Guingona joins FPJ: A colossal blunder / After Spain, Philippines?

Teofisto Guingona, so the cards said, was a genteel and kind man, a nationalist to the core, a rare politician of unblemished integrity. He was virtually all alone in this niche, spewing Promethean fire in a world of gathering darkness. He was the first prominent public servant to conceptualize and propose the impeachment of then President Joseph Estrada. And I was there in that small gathering at a friend’s house when he lit the initial matchstick that eventually led to Mr. Estrada‚s downfall.

To follow up, Tito Guingona replicated Emil Zola’s J’accuse in the Senate and cut Erap Estrada to pieces in a passionate, unforgettable diatribe.

He was much better than the Man of La Mancha who tilted with windmills. Guin-gona’s aim was swift and unerring. During the Senate’s impeachment hearings, his was a trumpet call to patriotism, to values that drew strength from the Sermon on the Mount. In a trice, like the king of notorious legend, Estrada was stripped bare and barren, with not even a fig leaf to conceal his privates.

That was the Guingona we all remembered.

He stared down fellow Senator Juan Ponce Enrile who sought to bamboozle him. JPE and fellow senators Francisco Tatad and Miriam Defensor-Santiago took up the cudgels to prop up Erap who peed and couldn’t put up his pants anymore. Oh yes. Tito Guingona, in a subsequent role as vice president of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, stood up almost all alone against the Visiting Forces Agreement. He warned the nation against the perils of opening our doors wide to the re-entry of US combat soldiers in the guise of joint military exercises called Balikatan. Our sovereignty would again be in great jeopardy.

For taking that position, Tito Guingona was unceremoniously and rudely yanked out by GMA as foreign affairs secretary. He stuck to his guns and we were all so proud of him. He was Demosthenes refusing to fall at Thermopylae. No man like Tito Guingona breathed with such consummate passion at the time.

And when the idea of a Third Force started to dribble from the shadows last year, Guingona strode forth to accept the mantle. And he alone at that time deserved that mantle. So he and his consiglieri launched Bangon! which was conceived to find a way out of the darkness, between the extremes of the left and the right, without any resort to violence. Understandably, Bangon! caught fire because it was non-partisan.

And as a final fillip to that nationalist sculpture of Teofisto Guingona, let me recall parts of my column titled "The Guingona factor" August 15 2003. Vide:

"Tito Guingona is never discarded by media and some sectors of public opinion because like that spot in the horizon looming forth, he is getting bigger and bigger. And he is getting bigger because there is a sort of political vacuum that was not there before. There is a nationalist vacuum. By that I mean there is nobody, no group, no meaningful organization that hoists the flag of Filipino nationalism with any kind of towering flare. Guingona, almost all alone, has embodied that flare."

I of course wrote much more than that. Nationalism of the Asian variety was the ideological force that could save the Philippines, rescue it from the class struggle bloodletting of Karl Max and an emerging Bonapartism of the military establishment.

And who would lead us to this future? Teofisto Guingona, of course.

Alas, I was never more wrong, more naïve, more stupid. We who were close to Tito Guingona – or thought we were – began to have the inkling many months ago that he was fidgeting with the idea of throwing his hat into the presidential ring. In fact, he had laid a foundation for that called, I think, Pagbabago. But I personally dismissed it as the last tug of a forgotten love or a vain ambition – the presidency of the republic. The surveys showed he had about as much chance to be the president of the Philippines as Jennifer Lopez embracing sainthood like Mother Teresa.

And when – shockingly – he began to emit noises about the possibility, then remote, he could join the forces of FPJ as adviser, we gave it to him – straight on the kisser.

We warned him he would self-destruct. We argued he would be entering the de-vil’s den. We said FPJ was just the puppet of Erap Estrada, his arch political enemy, the marionette of the cabal of the Marcos dictatorship. If FPJ should ever win, we argued, they, the close-in advisers of the Panday, would take over Malacañang lock, stock and barrel. This was a sinister recipe for national disaster, and Tito Guingona should be the last man to gingerly tweak the tail of Mephistopheles.

And besides, did he ever really think he would wean FPJ away from them? They simply wanted Tito Guingona as a trophy, nothing more, nothing less. In the end, he would wind up as political flotsam, unwept, unhonored and unsung. Stay, we said, stay Tito, the future is where you belong, not the odious past.

Mr. Guingona listened to all these arguments but didn’t falter one bit.

He bade our group goodbye. He set sail into the wild, grey yonder, a kite that would lose no time floundering in the air, shivering in the cross-winds of a presidential election campaign, flopping then very possibly crashing down amidst a pack of hooting hyenas. In FPJ, he told me, he saw an "instrument for change". Hellooo. It was like telling me a husked coconut, bald and mottled and ungainly, concealed the brains of Albert Einstein.

Why? Why did Guingona take this leap into the dark?

Were we all misled? Did we misjudge the man? Was he, in the final analysis, no different from the trapos he himself had denounced? In so many fits of loneliness, of desolation, of alienation from power, did he lack the courage, the conviction to stay put? Many of the great men of history sharpened their consciences in prison isolation, saw the emptiness of power for power’s sake and vainglory. And eventually scrawled their signatures across the sky.

In retrospect, we now see a dimension of Guingona we never saw before.

He had always wanted to be president. If he couldn’t be one, then he had to play a prominent role in the nation’s leadership. GMA consigned Tito to the scrap heap. FPJ offered him a starring role – "adviser on governance and public policy". This flattered Guingona a lot. "It covers everything," he told me. He imagined therefore he would be a Cardinal Richelieu, a Karl Rove in the immediate shadow of George W. Bush, a Chou en-Lai breathing inspiredly on the back of Mao Zedong.

In a sense, both FPJ and Tito Guingona are one. They live in the land of make-believe.

* * *

What happened in Madrid, Spain, just a few days ago, gives me the heebie-jeebies. At the crack of dawn, terrorists struck at several inbound trains, killed over 200 commuters, injured about 2000. This was the greatest havoc of its kind to ever ravage Spain in all its history. And now the entire nation is in mourning, millions of Spaniards pouring out into the streets to mourn their dead, and give vent to their grief, their outrage.

What really happened? Who was behind this tragedy, comparable only to Sept. 11, 2001 when three commercial planes manned by terrorists downed the Twin Towers and Pentagon and killed about 3000 people? ETA, the notorious terrorist Basque organization, was immediately suspected. But ETA never killed in these numbers, never destroyed in this horrible scope, never flung terror as to scare the entire world.

Was it then Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda?

A note signed by an Arabic name, purporting to be al-Qaeda’s, owned responsibility for the Madrid bombings. It will take sometime before the world and the intelligence agencies will know for sure. But if indeed, it really turns out to be al-Qaeda, then the Philippines will have to quake in fear and trepidation. Why? Because the so-called al-Qaeda note made clear Spain was being punished for having supported America’s war on Iraq.

The Philippines also supported this war. President GMA almost alone in Asia enthusiastically backed America’s anti-terrorist vendetta. Now, if al-Qaeda was really behind those gruesome bombings in Madrid, we Filipinos have to watch out. We should never have involved ourselves in the wars of the mighty.

But we did. And I hope we don’t have to pay the price.