EDITORIAL - One for all – and all for one

Is there any way to put it, in kicking off this annual self-congratulatory essay? Our Philippine STAR has turned 18.

It’s tempting to boast that today’s issue is a respectable 158 pages, or that our advertising in the past two months has soared by 35 percent. Or that our circulation has gone up so steadily that our modern presses (Hollywood-style in our pressroom) running flat out can barely keep up with it. But these have never been the factors that make up a good newspaper. We take pride in the fact that our reporters and editors, while we sometimes err, make awful mistakes, and, on occasion, suffer embarrassing kuryente, all strive day by day to tell the honest, unvarnished truth, and, in our opinion columns, dish out sincere views and reasoned opinions. Our faithful readers must surely have noticed that we have opinion columns written side by side that sometimes disagree almost vehemently with each other.

What makes this great newspaper successful is that, over the past decade plus eight years, from the earliest years of struggle in which the financial survival of this daily was somewhat in question to our present state of prosperity, is that The STAR group, on every level, from the newsroom to our various departments such as office staffers, advertising people, the printing department, and circulation, etc., have always been one big and happy family, caring for and helping one another – a microcosm, I hope, of what we continue to aspire for: the unity of our nation.

On this our day of celebration, we thank Almighty God who blessed us even in our darkest hours of tribulation, and answered our prayers, which were led by our Founding Chair, our dear Betty Go Belmonte. It remains a standing joke in The STAR (probably more serious than a joke) that every organization must be headed by two kinds of people, "a sinner and a saint." The late Betty was the saint, and I was the sinner. (Anyway, I confess to frequently coming late to the prayers.) However, her every orison went directly to the ear of God.

Well, having blamed everybody, including the Lord for our newspaper group’s progress, let’s return to the question of "unity" which continues to elude our fractious nation.

Last Monday, President Macapagal-Arroyo appealed in her State of the Nation Address (SONA) for unity in the face of our mountainous problems and serious challenges.

She defended her decision to "save" OFW Angelo de la Cruz by abruptly quitting the US-mobilized "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. In any event, she made the front pages of some foreign newspapers, despite the coincidence of the US Democratic Party holding its national convention in Boston, for the "coronation" of its challenger (to Bush), Massachusesetts Senator John Kerry, and his runningmate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. In short, GMA was pictured in a huge page- one photo by the Financial Times, edited in London but published worldwide. La Emperadora was portrayed resplendent in her mom’s recycled yellow gown, with the accompanying caption stating that she had received the pledges of lawmakers for her "implementing tax laws to trim go-vernment expenses".

The top photo on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, edited in Paris and published by The New York Times, was, in contrast, described in the caption as a bunch of angry "protesters in Manila jabbing an effigy of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo . . ." Indeed, the effigy constructed of papier-maché by the Leftists, who poked sticks and poles into her "face", was unflattering but somewhat of an exaggeration. The comparatively small group failed to gatecrash the opening of the 13th Congress and the President’s SONA, and didn’t get the television play-up they had expected.

Perhaps it’s time we began, indeed, putting out more "good news" and building up our public morale rather than bashing it daily with scenes of gore, mayhem, and utter despair.

The President in her SONA repeated an interesting non-sequitur which she had originally fielded in her Luneta inaugural address. She said: "It is not free markets but patriotism that makes countries strong."

I still fail to comprehend how "free markets" can clash with "patriotism", but in her predicate – while it has already become a bromide and a mo-therhood statement – she is right. What we all require in this time of selfishness, endless bickering and disappointment is a stiff dose of patriotism.

And not just, as the revolutionary French put it pithily, not merely liberté and egalité (freedom and equality) but, even more emphatically, fraternité. (In my rude translation, brotherhood and . . . how to say it, sisterhood).

* * *

Once, being interviewed on television, I was caught off-guard by a question I should have anticipated. The lady interviewer asked me: "What is the book that most influenced your life?"

Gee whiz. Don’t you often get the feeling afterwards that you could have answered more eloquently, said something better – or more impressive – or even said something else? Or that you could have delivered a better speech? That’s what happened to me. Afterwards, I had kicked myself mentally, for not having named a more inspirational book, one with more gravitas or of a more nationalistic nature – a work like the Holy Bible, or Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, even Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or even Moby Dick etc. And most of all, Homer's brilliant and most soul-searing epic, the Iliad, whch made immortal the beauty of Helen whose "face launched a thousand ships", the heroic Hector of Troy, the raging Achilles, and the Greeks who "burned the topless towers of Illium." Shucks, the book I mentioned, to my surprise over the years, never even made it to the 100 great novels of the world, a list published periodically. Would you believe?

Yet, it’s clear in retrospect that what you blurt out unexpectedly is the truth. I had replied to her query: The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas.

And what had I learned from Dumas’s swashbuckling novel of three of the King’s Musketeers Athos, Porthos, Aramis – and their young friend, the hero of the adventure, D’Artagnan from Gascony? That they had pledged their swords to each other, to their King and country, and to their regiment of Musketeers, through every challenge and danger: One for all and all for one!

Strangely, all through my boyhood that line from the Musketeers, that dime-novel written in 1844, seemed to be in my subconscious like a guiding star. I must have re-read it half a dozen times, as have many millions of young readers throughout the world. Loyalty, courage, pride – and love – were the lessons of that novel, which the author obviously had never intended to be profound, but remains to corny guys like this journalist an inspiration to mankind, and a legacy of which France herself must be proud.

Haven’t you noticed how many movie versions were made of the Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) starting with that oldie starring Douglas Fairbanks? Dumas also penned The Count of Monte Cristo (1844-45), made, too, into several movie versions. Then he had The Man in the Iron Mask, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, Twenty Years After, The Black Tulip. Believe it or not, I read them all – but the Three Musketeers and d’Artagnan remained dearest to my heart.

For that’s what we need in our country today. That’s what we had in the golden yesterday of our heroes: "One for all and all for one."

Dumas himself – whose grandfather was a French nobleman and paternal grandmother, Marie-Cessette, had been a black slave in the French colony of Haiti – had started out as a notary’s clerk, later securing a position with the Duc d’Orleans who was to become King Philippe of France. He wrote plays, novels, and short stories – but it was his historical novels that brought Dumas a great fortune. He, alas, spent money faster than he made it. He might be described as a pot-boiler writer falling into oblivion with the help of 73 assistants – just as Robert Ludlum keeps on "writing" espionage novels long after he died a couple of years ago.

Dumas led an adventurous life himself, and might have been plucked out of one of his own novels – but he squandered his fortune, and finally died of a stroke in 1870 at Dieppe.

Interestingly, the French literati and the intellectual elite looked down on the upstart Dumas, and when he died, all of them turned thumbs down on the prospect of interring him in the "Pantheon" where the literary and intellectual greats of France are buried. He was consigned to a lowly cemetery.

The other year, President Jacques Chirac, did an impressive thing. He took the unusual step of getting the French Government to disinter the bones of the "banished" Alexander Dumas, and had his coffin conveyed by carriage, escorted by horse men and soldiers in a military procession through the streets of Paris to be buried – at last – with veneration, in the "Pantheon."

The catafalque was escorted by a platoon, wearing the nostalgic uniforms and capes of The Musketeers, and on its side on blue cloth was embroidered: "One for all, and all for one."

Chirac declared that Dumas’s novels had inspired and uplifted more than two generations, not just in France but around the world, and thus the writer richly deserved the long-denied honor now belatedly bestowed on him.

His best novel was, in sum, the book that most influenced so many lives.

* * *

Two Greek thinkers who have also had a profound influence on questions of society and government were Plato (who wrote The Republic, which many quote but few have fully read) and Socrates – after whom so many of us Filipinos, including bishops, are proudly named.

The wise Socrates finally succeeded in irritating the rulers of Athens by his wit and outspokenness that he was arrested and condemned to death by being forced to drink hemlock, a poison that seeps through the veins and induces a painful death.

Plato lived in Athens which prided itself as a champion of Green democracy against other city-states like Sparta which represent a more oligarchic and warrior-based form of government.

Plato, describing the rise of democracy, shared with Karl Marx the view that as wealth accumulates in the hands of a few "the impoverished majority will be driven to despair and revolt". It was Plato’s warning that the wealthy, having been made weak by riches and laziness, would be easily overcome by an uprising of those who had nothing to lose. After a spell of violence and "revenge", the new (Marxist-type?) state would then settle down to a new regime in which all were supposed to have an equal share of government and, in his version, "the principal officers of the state are selected by lot".

What’s fascinating is that then Plato went on to describe how political life would break down "once the poor are in control". All authority and discipline, he predicted, would disappear. "Every man will be a law unto himself and no man will be obliged to undertake any public duty which does not appeal to him . . . anyone will be allowed to interfere in the conduct of affairs whether he is legally entitled to or not. Official rules and regulations will be laid on one side, criminals will be allowed to go unpunished, and an extreme tolerance will turn the whole social order into any easygoing anarchy which treats all men as equal quite regardless of their real abilities and merits."

Out of the fifth century came those words of warning.

Plato’s teacher, Socrates, for his part, described society as divided into three classes – the bulk of the citizens, the standing army, and a corps of highly-trained governors. Socrates put great emphasis on the choice and the training of his governors, and he established the principle that the task of running government should be completely in the hands of this trained elite. Only on such lines, he was convinced, could a society be developed which was "good" in every sense of the word.

Goodness to Socrates consisted of four virtues: justice, temperance, courage and wisdom. To these "Socratic" virtues, our own St. Paul gives us the addition, in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (Chap. 13), the qualities of "faith, hope and love".

The precepts which we ought to adopt in this time of crisis, disillusionment, cynicism – and near despair – are not new. It is for us to decide to embrace them.

Only then will we begin to climb out of the pit of despond, and begin our belated journey to a "Strong Republic".