Operetta all over again / Latest presidential ratings

There’s one thing about us Filipinos. We are the bullfrogs in the marshes croaking mightily about everything that blights our existence. Our leadership gets into action pronto with verbal might and main. Aux armes! They paint the walls with charcoal anger, with livid promises "thy will be done!" They don the armor of war. There is sound, there is fury. The president leaps into the fray. The TV cameras whir. Our men of the law get going. And almost everywhere you see the police fling their dragnet with smoking vendetta language. As is the case now where the "all-out war" against drugs led by the police stomps everything else.

Know what? Ninety-five percent is illusion.

That police dragnet only manages to haul in low-lifers, seedy neighborhood thugs, hoi-polloi end-users, the usual istambays, the usual suspects, the riffraff, the creeps, the cellar-dwellers of the underworld. Know what again? The elite upscale gated communities, like Ayala-Alabang, Dasmariñas, Green Meadows, Corinthian, Wack Wack, yes including Forbes Park are not touched at all. Do not tell me the youth, the scions of the high and the mighty, do not gorge on shabu, ecstasy or sniff marijuana. They do. And prodigally so. But as we said, they are high and they are mighty.

Know what still? The police dragnet "pretends" to also haul in case-loads of shabu by the tens, if not the hundreds, of kilos. But we know we shall never see these caseloads of shabu again. They will never be burned or destroyed in public. They will simply be recycled by the police. If not, whatever happened to the huge hauls of shabu by the tons these past two years? In police custody to be used as evidence? Come now, mynheers of the PNP, come clean. You appropriated them, you remarketed them, that’s what. And stuffed the proceeds in your doctored bank accounts.

And, of course, we all know no big, no really big drug lord will ever be arrested and arraigned. And neither will his protector or confederate, the powerful public official, Chinese-Filipino biggie, senator, congressman, governor, Malacañang habitué, ever land in the clink. All that presidential blankety-blank that the "rich and the mighty" this time will not be spared remains that – pious blankety-blank. I really don’t know why GMA readily and even perhaps purposely lends herself to this shoddy, sickening, shameless operetta. But she does and seems to be enjoying it.

It’s an operetta the Filipino people are made to go through again and again. Jueteng is even more flourishing today.

And this journalist over a period of half a century has witnessed this operetta. And I wonder what is it in our culture that indulges this operetta, why is it we don’t wax indignant and outraged, why we do not even vent this national shame in the streets. In other East and Southeast Asian countries, drugs are Enemy No. One. In Thailand alone, as we reportedly very recently in this space, the war on drugs in just about two months physically exterminated (yes, that’s the word) about 3000 drug lords and their criminal buddies. Thailand today is virtually drug-free.

In other countries like Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Taiwan – whatever claims they might have to democracy – narcotics suspects be they British tourists or American journeymen are arrested on the spot without arrest warrants. They are kicked into jail where they rot for months even years. Often, when the evidence warrants, the hangman’s noose descends on their necks. It doesn’t really matter if Tony Blair or George W. Bush intercedes mightily in their behalf. They hang.

They die because their society wills them to die for a grievous crime. And nobody ever invokes the hallowed Western legal tradition of due process of law. Here? As we said earlier, we Filipinos are specialists in operetta. In stretching due process of law to a criminal art.

And that is why not a single member of the notorious Marcos family has gone to jail, jueteng’s known and visible overload for decades remains scot-free, retired police generals with doctorates in high hooliganism reside in mansions, a cluster of businessmen who have hoarded illicit billions by not paying their taxes live it up like the crooked pharaohs of old, why Joseph Estrada might yet beat the plunder rap against him, why his prison remains the elite habitation of Veterans Memorial Hospital when he should be in an ordinary jail with prison bars and stinking latrines. And why oh why does Imee Marcos behave like celebrity, is treated like celebrity when her kind should shut up and disappear and nevermore, like the Raven, darken our chamber door?

Maybe we complain too much? Maybe we are too much of a pessimist? Maybe we see the glass half-empty and never half-full?

Hell, no. If our direst predictions about our country have come true, there is nothing wrong with me and my kind. There is everything wrong about us Filipinos and the sooner we admit it, the better for everybody. The president keeps talking about a "strong republic" as if this republic is already there for the taking. Well, it’s not. A strong republic presupposes the existence of a strong and united citizenry. Strong we ain’t and united we ain’t. The Philippines remains the basket case of Asia, unwept by the rest of the world, unhonored and unsung.

Solid proof, if further proof, is needed is the current five-alarm "total" war on drugs. We know that in the end, it will amount to nothing. Only the small fish will land in the government’s dragnet. Not a single police general will ever be kicked into the calaboose, not a single big, really big drug lord, not a single senator or congressman, or Malacañang overlord, not a single big smuggler. We’ve seen all of that before, over the decades, over the generations.

It’s sad, really sad. We Filipinos are a people meant or destined for some sort of greatness. Why not? We are a talented people, gifted, with all the promise or potential in the world. But we do not have will power. We don’t have tenacity and driving ambition. And, worst of all mayhaps, we have no love of country, the yeast that makes for national success. The Chinese have, the Japanese have, the Koreans have, the Indians have, the Malaysians have, the Vietnamese have. Even the Tibetans.

They peer at the future, and they have a vision. Filipinos work and even perhaps excel when they work abroad. Because the work-oriented culture and discipline abroad compels them to. Here, the breeze, somnolent culture of an archipelagic nation envelops them into some kind of bucolic hula hoop fog. They seek to drive out the mists by singing and praying and dancing. This is not the kind of energy that leads to nation-building.

In the end, it‘s nationalism that counts.

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We just finished a mini-essay on our culture. What we wrote has been borne out by the latest Social Weather Station (SWS) survey. Who’s in the lead? Somebody no educated Filipino would have touched with a ten-foot pole just over two years ago. He’s Sen. Noli de Castro, broadcaster non pareil whose main contribution to Filipino culture in his stentorian-sounding, corrida- "Magandang Gabi, Bayan!"

No offense meant, Noli. But you yourself even in your palmiest years never imagined you would one day top the senatorial elections, and today soar to the top of the flagpole as the Filipino most likely to win the Presidency if elections were held today. At least, you admit you have been overwhelmed by your unexpected political popularity. And yes, you have the becoming modesty to acknowledge that as of today you are totally unfit for the presidency, that you have to work at it, that your English is passable at high school level and won’t click in college and university. The presidency? The hees and the haws have it.

So you have 22 percent in the SWS survey, Roco 19 percent, and movie star Fernando Poe Jr. 19, Sen. Panfilo Lacson 12.

But since Noli de Castro pledges he is not running for the presidency in 2004, the field narrows down now to Raul Roco and Ping Lacson. I strongly doubt Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco will throw his sombrero. I strongly believe however that GMA will renounce her Dec. 30, 2002 renouncement and run as fast as her legs can carry her to the 2004 presidential elections. Barring the entry of a powerful dark horse, the ruling Lakas-CMD has two options. The first option is anoint GMA as its presidential standard-bearer. Its second option remains Con-Ass (Constituent Assembly).

The ultimate specialist in the Sneak Punch, the leaders of Lakas-CMD can topple the present majority in the Senate led by Franklin Drilon and provide Senate backing for Con-Ass. Or it doesn’t have to topple. Again using Pendergast illusionist tactics, it may already have infiltrated the Senate majority for the additional two votes required for both chambers to go into overdrive.

And voila, the Constituent Assembly. Terms will be extended. GMA remains president as Congress switches to parliamentary. Kabeez?