Why get sore at Lee? He was absolutely right/ The Wong syndrome - HERE'S THE SCORE by Teodoro C. Benigno

A great many people in high places have come together in a posse comitatus – in simple language, a go-get-him gang – to put Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew to flight. Such political grandees as Senate President Aquilino (Nene) Pimentel and Sen. Rodolfo Biazon, among others, are branding Lee as a pompous ass, an egomaniac, an unmitigated interloper. Why? Because Lee Kuan Yew was quoted in Tuesday’s broadsheets as saying the democratic process in the Philippines does not work "because the people are not educated."

Bam! Coming as it did after the riproaring success of People Power II, the reaction here was nothing short of verbal bedlam.

Who after all was this senior minister of a tiny island in the Pacific with a population of two million setting himself up as guru to the world, and pontifex maximus of international ideology? It was one thing to succeed in Singapore, no bigger than a Band-Aid patch in the Pacific, another thing to govern 75 million Filipinos strung over 7,000 islands and speaking 8-9 major languages, with a major war seething, subsiding, and seething again in Muslim Mindanao. Indeed, at first blush, Lee Kuan Yew has a lot of nerve and this author himself wanted to plant a boot in his pants.

But when you take a closer look and rein in your anger, Lee Kuan Yew is right. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Joseph Ejercito Estrada was our failure, not anybody else’s. We or 40 percent of us elected him president in 1998 knowing fully well he had no tools for the job as president, that he was politically and intellectually illiterate, that he was a big and bouncy beach ball set loose in Malacañang – not knowing what to do. Besides which, the evidence says, he stole in amounts that made the loot-avid Mongol emperors stop with envy in their tracks.

All right, we in the middle and upper classes can conveniently say we did not vote for Erap Estrada. Although I know many who did, including supposedly well-informed and educated journalists. But does that excuse us because we didn’t vote for him? No, it does not. The whole graphic lesson of the 1998 elections and all of the presidential elections before that was that we have a huge subculture of Filipinos who never had the privilege of education. They are the ones who voted for and many of them still idolize Erap Estrada.

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This is the subculture, subclass or substratum – if you will – of Filipinos we, who live up there in comfort, have alienated. Through neglect, through indifference, through apathy, through an elitist political and social system that beggars your poor neighbor in the slums, the squatter areas, the squalid bidonvilles (as they are called in Latin America) – everywhere where poverty is a bent, rotten twig wasting in the sun – we are guilty. Ours is a misfortune, as John Steinbeck said, "that is attended with shame and guilt."

The Church, the family, our entire educational system – where the nation’s values are supposedly niched, developed and refined – have failed our poor. Why have they failed? I do not know all the answers. Ask them. All I know is that we, the so-called educated and enlightened, and, yes, you, the rich in Makati and elsewhere, profess shock and stupefaction when many of the poor remain steadfast with Estrada. Why shouldn’t they? Through government after government, through president after president, through elections after elections, they have remained poor.

The wretched of the earth. The dregs of our society. With no stake in society.

And they have remained poor because we never gave them access to education. To productive jobs upgrading their skills, enhancing or promoting their entry into Information Technology. This, as Lee Kuan Yew warned, is the danger of "putting too much emphasis on democracy over developing an educated society." We are all shocked as we watch the electoral campaign on TV. The poor are interviewed and invariably they say they will vote for actors and movie celebrities. And who are Winnie Monsod and Liwayway Vinzons Chato, anyway? Never heard of them.

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Lee hits it right on the nail. You do not have an informed, educated and enlightened electorate. And your democracy is fiesta democracy, fun and frolic democracy. This democracy is weaned not on an intelligent assessment of the candidate – his values, his track record, his grasp of issues, his intelligence, his commitment to good government, his integrity – but how he/she is ignited in the public imagination. The so-called Infotainment world dominates. And it is frightening.

Excuse me for mentioning names. So you get a Rudy Fernandez and a Noli de Castro. It’s like getting an Erap Estrada all over again.

I have always asked this question: Okay, there is graft and corruption in many other countries in East and Southeast Asia, crime, occasional bouts of lawlessness. Misgovernment, too.

But why is it that they prosper and progress? Why is it that they make the wheels of production move more swiftly, while we can’t? We expand at 2.9 GNP. They expand at 5 to 7 or 9 or more GNP. Why can they expand the benefits of mass and even higher education to the more, much more of the poor? And we can’t? Why do we have such a small middle class? Are we a blighted nation? Is our Roman Catholic religion, which dispenses easy absolution over the greatest of sinners, at fault? Is it our fun-loving, fiesta-loving, loose-legged, twitchy-bellied, ample-assed culture?

We are wired to the world. Old habits, old politics, old postures and pontifications must go. Or we die as a republic. Sure, we pulled out EDSA II after giving the world EDSA I. And we have all the right to be proud of what we Filipinos achieved. But unless we excavate the rot and the filth, unless we stand sentinel and crack down swiftly and even ruthlessly on what’s wrong with our society, we shall not go gently into the night. We will explode. Nota bene: Watch the Supreme Court.

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Now, we add our voice to those who have lowered the boom on the top brass of our Armed Forces of the Philippines for retiring post-haste Rear Adm. Guillermo Wong as flag officer in command of the Philippine Navy. We requote AFP Chief of Staff Gen. Angelo Reyes who said his bounden duty was to remove Admiral Wong to save the institution. Wong was accused of having used stinging and abusive barracks language to berate his immediate staff for having committed irregularities in the alleged purchase of substandard helmets and assault rifles. And that millions have been pocketed by top Navy officials.

Or was General Reyes afraid that corruption in the Navy was just the tip of the iceberg? And it could ricochet and snowball to reveal widespread corruption in other branches of the Armed Forces of the Philippines? And not only in the AFP, but more so in the Philippine National Police (PNP)? Yes, the accusers of Admiral Wong could be right. His "leadership style" was brusque, he lacked tact and diplomacy and should have scolded his officers not in the presence of the enlisted men but behind closed doors.

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Be that as it may, it took the courage of Admiral Wong – yes, his blistering and admittedly offensive language – to reveal as nobody else at his level could reveal that all is not well with the military. Our political system is admittedly corrupt. But we had expected our military to behave a little better, for theirs was a manual of behavior different from the rest – to serve God and country with the culture of "an officer and a gentleman" and the vision of a straight-backed soldier ready to lay down his life any time.

And if it is true that Wong’s immediate staff was so incensed by the exposé they threatened to stage a coup and throw him into boot camp, then we have the making of a military at the top that could be corrupt to the core. It has always astonished me that retired general and admirals have a grab-bag of well-located real estate upon which to build residences that only the rich or very rich could afford.

Once the wife of retired Gen. Cesar Nazareno escorted me sub-rosa many years ago to a site in Fort Santiago – or was it adjacent to the Fort – where I saw virtual mansions of retired generals risen from the sod. And I marveled. Mrs. Nazareno was partly rebuking me for cricitizing her husband alone – at a time when he was in hot water – when she said other generals were living it up like oil sheiks. Now look, she said.

I had thought – and now I could be wrong or partly wrong – that our Armed Forces had moulted over the years since the Marcos dictatorship when their top officers were corrupted by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. I am afraid we now have a flawed military culture – a mirror I suppose of our corrupt society. The military’s elite comprises Philippine Military Academy (PMA) graduates where the Mistah cult is a prized serpent tattoo on the forearm. I have never known general now Executive Secretary Renato de Villa to berate scalawags and scoundrels graduated from the PMA. Sir?