Folly, folly everywhere

Almost everything in the so-called Makati Mutiny makes for a twisted movie extravaganza like Zorba the Greek. Gaudy military ambition there was aplenty, political greed and manipulation, an ex-president fingered as the Mr. Moneybags, his buxom mistress thrown in as an accomplice, an ex-colonel now senator in hiding ridiculously booming his innocence, a handsome army lieutenant who would have replaced Gringo as rebel poster boy now under arrest, blood-letting rituals for an under armpit tattoo, red flags and armbands redolent of Emilio Aguinaldo’s Magdalo, arms galore, bombs galore, an overall coup d’etat operation called Andres, the plush Oakland Hotel in Makati for background, plans to assassinate President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, takeover of Malacañang – bingo! – the whole works.

The only thing missing was blood. Not a shot was fired. After 19 hours, the mutineers returned abashedly to barracks like a reverse Pied Piper of Hamelin. And now they face trial in the military courts and the state’s court of justice. Do you laugh or do you cry?

Now, I ask you. Don’t you find the whole thing weird? I find the whole thing clumsy, misbegotten and stupid, an operetta that never took off, bungled from the very beginning, leaving clues everywhere. It was a road to Tipperary littered with tell-tale evidence. Yoo-hoo, it’s me, all over the place. It was a fist-fighter telegraphing an uppercut, a damsel coquettishly throwing down her perfumed handkerchief for the smitten swain to pick up. And so the mutineers were caught en flagrante delicto and basso profundo. Why, oh why, were they so heavy-handed, so amateurish, so ungainly?

It was a road to folly as almost all our roads from the very outset led to folly. We never learn. And maybe that’s our tragedy as a people. Everything is déjà vu. You've seen one. You’ve seen them all. We do not know how to create, to innovate, to invent, to devise, to set up new building blocks. Does it have to be Gringo all the time?

How many times have the so-called young revolutionary military rebels rebelled? With RAM as their coat-of-arms, with Gringo Honasan as their tarry hooting Richard the Lion-Hearted, they tried four, five, six times in 1987 and 1989. Every attempted coup was a dismal failure. That was fourteen years ago and that should have been the end. They should have learned their lesson. To try again would be folly. And so it was sheer, unadulterated, execrable folly when they called themselves "The New Heroes" for "The Last Revolution" and marched in the night of July 26-27 to Oakwood. And we were pinched 19 hours afterward like the Deadend Kids.

We go back in history and uncover follies of greater and more tragic or ridiculous scope.

Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack Dec. 9, 1939 was folly of the first water. Did the descendants of Jimmu Tenno really think they could vanquish the emerging superpower that was America? France’s Maginot Line erected on its eastern flank immediately prior to World War II was folly. All the German Wehrmacht did was smash through Belgium and the Maginot Line collapsed like a detached panty hose. America’s entry into the Vietnam War replacing France was folly. The colonial period was over and the US, taking over the colonial chores from France, soon realized it was up against a historical whirlwind of the world’s colonized countries banging the door to imperium.

The German invasion of Russia leading to Moscow in World War II was folly. The greatest conqueror of contemporary history, Napoleon Bonaparte, could only faintly knock at the door of Moscow before he was blown off by Ivan and the ruthless Russian winter. Others before Napoleon also tried. The greatest folly of course, or one of the greatest, was the incineration of six million Jews in the gas chambers of Dachau and Bertchesarden, among others. Adolf Hitler called it the "final solution". It was no solution at all. Hitler died the same kind of death. On his orders as the Russian armies advanced on Berlin, Der Fuehrer twisted grotesquely on a suicide pyre that blistered his body to bare bones.

Folly, it seems, has characterized our errant march since the end of World War II.

We could have taken the best out of Spanish culture, a silvery seepage of Christianity of the purest ray serene. We could have also taken out the adventure, the community passion for town and city projects, often the search for the best and the brightest. Our folly? We got the trappings of a crazy convent when we should have imbibed the good, communal works of collective Christianity. We got the iridescent lure of the promise of paradise to make up for the wretchedness of earthly life. Those were follies of the first cut, and we have them until today.

And if we turn to Tacitus, paramount among the forces affecting "political folly" is "lust of power . . . the most flagrant of all the passions." We Filipinos have that in stupendous abundance.

President Ferdinand Marcos’ proclamation of martial rule Sept. 21, 1972, was folly. Maybe his marriage to Imelda Marcos, when you look back, is folly. If he had married an Ilocana, the future of the Philippines would have been different. The Ilocana would have been thrifty, prudent, simple with no excessive appetites for diamonds, jewelry, opulent buildings and mausoleums, heart and cultural centers so dear to the heart of the Rose of Leyte. No lyrical lust for Dahil sa Iyo.

And, yes, Marcos’ arrest and imprisonment of Ninoy Aquino was absolute folly.

He could have left Ninoy alone, ignored him, after all the dictator owned or completely controlled media. Instead, he made a hero out of Ninoy, a martyr. He thought the arrest and imprisonment of Ninoy was the greatest thing he ever did. It was error, a big, blunder that eventually haunted him, sending him off packing to Honolulu where not all his fabulous stolen riches could save him from the most painful deaths – chilling expiry by lupus erythematosus. Marcos could have saved the day. He could have transformed the republic from lambent seaweed to steel. Instead he chose to plunder. And lost the opportunity to become the greatest Philippine president. Folly.

What else was folly?

Joseph Estrada’s running for the presidency in 1998 was folly. And the greater folly was that the electorate voted him to Malacañang. While inside, he committed folly after folly. And, believe you me, Erap para sa mahirap was wretched folly. He could have cut his losses but didn’t. And that was his greater folly. When you come to think of it, Erap’s electoral triumph in 1998 showed a nation that was a caricature of folly. But then that was the way we were. We Filipinos had not learned anything. We rode the same bucking, lurching horse and got thrown off.

Come to think of it, elections. We hold them every four or every six or even every two years. They never really amounted to anything. And yet it was and is our great folly that we held them again and again, knowing beforehand we were voting to power some of the biggest thieves, charlatans and phonies in our history. Lee Kuan Yew repeatedly saw us doing this and wondered what species of people were we. Placing folly on a pedestal.

And then again, our so-called enlightened elite.

Educated here, educated in Yale, Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Fordham. They should have known better. Posted in the highest reaches of Philippine society, theirs was and remains the asinine, unforgivable folly of not reforming or improving anything, unfazed by the wisdom of the Homeric gods they encountered abroad in their studies. They should have been the pioneers of reform. They should have cried themselves as river on their return from abroad, seeing the Philippines awash in poverty. Folly. Terrible folly. Unforgivable folly.

Is folly really the worst of diseases? Do power, do money, do celebrity smash the human heart, scrape the soul clean?

What is it about the Philippines that folly touches the native and he or she deceives more, lies more, prevaricates more, cheats more than most people in East and Southeast Asia? Of course, we can never fully eradicate folly. "If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us," Samuel Coleridge exclaimed. "But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us."

How true, how true.

Another great folly. Why cannot our leaders admit they have made mistakes, great mistakes actually, so we get the true picture, start all over again, but this time take to higher ground, and feel the whistle of the high winds? It’s always "The situation is under control", "Don’t worry, our fundamentals are sound", "The economy is okay, it’s coming up roses", "We’ll get al-Ghozi, don’t you worry", "Relax, everything has returned to normal".

Meanwhile we are all on our knees – bleeding. La folie tout entiere.