The real malaise / GMA’s real challenge

About the only person with a radiant, beatific smile these days is President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She must know something we don’t know, possess something we don’t possess, breathe rarefied air we don’t breathe. And yet almost everybody agrees GMA is in a hell of a pickle. And why not? The political opposition continues to accuse her of "cheating massively" in the May 10 presidential elections. And so two formidable presidential candidates refuse to concede – namely, Fernando Poe Jr., and evangelist Brother Eddie Villanueva.

The nation remains deeply divided and rankled despite GMA’s repeated calls and pleas for reconciliation and national unity.

It’s time for healing, President GMA says, time to forget the bitterness of the past, particularly the turbulent campaign, and resort to forgiveness. After all, it is added, that is what democracy is all about. There is always a winner and loser in elections. When the tumult subsides, the nation should get behind the winner – and move on. That is the only road to progress.

True, this is all very true. And yet, even as you accept that indeed the country must move on and that political divisiveness must eventually cease, you just can’t get rid of a creeping national malaise. It crawls on your skin, if not at times on your spine. It creeps somewhere on your psyche and just won’t go away. There is a profound post-election restlessness that was not there before. There is a feeling that maybe the country is sick – in fact, very sick. And this goes back some decades.

And this is where GMA comes in, the president, the healer, the unifier, finally a presidential winner on her own terms.

Her supporters say she is now a political eagle perched to swoop, and prove she can handle and perhaps cure the malaise. Her image-makers are now projecting a new GMA. She is calm, poised, almost regal, above the fray, sporting a million-dollar smile, dressed gorgeously to the nines, a thinker and a worker, indefatigable, out to throw thunderbolts where before she was easy prey for silly and stupid photo-ops and such munchy-fiddledee appelations as Ate Glo, Ina ng Bayan, the Iron Lady, the Lady in Black.

She has a gleaming six-point program designed to subdue the nation’s rising fever. So, en garde! The new GMA is on the loose.

What do we think?

Initially, however it may be divided today, the political oligarchy will close ranks. It is not in its interest to divide and sub-divide like an amoeba. It has the same interests to protect, the same universe of political sameness and enormous political fortunes, the commanding heights of power. It has no ideology, no intellectual or nationalistic ears pinned to the ground. Its feuds and quarrels were family quarrels, followed soon by kiss-and- makeup. It has the Church, Big Business, the ayatollahs of Makati and Binondo to protect them.

So the malaise does not come from there. The malaise goes deeper. It rumbles underneath with the slurp of social lava getting to be more distinct, more disturbing. The malaise is poverty, deep, grinding poverty. In other countries, this kind of malaise would have exploded – and they did explode – into revolutions, revolts, the shedding of blood.

The hope of many, particularly civil society, is that GMA can hear the gathering rumble underneath, hear it well, and this time fashion the real weapons that can diminish and eventually break the backbone of poverty. This is the focus she has to sharpen. In this, she will have to distance herself from or break with powerful groups, forces and individuals belonging to the Establishment including, many aver, her profligate husband Mike Arroyo. And a number of ultra-conservative bishops.

In this context, GMA has to cope with another ultra-sensitive issue, that of overpopulation. Poverty of the masses and the demographic explosion are Siamese twins. You can only diminish the poverty of 84 million Filipinos by radically slowing down the rate of population growth. Many previously poor countries in Asia surged to economic progress and prosperity because they were wise and resolute enough to cut off the tentacles of excess population growth.

Can GMA turn her back on the Establishment? Can she, like Park Chung Hee, Lee Kuan Yew, Dr. Mahathir, Chiang Ching-kuo, the ongoing Chinese leadership, cut down birth rates drastically?. If she can, poverty goes down just as drastically. In between, a sound and solid economic program, aimed at GDP annual growth of 7-9 per cent, sustainable for 15-20 years, will confer economic tigerhood on the Philippines. That is, of course, if at the same time GMA launches a full-blown education program, the tower-heads of which would be science, math, technology.

Obviously, President GMA will have to reinvent herself.

She will have to start cutting up the political octopus whose only innard is money. Why not? Maybe we have long belittled GMA and undersized her. We have relegated her to the margin as a political mediocrity given a man’s job and able only to master the art of the photo-op, the talent of Potemkin, the Russian genius who concealed broken-down villages with artificial facades.

Okay, we are willing to wait. First, let’s see how she organizes her cabinet, how she can load that cabinet with crackerjacks instead of misfits and political protégés. If we see the same people, or a great many of the same people, tied to her apron-strings in Malacañang, then, kiddo, what can you expect? Second, she’ll have to make her first One-Hundred Days in office look like a war zone. She will fight the battles that have to be fought, come hell or high water. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt cracking down on the Great Depression in the early 30s, she will have to make the high and the mighty cower. Wall Street shivered and suffered under the gaze of FDR.

I know this is a tall order.

But the times have shifted radically and swiftly. Our problems of 20 years ago, the problems of the first EDSA in 1986, look puny compared to our problems today. Our population then was about half our population today. The presidents that followed – Cory Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada – could only catch shrimps and not the big barracudas, sharks and octopi that were devouring our economy. There was still hope. There was no exodus of thousands of frantic Filipinos and their families for abroad.

Today, thousands flee the Philippines daily, including middle-class families. The economic times, the political pollution they refuse to bear anymore. They cannot raise their children here – they say – they have to be brought up in "sane, civilized societies".

* * *

Mrs. President, these are the gut problems you have to face. I agree they are terrifying. Your problems are not critics like me, nor the political opposition, nor the rutabaga roster of our troubled times. Your main problem is poverty and its accompanying baggage of fast-emptying stomachs, ignorance, alienation. There is also the fear we cannot stop or stall our slide. There is the further fear that we may crash-land.

Alienation, maybe that’s more like it.

We Filipinos do feel not just confused and bewildered, but lost. We claim or even boast of our cultural legacies from America, Spain and the West. And yet we are Asians in origin, in skin, in physiognomy, in our poverty, struggling to imitate America and the West, but never succeeding. Asia is fast becoming the economic colossus of the world. And yet we do not belong to this Asia. We are stragglers in our own continent, largely stuck to primitive village culture, cocooned by a mediaeval Christian Catholic ethos that traps and bushwhacks progress almost at every turn.

So yours is a great challenge, Mrs. President. It is almost like the challenge that faced Ferdinand Marcos when he declared martial rule.

He could have become a great president if he had a vision. But he had none. His only vision was power, the accumulation of great wealth, and the company of cronies whose greed was insatiable. Maybe his fastidious wife Imelda was also a drag. For she too had a fascination for riches, and the trappings of wealth. They have often said, Ma’am, your husband Mike Arroyo, is a historic stand-in for Imelda. And so you must not make the same mistake.

Challenge, yes. To follow the Chinese proverb, you must transform crisis into opportunity. You must behead when you have to behead, run your sword through if you have to, concentrate your fury on those who have impoverished our country. Focus your vision on eliminating poverty. But always, always follow the example of an angry Jesus Christ storming, and chasing the money-lenders from the temple.

Do this, Mrs. President, and history – throbbing and thrilling – will be writ on your coat-of-arms.