The logic of love, of suicide

This being the month when love is celebrated, how will an octogenarian creaking bravely on rise to the occasion? Imagine making love to a great-grandmother!

I have been attending several weddings recently and I remember best that wedding the other week in the sala of Judge Perpetua Atal-Paño of Makati. I had to be there for my daughter who was one of the witnesses and the bride was a grandniece. Being a civil nuptial, I thought it would not have the solemnity of a church ceremony. The best part of it was the advice of the judge to the newlyweds, something I never heard in church weddings! Commitment, money is not all that important in a marriage, what the husband and the wife must avoid, the need for compromise, the need to keep quiet (hold water in your mouth so you won’t be able to speak), intoned the judge.

Contrast this with another wedding of a grandnephew officiated by a silly priest. In his homily, he posed this scenario to the couple: “You are in a leaking lifeboat with your new bride and your mother, or your husband and father. You have only two life jackets. Will you give one to your wife or to your mother?” To the woman: “Your father or your husband?” The couple took so long to answer the question, which was actually easy to do if both had realized the logic of love. They would give the life jacket to the mother or the father.

Simply put, the logic of love is sacrifice. Sacrifice is selfless, the total absence of ego.

In the Japanese tradition it was expressed by those kamikaze pilots who dived to their deaths for the Emperor, and for Japan. At the end of World War II, when Japan surrendered, several Japanese officers took their own lives — the nobility of failure. To this day some Japanese officials, when shamed, end their lives. Ordinary citizens commit seppuku, too, when life loses its meaning.

Artists, writers — hypersensitive individuals — are prone to self-destruction when failure looms; Hemingway, because he could no longer get an erection; Kawabata when he saw his beautiful country being ravaged by modernity; Mishima when he witnessed the samurai spirit fade; and Van Gogh — well, his mind gave way. Most Filipinos end their lives for good, old-fashioned love: unrequited, betrayed.

Then there is the universal “amok” whose personality is destroyed, goes on a killing spree until he is destroyed.

Suicide as an act of heroism

Rizal sealed his own fate after he wrote his heroic novel, Noli Me Tangere. He had friends, however, in the highest niches of Spanish power because he was ilustrado. He was on speaking terms with the Spanish governor general, with the princes of the Church, some of whom doted on him for they admired his brilliance and the fact that he was fully hispanized by education. If he were an ordinary indio, in those days he would have been immediately executed as had happened to patriots of a lower station. He did not even have to return to Filipinas; he was a medical doctor with a good practice in Hong Kong — he would have survived in Spain, unlike Marcelo H. Del Pilar who was not a medico titulado. But Rizal returned to the land he loved so well and to a fate that was inevitable. He did not expect to be rewarded; there was no high office waiting for him at home. Truly, he is our national hero.

Gregorio del Pilar on Tirad Pass: on Dec. 1, 1900, the Aguinaldo party had already crossed Tirad and were already a distance away from the Pass. It was not certain that the Americans would be able to pursue them into that mountain fastness. But the young general wanted to be sure that they would not do so, so he and 60 of his trusted men decided to return to the pass to leave more distance between the President of the Republic and the Americans who were chasing him. There was no reward waiting del Pilar — he knew they were outnumbered, that they would not survive. That, too, is heroism.

Ninoy Aquino was a politician, a skilled opportunist. He returned not so much because he was needed here but because Marcos was very ill; he knew that it was time for him to return and fill the vacuum of leadership if Marcos died or was displaced by political mass action, Ninoy was the anointed successor; he had charisma, a vast following, friends in the Army, and a political machine. He had miscalculated. He was courageous, but that courage was opportunism, too. True heroism is selfless. He was murdered, not martyred.

General Angelo Reyes was prompt. At a convocation sponsored by the late Odette Alcantara, both of us came on time and we had a 45-minute one-on-one conversation before the program started. He did not evade my questions about EDSA Dos, the NPA conflict, our vanishing forests; alas, we did not talk about corruption in the Armed Forces. From that encounter, I could see how he regarded leadership. He said much of it was role-playing, and things go wrong when leaders deviate from their roles.

He shot himself in the chest — not in the head; this is regarded, by many, as courageous. His answers to his tormentors at the Senate hearing when he sought to defend himself and was stopped by that boor of a senator, Antonio Trillanes: “Was I greedy? Did I ever ask money from you?” are telling. And his last words (“I walked into corruption”) reveal his knowledge of what was wrong with the Armed Forces. Did he fight it? Maybe he knew he couldn’t do it. As a military man, perhaps he realized that the odds were stacked against him for not only was corruption embedded deep in the system, but the most powerful officials above him were themselves crooked.

Two generations earlier, Ramon Magsaysay resolved that problem and gave us the cleanest government ever. But look at what happened to him: he was killed in that airplane crash in 1957, which so many of us regard as sabotage. After him, the only man who could have done it was General Fidel Ramos. He was not a PMA graduate — he finished at West Point and was not hostage to the “mistah” camaraderie as nurtured in the Academy. He was above it all. And he did not do it.

Angelo Reyes was a decent officer who, as he said, “walked into corruption,” was sucked into it. He took the honorable way out, but that act was just for himself, it was not for the nation; for if it was, before going, he should have named them all — the hierarchs who luxuriated in that cesspool. Angelo Tomas Reyes was an honorable man, but was no hero.

So here now is the greatest opportunity for President Aquino to act. He does not need the Truth Commission anymore for there are now so many witnesses who are surfacing. What must be done is to insure that the witnesses will be protected from hired killers, from the hypocrites in Congress casting all those stones and from the fickleness of public opinion.

Here now is his rare chance to do what Magsaysay did, what Fidel Ramos did not do, what all past presidents were unable to do: he would need the help of General Ramos himself, of his cousin, Gilbert Teodoro, and patriots like Heidi Mendoza. He can bring up those brilliant and virtuous young officers who are waiting in the wings and transform the Armed Forces into a model servant of the people.