Blas Ople, once more / Captured like a rat

It was Ruben Alabastro of Reuters who came closest to depicting Blas Ople. He described the departed foreign secretary as a "colorful journalist" who soared to the status of a spectacular "political chameleon". That indeed was Blas Ople but in bigger, bolder letters. I knew the man well. We grew up together as green-at-the-gills cub reporters before hitting the high road as serious commentators out to set the world of journalism afire. Great dreamers we were. And the world of knowledge was our oysters.

From the outset, Blas courted left-wing ideology with intense concentration. But not much time passed either before he also sought the corridors of power. That was what was uncanny about him. He loved to match his intellectual prowess with holders of power who always inclined to right and the ultra conservative. That probably explains why Ople could pour his wine with impunity on the tables of the mighty. He served as intellectual adviser of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos for 14 years, largely as labor minister.

Ople not only lived to tell the tale.

In no time at all, he knocked at the door of President Corazon Aquino and found himself welcome. He had a gift for portentous language. Almost everything about Blas was portentous. His height, his size, his voice. His prose was portentous, only occasionally piquant. He had what few journalists have today, literary flair.

Blas had devoured huge portions of the literary classics before putting them at the service of his political philosophy, which started at the left, then swung gradually, irreversibly – and astoundingly – to the right.

When he started, Blas Ople was intimidatingly and eloquently anti-American. At the last stage of his career, when he died "with his boots on" as foreign secretary, the man was intimidatingly and eloquently pro-American. What does that make of him? A chameleon as Ruben Alabastro’s death opus asserts? Or an opportunist as his critics aver? Or a pragmatist as his pro-American admirers today claim?

One of his severest critics was Amando Doronila, who started his journalistic journey at the same time we did. With the same nationalistic baggage. And fervor.

And they had a rap, he and Doro. They had a bruising verbal wrangle when Blas was appointed foreign affairs secretary by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Doro gave it to Blas in spades. Blas countered that Doro was jealous because he (Ople) reached ground Doro could never reach. Blas’s counter, eloquent as it was, lost some luster because he bought full-page advertising space.

But may be we should write about the young Blas Ople very few people know about.

Not the tippler, not the drinker whose bouts with the bottle were legend. Almost everybody knows about that. The young reporter who worked many years with the Daily Mirror lived a very colorful life. At times, when inebriated, Blas would saunter to a rotonda and there direct traffic. There were few traffic lights then. And Blas had a ball. Suddenly, he had the power to command cars to stop, to turn left, turn right, move on, and he lapped it up with dramatic arm and hand signals. Until the police, earlier delighted, politely requested him to give way.

And then there was the Blas who slept on park or street benches.

Not that he wanted to. It was just that he had one too many and sought the nearest public bench to rest, perforce to sleep, and as the poet said, perforce to dream. The young reporter must have been a sight in his ruffled clothes and ruffled hair. He recovered first the guttural in his voice, then the argumentative, then the stentorian, as he wended his way back home. And yet for all the fury of his intellectual character, Blas was never one to engage anybody in fisticuffs. He would shy away when he felt physical trouble was coming.

Once, he falled to send in his story to the Daily Mirror desk. What his assignment then was I do not know or remember. Manuel Villareal, the legendary Don Manolo, whose word was law at the paper, was fit to be tied. When he learned that Blas Ople had arrived, Don Manolo bellowed Ople! Ople! Ople! as to shake the rafters of the Mirror editorial office.

Obviously in his cups, Blas Ople pulled out his pistol, aimed at the ceiling. And several shots exploded. Pandemonium broke out. Ople should have been fired, but wasn’t. He was too good as reporter to waste. Don Manolo, despite his runaway Castilian temper, forgave Blas his trespass.

Blas was one of the Joe Lansang boys. Hardly anybody remembers Joe Lansang anymore. He remains one of the Philippines’ great editors, with a great mind, a great pen, a great penchant for young scribblers whose idealism he worked on with tremendous intellectual guile and charm.

Joe was an incurable Marxist. He loved to draw us to his intellectual spider web, we the young, still runny-nosed, still to cut our wisdom teeth. Marxism-Leninism was the ultimate intellectual fad then for those who rebelled against the corrupt government of Elpidio Quirino, against "Yankee imperialism", against the "ugly American". This writer too came under the thrall of Joe Lansang and only moved out when another passion took over – a love for France, its language, its Cartesian philosophy, its literature.

One anecdote about Blas remains ingrained in my memory.

He was living it up during the Marcos dictatorship when I sought to interview him. As was his wont, he went into the subject of the interview with a lilt, a river flow of knowledge and eloquence. Then he stopped, almost like an arrow in flight. We were old friends and he probably figured he had to interject something lest this writer misconstrue his verbal flight as full acceptance of the status quo.

He said, of course to my surprise: "You know Teddy, I envy you. You still have all that freedom to write as you please, I don’t have it anymore." I was then a big critic of the dictatorship, writing as I was then for the international media.

Maybe, that was the quintessential Ople. The Ople who loved influence and power at times came into conflict with the Ople who never really, never completely left the seedbed of the Century of the Enlightenment. This was when Voltaire held sway, when Jean Jacques Rousseau, Diderot, and Montesquieu "pondered the imponderables" that led to the French Revolution of 1789. When reason was king. When the Church and the monarchy had to reel because the bourgeoisie was coming into being.

That is the Blas Ople I remember.

* * *

Yes, of course, it was a big, momentous event, the capture of Sadam Hussein. It was not exactly his capture, but the circumstances of his capture that riveted this columnist. The butcher, the ruffian, the merciless tyrant gave up without a fight. He was meek as meek can be, a coward, craven as craven can be. Was this the man who urged all of Iraq to fight the invading Americans to the last man? To uphold the glory of Babylon, to die as brave men do, on their swords? And there he was, climbing out of a spider hole, admiting he was Saddam Hussein, and he was ready to negotiate.

In the first place, although I expected Saddam to be eventually caught, I figured he would die resisting. Or he would die like Adolf Hitler in his steel bunker in mid-Berlin, in a funeral pyre with his mistress Eva Braun, at his given command. Or, like Herman Goehring, he could commit suicide with a pill of cyanide. Or like Mussolini, he would be strung like a pig dead to the world, killed by the guerrillas while fleeing Rome.

But there he was, large as life, even larger, as a huge beard and towering mane consumed his face, eyes peering out like those of a cornered rat. Which he was. Which he remained to the last.

But will the crisis that is Iraq swing to starboard because of Saddam’s capture? The moment will remain a big moment, as will be his trial. But today’s Iraq, with or without Sadam, is a huge boil on the international landscape, its troubles far from over, its conquest and continued occupation by the US a tremendous bone in the throat of a world seeking peace.

Iraq is merely a symbol of international relations gone astray after the end of the Cold War. It is Islam and will remain Islam despite all the efforts of America to transform this Middle East nation into a liberal democracy. Occupied Iraq has become the favorite haunt of international terrorists out to harass, flog, wound and kill American and coalition troops and civilian allies on the ground. And the mightiest nation in the world cannot do anything about it unless it leaves Iraq lock, stock and barrel. Which America is loathe to do.

Yes, that face of a captured Saddam Hussein will haunt the world for a long time. It is the face of a supposed historic past, a flashlight glued to the inside of his cavernous mouth... And yet it hounds the present and intrudes into the future like a bone in its throat. Yes, that flashlight.

The evil is gone. And yet what it has spawned remains.