A doctor weeps / Spain and terror

The library phone rang early Monday and I had to sprint to catch the call while swallowing the last morsels of breakfast. The caller was a well-known doctor, a close family friend, and immediately I knew something was wrong. His voice was unusually gravelly, often grating at his throat, and it was just a matter of split-seconds before he opened up – close to tears. "Teddy," he said, "what happened? Why did Vice President Tito Guingona join the camp of Fernando Poe Jr.? What is happening to us, to the country? Why? Guingona was a man we admired so much, we put him up there as a political icon? Why did he betray us?"

Betray was a word I hesitated to use in my first restrained outburst Monday in this space.

But now that the good doctor mentioned it, he hit the nail right on the head. Guingona’s act was an act of betrayal. For a long period, the vice president was our equivalent of a white shimmering knight in Camelot aboard a coal black steed, fighting for what was pure, what was noble in Philippine politics. He was a nationalist, in fact the nationalist. He was a Charlemagne who went to the wars, who embodied the future of France, who conquered the Lombards and the pagan Saxons, whose court at Aix-La-Chapelle was highly intellectual. And men of the highest intellect were drawn to this leader who was both warrior and philosopher.

Well, that was what a great number of Filipinos thought about Tito Guingona.

I myself was greatly impressed when I joined meetings of his core group more than two years ago, where shortly after we organized Bangon! They were intellectual heavyweights of the purest ray serene, blending the intricate disciplines of law, economics, political science, foreign policy and public service. That suited me fine. All my journalistic life, I had been drawn to men of this calibre. In a sense, this was Camelot all right and Tito Guingona filled the bill at the head of the table. Or so, I thought.

Oh yes, back to the good doctor.

"I had put so much store by Vice President Guingona," he said. "He made me look at tomorrow like a beacon, and I told myself, with Guingona we have a future, he is such a great nationalist, a man of his word, incorruptible. Bangon! to me was the wave of this future, particularly because he was the leader. Now he has left..." At this, the doctor could not restrain himself any longer. I said: "Go ahead, doctor, cry it all out."

He broke into tears unashamedly, unreservedly, a cataract of broken sobs, and phrases and sentences. I felt a tear or two dropping from my eyes for I knew how he felt. When Tito Guingona called me by phone Thursday afternoon to reveal he had already signed an agreement with FPJ and would therefore resign from Bangon! – despite all our grim warnings for him not to do so – I felt my anger, my frustration, my emotions scraping the bottom. But no, I had to keep a lid on my emotions. That could come later, as it is coming out now.

As a rival daily barked in its editorial Monday, Vice President Teofisto Guingona is a hypocrite. I cannot agree more.

He basked repeatedly in the limelight as paeans of praise poured on him as a genuine nationalist leader. When he stood up to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the US government on the issue of American combat soldiers coming in by the thousands purportedly just to engage in joint military exercises, he became the political hero we had all been looking for. When he walked the walk, the ground under his feet looked like it had been trod by a hundred horses. When he talked the talk, Guingona was the Oracle at Delphi, lighting up the future with a voice that streaked like beads of lightning.

Well, when he abandoned Bangon! to join FPJ, the hidden, the real Guingona came out. The trapo.

Remember what Charles Maurice de Talleyrand said? This French statesman sans pareil said, "If there’s anything worse than a crime, it is a blunder." A big blunder it was pure and simple, Guingona’s shocking volte face. Now, he rationalizes he had done nothing wrong. Now, he declares andando ad pianissimo he had never sacrificed his convictions and principles. Now he says his wife and son, running for mayor and governor under the FPJ political banner, had nothing to do with his decision. Really? His conscience is clear, Tito says, because FPJ had verbally accepted his entire program of government.

What blather! What nonsense! What pap! What horse manure!

Tito Guingona switched over because he could no longer stand being alienated or marginalized in the exciting cross-currents of Philippine politics. As vice president, he was really a spare tire. GMA paid him no heed. He was somebody when still foreign secretary. When he was yanked out because of policy disagreements with the president, he prepared arduously to become a presidential candidate for the May 10 elections. He had no chance whatever to win. But the overblown desire was there, the overweening ambition. There was the desert mirage he, Tito Guingona, would transform into the vaulting ground of Archimedes who said: "Here I stand and from here I will transform the world!"

That preparation for a presidential launch came a cropper. Whatever he was, Guingona was no Archimedes. The launch was abandoned. Again, Tito was isolated. He was close to the age of 75, a dead end in politics.

And so he grabbed what came next, the concept, eventually the project of Bangon! For a while this turned him on. But Bangon! was projected to be a bridge to the future, perhaps a long bridge. At his age, Guingona was no longer a man for the Long March. Bangon! besides worked best behind the scenes, meeting leaders of the left, the right, the center, chipping at a marble slab, structuring what could be the future.

Guingona fidgeted. He craved the limelight. He had to be a player, a powerful role player. The hidden statesman in him never really crawled out. Time was fleeting. He figured that apropos FPJ, he would be Professor Higgins to the clumsy and unlettered Eliza Doolittle. And, lo and behold, at Tito’s touch, FPJ would blossom into a political wizard. Then he would be president for six years with Guingona at his side, the eminence grise finally come into his own. The real power behind the throne.

That was all bunkum and remains bunkum. A pipe dream.

Now Tito Guingona will know how it is to wither and perish, victim of a Chinese variant of slow death – "death by a thousand cuts". He has lost all his nationalist admirers, patriots they like the good doctor, who naively believed he possessed the Sword of Excalibur. All he had was a crummy wooden stick, now put at the service of FPJ, whose greatest service to humankind was that he never read the Book of Wisdom.

* * *

The world remains gripped, shocked and stupefied by the recent terror attack on Madrid which killed more than 200, wounded about 1500, and brought out millions of Spaniards into the streets, the biggest outdoor crowds the world has ever seen. Poor they. They were, virtually all of them, against America’s launching the war on Iraq. They were also against Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar who not only supported that war but sent troops to join the coalition.

It was therefore no surprise that Aznar’s center-right party lost badly in Sunday’s general elections. The opposition Socialists won, which poses a lesson to the Philippines. It is now the growing belief Osama bin Laden’s al- Qaeda, not ETA, the Basque terrorist organization, was behind those Madrid bombings, called the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since World War II.

If the government of GMA is not scared we could be next, I am. Many are. If is one thing to boast that La Gloria was the first Asian leader to enthusiastically embrace America’s war on terror, America’s invasion of Iraq. La Gloria, like Aznar, never thought about the consequences. It is another thing to have pondered that the shadow terrorist world of Islam jotted down the countries that supported America, and had marked them for vengeance.

Who are we really, we Filipinos, to mount the rooftops and beat our breasts for Uncle Sam? We don’t even count in the core family of nations. And it’s only La Gloria, our irresponsible media, shall we say our government’s subservient foreign policy, that make the Filipino think he counts and counts big while beating the drums for Washington.

If one day, Jemaah Islamiyah, or a like-minded terrorist offshoot of al-Qaeda, should decide to explode their bombs in our LRT terminals or shopping malls, then we might as well kiss our republic goodbye.

America cannot protect us. We’re just being used. And we might as well swallow that ugly truth.