Mind-boggling

I’m astonished by those who say we shouldn’t be taking the WikiLeaks leaks seriously. Why ever not? They are not rumors, they are not speculations, they are not theories. They are facts. But of course the US Embassy is not going to comment on them. They cannot dispute the leaks’ veracity. The leaks are raw data in the form of cables the various American embassies sent their home office over a period of time. These are the American officials’ own assessments, own thoughts, own words. Nothing could be more candid, nothing could be more revealing, nothing could be more enlightening. For us.

And nothing could be more compromising. For them.

I did say a couple of months ago when we were saber-rattling over the Spratlys that it was all well and good that we had discovered feistiness and assertiveness in the face of a bullying neighbor, an emergent world economic superpower if not a certified political one, but that it would be even finer and better if we could do the same thing vis-à-vis a certified world political superpower, if a patently declining economic one, that had been bullying us for more than a hundred years. How we could see China threatening to dispossess us of a piece of disputed territory, enough to want to confront it with a World-War-II-vintage warship, and be perfectly blind to the United States nearly dispossessing us of a huge chunk of the national patrimony?

Long before we started to show an inclination to “embrace the dragon,” as Francis Ricciardone warned about years ago, a thing we got to know as well from WikiLeaks, we had been embracing the eagle. Or we embraced the eagle a little later after it clawed its way to our shores like a bird of prey—aves de rapiña, as an editorial by El Renacimiento, a newspaper during the early years of the American occupation, expressly put it. It was only later that we embraced the eagle, but with nothing less than desperate ardor, which hid the bullying completely. How can you appear as a bully to someone who demands to be bullied? Or how can you appear as a sadist to a masochist?

That’s the truly mind-boggling thing about the WikiLeaks leaks. It is not so much that Americans think nothing of meddling into our affairs, it is that we think nothing of begging them to do so. The American meddling is bad enough as it is. A foreign power trying to pry loose a chunk of a country’s territory is a thing to huff about. Elsewhere, an embassy caught doing that would have its officials automatically expelled, if not shut down. Not in the Philippines.

What rubs salt on wound is Kristie Kenney lauding the illegitimate president in whose watch this illegitimate thing, or patent crime, was done. Indeed, the illegitimate president who not only tolerated it but sold it herself with a passion. Naturally, Kenney found Gibo Teodoro gold and Noynoy Aquino dross. The first was a Gloria clone, the other was the opposite of Gloria. “We don’t care that he—or she—is an SOB, so long as he—or she—is our SOB.”

But that’s nothing compared to our own contribution to America meddling in our affairs. America really needs no ruse, or excuse, to do so. We ourselves demand to be meddled into. We ourselves beg them to please mess up our lives.

It was the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the first place, in the form of a letter by Hashim Salamat to George W. Bush, that importuned the United States to intervene and support its secessionist cause. Not that the United States needed much inviting in that respect, it was already scouring the Philippines for alternative sites for bases, grounded or movable. Salamat’s letter merely showed it wasn’t just Christian Filipinos who were thoroughly delusional in imagining America as their special friend, as Bush soon showed by invading Iraq.

Ghadzali Jaafar, vice chairman for political affairs of the MILF, now says it’s not true at all that the United States supported their call for a Muslim “substate” in the South, all it supported were peace talks between the MILF and the Philippine government. A silly denial, because if so why was Kenney in Kuala Lumpur to witness the creation of the Bangsamoro Republic? Why wasn’t she violently objecting to it?

It was Arroyo in the second place that made the meddling possible by dealing the Bangsamoro card with the Americans the way Marcos dealt the bases with them. Alas, for her the United States had learned its lessons with Marcos and was loath to back her up on her plan to declare martial law. But Kenney did back her up till the end of her ill-gotten term and nearly got Muslim Mindanao in exchange. No, there were no limits to what Arroyo would have done to cling to power, from coddling the Ampatuans to parting with Philippine territory. But the best laid plots of mice and men oft go awry, and in our case by the most providential of ways: During Marcos’ time with the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, and during Arroyo’s time with the death of Corazon Aquino. Enough to make you believe in miracles.

Mind-boggling as all this is, there’s something even more mind-boggling here, and that is the utter lack of mind-boggling-ness with which we have met these revelations. There is no fretting over it, there is no fury over it, there is no furor over it. Some even want to know why we should treat the WikiLeaks revelations seriously. The general attitude is to shrug and say, “What else is new?” You’d think an ambassador smiling her way to her hosts’ hearts while trying to steal an heirloom behind their backs was something that happened every day. You’d think an illegitimate ruler shouting “Take it! Take it!” in exchange for ruling forever was something that happened every day.

It’s enough to make you wonder when it was that we really became an independent country. Except that it won’t really boggle our minds to discover we’re not.

Truly, mind-boggling.