Republican Party Reptile(21)
A reporter from the pro-Aquino Manila Times asked, “What will happen if there’s no agreement about who won the election?”
“What do you think will happen?” said Marcos. For just a moment I thought that he wasn’t making a threat, that he really didn’t know.
I dozed in my fake-bamboo chair and was startled awake at the end of the session by Marcos saying, “When you see a nun touch a ballot box, that’s an illegal act.”
The stuff of nightmares, this country. And as every horror-movie director knows, it takes an element of the friendly and familiar to make a real nightmare. It has to be Mom eating snakes in the rec room.
In the Philippines, the element of the friendly and familiar is the Filipinos, remarkably nice people, cheerful, hospitable, unfailingly polite. Even the riot police and Marcos thugs were courteous when not actually terrorizing somebody. The gang members smile at you in jail. The dying smile at you in Smoky Mountain. When you ask a cab driver what the fare is, he says, “Ikaw ang bahala”—“It’s up to you.” In the worst red-light dive the atmosphere is like a Rotary lunch.
There was an anti-imperialist demonstration in front of our embassy. One of the protesters came up to Betsy West, an ABC-TV Nightline producer, and said, “If you could please wait five minutes, we’ll burn the American flag.”
WHITE MONKEYS
For comic relief there was the U.S. Congressional observer team.
Its chairman, Indiana senator Richard Lugar, started out with his foot in his mouth down to the knee. Reporters called him the Stepford Senator because of his jerky physical motions and mechanical responses. After a couple of hours of cursory poll watching on election morning, Lugar told Manila’s Channel 4 that everything seemed to be going along fine and “the only problems I saw were minor and technical.” Channel 4 played this tape over and over again for the rest of the day. Early the next morning, Lugar was huffing with indignation and told Tom Brokaw, “It’s a very, very suspicious count.” But that didn’t get local coverage.
Representative John Murtha, from Pennsylvania, was an improvement, at least in person. I ran into this big side of beef of a guy during the vote count at the city hall in Pasay, a working-class Manila suburb. He tried to make some statesmanlike noises about “the passionate commitment of the Philippine people to democracy,” a phrase reporters were by then condensing to “Pash Commit of Flips to Dem.” But outrage overtook him. “You can see what’s going on!” he blurted. “You can see what the will of the people is!” And he said journalists should quit going to the same places he was and get out to as many vote-counting centers as they could. “You’re the only hope,” he said. (Which I’ve never been called by a politician, or anybody else for that matter.)
Most of the Potomac Parakeets were a big disappointment. Massachusetts senator John Kerry was a founding member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but he was a bath toy in this fray.
On Sunday night, two days after the election, thirty of the computer operators from COMELEC walked off the job, protesting that vote figures were being juggled. Aquino supporters and NAMFREL volunteers took the operators, most of them young women, to a church, and hundreds of people formed a protective barrier around them.
Village Voice reporter Joe Conason and I had been tipped off about the walkout, and when we got to the church, we found Bea Zobel, one of Cory Aquino’s top aides, in a tizzy. “The women are terrified,” she said. “They’re scared to go home. They don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to do.” Joe and I suggested that Mrs. Zobel go to the Manila Hotel and bring back some members of the Congressional observer team. She came back with Kerry, who did nothing.
Kerry later said that he didn’t talk to the COMELEC employees then because he wasn’t allowed to. This is ridiculous. He was ushered into an area that had been cordoned off from the press and the crowd and where the computer operators were sitting. To talk to the women, all he would have had to do was raise his voice. Why he was reluctant, I can’t tell you. I can tell you what any red-blooded representative of the U.S. government should have done. He should have shouted, “If you’re frightened for your safety, I’ll take you to the American embassy, and damn the man who tries to stop me.” But all Kerry did was walk around like a male model in a concerned and thoughtful pose.
Before the Congressional observer team went home, Lugar read a thin-soup statement, crinkum-crankum so packed with “Pash Commit of Flips to Dem” that a Hong Kong TV correspondent was moved to ask, “For those of us who are not native English speakers, could you please tell us what you’re saying?” These guys may have talked tough stateside, but they had their mouths in the Delphic mush bowl when it counted.