‘They robbed us of our finest hour’

It’s interesting that – aside from Medicare – one of the hot issues building up in the campaign for the American Presidency (elections are still eight months away) – is the Bush economy’s failure to generate jobs.

True, another thorn in President George W. Bush’s side is Iraq, and foreign and military policy in general, including the palpak of not having found WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction).

But it’s still "the economy, stupid" as in the time of his father. You see, with his father, George Herbert Walker Bush having been only a one-term President, Dubya faces the same fear of the "family curse" as Gloria. Daddy H. W. B. had emerged from leading America triumphantly into Kuwait and Iraq in the Gulf War of 1990-91 an "unbeatable" wartime President, only to be trounced a few months later by that draft-dodging upstart from Little Rock, Arkansas, Governor Bill Clinton.

Here is Dubya, once again a victorious "wartime" President – seemingly invincible last May 1, 2003, when he had stood on the heaving deck of a US aircraft carrier steaming home from victory in the same Gulf, proclaiming the "war over". But now, challenged by the emerging Democratic Party contender, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, he’s reeling from issues raised on the home front.

Kerry – after rolling up nine of the ten states holding primaries last "Super Tuesday" (March 2) including vote-and-delegate-rich California (370 electoral college votes), New York (246) and Ohio (140) – is obviously the Democratic Party’s choice to slug it out with the Republic Defending Champ. He’s already zeroed in on the jobs issue. He pledges he will compel companies planning to shift jobs overseas to give workers a three-month warning, and not surprise their employees with a sudden "pink slip" in place of a pay check or pay envelop.

Kerry’s opening salvo, the moment his 9-state sweep assured him of the opposition party’s nomination, was almost by rote: "The Bush administration has run the most inept, reckless, arrogant and ideological foreign policy in the modern history of any country!"

One thing can be said of Kerry, who’s a decorated Vietnam War veteran, and is described by GQ Magazine as "tall, and athletic, with a face wrinkled from a lifetime of smiling". He’s beginning to look Presidential, more so in a suit, but even in casual mode, where he projects "landed gentry". As GQ puts it: "On a good day he looks like Ted Danson and on a bad day he looks like a clean-shaved Abe Lincoln."

The one thing that impressed me most, I think, was Kerry’s courage of conviction (although he flip-flopped on many issues, as Dubya and his spinmeisters are already pointing out about Kerry’s two decades on Capitol Hill). This was demonstrated to this writer when I spotted last Thursday’s issue of the Financial Times, the London daily circulated worldwide.

Kerry, "a practicing Catholic", was photographed by Getty "leaving St. John’s Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio, with an ash cross on his forehead to mark Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent."

Before the late John F. Kennedy had broken the ice and proved that a Catholic President (JFK had won by a razor’s edge) didn’t take "dictation" from the Vatican, that single photo might have cost Kerry the election.

Now Kerry is being greaved, and his armor being strapped on, as he moves into the arena of gladiatorial combat for the November Presidential elections. Dubya, for all the rust on his shield, and his worry-warts showing, is still the man to beat. He wraps himself in the flag and says to his foes: "Shoot me, and you shoot the flag."

Are there enough suicide-bombers in the Democratic Party to undertake that mission?

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Speaking of Ash Wednesday, I was surprised when I went to Hong Kong the other Sunday (February 29) to find our OFWs there going around, or assembling in the usual places, like Statue Square and the Star Ferry Landing, with ash on their foreheads. Then it dawned on me. Most of our Catholic workers, out of the 120,000 in Hong Kong, had been unable to get out of work during a weekday, Ash Wednesday. So our churches made the following Sunday, "Ash Wednesday". Their devotion was touching.

Incidentally, there are an estimated 7,000 El Shaddai members in HK and about 5,000 Jesus is Lord (JIL). However, when candidate Brother Eddie Villanueva went there recently to conduct a prayer-rally, no less than 15,000 had packed the stadium. Walking around Pacific Place, by the way, I was accosted by three girls, obviously JIL volunteers. They handed me one of those ubiquitous Brother Eddie leaflets, which proclaim: Maniwala ka! Babangon tayo! (Believe! We will rise!) You’ve got to give them kudos, those volunteers, for their persistence and enthusiasm.

I’m still waiting, though, for Brother Eddie to rise in the poll surveys, from his steady 1.8 percent.

* * *

That was a graceful article written by our former STAR editor-in-chief, Ramon J. Farolan, in the Inquirer the other day. My cousin Ramon had published a wonderful letter written by the late Senator Tomas L. Cabili, a Christian leader who had represented a mixed Christian-Muslim population constituency, in the province of Lanao.

Cabili had died in that terrible plane crash with Ramon Magsaysay.

Nowadays almost everyone remembers the name Cabili owing to the fact that his son Camilo was mayor of his hometown of Iligan City for almost 30 years. As for the letter, advising his daughter on how to make the most of her studies in America in 1956, it has been addressed to Maymuna, now Mrs. Apolonio Bautista.

We knew Tomas Cabili in our family only because he had been a friend of my late father. Both had served together in the pre-war National Assembly (the equivalent of Senator in the unicameral legislature). Cabili had been Lanao’s lone delegate to the 1936 Constitutional Convention.

Both were patriotic men who volunteered to fight when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, then invaded us. My father went to Bataan as a major, endured the Death March, spent five months in Camp O’Donnell prisoner-of-war camp – then died of malaria. Cabili valiantly fought in his native Mindanao as a guerrilla officer, I think along with the Wendell Fertig command. After Liberation, he was elected to the Senate where his obsession was, along with his friend, President Magsaysay, rural deve-lopment. (Magsaysay, too, had been a guerrillero in Zambales).

Mon Farolan’s publication of Tom Cabilis’ wise letter to his daughter, so full of love and brimming with tips on how to get what was best out of an American education, is so demonstrative of the kind of Filipino leaders we had at that time. They loved our country and our people, but were not averse to learning, too, how things were done abroad.

What the fine column of Mon’s left out, probably no one had told him, was how the gallant Tomas Cabili, home from years of guerrilla combat, angrily reacted when he learned that the American government had decided to give the men and women who fought the Japanese in the guerrilla movement "military back pay".

Cabili was disappointed. He had felt that every guerrilla and resistance fighter had volunteered to fight, and undergo privation and suffering, because of love of country and a sense of patriotic duty – not for pay. "When the Americans began giving backpay to our guerrillas," Cabili groaned later, "they robbed us of our finest hour."

Indubitably, the Americans had good intentions. Doubtless, with one million dead, Manila 80 percent destroyed, the country ravaged, Filipinos desperately needed financial help. But what Cabili mourned, I submit, was the loss of the purity of purpose which had motivated Filipinos to resist the invader, the enemy occupation, and face death and torture, in pursuit of the regaining of our freedom and the upholding of our national ideals. Cabili, perhaps, was too idealistic. But it brings a tear to the eye to remember that there was once a generation of Filipinos who were ready to give everything of themselves, without counting the cost.

US "backpay", of course, spawned legions of "fake" guerrillas. Thousands who had never fought, or had even been collaborators with the Japanese, rushed to be "enrolled" in fake guerrilla battalions, and went about town strutting around in undeserved uniforms. They gleefully took the money. The Americans, realizing what was going on, sneered at us as a money-grabbing nation of fakers and counterfeit "heroes".

Yet, millions of Filipinos had been like Tomas Cabili. When the bugle sounded, thousands of teenage ROTC cadets from many schools, such as the Ateneo cadet corps (almost all of whom volunteered to rush to Bataan), presented themselves – leaving behind weeping families – to be counted. Many of these kids perished in the fight. We will forever be grateful for, and salute their bravery.

Is the Filipino selfish and materialistic? War brings out the best and the worst. The Pacific War brought out the best of many of Cabili’s generation. When will we have such a generation again?

My late mother, Pelagia Villaflor-Soliven, widow of a Bataaner, had also been engaged in the underground movement in Ilocos Sur. After "Liberation" she had been awarded military "back pay" from the American government. She found that somebody else had faked her signature and collected the money – the money a war-widow so badly needed for her nine orphaned children.

As her eldest son, I had accompanied Mama to the paymaster’s office and was very angry and indignant about Mama having been "robbed".

She, on the other hand, took it very calmly. She said: "Don’t let it get you down, Son. Perhaps that person needed the money more. And besides – never forget – you don’t put a price tag on what you do for your country."

Never forget. That’s what Mama said.