MY PERSONAL REVENGE

There's The Rub
MY PERSONAL REVENGE
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer
Last updated 02:17am (Mla time) 06/20/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- Jackson Browne has a song I particularly like. It was originally written by Tomas Borge, a Sandinista who was blindfolded and tortured for 18 months in Somoza’s jails and whose wife was gang-raped by soldiers. The song is called “My Personal Revenge.” Some parts of it (translation by Jose Calderon) give you an idea of where he is going:

“My personal revenge will be the right/ Of our children in the schools and in the gardens…/ My personal revenge will be to tell you good morning/ On a street without beggars or homeless/ When instead of jailing you I suggest/ You shake away the sadness there that blinds you/ And when you who have applied your hands in torture/ Are unable to look up at what surrounds you/ My personal revenge will be to give you/ These hands that once you so mistreated/ But have failed to take away their tenderness.”

It’s an astounding concept of a “personal” revenge, given the depths of bitterness the author must have felt over the ordeal he had to endure. But it’s not just the awesome Christian turning-the-other-cheek that makes it wondrous. It is also that, completely practically, or pragmatically, or politically, it is the only complete and satisfying revenge there is. The only way to punish a tyrant who has oppressed a land is to regale him with a land freed from oppression and a people enjoying peace and prosperity. That is driving a stake into the heart of Dracula.

The only personal revenge against a tyrant that works is the personal revenge that becomes the national revenge. There is no other. Torturing a tyrant, or worse oppressing the country, in turn, is trying to kill Dracula with darkness.
I first used this concept during Cory Aquino’s time. I said then that the reason the country was having problems punishing, or even prosecuting, the Marcoses and their cronies -- indeed the reason the cronies came back with impunity -- was that the personal revenge exacted by those that came after them was, well, too personal. The personal revenge of the Cory government against the Marcoses was to steal back what the Marcoses had stolen from the people. The personal revenge of the Cory government against the Marcoses was to regale them with a land that did not teem with milk and honey but with blood and vigilantes.

The only way you can punish a tyrant is with the people’s anger. It takes an aggrieved nation to prosecute a tyrant, not a handful of selfish individuals with scores to settle. What enabled the Marcoses to come back was not the lack of a case or cases against them, it was the waning of public interest in prosecuting them. It is not easy to be angry at an old tyranny, or even remember it, when you are in the throes of a new one.
What was true then is truer today. To begin with, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had no reason to be bitter at the Joseph Estrada government. Unlike Cory, she never personally suffered in its hands; she even profited from it. She never had cause to harbor a grudge that she needed to subsume under, or fuse with, the national one. By rights, in complete gratefulness to those who had risked life and limb to put her in power, indeed to give back to a nation that had given so much to her, she had the obligation to inflict the kind of “personal revenge” Borge speaks of, forcing the former rulers to recoil in pain from the laughter of children wafting from schools and gardens and the sight of streets bereft of whores and beggars.

She did not. She foisted a worse tyranny than the one she found.

The reason for these perorations is that I find myself no longer assailed by the prospect of Estrada being released from jail. I was one of those who assailed him for his corruption, which went beyond the theft of money to the theft of morals, particularly given the shape, form and appearance of the Midnight Cabinet, as ugly a collection of goons and villains as the ones that graced Estrada’s own movies. I was the first to call for him to be impeached, when he closed down the Manila Times and called for an ad boycott of the Inquirer, long before the idea percolated in the minds of Manny Villar and his fellow congressmen. And I was one of those who rejoiced when he was jailed for malfeasance, imagining that a new day, gray and overcast that it was, had dawned.

I still believe that crime may not be made to pay. I still believe that two wrongs do not make a right, and that “if everybody cheats anyway,” as some bishops say, that is not an excuse for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to rule, that is an imperative for all cheaters to go to jail. But there’s something to be said as well for selective justice.

Estrada may have robbed, but he did not make this country the most corrupt in Asia. Arroyo has. Estrada may have stolen morals along with money, wrecking this country’s concept of right and wrong, but he did not break this country’s spirit completely, making right wrong and wrong right, punishing good and rewarding evil. Arroyo has. Indeed, Estrada may have pillaged and pillaged big, but he did not steal the most valuable of the citizen’s possessions, which is his vote, and the most precious of any human being’s property, which is his life. Arroyo has.
For Estrada to continue to languish in jail for his sins is for a pauper to rot in a pit for stealing a loaf of bread while a politician enjoys the fruits of his plunder. I grant Estrada is not a pauper and what he stole is not a loaf of bread, not in absolute terms. But he is so compared to the height and depth, the length and breadth, of what Arroyo has done, a ransacking not just of this country’s material wealth but of its human essence. No, these days I do not find myself assailed by the thought that Estrada would be free to reunite with his harem.

I’ll just wait for the day when we may exact our personal revenge on the one that has deeply wronged us.