Only if she’s feared can GMA win that old ‘war’ vs. jueteng

Once again, a Philippine President has declared "all-out war against Jueteng." Did La Presidenta GMA have to remind the police to enforce Republic Act No. 9287 and crush illegal gambling, particularly jueteng, masiao and "last two digits"? The first gambling game jueteng is prevalent in GMA’s own hometown of Lubao, her province of Pampanga, indeed in all Central and Northern Luzon. Masiao and "Last Two" have, since my student years, been prevalent in the Visayas and Mindanao.

Year after year, "war" against these evils which suck dry the pockets of the poor, and in fact, plunge into debt those who own no pockets at all, is supposedly being waged. No big shot jueteng lord has ever been collared and sent to prison. Jueteng flourishes. The kobradores who sell bets and keep things going from house to house, or shack to shack, have even been speaking out on radio and TV to complain that the government is destroying their only means of livelihood, while the poor demand the very jueteng which condemns them to insurmountable penury.

Just as Karl Marx declared religion as the opium of the people, jueteng, too, is the people’s opiate. In the minds of the hopeless, to hit the jueteng jackpot is their only perceived instant ticket out of misery, into sudden prosperity.

It was the French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), one of the authors who influenced our revolutionary hero Andres Bonifacio, who’s credited with the cynical expression: "If God did not exist, man would be forced to invent Him." By the same token, some claim that if jueteng did not exist, another illegal game of the same nature would have to be invented.

When he was just appointed Secretary of Interior and Local Government, transferred to that post from Defense, actually, General Angelo T. Reyes outraged many by making the off-the-cuff suggestion that we ought to "legalize" jueteng.

Reyes had to spend weeks explaining that he had not meant to imply that the police, which operate under his ministry, cannot stamp out jueteng, therefore he (Reyes) was ready to surrender and "legalize" the racket instead.

Lest I be misunderstood, I’m foursquare against jueteng, masiao, etc. Like slot machines, those rackets exploit the poor and enrich the ungodly, from the jueteng bosses to politicians and cops. But we have to face reality. The government introduced legal Lotto as the possible antidote to and replacement of jueteng, but Lotto didn’t click. Jueteng merrily rolled on as usual.

Jueteng, like AIDS and HIV, is a disease which has permeated our body politic and our society for so many years that it seems incurable. Did GMA "profit" from it and did jueteng operators bankroll her rise through each stratum of politics, until she finally ascended the throne? So many politicians have drunk so deeply from that well that it’s difficult to winnow the jueteng "balato" from the legitimate political "contribution."

Even crusading Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar Cruz has just announced that he received a P10-million check mysteriously delivered to his doorstep. Msgr. Cruz declared in Baguio City he’d been receiving anonymous checks over the past two years in the amounts of P10,000 to P5 million, but that P10 million check was the whopper.

The good cleric says he destroys those checks since he doesn’t want to take money which might come from drug or jueteng lords. I suppose this is because the checks were addressed to "Oscar Cruz." Even then, but again I’m no holy man so my opinion may not count, why couldn’t he have donated the checks to Caritas, or the Leper Fund, or some other charitable foundation? He wouldn’t have been beholden in this manner to any drug or jueteng czars or potential bribe-givers since the "tainted" money’s use for a good cause would be of public knowledge. Oh well. The utilization of dirty money is, I guess, repugnant in many quarters and believed to bring bad luck.

To each his own interpretation.

As for jueteng, I can only say that the President’s declaration of "all-out war" on it was merely cosmetic. I’ll believe war was truly declared if we see a few jueteng bosses arrested, along with their protectors and benefactors. But who’ll arrest them? The police? Tell me another joke.

As for our media, including us newspapermen, I believe all the noise we’re piously making about jueteng is counter-productive. We’ve run such lurid headlines before, year after year, to no avail. It doesn’t even help "sell" newspapers as our critics scoff. The public, I fear, has grown tired and is skeptical of our noise-making. All this jueteng-talk induces further skepticism and cynicism. Jueteng is a cancer which has long been diagnosed, whose political patrons, godfathers, and godmothers, have long been hinted at, but nothing has happened. No cure applied. No surgery implemented.

Here’s what I say. If GMA truly wants to crush jueteng then she will have to be ruthless and show no mercy, even to her closest friends, compadres and comadres. Further I say not.

I repeat, at this juncture, even if nagging is obnoxious. When a President does not want to enforce the Death Penalty and send persons convicted of heinous crimes to the Death Chamber, then she won’t be feared – by either friend or foe.

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England’s Maggie Thatcher, whom our Presidenta claims is one of her idols, wasn’t called the "Iron Lady" for nothing. She firmly stood the course under fire and shell, shrugged off media criticism and the deprecations of 300 economists, asserting, in a quip, "This lady’s not for turning." She showed no mercy. She showed no fear. She was not universally loved, but she will forever be admired, even grudgingly by her enemies. She did her best, as she saw best, for Britain. And thus will always be respected.

For that matter, England’s greatest monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, was called "The Virgin Queen" (for she never married), but she wasn’t a virgin. (Scholars may assail me for this rash assertion). She wasn’t even expected to inherit the throne of King Henry VIII, dear old dad, for after all she was his daughter by Anne Boleyn whom daddy had sent to the Tower of London to be beheaded – on May 19, 1536. Elizabeth never forgot the importance of being strong as an essential for survival. In this light, she even dispatched to execution her lover, Lord Essex, when he grew too ambitious. By being strong, conquering her own inner fears she made England strong – defeating (with the help of storms) the Spanish Armada and establishing her tattered Navy as a power on the sea. Her Sea Hawks, of course, looted the Spanish main and harassed the Manila-Acapulco galleons to enrich England and build up the British Navy. Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir John Hawkins were, it must be said, slave traders, too.

You have to visit the museum dedicated to Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich, the former naval academy town next to London – where they also reckon Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Our GMA might learn a few lessons from the plethora of Queen Elizabeth lore exhibited there.

My wife and I actually went to Greenwich – easily reached by ferry from London’s river Thames, or by car – to visit the Royal Observatory, constructed in Greenwich Park in the 1670s, which has from that year been the origin of "standard time" around the world. There’s a line drawn there. You can put one foot across the line and your other one just opposite, and thereby stand in two Time Zones simultaneously. Sounds nutty, but I wanted that experience.

Greenwich means more than this, of course. The ancient royal palace at Greenwich was the birthplace of three rulers: Henry VIII (yes, bigamous King Dad), Mary Tudor (his daughter by Catherine of Spain) and Elizabeth I. It was also here that one of the first revolts against unjust taxation was mobilized, at Blackheath, at the top of the same park. There, Wat Tyler assembled his band of 100,000 rebels against the Poll Tax.

Greenwich was declared the site of the New Millennium by the British government in the year 2000, and the now famous Millennium Dome constructed there.

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On the other hand, this is fast becoming China’s millennium. Cable News Network (CNN) is running a series called "China Rising." NEWSWEEK is calling this "China’s Century."

There’s an interesting frontpage lead story in this weekend’s Financial Times headlined: "Great Wall Overtakes Florence for Tourists." The article by Amy Lee disclosed that "Beijing’s Forbidden City and the Great Wall now attract more visitors than Florence’s Uffizi Gallery or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as China overtakes Italy as the world’s fourth most popular tourism destination."

The article points out, however, that France, Spain and the United States remain "holidaymakers’ favorites." France had 75.1 million visitors last year, and Spain had 53.6 million. Britain and the US were both up 12 percent in tourism. Britain got 27.7 million, while the US attracted 46.1 million tourists.

The last-mentioned statistic floored me, I’ll admit. I had believed, owing to the stringent security measures being enforced at US airports, foreign tourism to the USA had been drastically reduced. Those tough Transportation Security Agency (TSA) inspectors pat you down, examine your shoes and belt, rummage through your hand luggage. On your first airport of entry, while studiously polite, they frequently require arriving visitors to put their left and right forefingers in a computerized fingerprint machine. My left forefinger was "too dry," the immigration officer remarked, then asked me to rub it on my forehead to put moisture on it. Having been in jail during martial law, I’ve no objection to the fingerprint routine, especially since those newfangled doodads don’t use indelible ink and leave no stains, even on one’s dignity. In any event, I noticed an interesting thing. When my forefinger print was taken, it looked like my visa details flashed on the immigration man’s small computer screen. What will they think of next.

I also discovered that there’s a special padlock you can now buy at American luggage stores. This means that if you use this approved padlock, you can "lock" your luggage without TSA agents having to break into your suitcase or bag when they want to inspect it in your absence. It seems that TSA can access the combination of this kind of padlock with ease. You live and learn. I don’t like going to the United States due to the state of paranoia which exists at American exports, but you can blame them. After 9/11, the world has changed.

As for China, the number of visitors to China went up 27 percent in 2004, compared to the previous year. Some 41.8 million visitors went to China last year.