FOR several hours last Sunday dri?ving on the Manila North Road from the Agoo-Baguio Highway in La Union all the way to North Luzon Expressway felt like a motorist’s dream come true. Traffic was light, extremely light.
Hardly any buses were stopping willy-nilly to load and unload passengers. Just a few trucks spewed death-dealing fumes from overworked reconditioned engines. No pesky tricycles slowed down the flow of other vehicles. No kuliglig (hand tractors hooked up to carts loaded with farm produce) took their sweet time getting from point A to point B, tempting other road users to make dangerous maneuvers.
What made what is also called MacArthur Highway revert to a condition reminiscent of the sixties and seventies—when a road trip from Baguio to Manila could be accomplished in as little as four hours even without the tollway—were three prizefights taking place some 11,600 kilometers across the Pacific Ocean.
At the Staples Center in Los Angeles Brian Villoria, Rey “Boom Boom” Bautista and Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquiao were giving a magnificent exhibition of Filipino pugilistic prowess. Millions of their compatriots in the homeland and elsewhere were enjoying every minute of it, delighting in the rare occasion when three of their countrymen (OK, two Pinoys and one Filipino American) were decisively subduing their foreign rivals.
From Tuba in Benguet through Sison in Pangasinan and Paniqui in Tarlac to Mabalacat in Pampanga, the few motorists still on the road could not help noticing scores of people bunched around TVs and radios at roadside eateries and sari-sari stores. Those scenes must have been replicated in thousands of other towns from Basco in Batanes to Bongao in Tawi-Tawi.
Filipinos set aside regional differences and political discord, rediscovering national harmony as they relished the sweet success of their three kababayan—albeit vicariously. For a while there, it again felt good to be Pinoy.
Filipinos tried to hang on as long as they could to the euphoria that Villoria, Bautista and Pacquiao gifted the nation. However, the day the boxers made history in Los Angeles was not quite over yet when the nation’s attention was brought craashing back to the political disputes that are our nation’s disgrace.
Politicians and pundits were soon reminding us that a Social Weather Stations survey done from August 26 to September 5 showed that 79 percent of respondents wanted Mrs. Arroyo impeached. Moreover, 51 percent favored an uprising if she was not impeached.
“Anti-GMA feelings ran very high in the last few days of the recent hearings of the House Committee on Justice, with the nationwide third-quarter Quarter 2005 Social Weather Survey finding 79 percent wanting President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo impeached, 64 percent favoring her resignation, and 51 percent saying she should be removed by People Power if the House of Representatives would reject her impeachment,” SWS reported.
The findings reminded SWS of public opinion five years ago immediately before then-President Joseph Estrada was impeached.
The survey also found majority of its respondents (51 percent) favored “the call for People Power” in case Mrs. Arroyo’s impeachment fails to push through, which it did. Why SWS used the euphemism people power rather than describe it more precisely as civil disobedience or uprising, only the pollster can explain.
Whether against Marcos or Estrada, people power as a petty bourgeois alternative to a more thoroughgoing revolution nonetheless amounted to open defiance of duly constituted authority. It has often been said that only by the grace of the Almighty that EDSA 1 and 2 did not turn out to be more violent than they could have. However, middle class picnics, unlike, say, a Marxist insurgency, rarely lead to bloodshed.
People power conveys the romantic notion of an outraged people taking destiny into their own hands, laying siege on the citadel of power, forcing the corrupt and/or the inept to step down and winning for themselves a better life, like a Delacroix painting of the bare-breasted Liberty leading the French in storming the Bastille—with just a sprinkling of corpses lining the route.
For most Filipinos, unfortunately, as February 26, 1986, and January 22, 2001, showed, people power amounted to nothing more than one faction of the elite replacing another, a rigodon of the ruling class.
It would be interesting to find out what SWS respondents think of those who are working to unseat Mrs. Arroyo through people power.
Pollsters such as SWS ought to give their respondents a more honest and clearer idea of what yet another uprising by the so-called middle forces entails, who makes up its vanguard as well as its likely consequences, based on recent history. This way, there’s a chance respondents will give informed opinion, not just knee-jerk replies to half-understood survey questions.
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As promised, here’s more from an e-mail sent by JFKA, titled “Oxford Definitions Updated.” Enjoy:
Yawn: The only time some married men ever get to open their mouth.
Compromise: The art of dividing a cake in such a way that everybody believes he got the biggest piece.
Tears: The hydraulic force by which masculine willpower is defeated by feminine waterpower.
Dictionary: A place where success comes before work.
Classic: A book people praise but do not read.
More next time.
