Pick a side and go with it

Most Filipinos are ready to forgive and forget the checkered past of Juan Ponce Enrile and accord him the tribute and salutation befitting a valued Statesman. To delete all past transgressions from the nation’s memory bank and copy-paste his last legacy in its place: a sterling performance as Presiding Judge of the Corona impeachment trials.

Then a little anecdote was revealed about the reported 25-year hostility against now defunct COMELEC Commissioner Gus Lagman. It seems that the crafty Senate President maneuvered to get his pound of flesh because he believed NAMFREL caused his Grand Alliance for Democracy (GAD) party mates’ bid for the Senate to fail in 1987. He accused the watch-group, then headed by Christian Monsod, of padding Cory’s candidates with 2M votes each, a feat not even Garci could pull off for GMA in 2010! And since Gus Lagman was the IT expert, he was in JPE’s crosshairs.

According to the grapevine, Enrile personally convinced every member of the Committee on Appointments to outrightly reject, not just pass over the pending appointment of Lagman. That’s one mind-boggling grudge to sustain for one-quarter-of-a-century! If this is true, it was a petty, capricious and vindictive show of power. Not exactly the decorous behavior expected from the Grand Old Man of the Legislature.

To save him from embarrassment, the Palace decided not to reappoint the IT expert and reformist. What a big loss for the country and a tainted election body so badly in need of reputable, high-quality Commissioners.

But again, wondering with a raised eyebrow and niggling doubt, the perennial question comes up: JPE, which side of history do you really belong to? Political writer and analyst Alfred McCoy, in his speech “Dark Legacy: Human Rights Under the Marcos Regime” (September 1999), said that because of the peculiar state of Philippine culture and politics, the country has been “turning cronies into statesmen, torturers into legislators, and killers into generals.” Is this one more validation of McCoy’s acerbic observation? Even more perplexing, can JPE, at age 88, still afford to traverse the wrong side of history?

In a recent interview, he said that he believes he is but an instrument of a Higher Being. “We are his pawns, for whatever reasons he has. We think we control our lives — maybe we have some degree of control — but in the end, He is the one that decides how long or short you live, how you will fare in this world, what you will be…You do not know how far you go, where you will end, or whether you will go on and on no matter how rough the seas and then you will come in a placid area where finally it will end.”

Thoughts of mortality have evidently crossed the mind of the veteran politician who navigated the course of history with such polemic impact. Political writer Alexander Remollino named the former protégé of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos as one of the architects of martial law. In a 1991 TV interview, Enrile admitted, “I am the author of martial law.” In subsequent media dialogs he claimed to have personally issued a number of arrests, search-and-seize orders against oppositionists, including political figures, Media, student/labor activists and leftist groups during the Marcos regime. Whether those orders included torture and execution, is being argued by both his admirers and adversaries.

When Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in 1983, Enrile began to distance himself from the increasingly hated Marcos regime. He sided with disgruntled military elements to form the Reform the Armed Forces Movement (RAM) that conspired to mount a coup against Marcos. With support from the citizens, this eventually led to People Power. He confessed to the sins he committed while in the Marcos cabinet: his knowledge of the fraudulent voting in the 1986 snap election and faking an assassination attempt on his own life in 1972 to provide grounds for declaring Martial Law.

From darkness, Enrile emerged an inadvertent hero of People Power, demonstrating once again an indomitable power to survive. But the halo was short-lived as RAM launched one failed coup after another to unseat Cory Aquino and place Enrile at the head of a ruling council. It was not to be.

Surely a biopic or a biography on the fascinating life of JPE is in the works. Maybe even an autobiography that could explain why the Survivor zigzags so easily between opposite teams, why the intersection between right and wrong seems so blurry and how he gets away with it.

His background fortified him with skills and experiences that few men will ever have. Born out of wedlock on Valentines’ Day of 1924, Juanito Furagganan had 17 half-siblings on his father side and six on his mother’s. He survived drowning in a river, dysentery and being knifed by his classmates because of a girl. The attackers were children of the school board directors. Not only was the case dismissed — Juanito was the one that got expelled. Early in life he must have been traumatized by a firsthand taste of injustice.

After the war, he was reunited with his father and renamed Juan Ponce Enrile. To this day, he has a beef with the privileged class. He maintains, “The government is weak in relation to the elite in this country. They can destroy you. They are in control of the media. Why are businessmen in radio, television, newspapers, publishing? Why? They want to protect themselves, so they manipulate it.”

Enrile fans worship him as a “lion among lambs”; his deprecators scour him as “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The debate about the authentic Manong Johnny rages on.

In one Saturday Night Live episode, the subject was Oprah. The gag went, “What’s with her? She’s fat, she’s thin, she’s fat, she’s thin. I mean come on, pick a body and go with it!”

On JPE we ask, “What’s with him? He’s right. He’s wrong. He’s right. He’s wrong.” Pick a side and go with it.

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