The guns of October: The hopeless rot of politics, a political Payatas

The guns of August just didn’t go off. And now what we hear are the guns of October pitting minority against majority in the Senate. Sen. Panfilo Lacson against Mike Tuason Arroyo, the political opposition against Malacañang. If you look closely enough, it’s a pure, simple, and utterly disgusting charade. It is designed to divert public attention from the overpowering issue of drugs. It wants us to close our eyes to how near narcotics is to converting the nation into the stinking, wide-open belly of a beached mackerel. It wants us to forget how a senator cunningly plots his way to the presidency over a nation on its knees coughing blood and the spittle of a deadly drug at work.

I don’t buy that scenario of First Gentleman Mike Arroyo orchestrating P250 million of PCSO (Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office) funds for the senatorial campaign of Joker Arroyo, Johnny Flavier, Ernesto Herrera and Obet Pagdanganan during the May 11 elections. That scenario is so flimsy and ridiculous I just wonder whey media swallowed it hook, line and sinker. But that kind of news does sell. Mike sells, and how he sells!

Joker Arroyo and Johnny Flavier were a shoo-in, potential topnotchers in the Senate polls. Joker was often referred to as Mr. Impeachment himself during the Senate impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada. His lofty and fiery words were just a decibel removed from David Ben-Gurion whose equally florid white hair shook in the wind when he sought in flaming oratorio to carve out a piece of earth for Israel. Flavier was top-rated and unbeatable for the Senate. He needed no help from Mike Arroyo and the PCSO. If indeed, precious PCSO funds were poured on Pagdanganan and Herrera to ensure their senatorial victory, whyinell did they lose?

Let me tell you this. So the background becomes clear.

The Puwersa ng Masa, headed by Senator Edgardo Angara and Aquilino Pimentel, is the rag, tag and bobtail of former President Estrada’s ruling coalition – the LAMP. History records it as the party that stayed in Malacañang and Congress the briefest because it was an open-faced and scandal-ridden Klu Klux Klan that robbed the nation by day, caroused by night. The president claimed to serve the poor (Erap para sa mahirap) while constructing mansions for mistresses worthy of the sybaritic tastes of the Queen of Sheba and pouring ill-gotten money by the billions into banks.

So now, to make the people forget about Erap, Atong Ang, Ping Lacson et al. so we won’t think anymore about jueteng, shabu, the Chinese Triad, laundered money deposited in the billions of dollars in secret accounts abroad, so Luis Chavit Singson, Clarissa Ocampo, Emma Lim, Mary "Rosebud" Ong and Col. Victor Corpus slide into hazy memory, so Bubby Dacer, Emmanuel Orbito, Edgar Bentain and the PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Crime Task Force) and its many skulls, skeletons and horrors are swept under the rug, the Senate becomes the forum for the dumping of all sorts of political garbage. Swill. Dung. Pee and defecate from the Senate stage. It’s sheer entertainment. Come gather, all you suckers.

And this is what we have all become. A political Payatas piling up wretchedly upwards until it collapses on us all because we have lost the will to build a nation we can call our own.

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo hardly helps by just drifting along. She is a papel na bangka in a swirling sea, unable to rise to the stature of some of her post-war peers in the Near and Far East like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, Park Chung-hee and Kim Dae-jung, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad, not to mention of course the Chinese triad of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zhemin. Gloria remains to be touched, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "by the better angels" of her nature. She is dead to the "mystic chords of memory" so dear to Lincoln that stretch to the battlefields of politics where she must fight, fight the good fight, and fight to the death – if need be – for that is her only mission. For the country has to be saved. With the armor of values.

She doesn’t fight. It’s not in her nature. She walks a tightrope she hopes will lead her without much incident to the year 2004. Then she can run for the presidency on her own.

And now GMA is battling for her spouse, Mike Arroyo, a man of means and towering bulk, as he is a man of adventure and many appetites. Mike never fulfilled his wife’s pledge, that he remain inconspicuously and unobtrusively on the sideline, like Margaret Thatcher’s husband – Dennis. Mike loves the limelight, to be thought of as a power on his own, brokering, finagling, mediating, counting heads and counting money – a many-receptacled shadow who does what Gloria cannot do. And Gloria cannot seem to do without him. And so there they are – like two lovelorn scorpions in a bottle, the bite of one able to kill both.

* * *

This is what happens when the nation has lost its way. It never really found its way despite two or three EDSAs. The basics were forgotten.

The economy worsened. The population multiplied. Poverty spread. The gap between rich and poor widened. Graft and corruption got much, much worse. Crime and lawlessness spilled through a breaking dam. The rule of law – better still the performance of our police and law-enforcement agencies – was a mirage. Our courts appear to be hostage to rampaging criminality. Our educational system slid unto scandalous underdrive where before a diploma was the most precious possession of any rural family. Our traffic is a nightmare. And so is our garbage strewn everywhere. The Muslim problem in Mindanao has become worse, more fearsome now because we discover Abu Sayyaf is a creation of Osama bin Laden.

And to top it all, our political system is a pathetic caricature of the model it was supposed to imitate – the American model. After the passage of 50 years, our democracy isn’t working at all. All our institutions are broken down and nobody can fix them.

The "better angels" aren’t there anymore. Philippine politics, once a promising democratic starter in Asia after World War II, is now the nation’s dumpsite of everything that rots. In recent years, the Lower House was pointed out to as Sodom, but most people hesitated to name the Senate Gomorrah. Today, the Senate is similarly depicted, although this writer would qualify there are still four or six senators out of 24 who have not yet gone down the sinkhole. The Senate nonetheless manages to make a lot of noise, much of it hot hoosh, because the Puwersa ng Masa with 11 senators remains in contention. Why? Because although its snake-head with has been severed at least politically, meaning Estrada, its long, slithering, scaly body whips dangerously across the length and breadth of the land.

By virtue of imagery, demagoguery and deception – which mass poverty is heir to – huge slices of the masa still look up to Erap Estrada. But we are in a grey area now because Estrada is politically finished. And Lacson is heir to Estrada. But even while finished, Puwersa still has a lot of financial resources – billions–and this explains why our courts and our justices are playing cops and robbers with the citizenry. Can you imagine? Nine lawyers of Estrada playing hookey on the same day? And Estrada, following the script, goes to the Sandiganbayan in slippers, only a jacket on his back, scowling, his moustache arching like a cat’s back in feigned disgust and calling the whole thing "judicial terrorism." Yo!

But what the Estrada condottierre did not bargain for, did not anticipate was the emergence of narco-politics as the issue that would blow the stockings out of the citizenry. It did not anticipate there would be a Mary "Rosebud" Ong and a Col. Victor Corpus who would blow the cover of the police as the narco-traffickers, not just the police, but a neophyte senator whose record as a PNP director-general and PAOCTF (Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Task Force) was – if his accusers were to be believed – the stuff of werewolves and vampires, of bundles counted in the millions almost nightly reportedly by Supt. John Ong, delivered straight–again reportedly – to Chief Supt. Reynaldo Acop and from Acop – again reportedly – to the PAOCTF, and the star-spangled super-general in attendance. And if he was there, was Erap far behind?

Get the picture?

The guns of narco-politics had to stop roaring. Other guns had to roar to take the heat off. Mike Arroyo had to be demolished and through him, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The Senate majority had to be demolished. And this is probably where the leaders of the Puwersa ng Masa, including Ed Angara and aside Ping Lacson, blundered. They named Joker Arroyo as a beneficiary of the supposed PCSO scam. They picked on the wrong man. Joker, a fighter if ever there was one, can take the whole lot of the Puwersa ng Masa in the Senate and skedaddle them like a flock of geese. If Ping Lacson decides to take Joker on, the ex-PNP chief who delivered that privilege speech will go up and down like an elevator during the rush hours. Like Primo Carnera at the lands of Max Baer who even punched the former to the press box. In the end, it will be so much sound and fury about virtually nothing, as Shakespeare said.

I see a political Payatas towering in the air, and believe you me, it will come crashing down with all the filth you can imagine.