THERE’S THE RUB

Death and progress
By Conrado de QuirosInquirer

Last updated 01:02am (Mla time) 06/05/2007

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is unperturbed. The Team Unity debacle, she says, will not deter her from pursuing economic progress. “The path we have set for economic reforms will not be upset by partisan elections. Politics will not undo our economic progress.” She has only three more years to go, she continued, and she will not be distracted by the results of the senatorial election.

Either she has good instincts for propaganda or her handlers know their business. If you notice, over the past several months, she has removed herself from the electoral scene and over the last couple of weeks has been abroad busily projecting herself as “delivering the goods.” At the very least, that frees her from blame for whatever might be said about the conduct of the elections, which her people have been desperately trying to overturn. At the very most, it makes her out to be working where everybody else is playing. Or it makes her out to be engaged in the serious business of uniting the country through economics while everybody else is engaged in the frivolous indulgence of dividing the country through politics.

Nice try, but it doesn’t cut.

All the alarm bells in my brain go blaring when I hear things like this. The last time I heard Arroyo say she had only so much time left and would rather spend it uniting the country through economic work rather than frittering it in political play was in 2002. She even went on to pledge on Rizal Day at the end of that year to not run in 2004, knowing as she did that she was a source of dissension. Less than a year later, she cast her lot in the field, and the rest is history. Or thanks to people like Garci, this country’s democracy became history.
When Arroyo acknowledges that she has only a few more years to go, be very, very afraid.
More than that, that was how Ferdinand Marcos postured toward the end of martial law when the world turned against him. Quite literally, the world, including the United States at one end, which would eventually force him to cut and cut cleanly, and the Filipinos at the other, who after August 1983 would have liked nothing better than to cut and cut him cleanly. During his twilight years, Marcos also postured about being busy with salvaging the economy, which he said was what the “silent majority” wanted, while his enemies were busy “salvaging” it with their fractious politics. Marcos did cut, but not so very cleanly: He had to be cut off from Malacañang by an angry crowd.

You know you’re looking at trouble when you see posturing like this. At the very least what’s wrong with it is that it offers a monumental contradiction. It says that a ruler, particularly an illegitimate one, can lead a nation to progress when its people do not particularly want him or her. In a parliamentary system, the kind the Charter-change proponents, including Arroyo herself, have been pushing for, the “vote of no confidence” that the senatorial results represent would have been enough to make a prime minister resign. I’ve yet to know of a nation that progressed whose ruler could not rally the people behind her. I’ve always thought progress was something that was premised on widespread, if not universal, support.

There’s more. For you also have to ask, “What economic progress?” As in Marcos’ time, the “progress,” or whatever there is of it, is happening in spite of, and not because of, government. It’s happening because of the overseas Filipino workers, a humongous price to pay for survival. Just some weeks ago, an official at the Department of Foreign Affairs acknowledged the ravages overseas work was inflicting on the integrity of the Filipino family, and was incorporating that warning in its pre-departure orientation seminars.
As in Marcos’ time, the “progress” is being paid for by enormous loans. Lest we forget, this administration has borrowed more than the past two presidents combined. As in Marcos’ time, the “progress” isn’t trickling down to the poor: Arroyo has yet to answer the question (she says it’s “political”) why the “progress” hasn’t benefited most Filipinos. As in Marcos’ time, or probably more so, corruption riots -- we are now the most corrupt country in Asia -- which answers in part why the manna isn’t falling down. The officials of this government merely project their individual enrichment to that of the nation.

But in the end, what’s truly chilling about this posturing is the authoritarian message it sends. What it says is that it doesn’t really matter if you cheat in elections or you have a ruler who isn’t elected so long as you have “economic progress.” What it says is that it doesn’t really matter if murder and mayhem riot, if the victims are journalists or political activists, if they live in places God has forgotten or in those Mammon remembers, so long as you have “economic progress.” What it says is that it doesn’t really matter if your liberties are taken away and the two Gonzalezes and ilk are free to dictate how you may live your life, so long as you have “economic progress.” What it says is that it doesn’t really matter if right is wrong or wrong is right, the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished, so long as you have “economic progress.”

Indeed, what it says is that it doesn’t really matter if you have democracy or not. That argument was expressly revived by Washington SyCip some months ago in an article in the Business section of this paper, an argument we heard throughout martial law: that American-style liberal democracy wasn’t suited for the temper of Filipinos. For reasons known only to him, SyCip considers himself one.

You know you’re in trouble when you hear rulers, particularly illegitimate ones, talk about “economic progress” and not “fractious politics” being what the “silent majority” ordered.

The only reason that majority is silent is that it is dead.