Republican Party Reptile(23)
That night I went to the hip café in Manila, the Hobbit House, to see Freddie Aguilar, who’s billed as “the Bob Dylan of the Philippines.” This is unfair, since he’s good-looking, plays the guitar well, can carry a tune, and writes songs that make sense.
Many of the Hobbit House patrons had long hair, as does Freddie, who joked from the stage about how many Marcos supporters were probably in the audience. The customers pealed with in-crowd glee and demanded more verses of Freddie’s protest tunes. They actually sang along. The decor, even the menu, was right out of Greenwich Village or Old Town or North Beach circa 1963. Except that, as always in the Philippines, there was one nightmarish detail: All of the waiters and waitresses were dwarfs. They were tugging at my blazer hem to show me a table, slipping through the crowd at crotch level, delivering orders and scooping up tips with just their little heads visible above the tabletop. A dozen drinks couldn’t put this right.
The next day I attended a protest Mass at Baclaran church. There were more people inside than could possibly be in there, people pressed into a single thing, like coral. Americans would have been fainting and breaking into fistfights and having cardiac arrests. But the Aquino supporters beamed and waved the L sign. They were wearing yellow (as in “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree”) in memory of Benigno Aquino, Cory’s gunned-down husband. When Cory herself arrived, a visible charge went through the crowd, like a concerned-citizens version of the wave.
“COR-EEE! COR-EEE! COR-EEE!” they hollered, but not in a Beatlemania way. They were there to help her. They were there to protect her. They were there to make the world what the world should be.
The homily was spoken by Cardinal Jaime Sin, whose bizarre name led to such local-newspaper headlines as SIN REQUIRES SOBRIETY. He asked business owners to be understanding if employees had to take time off for the upcoming civil disobedience.
Then Cory came to the pulpit to speak, and part of the crowd—the foreign-journalist part—turned ugly, shoving, kicking, and elbowing for position. I was sandwiched against the pulpit’s five-foot-high base, my chin practically on the toes of Cory’s yellow pumps. I was unable to avoid looking up her dress. She’s a direct woman, slightly schoolmarmish, no nonsense about her. Her charisma seems to proceed from her very lack of charismatic qualities—an ordinary citizen made noble by the force of events. It’s as if Harry Truman had been murdered by Thomas E. Dewey and Bess was carrying on. Nice legs, incidentally.
The crowd began singing “Bayan Ko” (“My Country”), the anthem of the campaign, written in the 1930s, during American rule. They sang in the clear, harmonious voice that seems to be given to all the world’s put-upon people. The words, in Tagalog, mean:
My country was seized and driven to misery.
Birds were given the freedom of flight.
Cage them and they will cry
Just like a beautiful country
That has no freedom. . . .
Philippines that I adore,
Nest of tears and suffering.
My ambition is to see you free.
If our people will unite,
Then this will come to be.
Standing there by the altar with the rest of the press corps, looking out at these nice, determined faces, feeling this appetite for hope, I began to cry. I was standing there like a big fool with tears running down my face. I remember it all from twenty years ago when I was in a crowd like this—the meetings, the marches, the joy of moral certitude, romance amidst the tear gas. I remember the wonderful fight against prejudice, poverty, injustice, a new day dawning. . . . And I remember how it all slipped away and came to shit.
THOSE INSCRUTABLE
ORIENTALS
But maybe I should have spared myself the Kleenex. Or maybe not. I don’t know. It’s simple enough that Marcos was an oinker and overdue to get sugar-cured and hung in the smokehouse. But a lot of other things about the Philippines weren’t so simple.
Where were the guerrillas, the New People’s Army, the question mark in Aquino’s future, while all this was going on? Having Winter Carnival? Nobody seemed to know. I talked to Oswaldo Carbonell, Manila chairman of Bayan, the left-wing umbrella group with close ties to the NPA. Bayan and the NPA had urged a boycott of the election, but no one boycotted it. Now Oswaldo was leading a not very sizable demonstration by student radicals. “We welcome the NPA,” he told me in one breath. “The Cory people are with us,” he told me in another.
And while the communists were doing nothing, Marcos was doing too much.
Why did the old slyboots invite a Congressional observer team, an international observer team, and two battalions of newsmen to an election that was supposed to give him legitimacy and then cheat like a professional-wrestling villain? There he was: bent over, pants around his ankles, with his ass pressed against the window of public opinion.