An discordant view of presidential security

Dax Xenus, (I hope I got his name correctly), was a character in an old Robbins' fiction called The Adventurers. My failing memory recalled the book as a story of a restive society. To justify Dax's role in every stage of the escalating struggle against his government, Robbins depicted a picture of dramatic contrast. Inequity permeated the whole social structure. As against the marked opulence and arrogance of the ruling class, there was dire poverty on the part of the governed. The societal imbalance served as the fuse of the inevitable revolution. In that book, the drive for a change of power, uprising, in other words, became a crusade of an oppressed constituency. A hungry people saw the need to rise against the establishment.

As the plot evolved, the rulers unabashedly displayed their despicable preference for ostentation. But, because they were conscious of the growing restlessness of their people, they had to surround their leaders with trigger happy body guards and adorn their presidential palace with a wide cache of security implements. In the end, they moved their officials amidst armies and converted their citadels of governmental into some kind of fortresses. They had a garrison state masqueraded! The menacing plethora of centurions and the fearsome look of castles being guarded by men in full battle gear, ironically served to ignite the eventual siege by the oppressed mass.

There is a striking similarity between the product of Robbins' fertile mind and our nation.

A glimpse of this similitude is, every now and then, seen on national television.

Particularly, the external appearance of the extremely tight security provided to the Malacañang, sometimes called the Peoples' Palace, the official residence of Her Excellency, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is, compared to Robbins' fiction, uglier. Its ugliness is unmistakably projected by barbed wires, trenches and other obstacles. I do not even have to mention the battalions of Marines and Policemen with long arms who are positioned few meters of one another within the perimeter of the presidential home because their presence is anathema to peace. How can it be a People's Palace when its occupant, our beloved president, is inaccessible to the "people"?

Of course, President Arroyo, being the number one citizen of this country, is entitled to the highest form of available security. That is beyond dispute. So, for example, are neighboring Malaysia's Dr. Mahathir Mohammad and US George Bush across the Pacific Ocean. Yet, in their official homes, the White House, especially, we can hardly see the kind of man made obstacles and the number of armed combatants as those that surround Malacañang.

It is unfortunate that President Arroyo is, by all indications, insecure. Judging from the kind of security arrangements foist on Malacañang, the president is afraid of her own people. She is fearful that, in the manner Robbins wrote, one day, the people she governs may, led by a Dax Xenus reincarnate, just storm her presidential residence and seize governmental powers from her. This is, of course, not baseless imagination nor idle thought. Our president remembers that it was the unorthodox and way she began to assume her reign.

Yet, President Arroyo must have bowed beneath the weight of the armaments figuratively borne on her shoulders. She is unable to move as freely as a well-loved leader does. The kind of security she is subjected to prevents her from mingling with her constituency and really understanding the correct public pulse. All that she is made to see is camouflaged by make-believe peace and drowned by pre-arranged cadence. Whenever a public appearance is scheduled for the president, her security forces only allow to filter in people who are ready to speak of things she pleases to hear.

I am beginning to believe that the president is not allowed to perceive the real score. Each day, she gets barricaded in fortress-like Malacañang and isolated from her own people. As the rate it is going, she will not even recognize that it is already Dax Xenus who knocks at her presidential doors.