Elegance of language stands as a prime desideratum in any literary undertaking. Clarity of thought and expression, an engaging course of shared narrative, the prized proffer of insight, and an interesting, nay, enchanting, story to tell are handmaidens of achievement. The author of A Nation on Fire: The Unmaking of Joseph Ejercito Estrada and the Remaking of Democracy in the Philippines (Icon Press Inc., 2002) is well qualified, indeed eminently predisposed, to validate and tame such rigors of writing.
Francisco S. Tatad, familiar to most as "Kit" – until the last national elections a Senator of the Republic, a distinguished writer and long-time public servant, however occasionally controversial – can soothe any detractor’s savage breast with the prim if often mellifluous exactitude of his prose.
The non-fiction account detailed in this sprawl of a tome, all of 658 pages, may be said to be not as enchanting as it is engrossing, primarily since it puts together judiciously selected passages from voluminous files, most of these pertaining to the Estrada impeachment trial. And then there’s the running thread of a live, active voice buttressing, verifying, or questioning the procession of anecdotes and events.
In a prologue of sorts, author Tatad serves up a humble backgrounder on his effort: "In the spring of 2001, I sought refuge in a daughter’s apartment in New York while awaiting the birth of my first grandchild. There I read and reread the records of the Estrada trial where I had sat as a senator-judge. The readings took longer than the writing, but so big was the end-product it had to be cut to size.
"Juan T. Gatbonton, an editor’s editor and old friend, gladly agreed to help. Arnold Moss, his lifelong friend and collaborator, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s. Noli C. Galang, the third part of the team, designed the book. Louie Reyes looked after the printing, and Girlie Pineda Canlas of Yen Makabenta’s PRISM compiled the index.
"To my wife and children, though, I owe my heaviest debt. They never had much of me in my long years in the Cabinet and the Senate; they even had less of me while I took on the demons of this authorship. For my forced seclusion and silence, they paid the highest price.
"Many have written and many more will write about the subject of this book. I let the story tell itself, with a minimum of comment. I make no attempt to edit actual courtroom quotes, except where I might have walked in my sleep. But in translating statements in Filipino, I claim a prerogative – I first get a fix on the original and make sure the meaning flows and the syntax is right.
"I have tried – I hope with some success – to avoid all personal bias, especially in treating incidents which so many missed or misunderstood at the height of the media coverage. But not being neutral on the Constitution and due process, I try to state my position on this issue with clarity and strength. Some may find my views too strong for their taste. This is always a risk. Throughout my public life I have consistently fought for unpopular causes, whose greatest champions are yet unborn or long dead."
Some readers may raise all three eyebrows – including that over the third eye – over Tatad’s qualification as a neutral, contemporary historian. Everyone knows he became a staunch political supporter, and not-so-confidential adviser, of Estrada. In fact, partisans on both sides of People Power II of January 2001 would credit then-Senator Francisco Tatad with inadvertently precipitating his champion’s downfall by forcing a vote on whether or not to open an envelope.
But Tatad comes clean early in the book, right in his Introduction, with regard the evolution of his relations with the yet "unmade" subject of his account.
"Long before the campaign (of 1998), I had engaged Estrada in a brief polemic on the moral requirements for high office. I said rather bluntly that in a monogamous society a politician with so many ‘other women’ had no business seeking the highest office. He cut short the debate by challenging me to a test of brawn. I politely declined."
Tatad then offers the following rationale for his eventual conversion soon after Estrada’s victory in the 1998 presidential election.
"Concerned that the new presidency might founder, I decided to offer Estrada critical collaboration. Having pronounced him unfit, I did not find it easy to do so. But it was a choice between shouting ‘the Emperor is naked!’ at every turn and helping him, for the country’s sake, to make fewer mistakes. This also meant giving up media mileage. But after nearly a lifetime in public office, I knew how empty is the applause from the gallery. Instead of producing yet another book of speeches, I thought it more useful to send private memos to the President."
Unfortunately for Estrada, and perhaps fortunately for the country as anti-Estrada forces would doubtless have it, some of these memos may have fallen on daft else disabled eyes.
"Immediately after Senate Minority Leader Teofisto Guingona accused him of impeachable offenses on the floor of the Senate, and after the congressmen had begun working on their impeachment complaint, I asked Estrada, in a personal memo, to form some kind of crisis committee to help him respond to developments. In another memo I suggested some details of how the crisis committee might work.
"He finally created the committee on 19 January 2001 – just one day before he fell. I also asked him to consider power-sharing as a way out of the crisis. I could sense it deepening amid the lack of an adequate response from the Presidency. Again, there was no feedback."
Tatad reserves his strongest criticism for the extent and manner, as he reputes, in which due process was waylaid in the impeachment trial. As we had heard or read him in previous public pronouncements, his disappointment over the roles Congress, the Church, the High Court, the so-called civil society and the media played in the case against Estrada partakes not of a scathing nature, rather conveys an intellectualized defense of the constitutional system of government upon which rest the workings of a viable if spirited democracy.
Of course the entirety of his account also lays bare a chronicler who happens to have been a role-player in the documented drama. Appreciation of literary capital may, on the other hand, invest substantial equity in the name of participant or partisan.
Other questions come into play: Must wisdom wait for an ageing of accounts, for the varied, interweaving filaments of contemporary socio-political verity, thus history, to settle and ferment? Or it it reasonable to attempt a quick reprise of anecdotal chronology even if it still contains sore points resting on bias or prejudice? Should an author always be an honest broker of a chronicler?
To be sure, this particular author cannot be accused of intellectual dishonesty. He believes in what he stands for, and he writes lucidly and felicitously of his process of character and institution evaluation, even of his evolving, thus charmingly and effectively political, appraisal of players and events that have come or are still coming to pass.
The book’s structure alone manifests a vigorous exercise in confronting the "demons of authorship" even as the chronicler rises to the challenge of glut.
It is divided thus: Book I: Impeaching the President; Book II: Trying the President (which forms the bulk of the documentation cum commentary, serving up all of 361 pages or more than half of the book); Book III: The Ousting of Estrada and the Death of Due Process; and Book IV: Remaking the Nation, with its single chapter titled "What Is to Be Done?" and where Tatad offers his thesis that "The ousting of Estrada left a scar on the constitutional institutions of the Philippines."
"We need to become a serious people," Tatad offers as a constant refrain in this finale of an appraisal.
Here I appreciate most a section where the author zeroes in on unarguably the most fundamental sea-change we have to undertake and undergo. It carries the following bullet lead: "Education is the key. But we must first have a clear idea of who we are and what we want to become to have a responsive theory of education."
Tatad asserts: "Education must rekindle our people‚’s faith in themselves and expand their horizons. For years Filipinos used to describe themselves as the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. In Asia their proficiency in English as the language of international diplomacy, the media, and commerce went unchallenged. Mindless language policies, however, have since made that advantage a thing of the past. And, ironically, proficiency in Filipino has not compensated for by (sic) the decline of English– though it is to propagate the national language that the school system discourages extensive English usage. Filipino itself has not grown. On the contrary, it has been bastardized. The result is Taglish – an awkward and artless combination of street Filipino (which is Tagalog-based) and street English, unworthy to sit in the company of other national languages."
I wouldn’t mind it if Francisco S. Tatad were ever made to rejoin the ornery table of government, if only to sit as Minister or Secretary of Language.