Long-suffering nation / The magic of song

At a death anniversary luncheon several weeks ago, I jerked upright in my seat when an Irish Catholic priest ventured the statement the Philippines was a jolly good country, its people a happy, satisfied people. Whaaat? This man in the cloth meant what he said. When I disagreed, he looked at me as though I were an apostate, a Filipino not in the swim of things who had lost his way. If not his mind. The Irish priest had been here six years. Obviously he liked what he saw. He figure that whatever our problems, they were very temporary. We Filipinos had the disposition (read religious resolve) to solve these problems in good time and proceed to higher ground.

I didn’t know whether the man was mad, or simply at his Sunday homily best, or propitiating his tablemates. All of us were elderly Filipinos, successful professionals who probably didn’t want to disagree openly with a gung-ho foreign priest. I hasten to speculate that maybe they really didn’t want to. Maybe they share his optimism. Maybe the priest knew his audience, a people who lived in the lotus land of might-have-been. They were aware of the nation’s poverty and misery, but were resigned to what they thought was its fate – to suffer. To accept the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as the poet said. To live today and wake up tomorrow, with God as their witness, a God who guided their lives. A gentle God, a wise God, a providential God. Suffer now. The rewards would come in heaven.

In my case, I had long been God’s angry man.

So as is my custom, I tangled with the priest. Gently but persistently I demolished his perceptions, his arguments. I brought down his thesis that we as a people were very okay. I came out with a swarm of facts, figures and statistics. At first he refused to believe the figures. All right, I said, let’s have your figures. He couldn’t produce any. Backed against the wall, he resorted to argumentatum ad hominem. He asked me if I had ever been to Laos. I said no. Then he said you Filipinos are very lucky, the Laotians live in much more misery than you do.

I agreed. But I countered that only in the late 50s and early 60s, the Philippines had been a model for many Asian countries, still woozy from centuries of Western colonization. So comparing us to Laos was quite insulting. But he still stood his ground, still insisted the tide would soon turn. When I countered again that hundreds of educated Filipino middle class families were now migrating abroad, convinced there was no future anymore for their children, that "the situation was hopeless", the Irish priest finally ceded ground. "Is that the truth?" he rhetorically asked. When almost all those at the same table responded that indeed was the truth, his jaw fell.

Maybe this column came deliberately to mind because for many years as a journalist and political observer, I was constantly amazed at the Filipino’s capacity for suffering. And oppression. He was miserable yes, living in abject poverty, spread like helpless insectivora in squalid squatter villages. In Metro Manila alone, 250,000 children were vagrant or homeless, begging, in tatters, foraging in garbage dumps. At the mercy of the elements.

Why, I often asked myself, did our poor resign themselves to being poor? Why did our Church or churches simply accept this poverty? And not do anything about it? Why do our rich and powerful simply seek the comfort and security of their gated luxury villages, their consciences indifferent to a nation sinking in squalor and decay? Why do our politicians exalt the Golden Calf and Pork Barrel to the detriment of their real constituents – the poor?

Another columnist, former Supreme Court Associate Justice Isagani A. Cruz, asked another question. Why are Filipinos such a "foolish" and "stupid people", he wrote recently in the Inquirer, that they easily forgive those who have betrayed the nation? He mentioned names. He mentioned the Marcoses, the dictator, children Bongbong, Imee, Irene, Imelda of course. He mentioned Fabian Ver and Eduardo Cojuangco. He mentioned Blas Ople "who defended Marcos in Washington while EDSA I was raging. He mentioned Edgardo Angara, ‘UP president as blessed by Marcos and head of the most powerful law firm then." And why did the Supreme Court en banc acquit Imelda Marcos of plunder charges when the First Divison convicted her?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

Probably the most relevant, the most devastating, the most poignant WHY is this: Why are Filipinos by the tens of thousands being evicted today from Malaysia? And again, why will more tens of thousands of Filipinos be evicted from Italy and Israel? And then after them, if war should break out in Iraq, why will possibly hundreds of thousands of Filipinos be evicted from the Middle East? Why do we Filipinos get the boot faster than anybody else? Why, as a general rule, do we take injustice supinely? Why don’t we fight back? We were never meant or born to be permanently poor, oppressed, beaten and battered by circumstance. Why then can’t we get off our knees?

Why can other countries, other nationals escape poverty and we can’t? Why can they be creators and builders, and we just can’t? Why are we Filipinos now like the ancient Jews, a diaspora scattered all over the world?

And even when we were kicked out, like the tens of thousands who were kicked out of Sabah, do we want to go back?. The answer is obvious of course. There are no jobs here. There is only poverty, oppression, unemployment. But why have we come to such a pass? Another columnist, my neighbor Prof. Felipe Miranda of Pulse-Asia seeks to provide an answer: "Over the past 400 years, Filipino familiarity with the country’s political regimes and the authorities firmed up this prudent orientation. They must take care of themselves since government and presidents usually distance themselves from the people aid, in times of need, are too far. (At times, Filipinos could and did suspect that God might be the farthest of all)."

Well, there you are. We have come full circle.

What Professor Miranda is actually saying is that as a people, as a nation, as a republic, we have failed and continue to fail. And our leaders could’t give a damn. The idea of this column started with the blizzard of news attending the first anniversary of 9-11 in America. That date, September 11, 2002, is for the Americans an event buried deep in the national psyche. Its symbolism was maddeningly powerful. It was like a hidden lodestone of forked lightning coming alive. How best to illustrate America’s vulnerability than for its enemies to destroy Twin Towers, citadel of the nation’s economic greatness, and the Pentagon, fortress of the nation’s military might?

And so it is with us – in the same perverse way. How best to depict the Philippines’ utter helplessness than kick out tens of thousands of Filipinos from Malaysia. It hurts like ethnic cleansing. How best to depict this than a more reverberating follow-up – in case of war in Iraq – by kicking out hundreds of thousands, maybe millions more Filipinos from the Middle East and Europe? Is this what we have come to?

And where would they go? Back to the Philippines? Are ours the endless misfortunes of Job? Are we accursed as a people? Will we never wake up?

* * *

But even as we ask these questions, we revert to a moment of enchantment Friday evening at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. This was the highly successful "Lagi Kitang Naaalala" (A Musical Tribute to Levi Celerio, Atang de la Rama, Lucio San Pedro) presentation. It was good to be there. It was an escape, a temporary swirl into the magic of song as only the trio could create, compose and conceive it. Fr. Horacio de la Costa was right. The Filipino might be in rags. But concealed somewhere in those rags, he said, are two jewels. The jewel of song. The jewel of prayer.

Ah, Filipinos can really sing.

The singing Friday night at the CCP, the numbers, the personages, had a magical effect. I seemed to have visualized the rags mentioned by Fr. De la Costa sweep across the stage, then bunched into knots, then loaded into giant wheelbarrows, then lofted into space as though by a hidden hand. And suddenly in the place of those rags, there was song, a medley of songs, then that highly emotional musical brawl into the National Anthem. I seldom attend musicals, stage presentations, except when beckoned by Lea Salonga and Zenaida (Bibot) Amador. And yes, when he was still alive, Redentor (Red) Romero.

Many of the songs brought me back to a past I had long forgotten, a past no longer to be relived for those were the days when the Philippines enjoyed "iyong mga taon ng peacetime". The lovely Regine Velasquez had me riding a time broom with her rendition of Lagi Kitang Naaalala, Sa Ugoy ng Duyan, Saan Ka Man Naroroon, Sapagka’t Kami ay Tao Lamang had me traipsing on primrose pathways when I was still a youth and not yet the gizzard I am today worrying myself to death over the world’s problems. Then came Galawgaw/Alembong, Bituing Marikit and Waray-Waray, followed by Bayan Ko, Lagi Kitang Naaalala (the inimitable Madrigal Singers). Elizabeth Ramsey and daughter Jaya in Waray were a riot.

I was lost, magically lost. I would have wished the evening to last forever. Yes, nobody can sing like the Filipino.