How can we manage to turn the tide?

Having made the wrong call on the demand for Vitaliano Nañagas’s head by the troublemaking executives and personnel of the Social Security System (SSS) and firing the unfortunate fellow in the most wishy-washy manner, President Arroyo may be beginning to realize her mistake. She fired their "hate object", not the illegal "strikers".

Madam Arroyo should now brace herself for more challenges to come. She’s shown by the SSS debacle that she may have only wishbone where her backbone ought to be.

The way I see it, the trouble with President GMA’s decision-making is that she’s still dreaming of being reelected in the year 2004. This is why she wavers and unsuccessfully attempts a shakey balancing act, trying to keep in her corner the Radical Leftists who claim they helped her topple her predecessor with their numbers at the EDSA DOS or People Power II mass rallies last January while, to appease the other end of the social spectrum, throwing a sop to the so-called upper middle class and the business elite by maintaining a bunch of Cabinet bright boys with the right haircut, the proper university pedigrees, well-groomed, and well-manicured in her circle.

The problem is that she’s finding it easier and easier to surrender to the noisy pickets and blared-forth threats and propaganda of the Leftwing groups and, indeed, the Communists in her pangkat than to confront their bullying even when they’re dead wrong.

The President still does not realize that the Leftwing Radicals – whose main aims are to destabilize society, seize control of the masa, and get themselves swept to power on the ruins of this tottering Republic – are not her friends but constitute what the European phrase identifies as "the enemy inside the gates." They cannot even be referred to as fickle allies. Their goal has remained unchanged: Power. They are never any leader’s allies, unless he or she, as a convenient pawn, fits into their attaining, in the end, their single-minded agenda – a takeover of the nation.

Believe me, the New People’s Army rebels in the field, although their ranks seem to be on the increase, are not the more proximate threat. The radicals remain – even though they don’t mouth these days the discredited and outmoded shibboleths of Marxist, Leninist and Maoist dialectic – still actively engaged in "parliamentary struggle." Why, thanks to the party-list, some of them are already members of parliament.

In the middle, alas, stands an increasingly forlorn and bewildered President Arroyo, torn between the Leftwing’s mounting pressure and ill-disguised bullying of some ranking elements of the military who exact appointments and concessions from her on the unsaid but implicit premise that, when they had announced their "withdrawal of support" from their commander-in-chief, ex-President Estrada in January, that’s when he fell.

It’s time, if it’s not too late, for GMA to re-invent herself. To become Presidential, not in the cosmetic but in the real sense – ready to do battle for what’s right, courageous enough to make unpopular decisions, determined to thwart further eruptions of that obscene monster, irresponsible and selfish "people power", which was the illegitimate spawn of EDSA UNO, EDSA DOS – and, yes, Virginia, EDSA TRES. Everyone who has a gripe, an axe to grind, an outburst of rage or is afflicted with blinding ambition, now feels that sending a mob into the street to wave placards and banners, and trumpet demands on a bullhorn can call that rabble "people power."

Enough, already!

The President and Commander-in-Chief must swing even into the extreme: Put the next mob to rout. Why? Because a stern response is now vital, thanks to her previous faltering, if we are to prevent anarchy from taking over our streets.

This will not happen unless President Arroyo banishes from her mind the very thought – the delicious temptation – of being re-elected to the Presidency in 2004. This craving is what saps her will, deprives her of moral force, seduces her into political deal-making rather than resolute decision-making.

Let her do her job now, and leave the future to take care of itself. If she’s a great President now ("great" in this context is invoked deliberately), she’ll be hailed and remembered for generations to come. If she bungles it now, with our nation disintegrating before our very eyes, our economy in a free-fall, crime on a rampage, and barbarians (like the Abu Sayyaf) knocking, with yells of mockery, at our gates, then what will be left in 2004 for our children to inherit?

GMA must understand that this is her moment. It may never come again.

* * *

I borrowed the title of this column from a book. The one and only time I got to meet John F. Kennedy was in 1962, just a year before his assassination in Dallas, Texas. Despite the frowns of Lincoln "Link" White and his deputy, Bob McCloskey, in the White House press office, who decreed that JFK shouldn’t be giving private interviews to foreign correspondents, I had been "smuggled" into the Oval office by one of my professors, Dr. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a JFK adviser and speechwriter (later to pen the most moving postmortem biography of the fallen leader, to rival that of Ted Sorenson’s, A Thousand Days).

That day it was sunny and bright with not a cloud on Kennedy’s horizon. What struck me was that he was so blonde, so as to appear almost albino, but this did not show in his photographs. When he said goodbye to us on the steps of the Rose Garden, JFK handed me a blue-covered book which I asked him to autograph. He scribbled only "Jack." When I requested him to spell out J. F. Kennedy at least, he laughed: "But that’s my name – Jack."

The thin volume was entitled To Turn the Tide. It turned out to be a collection of the early speeches of his Presidency, including, of course, the famous inaugural address, of which Schlesinger was rumored, along with Sorenson and others, to be one of the authors, although JFK had written the speech into final form himself.

The goal the young President had apparently set for himself was "to turn the tide" of an America adrift, unsure of itself, combating racism, fighting the Mafia (and the FBI, too, as Jack and Bobby were to groan during their tussles with J. Edgar Hoover). He didn’t get very far. An assassin’s bullet cut him down in the "lustihead of his young powers."

Perhaps, his critics claim, it was just as well, although we’ll never agree. His dramatic death enshrined forever in the hearts of Americans and his admirers around the world the legend of JFK’s Camelot. As the man who invented the term, at Jacqueline’s prompting, Theodore H. White was much later to mourn – probably "Camelot never existed." Around him, JFK, he said in retrospect, assembled no noble knights of the Round Table, but hard-nosed tough politicians and pragmatists. White admitted, on the other hand, that while the Kennedy cabal was rough and tough, they were stubbornly honest. And that, in "turning the tide", I submit, is sufficient unto the day.

There is no White Knight whom we see galloping out of the blue to inspire and save our nation. But, even in this discouraging hour, if our President and our people join hearts and hands to resolutely endeavor to turn the tide, it may yet be our shining hour. We have few options left. Beyond lies the abyss.

* * *

THE ROVING EYE . . . Will GMA try to cast herself into the role of "Traveling Salesman" like former President Fidel V. Ramos. August is a busy month for her. She’s going to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia tomorrow, Tuesday, Aug. 7. On August 22, she will be in Brunei Darrusalam visiting the Sultan. On August 24, she will be in Singapore, coming home on the 26th . . . The next trip will be to Tokyo on September 10 to 14. In Japan, the President will address the Philippine-Japan Joint Economic Council, then the Global Business Dialogue (of electronic firms). Her important appointment will be with His Majesty Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko, both of whom she apparently knows well. She will also confer with Japan’s popular Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, whose hold on office has just been strengthened by his having led his party, the Liberal Democrats (LDP), to victory in the upper-house electioons last July 29.