A toast of poison

Serve an American anything, and he will nod his head in appreciation, mumbling sweet incoherent phrases while savoring the taste in his mouth. As to whether he truly likes the taste, your guess is as good as mine.

This is the picture that comes to my mind when I think of former US ambassador to the Philippines William Sullivan in connection with the supposed derogatory secret cables he sent to Washington, recently made public through Wikileaks.

In one of those secret messages, Sullivan supposedly reported how then Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos forced some of his generals to dress in drag at a birthday performance in his honor at the Palace.

I do not doubt Sullivan’s report. If he said the generals dressed like women, I do not think he was describing chickens. It is debatable, however, whether Marcos forced the generals, as Sullivan implied, or they were all in it for the fun, as Marcos’s son Bongbong now explains.

But that is not the point I am trying to make. I have reason to believe that when Sullivan dashed off the secret cables to his bosses in Washington, it was with great darkness in his heart. Sullivan must have found the Malacañang episode utterly repugnant.

And I could not blame him. No amount of diplomatic experience can force a man to completely swallow the different cultures he gets to be immersed in even after a lifetime in the foreign service.

Thus, what may seem like fun to Filipinos may not be funny to Sullivan. And granting it was not funny at all, then Sullivan could have found himself some polite pretense to leave, and perhaps to never again attend any more Palace parties and risk any more unpleasant surprises.

But I can picture Sullivan sitting there, gorging himself on fine Palace food, sipping up on fine Palace wine, nodding his head in appreciation and mumbling sweet incoherencies, both for the feast on his table and the feast for his eyes.

If he found the little game of the generals on stage distasteful, I am sure he never breathed a word about it at the party. On the contrary, I would suspect he was among the loudest clappers at the antic, perhaps letting off a cowboy “yeee-haa” just to please the hosts.

It must have been back at his residence that Sullivan would pour out all his disdain. And that is my point — what was the point of him staying up to pretend enjoying the party when all that his effort at diplomatic pretending would lead to was to backstab the hosts.

No amount of diplomatic finesse can gloss over such grossness of character. This is not in defense of Marcos and what happened, if it was as Sullivan described it to have happened. It is, on the other hand, to assail hypocrisy at the highest levels.

How can Sullivan criticize something against which he never did anything, even for his own personal benefit? I can understand the dictates of his diplomatic obligations at the time. But even official duties cannot get in the way of personal principles.

Confronted with something he found personally abhorrent, I do not think it detrimental to US-American relations for Sullivan to have coughed up an alibi to up and scoot. If Sullivan can sit tight and pretend to like a show he abhors, a bum stomach would have been far easier to fake.

What the Wikileaks report did was expose far more than the Marcos excesses. After all, what is there to shock us further about a regime that has scarred us for life? But Sullivan was a revelation. And as such, the red flag is up on all who followed him to our shores.

Beware then of cordial and diplomatic niceties, for you will not know what can hit you behind your back. Beware the friendship of those who are forced into amity by official dictate. The toast in your honor could tomorrow be a secret derogatory cable for Wikileaks to uncover.