That abominable bust / The Cha-Cha jabberwocky

Even Ferdinand Marcos didn’t like that bust. Accosted by the foreign press in 1976 to comment on the immense concrete bust beating his likeness looming above the highway entry to Ilocandia, the dictator wryly admitted: "I don’t exactly like it very much. It has no taste." He was right. A man with a better than average taste for architecture and the arts – although his taste for politics was awful – Mr. Marcos readily detected the bust’s glaring shortcomings. It was meant to resemble America’s Mount Rushmore, a lofty peak chiseled to harbor in gleaming rock the dignified facial features of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

The Marcos bust was not anything of the kind. It was simply huge without any character, towering without reflecting the personality of the dictator. Marcos was physically formidable, particularly his face, a visionary whose poisoned vision had to fail, and yet arresting when you were face to face. The dimples were no longer in the bust, the charm, the dynamic stealth. Hair, forehead, eye, nose, cheeks, ears, lips and jaw were carved out of stone – and a giant face appeared – that of Ferdinand Marcos. But there was no character projection.

That bust really had to go.

Marcos no longer had any relevance. Time had passed him by, cruelly. As time had passed Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Hideji Tojo, Francisco Franco, Ivan the Terrible. Their statues, which littered the national landscape, had to be hacked down by an angry populace eager to embrace a new tomorrow. Imelda Marcos described the Marcos bust as a "love offering". Imee Marcos was "deeply disturbed". The other Marcos siblings have kept quiet, afraid perhaps even their lives were in danger since the CPP-NPA through Ka Roger (Kmdr. Gregorio Rosal) has owned authority for the bust bombing.

The bomb depredation was a work of art, if it can be called that. The thick pomaded hair had disappeared. The eyes – ah, those eyes – were bombed out all the way to the ears. The forehead was reduced to rock splinters. The mouth – that once eloquent mouth – was a jagged ruin on the left and center, a pathetic, creepy morsel on the right. The jaw was a rivulet of line destruction. The only item left intact was the Marcos collar, broad, pointed, inevitably swallowed by rock. Taken together, the bombed bust looked like a hooded Hollywood alien about to fully disintegrate.

And so everything comes to pass. Even the Marcos monument that was meant to last forever.

If there was a president I remember vividly it was he. Not that we were friends or close acquaintances as this author had been with Cory Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Imelda Marcos who had taken a liking to me often invited this journalist to Malacañang and made sure most of the time I was seated next to Mr. Marcos. Except for a few times, Mr. Marcos and I did not hit it off. Maybe because I was founder-president of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP). He had an intense dislike for the foreign press which reported as it pleased, which he sought to control but could not.

But the few times we did fall into intimate conversation, it was sheer delight. The man was formidably read, could quote Napoleon, Nelson, Tennyson, some of the great classical poets. And his memory was phenomenal. The battles of Bataan were writ in stone in his mind, because he was there as a young lieutenant. Every nook and cranny of the battlefields of Bataan came to life. He could not of course talk about the Battle of Besang Pass of which he claimed to be a veteran. There is no authority alive of that battle who can authenticate his presence at Besang Pass. I fought at Besang Pass as a wet-at-the-ears guerrilla and survived to tell the tale.

But there had to be a Ferdinand Marcos. Without him, there never would have been a Ninoy Aquino.

They were political Siamese twins, useless one without the other. Ninoy was only too happy when President Marcos took notice of him, branded him a communist sympathizer, later on virtually an NPA commander. Ninoy, ever the astute cunning matador, prodded the president to further snort fire at him as a communist, which he was not, was never. And so emerged the battle between the two most prodigiously endowed Filipino politicians that ever lived. And what a socko duel it was!

Ninoy died a martyr in 1983, asprawl on an airport tarmac. Marcos died in Honolulu hospital in 1989, a total physical and political wreck.

* * *

All that nonsense on charter change (Cha-Cha) must stop forthwith. It is an imposition on the nation’s time, the nation’s patience, the nation’s sensibility, the nation’s coffers. Maybe later on after the 2004 presidential elections but not this time. The two top priorities should be clean and honest elections more than a year hence and feeding the poor. What doth it profit us if we have charter change and yet we have elections that have more twists and turns than a corkscrew? And our poor looking at their empty plates like Picasso’s wretched proletariat. Soon, the government must set up soup kitchens to alleviate their hunger.

The House might be hitting the brass gongs in anticipation of charter change through both houses of Congress transforming themselves into a Constituent Assembly. Well, the Senate, which has a loftier vision of politics, is in no such hurry. Senate President Franklin Drilon hit it right on the nail when he said: "The country is facing more pressing problems and it would be irresponsible for the Senate and the House to focus their attention on amending the Constitution instead of exerting efforts to improve the lives of Filipinos."

Sen. Loren Legarda similarly weighed in when she said: "Any charter change at this time will be politically divisive. The country is experiencing an economic slump and what we need now is unity, not division." Sen. Juan Flavier, ditto: "This is not really the right time to even change the form of government."

What we Filipinos have to watch for is the impending war in Iraq. Our latest information is that the US invasion (by land, sea and air) could be launched the end of this January. The last ace of peace as mandated by the United Nations Resolution 1441 was for UN inspectors to spread out all over Iraq to find out if, indeed, Saddam Hussein had manufactured a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and flush these weapons out from their hiding places.

So far, the inspectors have not found anything.

The whole thing is beginning to grate. The US government claims massive deception is involved because American intelligence has solid proof such weapons (chemical, bacteriological, perhaps even nuclear) were in the works. And since deception is there for all to see, the US claims, Washington now has the right to disarm (read: invade) Iraq. Saddam Hussein for his part claims the inspectors are not really all that interested in ferreting out the weapons. They are in Iraq, he adds, because many of them are really spies and not scientists.

Meanwhile, the mightiest war machine ever assembled is now in place, now ready to invade Iraq at a moment’s notice.

I really do not buy all of America’s ideological claim the US is out to destroy a threat to world humanity by crushing and occupying Iraq. Maybe, There is the added intention to democratize Iraq, make it a model for the Middle East as it absorbs American values – hah! – the American way of life. Let us be blunt. America is also out to claim ownership of Iraq’s oil whose output is the second largest in the world, next to Saudi Arabia. But make no mistake about it. Saddam Hussein will put all of Iraq’s oil wells to the torch, deny present capacity to America although eventually the US will repair the damage.

Once producing more than two-thirds of the world’s oil, America today imports 60 percent of its oil needs, the majority from the Middle East. Come the year 2020, the current estimate is America will import 90 percent of its oil, given current consumption and the rapid growth of US industry, its millions of gas-guzzling cars, the plethora of turbines that underpin every factory. And in times of war and preparation for war, the oceans of oil poured into US’s ships, submarines, planes, tanks, motorized infantries.

Without oil from abroad, America dies.

And if the war in Iraq is not a short war – at most two months – its economic ravages will affect the whole world, the Philippines of course included. So it is absolutely preposterous that a group of prehistoric – and yes prehensile (look that up in the dictionary) – Filipino politicians can only think of charter change in the kind of jabbering language common to anthropoids.

Ungga, ungga.

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