Republican Party Reptile(24)

And Marcos left behind a sizable body of crooks and collaborators armed to the teeth, with plenty of money. One thing the deposed president couldn’t cram into the American transport planes was all the cats he’d fattened. Will the super-tutas sell their polo ponies to buy house trailers for the folks in Smoky Mountain? Will the thugs march off merrily to reeducation camps singing lewd parodies of “Bayan Ko”?

Then there’s the economy. As far as I can figure, there’s no one anywhere who knows anything about fixing a third-world economy. The last three underdeveloped nations to become relatively prosperous were Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, and they all did it under hard-assed dictators like . . . well, sort of like Marcos.

Time for the Santo Niño. It’s a small charm that’s popular among the Philippine poor, a brass Baby Jesus with a hard-on. You wear it around your neck, and if you’re in physical danger, you’re supposed to put it in your mouth.

By Saturday, February 15, eight days after the election, protest enthusiasm seemed to have ebbed. Cory Aquino hadn’t been seen in public for two days. That night the Philippine National Assembly declared Marcos the winner. I rushed down to the palace for the riots, but there were none, just Bongbong and a BMW full of “junior cronies” driving none too steadily out the palace gate after the private victory party. In the backseat, the son of the Philippine ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was so blasted he was falling out of the car window.

An Aquino rally had been called for the next day. Cory supporters were to march to Rizal Park, in the center of Manila. I went out to one of the staging points in Quezon City, a middle-class suburb that is perhaps the most fervently anti-Marcos place in town. Only several hundred protesters were there at the appointed hour, milling around rather pointlessly. Eventually the crowd grew to about a thousand. The caskets of two murdered Aquino supporters were driven by, signaling the start of the march. (Carrying martyrs all over the place in their caskets is a big thing in the Philippines—sort of waving the bloody shirt and what’s in it too.)

The marchers, chanting in a desultory way, began to move toward downtown Manila. By the time they’d gone a kilometer, the crowd had quintupled. In another kilometer, it had quintupled again. Only once, at the University of Santo Tomas, did I see a group join the march in an organized way. People just materialized. And all along the six-kilometer route, cheering crowds were hanging banners, flags, selves out of windows and throwing yellow confetti that they’d made by tearing up the Manila Yellow Pages.

By the time we reached Rizal Park—and it wasn’t long because the marchers moved at a jog-trot—there were a half million people gathered around a ramshackle portable stage.

The crowd was squeezed even thicker than it had been at Baclaran church. I was with Tony and Betsy West from ABC. When people saw we were reporters, they somehow made way, moved where there was no room to move. “Foreign press!” they yelled. “Make way! Foreign press!” We were handed through the mob, right to second row front on the center aisle.

The crowd chanted, “COR-EEE! COR-EEE!” in a fearful thunderous rumble that made your lungs and liver swing like bell clappers in the rib cage. Then they began to sing. To hear half a million people sing “Bayan Ko” is ... is like hearing half a million people sing anything. Even the theme song to The Jetsons would have been stirring.

Cory Aquino stepped to the microphones. The crowd was in the kind of frenzy, passion, rapture, transport, wild excitement, or enthusiasm that sends a man to the thesaurus.

But did Cory give a rousing speech, calling for the head of Ferdinand Marcos and telling her countrymen, “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war”?

She did no such thing. In her calm, high-pitched voice and best head-librarian manner she outlined a program of tame dissent. There’d be a national day of prayer, when people should take off work and go to church, she said. She asked the audience to boycott seven banks and certain other “crony corporations,” including the San Miguel brewery. She asked them to delay paying their electric and water bills. And she requested a “noise barrage”—a traditional Philippine protest—each evening after she’d spoken to them over a church-owned AM station. “And you should experiment with other forms of nonviolent protest yourselves,” she said, “and let us know how they work.”

That was it. Keep your money in a sock. Don’t drink beer. And bang garbage-can lids together when you listen to the radio. Betsy, Tony, and I walked away scratching our heads. The crowd dispersed quietly.