Force vs object / Remembering Manapat

Irresistible Force vs. Immovable Object. That’s how the campaign is shaping up for the May 10 elections. And everybody is just about riveted to the presidential brawl between FPJ (Fernando Poe Jr.) and GMA (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo). Right now, FPJ seems to be unstoppable. Da King came in like a cannon ball, and now he is hurtling like a Cruise missile headed for Malacañang. And God help anybody who tries to deflect his course. President Arroyo is enscoused in the Palace like a female Gibraltar. Impervious it seems to any force or element human or otherwise seeking to dislodge her.

It’s gonna be a knockout and dragout fight. You bet.

In the process, Raul Roco, Ping Lacson and Brother Villanueva have been unceremoniously elbowed aside. They just don’t have the resources of firepower to mount this kind of battle, never did have any in the first place. The only event, it seems, that can cast a healing hand on the whole shebang is a Supreme Court decision. But even that may just be temporary. There are other formidable land mines along the way, to be detonated by either Malacañang or the opposition when the time is ripe. And there you could have the beginnings of Armageddon.

It’s really ugly, these elections.

Some suggest that FPJ should voluntarily withdraw. But I doubt that he will. Or his janissaries, led by Juan Ponce Enrile and Gringo Honasan, not to mention Ernie Maceda, will allow him. There’s too much at stake here. Fortunes in the billions of pesos, if not dollars. Power. He or she who possesses the presidency possesses the power to move the nation this or that way. And every snap of the finger is a flip of the magician’s top hat that can store fortunes in a bank vault. Or kill off an enemy or enemies.

And neither, I think, will GMA withdraw. She has tasted power and so has her husband Mike Arroyo. The trappings of power can easily intoxicate any president. That is why Ferdinand Marcos declared martial rule September 1972 and stayed on till 1986 till the massed throngs of EDSA bellowed the cry that scared him and prompted US president Ronald Reagan to tell Macoy to go. That is why until now Joseph Estrada still thinks he is president of the Philippines. If not the reality. Why not the illusion?

Presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye, of course, sleep-walks when he says: "What is important is, let’s look forward to the holding of clean, honest and orderly elections."

Clean? Honest? Orderly? The guy nuts? The coming elections, methinks, will be the dirtiest in our history, the most dishonest and disorderly. It’s like seeking to calm the maelstrom, or behead a tornado, or dissipate the headwinds of a five-alarm typhoon. That’s just what I’m afraid of. The elections could trigger a social explosion, an explosion that since the days of Ferdinand Marcos had threatened to erupt but never did.

EDSA I and Edsa II were not social explosions. They were, at best, the top of a volcano’s crater showing off, regurgitating preliminary smoke and fire. But they never really spewed out the deadly load underneath that could devastate entire towns, villages and even cities. The two EDSAs simply slid and tightened the noose around the necks of Presidents Marcos and Estrada, then jerked them out of Malacañang. Only them.

The same system remained. In no time at all, the same crooks, the same vultures, thieves, criminals, rascals and rapscallions were back. The same Congress, the same judiciary, the same smell, the same stink. Hardly anybody landed on jail. Just look at the Marcoses, Imelda, Imee and the rest of the family. They are having a lark. They are back in power. Although the pater is there no more, the deadly Ferdie who during his time twirled the Philippines round his imperial and imperious forefinger.

I will stop here. I will not second guess what will happen the next few days, the next few weeks, the next few months. Not today, anyway.

I will just say as a writer that I have been around for more than half a century, and my sense of smell and my sense of foreboding are better than ever.

* * *

I used to know him, Ricardo Manapat. At the time, he was not yet Ric the Gruesome Geek but Ric the beau ideal with the beau geste. Was that way back in early 1991? Father Blanco, SJ, I think it was who phoned me, asking if I would like to meet his protégé. I said, of course, yes, Manapat’s name was then already going around as a fighter as fighters were during the days of the Katipunan, the days of the French Enlightenment. But he was not publicly visible yet.

We met at a back table of the Aristocrat Restaurant near Malate Church. There was the reverend, another activist girl and Ric Manapat, of course. He was physically diminutive. But from the word go, his mind, his brains, his intellectual reflexes were of the finest Toledo steel. His book Some Are Smarter than Others was, I was made to understand, about ten years in the making.

Ric was that rare creature – a scholar. The book was a tour de force of research. It was the product of a mind that could blow canvases into masterpieces of form, color and volume. He had roamed Europe, could speak French, Spanish, Italian. And so our minds easily conjugated. I was an intellectual wino in Paris for four years. I could have sworn at times during our meeting he was a monk. Ric Manapat looked so innocent, but so fierce, the future a huge moral battlefield in his mind.

Some Are Smarter Than Others was a treasure trove. It was a searing indictment of the elite, the Marcoses particularly, the Cojuangcos, their many sins, their thievery, their flouting of everything that was honest, clean, decent. I extracted profusely from Manapat’s book and wrote column after column at the time. I figured here was a man I could get along with very well, and I looked forward to more meetings with him.

But that was not to be.

The first thing I sought was adequate security for him. Ric Manapat could easily be a target of the opposition then, bumped off easily in the night, or salvaged. I called up friends in power or close to power. I got a rude, sudden jolt. I found out that his security had already been taken care of by Gen. Joe Almonte, and close by were Tony Carpio and Tony Abaya, close confidantes of former president Fidel Ramos. Sooooo.

It didn’t take long to figure that out. FVR was running for the presidency in 1992. He was up against Imelda Marcos and Danding Cojuangco. Ric Manapat and his book Some Are Smarter Than Others were the perfect propaganda foil. General Almonte and his smarties, led then by Tony Carpio, had done their homework well. What I didn’t know was whether Ric Manapat could maintain his idealism or be swallowed by the FVR nomenklatura.

Sad to say, I think, Ric Mapanat eventually got lured into Joe Almonte’s spider web. In no time, his hand was visible behind the Smart Files or the Crocodile Files, small grenade bursts against the enemies of those in power. With FVR in power, General Joe Almonte had won his bet. He had Ric Manapat in tow. Poor Fred Lim. He didn’t know what hit him when the same National Archives set him up as a Chinese national, therefore a constitutional impostor running for the presidency.

Now that I look at Ric on television and with all that controversy raging around him, it is hard to believe this was the same Ric Manapat I met in 1991.

He has taken a leave of absence from the National Archives. They say the truth is that Ric Manapat has so compromised himself that Malacañang had to ease him out. Or is that part of the stratagem? Is Ric just the fall guy set up to absorb the first opposition blast? Know something? Those three employees of the National Archives may be opposition sleepers. How could that trio be so brave, so intrepid, so foolhardy as to bang Ric Manapat, accuse him of forgery, risk their jobs in broad daylight? That thing just doesn’t happen.

Minor bureaucrats just cower, don’t say anything.

And don’t tell me either that Manapat’s accusers on high like Senators Tito Sotto, Ed Angara, Juan Ponce Enrile, Ernie Maceda, Estelito Mendoza, are archangels divine, of the purest ray serene. They ain’t. And everybody knows that. This is FPJ’s weakest point: that he is being defended by relics and recidivists from the past who are now using him to get back to power. Anyway, in due time the Supreme Court will pronounce sentence.

And it is everybody’s hope, this will roll back the political tidal waves now threatening to engulf the nation.