How the mighty have fallen

There’s no small irony in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo now desperately looking for ways to flee the country. That irony is that she’s still here.

I never thought she and her family would be able to do so after her rule and said so in several columns. They could not afford to, I said. The depth of anger and loathing for her and her husband, enough to have sent some of their bitterest foes to the afterlife from apoplexy at the sight of her, guaranteed it.

Her rule might have been a second-hand, trying-hard, copycat of Marcos’ own, but it had violently pissed off a citizenry that had gotten used all over again to having presidents who were elected and who reasonably hewed to liberal democratic practices. Next to Marcos, Arroyo was the most unpopular leader this postwar country has ever had, and that’s putting it mildly. No, I said, she and her entourage would flee the country the way Marcos did, tails between their legs. Arroyo would probably seek asylum in Spain whose language she spoke, and whose officials once toasted her defense of human rights the way George Bush père toasted Marcos’ adherence to democracy.

But lo and behold, she did not. On the contrary, she defied fate by running for representative in her favorite province. And won, of course, having the loot to buy up the place. But what was she thinking?

Well, she probably thought this was a forgetful country, the sins of the past were always drowned out by the sins of the present. Out of sight and out of power, she could bide time and rehabilitate herself. The Marcoses had done so, Imelda coming all the way back to flaunt her ways and Bongbong demanding in tones alternately aggrieved and haughty that his father be buried in Libingan ng mga Bayani. Out of sight and out of power, she could always direct public attention and flak toward the new government. As representative, she could apply herself to that task.

She probably thought even more that the new government had no will, no resolve, no character to run after her. P-Noy’s “kapag walang corrupt, walang mahirap” was just a campaign line, it would have a very short shelf life. In any case, she could always defend herself, she had a whole division of lawyers and a whole army of political friends to shield her from harm, or justice, whichever came first, whichever was more implacable.

Wrong on both counts.

This country may be forgetful in the long run, but it does have a strong short-term memory. You see that in the wellspring of support P-Noy has gotten for his decision to stop the former First Couple from leaving. The anger and loathing are still there. The people want the former first couple punished. The people want the former first couple jailed.

For a while there, it seemed as though Arroyo’s gamble would pay off. She and her allies had gone on attack mode from the start, accusing P-Noy of lacking the strength of heart and mind to pluck this country out of its dire straits, a thing he was trying to cover up by dwelling on the past, which was what his anti-corruption campaign was really all about. Quite unlike his predecessor who had managed, whatever was said of her, to keep this country’s head above water amid the flood of economic woes that had tumbled upon the world. Armed with a communications arm that was no arm at all, government inexplicably turned defensive, fending off the attacks instead of going on attack mode itself. And so for a while, it seemed as though the least that could happen to Arroyo was that she would go free. The most was that she could reinvent herself and mount a comeback.

No longer. Prosecuting the Arroyos is the best thing P-Noy has done. Punishing the Arroyos is the best thing P-Noy has done. Preventing the Arroyos from leaving is the best thing P-Noy has done. It turns the world back on its feet. It gives Filipinos to see, or hope, that there is justice in this world.

P-Noy has gone past his mother in this respect. Then the operative word was reconciliation, a thing Jaime Cardinal Sin, whose influence on Cory was enormous, was big on and managed to inveigle government to adopt. The Presidential Commission on Good Government did try to retrieve the ill-gotten wealth, with mixed success, but neither the cronies nor the Marcoses themselves when they came back to the country were prosecuted and jailed for corruption over and beyond the call of greed, or for corruption in the sense of corrupting every institution of society.

P-Noy’s resolve to run after the Arroyos is historic in this respect. It goes beyond the jailing of Erap which had political, or indeed personal, reasons written all over it. If he succeeds in jailing the Arroyos, P-Noy will have achieved reconciliation in the truest sense of the word. A meaning the Marcoses and the Arroyos have been at pains to pervert by asserting that P-Noy is missing his chance to unite the country by failing to reconcile with them. The point of reconciliation is to reconcile with the people, not with those who oppressed them. The point of unity is to be one with the people, not with those who screwed them.

As to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, the contraption adorning her head, a pathetic effort to draw sympathy from an unsympathetic public, merely reminds me of another face hewed out of stone on a hill in Agoo. That is the bust of Ferdinand Marcos, ravaged by time and weather, the furrows forming along the cheeks looking like tears of blood trickling down his face. Both had reigns that rained tears of blood upon the land, both looked at the height of their power as though nothing could touch them, not the machinations of man, not the hand of heaven. Both looked at the depth of their mendacity as though they would go on forever. Look at them now.

How the mighty have fallen.