Way off the mark?

It’s confirmed. A Social Weather Stations (SWS) poll has revealed that four out of five Filipinos feel Christmas this year will be happy, and most are thankful particularly for their health.

In sum, if Filipinos believed the doomsayers – meaning politicians and us columnists – this nation would be in the dumps. In a blue funk. Consumed by depression and gloom. Why, the SWS went on: Nearly all the respondents said they were hopeful about the coming year!

The coming year, indeed, will be pretty bad. There will be company failures and bankruptcies. There will be closures and lay-offs. There will be troubles and problems. But what the heck. The Filipino is a cock-eyed optimist. He may despair of corruption and graft, be plagued by violence and crime, be laughed at by foreigners, and caricatured by critics as a figure of fun – but, he is stronger than he himself thinks. Some may scoff at the thought that, whatever typhoon buffets our nation, we’ll muddle through. Yet, this is what makes us endure. And what makes us invincible – even, sometimes, in our invincible ignorance.

* * *

Mark Jimenez may not be Samson, but he’s managed to bring the roof down on many heads – including those of Mike Arroyo and Nani Perez. This guy M.J. simply refuses to go gently into the night. He goes on firing away with his scatter-gun mouth.

Do you think he’ll really leave, as the court just ordered, by December 26th? By "leave", meaning he’ll meekly depart – as he "volunteered" – in the custody of US federal marshals to face the music in the USA?

No less than Speaker Joe de Venecia has given the US Embassy and the Derall Bureau of Investigation (FBI) his pledge that Congressman Jimenez (6th district, Manila) will come in to be voluntarily extradited to the US. In short, the Speaker of the House has guaranteed Jimenez’s (Crespo’s) compliance. There’s already betting, however, that M.J. will "escape" instead. Y’know: As they say, disappear; get away; "do a bunk" (as the Brits would put it).

Shame on those Doubting Thomases! Do they doubt the word of Speaker De Venecia?

In any event, up to the end M.J. continues rocking the boat. At a dinner party the other night, a congressman was asked by the other guests whether the legislature had pushed through the passage of a certain major bill. "We didn’t even try," the congressman retorted. "Anything we did these days would surely be ignored. Whatever we accomplished, the banner headlines the following morning would still be about Mark Jimenez!"

He certainly made his mark.

* * *

According to correspondent Howard W. French of The New York Times, in a dispatch from Seoul yesterday, the President-elect of South Korea, Mr. Roh Moo Hyun, 56, "has vowed to renovate South Korea’s alliance with the United States to put the countries on what he insists should be a more ‘equal footing’."

At the same time, the story went on, Roh asserted that "through ‘patience and tenacity’… his country will take the lead in defusing a gradually mounting crisis between Washington and North Korea."

I was struck, reading this report, by the consistency with which Roh (who takes over as President next February 25, 2003) has pursued those two views – which he kept on reiterating during his campaign. He had told me the same things in exactly the same words when I interviewed him last September in Seoul.

Roh had started out as the underdog, then, buoyed up by a wave of anti-American feeling among younger Koreans, edged out his more pro-American (get tough with North Korea) rival, Lee Hoi Chang, 67, by a two-percent margin.

Since Roh was the candidate of the Millennium Democratic Party of outgoing President Kim Dae-jung, this means that Mr. Kim – whose former popularity had plummeted like a stone in the past two years – will have his "Sunshine Policy" towards North Korea reiterated, not discarded as the opposition’s Mr. Lee had promised. President Kim, for that matter, may even get a reprieve from his political critics who had been announcing they would investigate his Asia Pacific Foundation’s financial activities." (I guess, "foundations" are in bad odor in South Korea as well.)

When this writer met Roh last September 10 in the Emerald Room of the Hotel Shilla in Seoul, after half an hour’s dialogue, he had handed me a position paper on his views entitled Toward Peace and Co-Prosperity in Northeast Asia.

This is where he underscored the need to reshape South Korea’s relations with the US to a "more equal footing," not with Seoul playing the role of a more junior partner.

He declared: "Internationally, we are living in the era of global market integration. The Cold War Era that dominated the 20th century has ended. Reconciliation and cooperation has become a new survival logic." He pointed out that, "ideological debates and red-baiting have now become antiques from the Cold War Era. International issues have also changed. Regional disputes and racial and religious conflicts, terror, and drug trafficking have emerged as new elements of threat."

Roh said that "in looking at the South-North Korean issue, we must expand the field of our vision to look not only at the Korean Peninsula but also to include the Northeast Asian Region… reconciliation and cooperation between South and North Korea must be elevated to the level of peace and co-prosperity in the Northeast Asian region. This is the direction of improving the Sunshine Policy."

Roh comes, to invoke a bromide, from the school of hard knocks. Our Seoul-based correspondent Don Kirk of the International Herald Tribune, who covers the Philippines as well, yesterday published a background report on the president-elect that says it all: "Roh earned his credentials as an idealist with the courage to take on the ruling establishment 21 years ago. Then, the young lawyer volunteered to defend two dozen students who had been held for 57 days for possessing literature that was banned under the national security law, a notorious document that remains on the books. The torture meted out to the students was typical of a period in which President Chun Doo Hwan, a former army general who lost power, sought to justify his bloody suppression of the Kwangin revolt for which Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death as the instigator.

Kirk recalls that Roh was born to a farming family 56 years ago near the southeastern port of Pusan (Busan). He had to go to work after graduating from a commercial high school at 20. He studied law on his own, passed the bar exam, served briefly as a judge, then went into private practice at 32. The writer disclosed that "Roh acknowledges the influence of his wife, Kwon Yang Sook, whom he married in 1973… a year before their marriage, Kwon’s father died in prison, where he had languished since the Korean War on charges of having supported North Korean forces during their invasion of the South in 1950."

You may draw your own conclusions from that tidbit of information.

Kirk, on the other hand, led off his piece with the lines: "He has made enough fashionably anti-American remarks to frighten conservative hardliners from here (Seoul) to Washington, but Roh Moo Hyun, in the first flush of victory . . . in casting himself as a moderate with an edge of forward momentum."

He is assuring the skeptics that his policy towards North Korea and the US will "not be much different from that of the Kim Dae-jung government."

Really? That’s not the impression I got when I met Roh. As even correspondent French of the NYT recalled in his own article,"… more than a decade ago he (had) advocated the withdrawal of American troops from the country altogether, a position he has since repudiated."

Whether this view will surface again, now that the electoral contest is over, remains to be seen.

* * *

Roh is a firm believer in Korea’s destiny. He pointed out to us that "the Koran peninsula lies at a cross-section linking maritime and continental powers".

"Moreover, with 1,200 km. radius of Seoul, there is a potential market of 700 million people. This is a bigger population than that of the US and the European Union combined. Korea can be reborn as a powerful economy in the region.

"Korea will also lead the way to forge peace in Northeast Asia. If we overcome the division and achieve peaceful coexistence, it will give us a new capacity to mediate and to forge peaceful relations between the US, China, Japan, and Russia, the four owners surrounding us. We will be reborn as the center-nation of peace and co-prosperity in Northeast Asia."

One thing you can say: This guy doesn’t think small.

There’s a lot more which can be gleaned from my own notes and from Roh’s original "position paper", but those things can come later. This is a time for Christmas, as far as most readers are concerned, not kimchee.

But good luck to the victorious Mr. Roh! Those who didn’t take his words seriously last September are taking a second look at them now.

For curiosity’s sake, perhaps, you might be interested in what I said of him in this corner last September 11: "I found Roh brilliant, candid and articulate… At this stage, though, he’s running behind."

Well, he certainly caught up.