Up close and personal

United States Ambassador Francis Ricciardone Jr. quietly slipped into town last Tuesday night aboard a Northwest Airlines flight via Nagoya. I was wrong, then, I’ll have to admit up front, to have jumped to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be back – and that Washington DC, in its pique over La Presidenta’s recall of our "troops" (humanitarian aid missioners?) in Iraq, had recalled its envoy permanently.

I talked with the Ambassador yesterday, on the phone, but his lips are sealed. He still hadn’t spoken to our President, he said, nor to Foreign Secretary Delia Domingo Albert (who’s in-country but somewhere in the provinces), so he told me: "In this situation, Max, I’m neither seen nor heard by anybody else."

If you’re old enough to remember, there used to be a famous short story read by English-language students all over the world entitled, "A Message to Garcia". I wonder whether Dubya, who’s now in dubious condition in his bid for re-election, has sent "A Message to Gloria".

Perhaps America and the Philippines are still some kind of friends, despite La Emperadora’s retreat from Baghdad, which is not to be equated with Emperor Napoleon’s disastrous retreat form Moscow. I guess she decided – not by way of excusing it – that Napoleon had got it wrong: You can’t fight a war on two fronts. GMA chose, possibly, to concentrate on the domestic front, not the international front.

We’ll know if our oil and our credit – not to mention our finances – run out, whether it was the right choice.

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The scare headlines about the cost of Brent Crude jumping to more than $44.90 per barrel are terrifying enough. Wait till the price hits $50 per barrel. In sum, the entire planet is in for hard times, and we may be longing for the good old days when the oil price shocks of the 1970s screwed up the economies and the equanimity of the planet.

But what the heck. When I was a small boy a century ago, it seems, my hometown in Ilocos Sur had no electricity, no running water (we used deep wells, clothes were laundered in the stream), and irons were heated by hot charcoal. Tell that to the air-conditioned, mall-going, cellphone texting generation, though, and they’ll look at you like you come from the Stone Age, which is literally true. We cannot go back to "The Way We Were".

In its June issue, The National Geographic magazine said it all – and it takes weeks before publication for the Geographic’s editors to assemble one of its glossy issues.

The cover blurb "The End of Cheap Oil" and the subhead of its major story read, prophetically: "Think gas is expensive now? Just wait. You’ve heard it before, but this time it’s for real: it’s the beginning . . ."

As the magazine points out, oil demand, now 80 million barrels a day, continues to grow.

In the continental US, production already peaked way back in 1970.

China, with its surging economy, for starters, is gulping up more and more oil – consider its 1.3 billion people, and its 10 million cars on the road "and counting". When I was last in Shanghai, the omnipresent bicycles which had "powered" the People’s Republic in the Maoist past, and even in the "to grow rich is glorious" era of Deng Xiao-Ping, had been elbowed off the roads and highways by the gas-guzzlers. I saw, for instance, Buicks galore (made in China by General Motors), a brand which we in the Philippines had already forgotten. The Buick as well as every luxury car, to boot, is alive and well in the New China, which is becoming, next to America, the biggest capitalist country in the world, while still in Communist disguise. Those expanding factories and industrial complexes aren’t just running on hot air, and certainly not on the Dialectic or The Little Red Book. Then there’s President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, striving to recreate the old Soviet Union and something resembling Soviet "power" but in democratic camouflage, too. He’s out to crush not only Yukos, the biggest private oil producer (and bring the oligarchs to heel), he’s shooting for total control. Perhaps the Russians like these – who knows?

Lukoil, the state-oriented company will obviously take the lead in oil production. Since Russia holds the second largest oil reserves, next to Saudi Arabia, I kid thee not, Putin bullying Yukos over its alleged back-taxes of $3.4 billion, and continuing to throttle its former chief, Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was slapped in irons into the new Gulag (Mikhail’s goose, every gospodin knows, is cooked) has put oil production there in perceived limbo – and winter is coming.

Let’s face it. Oil is politics, and, worse, oil is running out.

It’s astounding that here in slaphappy Philippines. some unctuous businessmen and political bigmouths are still demanding that the price of oil, gasoline, fuel, etc. must be brought down! We don’t live in a fool’s paradise. We live in hell, but the fools don’t even know it.

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Tonight, we’ll have President GMA as our guest of honor and speaker in our Manila Overseas Press Club (MOPC) gala, which is traditionally known as "President’s Night". It will be held this time in the InterCon ballroom in Makati.

This is an affair which has been conducted annually for almost half a century, with the exception of a 14-year hiatus during the Marcos dictatorship’s Martial Law, when almost all of us MOPC members, especially the foreign correspondents, deserted the then "tuta" or pro-Macoy regime MOPC and organized the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP). Its founder, our colleague and columnist, Teddy Man Benigno, sometimes wittily described our "rebel" bunch as Fuck-Up.

Today, the liberated and restored MOPC and the FOCAP co-exist cordially, and many are members of both. And tonight, we’ll see many of them being sworn in before Her Excellency, GMA.

As chairman of the MOPC this year, a title bestowed on elders, I’m happy that GMA has accepted our invitation to meet with the press at tonight’s forum, "up close and personal". President’s Night has always been a give and take, in which Presidents tell all.

One of our most articulate leaders, as the recent git-up-and-go political campaign she conducted demonstrated, La Gloria will unveil her plans, and how she intends to meet the challenges facing us.

When I was president of the MOPC, an eon ago in 1970, our most eloquent President’s Night guest speaker was Ferdinand E. Marcos. He was brilliant, oozing with magnetism and bonhomie, full of bons mots – flashed a multi-megawatt smile, and charming to everybody. Beware. He even promised this writer, on television, the "Legion of Honor". I replied, "I won’t hold my breath, Mr. President." Sure enough, not too long afterwards he ordered me arrested and frogmarched into military prison.

The MOPC, which used to be the stronghold of "balut" (a game, not the duck egg), used to preen itself as the Officers’ Club of the press, while the National Press Club (in which I’m also a Lifetime Member) was the Enlisted Men’s Club. The joke was on us that same 1970, President Macoy’s military goons smashed into our MOPC clubhouse, then on Roxas boulevard, and dragged off my MOPC Vice President, Quintin Yuyitung, publisher of the Chinese Commercial News. They also arrested his brother, Rizal Yuyitung, editor of the same Chinese-language daily. The two had been bon and raised in the Philippines and were Filipino citizens, but Macoy’s military "shanghai-ed" them aboard a PAF C-47 to Taipei, where they were handcuffed and taken off to jail for publishing Chinese Communist "propaganda"!

How could two Chinese-Filipino journalists have been spirited out of their country, the Philippines, then taken forcibly to Taiwan to be tried for "treason" against the country they had never seen, or to which they had never belonged?

This writer, my then Manila Times Publisher (and former MOPC President) Joaquin "Tatang" Roces, and Johnny Mercado of the Press Foundation of Asia, rushed to attempt to rescue Quintin and Rizal.

We met with the International Press Institute, where I was named to the IPI Committee to fight for Journalists in Prison, and a full-dress IPI group flew to Taipei to protest. Fortunately, the Yuyitungs, while sentenced to a brief spell in Taiwanese prison (those Taipei Kuomintang guys blinked), were afterwards released and came home – but not until after Marcos martial law had been overthrown.

This is one of the battles the MOPC fought – and fortunately won. So, we’re not just a social club, we’ve battled, like all true press clubs, for our freedoms and yours.

Anyway, let’s see what transpires this evening. At the MOPC, there’s never a dull moment.