Quo vadis, Gloria? Who killed Cock Robin?

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s greatest enemy is herself. It’s the perception that she has never outgrown being a child, an Alice lost and amused in Wonderland. That presumably explains her plunging popularity, why even faster than her predecessor Joseph Estrada, she has squandered presidential power, and is now seemingly on the skids. The latest Pulse Asia survey November 6-22 has landed on the presidential kisser like a baseball bat. And now GMA’s problem is jangling like a live electric wire. She has to decide whether the presidency is really worth it and run in 2004, or like a gun that has badly misfired consign it to the kangkungan.

That survey had the sound of a brass gong in a Mongolian temple.

GMA landed fourth in a presidential slate of four. She garnered only 12 percent. Raul Roco came out ahead with 19 percent, second was Fernando Poe Jr. with 17 percent, third was Noli de Castro with 16. Panfilo Lacson, earlier thought to be a powerhouse landed only three percent behind Hilario Davide 7, Edgardo Angara 5, Loren Legarda 4. I may have slightly doubted Ibon‘s presidential survey several months ago with Raul Roco streaking like a meteor, Joseph Estrada in between, and GMA a far third. But not Pulse Asia.

This is a situation tailor-made for national crisis that has the smell of packaged gunpowder. I do not see GMA abdicating power as a new movement called the Arroyo Resign Movement would have it. GMA is not a hate object as Erap Estrada was, as Ferdinand Marcos was. She could be incompetent, maybe, inefficient maybe, her leadership unkempt maybe. But there will be no flashfloods of hate and abomination, fire in the air seeking to consume her, like they did the Ceauseseus in Romania, the Mussolinis in Italy.

The danger lies in the military-police combine that makes up GMA’s bedrock support.

Either the uniformed, boot-clicking gentry support the President till 2004, perhaps even back her 2004 election bid. Or, as is the case with all ambitious, power-grabbing military establishments all over the world, the generals and colonels could resort to either of two things: Coalesce with GMA in a junta if she should declare martial rule or a state of emergency. Or boot GMA out and monopolize power. There is a third: The military may give way to a government of national salvation, reconciliation and unity. This may sound infeasible and unworkable right now. But that government of national salvation worked in England on the eve of the Second World War as Great Britain closed ranks in the face of what was then an impending Nazi invasion.

As it is right now, Raul Roco emerges as the Sir Galahad of Philippine politics.

He has the credentials, the integrity, presumably the Excalibur. As nobody else on the political landscape has them. He has gone through all the political exercises – the hoops of fire – from successful corporation lawyer to congressman to senator to presidential candidate to Education Secretary without going into any cave of Ali Baba. He is a Ninoy Aquino original. This explains why Cory Aquino invited Roco to the 19th anniversary rites of Ninoy’s assassination at the Manila Memorial Park last August 21. But above all, the public saw Raul Roco in action during the Senate impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada and immensely liked what they saw. He was a man of brains as he was of muscle, a man of the podium and a man on the flying trapeze.

Is it too late for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to reverse her political fortunes?

No, it’s never too late. But to do that, GMA will have to change overnight, moult overnight, transform her political philosophy overnight, grow six moral inches overnight, learn to fight with different weapons overnight. Out with all those photo-ops which depict her as a child lost in the circus, addicted to charm of the clown and the glitter of the uniform. Out with the overwhelming majority of her counsel and advisers, media, dream team and otherwise, who are there like Erap Estrada’s were – to grab as much power there is, as much loot of the land and fat of the land as there still is. Out with the rascals, the crooks, the smugglers, the criminals, the grafters, the tax evaders, the drug lords.

This is what the traffic will have to bear and it’s the only way.

Well do I know, however, that no president of the Philippines had ever the guts to chop off the head of his/her closest friends, relatives, super-rich power blocs, consiglieri who were instrumental in her ascent to the giddiest heights of political power. For all his pretenses, Ferdinand Marcos, surrounded with more hoodlums, oafs and oxymorons than the pot-bellied sybarite King Farouk during the latter’s palmist days, could only execute one felon by firing squad at dawn. And at that he was a Chinese drug lord – Lim Seng.

Now if only PGMA in a month’s time could arrest, jail and indict (1) the top three drug lords in the Philippines; (2) the top three most corrupt wheeler-dealers in Philippine politics; (3) the top three tax evaders; (4) the top three military and police felons who have committed high crimes. Let’s assume she can only crack down on three or four or five felons. I assure her she’ll become a heroine overnight. Paeans and odes will rain on her as will garlands and posies, the adulation of all, headlines not just here but all over the world.

But can she? The Gloria I knew, the Gloria I worked with for ever a year, locking strategic purpose and moral sinew into her presidential campaign, couldn’t have. She had no fire in her belly. She had economic purpose, maybe, but she had yet to stir the political cauldron for great and courageous decision-making, yet to have a feel of political power at the top, yet to learn the language of righteous anger, spit the bullets of justice against political evil, blow tongues of fire into the opposition, master the grammar of temperance, dig redeeming foxholes and trenches in the rotting heartland of the poor and oppressed. That she didn’t know.

And until now, I don’t think she knows. Her tragedy was that she was born and inducted into big-time Philippine politics at a time these politics had become an abomination, maybe beyond salvation. It could only succumb too the magic of a great leader, a great savior, a Lee Kuan Yew maybe or a Mahathir Mohamad, and oh yes, a Ninoy Aquino if he could send his fist crashing through his grave to prove the Filipino is worth dying for.

That is probably the real terror of our existence. We do not need the terror of Osama bin Laden to inflict terror into our lives, nor the looming, bullying genie of an America to bawl out more fear of terror, as witness the closure of the Canadian and Australian embassies. Our terror started when we Filipinos grew and grew and grew and we dug out more graves, still more graves, endlessly much more graves.

We couldn’t feed them as they got really hungry or heal them as they got deathly sick. That was the ultimate terror.

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I don’t buy this hectoring of Mary "Rosebud" Ong, her being singled out as one of the possible killers of Col. John Campos. Her fault, if fault it was, was to have been the five-year inamorata of the handsome police officer. So what if they fell in love? Both lived highly dangerous lives. They operated in the world of drugs often, we understand, as double agents. Here often were the cloak, the dagger and the gun and untold fortunes. The loot from narcotics has done in several countries like Colombia. This Latin American country, we are told, has been totally corrupted by drugs, many of its governments in the past in the pocket of international drug syndicates.

When Mary Ong pointed the finger at Sen. Panfilo Lacson as Campos’ killer, she was just being consistent.

During all the weeks that the Senate held hearings on the billowing drug issue, Mary Ong contended, as did Col. Victor Corpuz, head of the ISAFP (Intelligence Service, Armed Forces of the Philippines) that Ping Lacson held the reins of the multimillion-dollar drug racket in this country. The names of Gen. Reynaldo Acop and Col. John Campos were brought in, the evidence of the prosecution being that the two officers were in cahoots with Ping Lacson, formerly Philippine National Police chief.

What was funny about the Senate hearings was that the bulk of the Senate treated Victor Corpuz and Mary Ong like intruders. The upper chamber looked like a court of inquisition more than a court of inquiry. The two were snarled at, their bloodlines questioned, their motives raked over the coals. Of course, Sen. Panfilo Lacson was treated by his peers with kid gloves. He was now a senator of the realm, wasn’t he? He had found safe harbor in the nation’s towering legislative chamber, the chamber of Untouchables.

Who killed Cock Robin? Certainly not Mary Ong.