Echoes, reflections / Fat culture of violence

There is half-crawl on your skin as the anniversary of EDSA. approaches and almost suddenly remembrance of martial law takes hold of you. Echoes. Reflections. Malacañang was lit bright during those years, and whatever the circumstances, the Marcoses always persevered and prospered and pivoted to the call of the almighty peso. Looking at the Philippine STAR's front page Saturday, the half-turned faces of Imee Marcos and Noynoy Aquino leaped at you, each smiling back to the other's back, but ignoring each other. This was at the launching of the Central East Asia Growth Circle in Malacañang.

On the sports page, there was an elongated photo of Tommy Manotoc powering Canlubang to the ninth PAL Interclub gold team championship at the Pablo de Oro golf course. Once he was the treasured husband of Imee. Their not-so-secret love affair and their marriage abroad shook the Palace, incensed President Ferdinand Marcos and rattled Imelda. What to do? Tommy Manotoc disappeared. Coffee shops all over Manila speculated this was Manotoc-gate, the beginning of the end of the Marcos dictatorship.

The fear was that Tommy had been liquidated by the Marcos gendarmerie. Later, many weeks later, he returned in a scenario that was unbelievable. He was caught by the NPA and managed to escape. The truth was reportedly that he was grilled by military intelligence to find out if he was spy of the opposition.

And the opposition -- whatever the opposition then -- would rise in full cry. Tommy was known to be a nephew of Raul Manglapus, and the latter, in exile in America, could raise unshirted hell. Raul, a favorite of the lecture circuit in the US, could indeed stir up a lot of trouble for the dictator in America. And so we in the foreign press community in Manila worked this story as we would a wet towel wringing it dry. Manglapus next to Ninoy Aquino was head of the Philippine political opposition in the US.

They were glamorous then, Tommy Manotoc and Imee. The former tall, handsome, a woman's man, separated husband to beauty queen Aurora (Au-Au) Pijuan. As I looked at him in The STAR photo, hitting an approach shot, Tommy had grown old. The face had turned leathery, the eyes somewhat misty, the smile drawn out. Where the stomach was flat as a washboard during the martial law years, there was now a paunch. Down below, veins bulged out on his legs. But Tommy was still the sportsman nonpareil.

Imee on the other hand today looks like a movie star.

I don't know what they did to Imee's face and hair. But they did a good job. The chin was no longer somewhat prognathous, the eyes sparkled, the hair dished a sparkling brown, and she looked like somebody who just stepped out of Vogue. This was not the Imee I knew in the past. I do not know that I ever talked to her, nor to Bongbong and Irene. They were just in their teens, and it was their parents who interested me as a journalist. But Imee was often in the limelight.

She was known to be a rebel and she actually was. We had hoped her rebellion would mature, that she would indeed stand up to her father and mother. She was reputed to be the most intelligent of the Marcos siblings with a temper like her father's, a rebel flare in the night with terrible tantrums. And yet her father -- the dictator -- indulged her for she was bright and the favorite. She had the temper for politics. The father must have reckoned that one day Imee would become the president of the Philippines. After Imelda, of course.

Bongbong just did not connect. He loved girls, so they said, had no stomach then for politics, just cavorted along, carefree, a face in the Marcos family, no more than that. Irene was the silent one, simple, bred as though in a Carmelite convent, nothing of the wiliness of the Marcoses in her. We all found out we were mistaken. For today Irene Marcos Araneta is reported to have a $12 billion secret account, formerly in Switzerland, now stashed elsewhere. And the face has changed. When she danced the twist with George Hamilton on Imelda's 70th birthday, she looked itchy-bitchy. No offense meant.

How rich are the Marcos children? If Irene indeed has $12 billion, and she is the youngest, Imee and Bongbong must have more. And Imelda much, much more. But these are riches that have a curse. Imelda's approval rating, as per Pulse Asia, is at bottom or close to the bottom. And the siblings, however self-righteous they may appear in public at times, I am sure, feel the shadows slithering on their skin. They certainly realize the name Marcos, once the most formidable in the land, has become a painful, piercing arrowhead.

They could have chosen to remain abroad if they wanted to. But they chose to return. They probably figured that under the presidency of Joseph Estrada, they could hack their way back to normalcy and respectability. Back to power, with all those billions in their knapsack.

But the president himself is in trouble. He had greatly succeeded in escaping the so-called Marcos curse when he won by a landslide in the 1998 elections. Who cared that Erap Estrada was once upon a time a protégé of the dictatorship? But now the people are finding out there is a lot of Marcos in Estrada. There is an unquenchable appetite for power and fortune, the dislike for the middle and upper classes, particularly the Spanish-Filipino, the old rich, the trappings of lording it over 75 million Filipinos, the mating call of the Casbah where women writhe to the sound of little bells.

The difference is that Erap is not Macoy. The dictator was well prepared mentally, intellectually, psychologically and -- of course -- politically for the presidency. Except that he pushed his luck too far and EDSA pounced on Marcos like a king cobra. Erap, as he often admits, was not similarly prepared. Now 14 years after EDSA, we seem to have gathered together again, but the roles are strangely dispersed. And disparate. We have the Marcos siblings and Imelda, the cronies, almost the same rich and the same poor, and finally Erap Estrada who rides resplendently in a boat but he has no paddle.

There is no dictatorship because there is no dictator. Erap can never be one. He does not have that grinding, crushing will to power that dictators have. But the feeling is that we are all back to where we were before EDSA, and that somewhere, somehow, we are a chandelier attached to the ceiling by a thin string.

And that string may snap soon. What then would happen to the Marcoses?

It was a compelling subject of mine, fraternity hazing, rumbling and killing. It started with Lenny Villa in 1990 and since then every frat killing had me cholered up. Outraged. I am sorry I could not attend the 10th anniversary of Lenney's death at the hands of Aquila Legis. Mother Gerrie Villa's invitation came too late but I should have been there to sorrow with them. There have been so many fraternity deaths since then, the latest UP engineering student Den Daniel Reyes. He was an Alpha Phi Betan. The suspected killers are Fulgencio (Bib) Factoran III, Gil Taway and Marcelo Rongo, all Sigma Roans. Bib is the son of my former cabinet colleague in the Cory Aquino government, Jun Factoran.

I don't know, but I can't seem to get up my anger anymore as I did before. Another fraternity rumble. Another killing. Another explosion of public anger. And then what? A huge hiss as from a turbulent ocean and then the failure of our police authorities, the NBI mainly, to catch the culprits.

Dennis Venturina died and that happened. Nino Canilao died and the same thing happened. That about Canilao was particularly distressing for he was not a frat member, was killed by mistake at the UP campus. Canilao was a boy from the dirt poor who made good in his studies, became a scholar, was bright, modest and well-behaved. A good boy slaughtered. And they cannot get the killer because he is supposed to be the son of a powerful Muslim politician.

That's it. Fraternity rumbles, hazings, and killings are the doings of the rich and upper class families, highly educated, all Christians they, civilized they call themselves. And yet there is in them, as there is none among the poor, an animal urge to pond and pummel and even kill each other in rumbles, in fraternity hazings, in the name of fraternity brotherhood, even love. This is insane. And it is the more insane, because they are our leaders to tomorrow and they bear with them the curse of fraternity culture.

I should know. Since Lenny Villa died, I stayed with the case and made sure nobody could wriggle away. The printed word can sometimes be effective and eventually more than 30 Aquilans were brought to trial, charged with Lenny's death. Judge Adoracion Angeles sentenced 28 Aquilans, I think, to rigid prison terms. They just laughed at me. They had protectors on high, Aquilan high priests in the Court of Appeals. Not one has spent a day in jail. All are riding high.