Erap headed for fall; What about democracy?

Make no mistake about it. Joseph Ejercito Estrada, like a big, ripe, juicy cantaloupe, will fall and crack wide open one of these days from an overhanging bough. His life was probably destined to end that way – crash as a coconut crashes, blown down by the winds of ugly fate and uglier circumstance. Everything he is doing now is just for show, third-rate theater, before an audience that is part sympathetic, part amused, part cynical and – largely – tired of all his utterly hilarious histrionics.

The guy thinks he’s still in the movies. In a letter to one of his lawyers, he writes sotto voce and lamentissimo that nothing can save him now from (boo-hoo) "inevitable death, a future already written for me by the present administration in connivance with the Supreme Court . . . They have taken away my office. They have taken away my dignity. And they will take away my life." Bejesus! Estrada seeks to rise to the stature of the tragic and bedeviled Hamlet. He succeeds only in looking like a spent and decrepit Cagliostro, whose career of deceit ended in life imprisonment in the fortress of San Leo. Where the only thing he could contemplate was his fat and protruding belly.

His only salvation now, he thinks, is the masa. To arms! To arms! But Estrada’s poor and unthinking masa – differentiated from the wider masa as a social class – will only march if they are paid. And even if they are, they will not agree to being used as cannon fodder as they march to Malacañang, the sorriest band of mercenaries you ever saw, kiting it and fleeing like hysterical hippopotami at the first round of rifle fire.

Erap, call off our boys before they are massacred.

And, puhlease, cut out all this silly stuff that you are the victim of a government out to do you in by hook or by crook, not by the grace of God, you say, but by the grace of santong paspasan. Cut out all this reference to Ninoy Aquino alongside whom you look like a circus popinjay. People say you are stale sarsaparilla and Ninoy radiant, bubbling champagne. Ninoy was a national hero and you a leading candidate for the most ignominious president the Philippines ever had. Ninoy had more guts than a Turkish battalion, willing to face a firing squad with ice in his nerves. You only had guts in the movies, and all the bullets you ever fired came from the bark of a director. Ninoy was completely innocent, a man for the Renaissance. You? Your critics say you should undergo transorbital lobotomy.

Movies, yes movies. You are taking on everybody. You are the Lone Ranger against all the baddies, wrongoes, thugs, political hooligans, rogues in grey Makati business suits, rogues in the cloth, rogues everywhere. You are even now fulminating against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, when formerly she could do no wrong and was on your side. Anybody who says he or she is for the law is your avowed enemy. The incubus in all your nightmares is Clarissa Ocampo who exposed you as Jose Velarde. And now you would make light of her testimony like a groggy, slug-silly boxer pretending he ain’t hurt at all.

You who repeatedly claimed you were innocent and you would prove this in court now considers the court — the Sandiganbayan — your enemy that must now be expunged from the face of the earth. The most respected public figure in the Philippines — Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide — you would now deride as scum. Your only friends left — outside of your family, of course — are your nine lawyers who, if you don’t mind my saying, look at you more as a cash cow than the Demosthenes you would like to emulate. And yes of course, you have such political allies as Ping Lacson, Gringo Honasan, Butz Aquino, Nene Pimentel, Dingalen Dilangalen. They could have been taken out of the pages of Long John Silver.

Many signatories of the Senate and House resolutions favoring your having knee surgery in America are now withdrawing like roosters at dawn muting their cockadoodledoos realizing they have been jobbed.

According to a Philippine STAR front-page story, you would now proceed to Act Three in your strategem to shoehorn President GMA from Malacañang. This would be "hunger strike", according to Palace Spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao. Begorra! It’s about time! But can you do it? Erap Estrada not eating is like Frank Sinatra not singing, Michael Schumacher not driving, Mike Tyson not rampaging, Lucille Ball not spoofing, Jack the Ripper not ripping, Kim Basinger not having a curve, Julia Roberts not smiling, Jennifer Lopez not displaying her caboose, Al Capone not cheating, Atong Ang not gambling, Didaden not dingalinging.

The jig is up, Mr. Estrada. You have turned your trial for plunder into opera bouffe —- and the whole thing stinks.

* * *

Just as this columnist predicted, all this hoot and caterwaul about Joseph Estrada is good for the country – in the long run. And so is the entry into Muslim Mindanao – more particularly, Basilan – of the elite combat forces of the United States. Together they form a pincer, Together they have scattered layers of verbal gunpowder, now lit by spiraling debate, discussion and controversy. Together, they sort of illumine the future. And the future does not look good at all. Together, they reach deeper into the nation’s reserves of understanding, intelligence and comprehension of national issues.

What do I mean by this?

When I wrote sometime ago that EDSA I and EDSA II had slid into the slipstream of history, hardly anybody understood me. I explained that both EDSAs had served their purpose. They had taken out greedy, corrupt, and scandal-ridden presidents and — wow! — that was very good. It didn’t turn out to be very good. The rot remained, the political system was corrupt as ever. The thieves abounded even more, crime and violence escalated and largely escaped justice. EDSA III? That was no EDSA at all. If by EDSA we meant a popular rising that had the support of the Church, the business community and civil society. The May I siege of Malacañang was a political deformity, promoted and stirred by right-wing demagogues. And so it failed. EDSAs do not fail at all.

And so people wondered. Why did the rot remain, all the political stink, crime, violence, graft and corruption on an even more colossal scale? Didn’t they get rid of two utterly disputable presidents -— Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada?

The discussion, the scrutiny, the level of debate went up two to three notches. If it was not misrule at the very top, than what was wrong with the country? Then they started to look at our institutions, the executive, the legislative, the judiciary. Why were they malfunctioning? Why did their services not reach, not benefit, not improve the lot of the masses? Why do our poor, now officially at 40 percent of the population remain poor and getting poorer? Why are the rich getting richer? Why do so many countries in our Asian neighborhood prosper and progress, get rich even, while we continue to flounder as the Basket Case of Asia?

I sought to explain there was something fatally wrong with our system.

And so many of our educated, literate and articulate are now looking at the system. Something they never did before. Everything was all right, they said, we had all the laws. We had the shield and the spear to protect and safeguard our democracy. Our Constitution. All we lack is the leadership. So it went down to leadership. But there was no good leader around. Our political system was thick as thieves. Our justice system — our judiciary — was not working at all. The biggest thieves were the biggest successes, and a great many of them were in Congress and Malacañang and — we often forget — the private sector. Not to mention the police and perhaps the military.

So what then? Our brand of democracy? Many intelligent people don’t want to touch this subject. Democracy is sacred, a temple, a Gothic spiral. We shouldn’t monkey with it. Without democracy, the argument goes, we will have a military dictatorship. We tried that with Ferdinand Marcos, and it didn’t work at all. Then what? This is when everybody scratches his or her head. If the system is wrong, fatally flawed maybe, if our institutions are ramshackle and decrepit, if our misbegotten poor begin to overflow and get very hungry and desperate and someday perhaps violence-prone, if our leadership is rotten, vile and sordid, if narco-politics threatens to devour the country, where then in heaven’s name will the Filipino people go?

Prayer, some say. Fasting, others say. But what if the social volcano should explode? Will God in His infinite mercy provide?

If He does not — not immediately, anyway — what do we educated, middle class, conscienticized Filipinos do? Shall we allow the nation to go to pot? Shall we simply wring our hands in helplessness as the military seeks to remove the debris of the exploding social volcano and take over, set up martial rule? This is where we are at the moment, lost, bewildered, confused. The post-World War II system is on the verge of capsizing. Our brand of democracy — in practice for more than half a century — has failed us. And we are teetering like Argentina. Whither then our democracy?