Category: politics

the games begin

was going to blog on alex magno’s game-changer series, express amazement at how cory’s death and noynoy’s audacity seems to have changed his politics, and wonder what his bosses gma and fg have to say.   then i read manuel buencamino’s bading post on gary olivar, and someone asked about gary o’s fellow ex-radical alex magno, bumaliktad na nga ba?   and manuel said no, and he seemed very certain.   so napaisip naman ako.   magno has been saying all the right things since cory died and noynoy declared.   Game-changer 5 is a piece i wish i had written.

… Despite all the tinges of retro here, what has commenced is a highly experimental political initiative. The goals are larger than Noynoyfor President. Larger than the presidency itself.

This is no longer about “opposition” versus “administration” — although that continues to be a bogey in the minds of some. It is about new versus old — although that might be difficult for some to even begin imagining.

This political initiative draws its power from voluntarism at the grassroots. That voluntarism can only spring from clear principles about what leadership ought to be and at what standards we ought to hold the wielders of power.

It is about reestablishing governance on a new ethical basis, reinventing government so that it becomes an enabler rather than a hindrance to getting things done. It is about rediscovering a new cadre of leaders who will catalyze the energies of the nation rather than stunt them. It is about neutralizing the old cabal of powerbrokers by calling up people’s power in its most sophisticated, less populist form.

There will, no doubt, be a large dose of emotionalism in this effort. That is indispensable. People will have to be shaken enough to abandon politics as usual and be freed from the traditional habits of Filipino politics. All the disgust and all the anger that have accumulated need to be re-channeled no longer at settling old scores but at building a new scoreboard for governance.

In a matter of weeks, the doors of our electoral politics have been thrown wide open. The new forces must now march in. This is what this experiment is all about.

Until a few weeks ago, the politicians of the old mold and the powerbrokers of the old trenches controlled the dynamic of democratic selection. They hired the best minds from the industry that successfully sells shampoo and toothpaste and deodorants to our consumers in order to sell contrived constructs of political personalities to a dumbed down electorate.

For this experiment to succeed, we will have to raise the quality of the electorate, force them to think about abstract options more than just people in the flesh — or worse, money in the bag. This, win or lose, will be a major step forward in itself.

This is more than just enabling one candidate to win the count over the others — although that, too, is important. This is not a battle fought to be lost. But in order to win, it must succeed in its larger goal of bringing in new forces and new ideas into the electoral field.

The Edsa Revolution was exactly like this. It asked the people to contemplate what seemed impossible because it had become almost an alien concept: be free, be decisive in our numbers, build a government accountable to the people….

indeed.   hope springs eternal.   the game has changed.   suddenly ping lacson has found the courage to denounce erap in no uncertain terms.   tanong ni erap, bakit ngayon lang?   eh kasi, i suppose, ngayon lang naging timely for ping, to defend himself in the dacer case, and to further the cause of unity behind noynoy, why not.   the game has changed.

tanong ko lang kay ping, bakit to-be-continued, bakit hindi pa niya tinapos kanina?   anong strategy ‘yan, in aid of under-the-table behind-closed-doors wheeling-and-dealing, to what end?   or maybe it’s just to prolong his stint on center stage.   whatever.   if as a result erap decides not to run, good for him, good for ping, good for us.

also looking forward, of course, to jinggoy estrada’s privilege speech in defense of his father.   magkukuwento din daw siya tungkol kay ping.   sige sige, let’s hear it all.   matira ang walang bahid.   matira ang malinis.

as for senate president juan ponce enrile’s report that there is no yellow fever in the countryside, not in the north, not in the south.   hmmm.   well.   maybe he’ll be the last to know, just like in EDSA ’86.

mar roxas, way to go!

why was i surprised when mar called a press conference to make his important announcement?   certainly not because i wasn’t expecting him to give way if noynoy decided to run.   i guess what i wasn’t expecting was that mar would make the first move, now na!   and that noynoy would quickly follow, bukas na!   aba, biglang nagmamadali, bakit kaya.

not that it’s a bad idea, kung tatakbo din lang.   i won’t bore you with the heavenly signs (as above, so below), but any astrologer would tell you that it is infinitely better to start anything new this week rather than in the next three weeks.   so mar’s timing, wittingly or un-, is perfect, actually, and the decisiveness, as president of the liberalparty, is quite impressive.   kapanipaniwala na inuuna niya ang partido, sige na nga, ang bayan, kaysa sarili.   not bad atall.   he’s suddenly smelling real good.

i still think noynoy would do better if he finished his senate term first and then prepared to run in 2016 but yeah who knows, rising to the challenge now while the clamor is high could be right too, politically and historically.   at least it makes the campaign for 2010 interesting, even exciting.   no doubt we will be reminded of cory’s people-powered campaign in 1986 — no money, no media.    no doubt noynoy’s people will do even better, given access to media and the example of obama’s 2008 campaign.

but first let’s hope that other opposition presidentiables take the cue from mar and drop out too in favor of noynoy.   actually the only one i can’t see giving up, giving way, is manny villar of the nacionalista party.   so maybe at best it’s going to be a three-way race.   noynoy vs. villar vs. gma’s candidate.   puwede na rin.

unless of course villar and gma start running scared and decide to join forces.   that would be fun, and awesome.

gloria should go

… to the wake, i mean.   and she knows it.   not so much for the nation — we can take or leave protocol, i find — but for the international community.     the whole world is watching.   she has to handle this right, or lose face.

the news is that she’s arriving at 5 a.m. which gives her a few hours to get to the cathedral before the 9 a.m. show.   the question is, what time should she go.   soon after she gets back, habang kokonti ang tao, habang wala pa ang mga aquino?   or should she wait until the aquinos are there so she can personally extend her sympathies as well?   or her flight could be delayed, haha.   we’ll know soon enough.

nakarma naman talaga si gloria.   what rotten luck that the obama summons came when it did.  if she had been here when cory died, she could have simply appeared at the la salle wake the moment cory was ready and gotten it over with, before it became an issue.

shecould also have accepted graciously the aquino family’s preference for a private funeral, sabay pakiusap for even just half a day’s lying-in-state in congress and / or malacanang.   tama rin naman yung mga nagsasabing cory deserves a state funeral.   i would not have minded seeing legislators as well as the executive paying homage to cory and promising to keep the cory spirit alive.

as for cory’s post-garci demand that gloria resign, which the aquinos may well refuse to ease up on, well, in the spirit of the times gloria could offer them an ex-deal.   instead of resigning she’d stop all con-ass attempts during the remainder of her term, and she’d admit her mistakes re the national artist awards and the jbc list.   wouldn’t that be fantastic?

i know, i know, i’m dreaming, haha.   si cory kasi.

mean and nasty

i wondered who was responsible for the friday rumor that had cory passing away and people bursting into tears.   mabuti at napasinungalingan agad, though not quick enough to spare us a taste of the great grief coming, sooner or later.

i wondered who could be so mean and nasty.   who could be so unkind as to play with our emotions like that.   malacanang, maybe?

STATE OF WAR
Conrado de Quiros

The rumor I’ve heard is that Malacañang started the rumor. That rumor was that Cory died last Friday, a rumor that spread faster than Hayden Kho’s videos that day.

Even the British Embassy was duped into believing it and issuing a statement condoling with the family and the Filipino nation. Which sparked some idiotic reactions, not least from Dante Jimenez, the fellow who once proclaimed himself anti-crime only to end up being party to it, who demanded that whoever was responsible for the statement be made persona non grata.

For what? For being victimized in the same way as Cory’s former chief legal adviser, Adolph Azcuna? For spontaneously combusting into lamentation and commiserating with the host nation for its immeasurable loss? That is to unduly hasten people to their graves? If so, then we should condole every day with Arroyo’s family. Maybe that will do the trick. Some people ought to recover from their sicknesses, others ought to be shot.

But to go back: The rumor I heard is that Malacañang sparked the rumor to see how the public would react to Cory’s demise. Is it believable? I don’t know, though stranger things have happened in this country. But whether true or not, I believe how the public will react to Cory’s demise is not farthest from their minds. I believe it is the one thing that terrifies them. I believe it is the one thing that drives them out of their freaking minds.

The one thing Arroyo has never allowed since she took power, and especially since she wrested it by telling Garci she wanted to win by a million votes over her nearest rival, is people massing in the streets in numbers that could turn into another Edsa. Cops and soldiers have variously: prevented groups from gathering at the Edsa Shrine, headed off leftists groups to prevent them from swelling the ranks of those gathered at the Ninoy statue (easy enough in light of those groups advertising themselves with sanguine flags and even more sanguine slogans while marching down Edsa), scuttled rallies, imposed curfews on them (7 p.m. or thereabouts), floated rumors about bombings and other acts of violence in the rallies, and intimidated by coming out in the streets in full combat gear.

The ploy has been successful enough thus far. No rally has ever reached the proportion of Edsa I and II. Not the rallies in 2005 in the wake of “Hello, Garci” (which Malacañang met with “calibrated preemptive response”), not Danny Lim’s “withdrawal of support” (which gave Malacañang the excuse to experiment with a state-of-emergency declaration), not the huge rally to protest NBN, which never snowballed, thanks to the ploys above.

But what happens if, heaven forbid, something should happen to Cory?

If the vigil is held at the Manila Cathedral, the headaches for Malacañang will be epic. In the first place that is Alfredo Lim territory. Lim, of course, is the tough-as-nails mayor of Manila, the former tough-as-nails NBI director, and the former tough-as-nails chief of the Western Police District, who was known to shed a tear at the (false) news of Cory’s passing. He is also a tough-as-nails follower of Cory, whose loyalty has never wavered, who indeed went out to fight off Enrile’s and Honasan’s legions when they tried to grab power from her in 1989. Lim got a commendation for it.

A vigil in the Manila Cathedral will be impregnable. A vigil in the Manila Cathedral will be unassailable.

Quite apart from that, there is Filipino Culture standing like the Frown of God in the way. Few things are sacred to us, Filipinos, but one of them is the gathering of kin and friends to extol the virtues of a loved one who has gone ahead of us. Cory may have only a tribe of kin, but she has the whole nation for friends-and I do not mean Facebook. If the country turns out to commiserate with the kin of someone who has done so much for it, what can you do? If all of us decide to keep physical vigil with someone who kept spiritual vigil with us in the hour of our death, what can Malacañang do?

You cannot prevent people from attending a vigil, certainly not one for what the country considers even now a living hero. Not even people who do not believe in God, or who do not know whether there is one or not. They too can always believe in the power of good and the reprehensibility of evil, and recognize the embodiments of one and the other.

You cannot trot out cops and police in battle gear to meet people who are making their way to the Manila Cathedral carrying candles to light their way in lieu of cursing the darkness. You cannot scuttle a vigil, you cannot dictate limits to how many people may wish to personally express their overpowering sense of bereavement, you cannot prevent people from lifting their voices to heaven asking God have mercy on someone who has brought heaven’s light to the world, have mercy on a nation that has not always bathed in it.

You cannot impose a curfew on a vigil.

That is not to speak of what would happen if–pray heaven it is yet a long way off–Cory is finally reunited with her husband in the resting place of heroes. I have little doubt the crowds that will see her off, tears welling in their eyes, their hearts bursting with the magma of grief, will be bigger and more volcanic than the one that did so Ninoy. I have little doubt the men in barong and the women in dresses will be joined by the men in bare feet and the women with infants sucking on bare breasts, businessman and farmer, executive and laborer, priest and soldier, equestrian and plebeian, rich and poor, nun and whore, saint and sinner, chorusing, like Job, in anger and despair, “Please lang God, tama na, sobra na tigilan na.”

I don’t know that Malacañang began the rumor. I do know Malacañang will be the end of it.