Filipino allies’ propaganda were concerned. (I would not consider Erap even if he placed second in Smartmatic’s voting system). But there is a case for wondering why Manny Villar, Gilberto Teodoro and Richard Gordon did not get a better hearing and standing than they got in the last election if the intent was to lift up the political understanding of Filipino masses.

The trouble was a formula and Noynoy was the candidate for it. The formula was to use the ingredients of February 1986 when Noynoy’s mother became president of the Philippines after the tragic assassination of her husband, Ninoy: large emotional crowds that would propel the story of good and evil using related and living personae to repeat 1986. That is why although Mar Roxas was the better candidate for the Liberal Party he did not fit into the formula.

It was Noynoy, the son who fitted the role for a revival of St. Cory’s crusade against evil Marcos. Interestingly, even if President GMA was not in the contest she was the unstated enemy of good. She was according to the propaganda the Marcos of our time. How did it come to that?

That is what the May 10 election was made out to be — the return of an Aquino-Marcos bout with Noynoy and President GMA cast as another Marcos, no matter how untrue. It was about creating an atmosphere that would revive the feelings and perceptions of 1986. For a large segment of the Filipino electorate it did not matter that it was not Aquino vs. Marcos. It was a feeling they had in 1986 and they can be made to feel the same way again. It is not by chance that Imelda Marcos was interviewed in CNN as if she were also running for president.

The formula worked with some help from the Smartmatic voting system. So why are some American media making it look that way?

Just to complete the drama personae, we had Sen. Richard Lugar who was a major American player in Manila in 1986 joining in the chorus. Is he aware of what has happened to the country since the first EDSA revolution?

The dispatch said “the US Senate’s most senior Republican and longest-serving senator in Indiana history hailed the election of Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III as the Philippines’ 15th president.”

“We’re so proud and happy that Sen. Aquino won. That man is going to do a good job for your country. And we’re all going to be working alongside with and behind him. The Philippines has always been very special to me,” he told Jan Chavez-Arceo during the Jefferson Awards ceremony at the National Building Museum in Washington. As far as he was concerned so long as an Aquino won it was all right to him. But what about Filipinos who considered the election as an opportunity to make an intelligent choice to lead the country? They never had a chance. That Lugar story is a dead giveaway.