YOU know this government is in deep organic fertilizer because of one telltale sign: It has discovered nationalism.
Ferdinand Marcos made the same startling discovery when his patrons in Washington began abandoning him after his minions shot Ninoy Aquino to death on the tarmac. And after his enemies grew to a multitude overnight, their cries finally piercing through deaf heaven and even deafer Washington, whichever was the more powerful or the more loudly implored.
Overnight, the Marcos regime turned country-fearing, making threatening noises against the US bases, the KKK, a livelihood project, even trying to imitate the original KKK with some of its officials making blood compacts by torchlight in support of the Philippine Ideology. That Ideology, manufactured still overnight, made Marcos the apotheosis of an unfolding of Philippine history as reeled off by the heroes. In one twist of real history, the young military officers who became its captive audience took the nationalism to heart and decided to free the nation from captivity under him.
That is the context with which to view GMA’s allies loudly vociferating against the World Bank and the VFA. They’re all over the place, Miriam and Johnny and Joker suddenly discovering that the World Bank is an oppressive institution and the VFA an exceptionally onerous exaction on their beloved country.
At the very least, what’s curious about it is that until the World Bank implicated Mike Arroyo in a plot to defraud the World Bank, they never threw a stone in its direction. Indeed, one moment Miriam and friends were looking hard at the charge sheet against the First Gentleman, the next they were hard at work prosecuting Daniel Smith. Funny how crime and punishment works in this country. At the very most, they forget it was Miriam who, claiming to be a constitutional expert, argued that Erap, then her lord and master, and not the Senate, had every right to sign the VFA because it was not a treaty but a mere agreement. Since then everyone has referred to it as a treaty, a thing Miriam has never bothered to “correct.”
Of course the VFA ought to be scrapped. Of course the VFA ought never to have been signed in the first place, voiding as it did the heroic struggle to terminate the US bases, and proving as it has that a base by any other name reeks as foully. And of course the World Bank, as much as the International Monetary Fund, should be pilloried for foisting a “structural adjustment program” and GATT’s version of globalization on us, both of which put us directly in the path of the super storms of the global market, which razed down our agriculture and industry. Of course it’s justice, however Stone Age, to throw Daniel Smith in Muntinlupa and turn a blind eye to whatever it is the inmates there do unto foreigners, young or old, as they do unto Filipino women.
But GMA and her boys and girl have about as much authority to damn them as Mike Arroyo has to damn Jesus Christ’s two companions on the Cross.
Only recently GMA was desperately chasing Barack Obama he had to hide under his bed while she was in the US (and probably long after) for fear of her suddenly materializing by his side, slipping through US security which Al Zeidi proved isn’t particularly ironclad. You wonder why Malacañang doesn’t just resort to Photoshop and put GMA side by side with her long-hunted prey, waving to the world.
Indeed, not too long ago GMA was just loudly proclaiming the Philippines’ role as America’s junior partner in Asia, and her own one as Chief Little Brown Sister. That was when George W. Bush unveiled his plan to rape the world, notably the Arab one which greatly minded the proposed intrusion into their behind. Bush, who stole the vote in Florida, said, “You are either with me or against me.” GMA, who benefited from People Power and reviled it afterward and who later stole the vote in the Comelec, said the same thing. Kindred spirit, kindred gall. And very probably kindred fate, Bush very probably getting away with the lighter sentence.
The pseudo-nationalism or fake patriotism never really helped Marcos. At the end of the day, the quintessential Amboy, as James Hamilton Patterson called him, fled to—where else?—the USA. Of course some say he agreed to board the plane only because he heard “Paoay” instead of “Hawaii” when he asked after its destination, but that belongs more properly to text joke than to history.
Alas, there’s nothing roughly sounding like Lubao in America. In any case, there’s no welcome mat awaiting GMA there anyway, not even in Citizen Dubya’s door. And still in any case, Marcos himself found no peace in the US, finding only no end of legal summons choking up his letterbox.
The last days of Marcos and GMA have one dazzling thing in common. That is democracy pushing out of the loins of tyranny across the world. The US was not its midwife during Marcos’ time, it was its abortionist. Reagan was supportive of Third World gangsters. But the same Third World was afire with struggles against dictatorship, as indeed was the socialist world, no small thanks to glasnost, which would bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today, the US is democracy’s potential midwife, with Obama assuming that role, birthing democracy once more from the loins of (homegrown) tyranny. Already the expectations of a new world are rippling across the world like a tsunami. Those who cling to power through corruption and deceit—or plots to mount iron-fisted rule—must truly find themselves on the wrong side of history, where echoes only the death knell across desolate space. History has never treated its wrong side kindly.
Feigned patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels. Fake nationalism presages their downfall.
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