Yesterday's people

It was billed as one of those landmark events for which the Luneta has become historic. It ended up a forgettable one.

Drumbeaters for last Sunday’s "prayer rally" raised expectations for up to a million people turning up. In response, the police brought in reinforcements from nearby provinces to ensure the security of the gathering.

Text messages were circulated to help buildup excitement for that event. The messages warned that government would declare martial law in order to prevent the rally from happening.

That was cheap political intrigue intending to provide a semblance of political importance to an event that was, from beginning to end, of little consequence.

In the end, the policemen and the street vendors were probably more disappointed than the rally organizers. The official estimate of rally attendance was 15,000 at its peak, counting in the vendors.

Even more disappointing were who turned up.

The rally, if it could be called that, was populated by the usual suspects: the Black and White Movement (which is never more than a handful), the crypto-leftist group Akbayan, the Makati Business Club and other corporate technicians of the oligarchs, a handful of old and quickly fading politicians who appear to be aching to get back to center stage.

In sum, the crowd was, by and large, roughly the same circuit that tried and failed to topple the present leadership in July 2005.

They tried, at that time, to use the momentum of public excitement to force the President from power and then position for the succession. That episode of betrayal, greed and ambition presents one strong argument why this decrepit constitutional order ought to be replaced: it is too vulnerable to the ploys of oligarchic powerbrokers.

The profile of the attendees in last Sunday’s flop of a rally gives us a hint why this exercise was undertaken at all: those who push for it succumbed once more to what we might now call the ‘Hyatt 10 Syndrome.’ They thought that, by means of cheap political intrigue, they could stoke popular passions to fever pitch and force political discontinuities.

What they ended up with was yet another wasted Sunday afternoon at the park.

Well, not a total waste though. The event instructs us well about the disposition (and incompetence) of those behind this ploy. Like the radical militant groups, those behind this events have begun scavenging every issue – from the VAT to oil prices to the 20th anniversary of the Edsa Uprising to a proposal to amend the Constitution – on the long chance of producing a revolutionary moment.

They have become a bunch of carpetbaggers in search of a putsch. They will exploit every issue, plumb every public concern, adopt any oppositional stance on anything in the desperate hope that doing so might touch off a popular uprising.

The ‘Hyatt 10 Syndrome’ has become a national malaise. It is a marginal bunch in constant quest of political turbulence. They will sandbag every reform initiative and throw a monkey wrench on everything government does – because if this administration succeeds in anything, they are lost.

This syndrome will keep the poison flowing in our politics, disable every national effort and cause us to manage snatching defeat from the jaws of victory – all because of bitterness and desperate ambition of a few.

And why have some of the bishops allowed themselves to be pawns of poisoned politics?

My guess is that they are sincere and know no better. They are easily seduced by things cleverly packaged as righteous and moral.

Recall that the bishops have taken patently wrong positions in the past simply because those wrong positions were presented to them as righteous and morally correct. They took a position against the deregulation of the oil industry, a policy reform that now benefits all of us with some of the cheapest gasoline prices anywhere in the world. They took a position against RVAT, a revenue reform measure that has been principally responsible for a stable currency and low inflation that benefit the poor above everyone else.

The same peddlers of political snake oil presented them with a warped version of the effort to advance constitutional reform. It is a version coated with malice, depicting constitutional reform as some self-serving ploy rather than as a venture that might do the nation good. Those bishops already beholden to the obsolete orthodoxy associated with the leftist militant groups were first to swallow this poisoned version of the effort.

Besides, there is the Cory Aquino factor.

The former president, aligned even more tightly with the Hyatt 10 circuit and enveloped by the likes of Franklin Drilon, continues to be perceived as some Marian character by the Catholic hierarchy. Cory has been maternally protective of her 1987 Constitution and is closed to any proposition that something might be wrong with it.

That has drawn her to oppose any and all proposals to introduce amendments to that document. Her first instinct to gather her flock at the Luneta whenever there appears a possibility that her Constitution might be revised.

The Catholic Church, too, it must be mentioned, is an institutional powerbroker. It constantly leverages government to ensure its doctrinal interests are protected. It is institutionally attracted to episodes where it could ride the popular side of a public issue in order to strengthen its leverage on government policy-making.

This is why the bishops became involved on the wrong side with the issues of deregulating the oil industry and imposing VAT. The wrong side happened to be populist, and therefore popular.

The political profit the Church makes from taking the wrong side translates into improved capacity to pressure government on core doctrinal concerns such as contraception, divorce, abortion and, possibly, gay marriages.

The heyday of Church stranglehold over policymaking was when Cory was president. The population program was scuttled and we achieved one of the highest (and most devastating) population growth rates in the world.