Republican Party Reptile(17)

My favorite B-girl, Jolly, who has the face of a pouty Hawaiian beauty queen and a body that could cause sins of commission at a hundred yards, takes a playful punch at my nose. “Laban!” she says. It means “struggle” in Tagalog. “I vote for Cory.”

The other girls giggle. “She’s not old enough to vote,” says one.

“We’re all for Cory,” says another. “Even the mama-sans are for Cory.” The mama-sans are the combination madams and bunny mothers of these establishments. They hire the girls, make sure you buy drinks, and charge you a “bar fine” if you take anybody home.

I ask a mama-san, and she agrees. “Everybody here is for Cory. Only owners are for Marcos.”

And I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I visit an owner, an Aussie thug who runs one of the B-girl joints on Pilar Street. He’s about forty, blond, thick-chested, with mean blue eyes and an accent as broad as the space I’d give him if he were swinging a chair in a bar fight. His office is a windowless upstairs room. The desk is covered with thousands of pesos, bundled in rubber bands.

“The tourist trade has gone to hell,” says the Aussie. “And it’ll get worse with all the crap you reporters are turning out about the election. But something’s got to be done for the Flips, doesn’t it? They can only take so much, can’t they? Now they’ll be up in the hills with the New People’s Army or some bloody thing.”

Thugs, whores, cabbies, street Arabs, gin jockeys—these are by nature conservative folk. When you lose this bunch, your ass is oatmeal. You’d better pack your Dictator-model Vuitton bags and pray the U.S. Air Force will Baby Doc you someplace nice.

To think that they had an “election contest” in the Philippines is to get it all wrong. It was a national upchuck. It was everybody with sense or scruples versus everybody corrupt, frightened, or mindlessly loyal.

Marcos, like any good crime boss, knew how to command loyalty. He co-opted the two traditional political parties and formed them into his own nonideological New Society Party, the KBL. He declared martial law to avoid giving up office in 1972 and then changed the constitution so he could rule by decree and be reelected in perpetuity. He sent hit men after some of his enemies, jailed others, and forced the rest into exile. Then he ruined the Philippine economy by granting monopolies on everything from sugar milling and copra processing to grain importing and by pumping oceans of government money into lame and corrupt corporations—a system known as crony capitalism.

According to Newsweek, American and Philippine economists estimate that Marcos and pals shipped as much as $20 billion out of the country. We’re not talking about Michèle Duvalier’s fur collection. Twenty billion dollars is more than half the Philippine gross national product, enough money to turn the archipelago into Hong Kong II. By comparison, total U.S. aid to the Philippines since independence in 1946 has been less than $4 billion.

Reporters who do duty in the third world spend a lot of time saying, “It’s not that simple.” We say, “It’s not that simple about the Israelis and the PLO,” or “It’s not that simple about the contras and the Sandinistas.” But in the Philippines it was that simple. It was simpler than that. Ferdinand Marcos is human sewage, an evil old power-addled flaming Glad Bag, a vicious lying dirtball who ought to have been dragged through the streets of Manila with his ears nailed to a truck bumper.





GOONS, GUNS, AND GOLD


As a traditional phrase describing Philippine elections, “goons, guns, and gold” doesn’t cover it. I know everyone has heard this election was stolen. But, Jesus, the cheek of the thing. The fix was more obvious than a skit on this season’s Saturday Night Live.

Marcos had complete control of Philippine television. On Manila’s Channel 4, the anchorman was a smirking toadeater named Ronnie Nathanialz—in looks and delivery, a sort of Don Ho from hell. He was known locally as TV Ronnie Sip-Sip Tuta. In Tagalog, tuta means “puppy” or “lap dog,” and sip-sip is something worse than ass kissing. TV Ronnie’s news broadcast would go: “Good evening, viewers, and welcome to popular Channel 4 news. Tonight we continue our unbiased coverage of the honest, fair, and peaceful Philippine elections where much-admired President Ferdinand E. Marcos is showing a commanding lead according to all reliable commentators.”

I’m not making this up. If you listened to Channel 4 for more than a minute, you’d start boxing yourself on the ears, trying to get the steady hum of bullshit out of your head.

Then Channel 4 would broadcast a taped segment from COMELEC, the government election commission. Functionaries would hold an empty ballot box up to the camera (“Nothing in the hat!”), then show all the locks and seals to be attached to each box and demonstrate how this box would be carefully moved under military guard from hither to thither, and so forth. It looked like the election was being fixed by a high school magic club.