Republican Party Reptile

by P. J. O'Rourke

  It was the day after the election, and President Marcos was holding a press conference. It was completely uninteresting to see him in person. His puffy face was opaque. There was something of Nixon to his look, but not quite as nervous, and something of Mao, but not quite as dead. Marcos predicted how much he’d win by, which turned out to be how much he won by after his KBL-dominated legislature tallied the count. He blandly lied away, accusing the press of making things up and the other side of threats and cheating. One member of the press asked him about threats and cheating of his own. Said Marcos, “Why hasn’t the opposition brought this to the attention of the authorities?” (Which were him.)

  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.

  Now they’re giving each other bipartisan backslaps for their brilliant handling of a delicate foreign-policy crisis. But all the Filipinos saw was three weeks of President Reagan taking every position on the opinion compass about whether Marcos was a cool dude or what. The administration didn’t get around to “throw the bum out” until Ferdinand and Imelda were practically unpacking their underwear in Guam. I don’t think there’s a way to exaggerate the true love we could have had in the Philippines if we’d gotten on the side of the angels and stayed there. But, I was quick to point out to my Philippine friends, it could have been worse. We could have lent B-52s to Marcos the way we did to Nguyen Van Thieu.

  DOWN FOR THE COUNT

  First thing in the morning on the day after the election, Tony Suau and I went to watch votes being counted at the city hall in Makati, Manila’s central business district. It was clear, even before the polls closed, that Marcos would have to cheat before, during, and after the balloting. Cory Aquino had shaken up a warm six-pack of indignation, and the pop tops were off.

  The ballot boxes, aluminum cubes about the size of milk crates, had been brought from Makati’s polling places and stored in a warehouse behind the city hall. A couple thousand Aquino supporters surrounded the two buildings. The NAMFREL volunteers linked arms and formed a human corridor from the warehouse, across a plaza, through the city hall basement, up three flights of stairs, and down a hall to an assembly room. Every ballot box was carried through this double file by a flying wedge of a half-dozen people, each keeping at least one hand on that box.

  Tony and I were on the second floor with one flying wedge that had obligingly stopped in midrun so we could interview them. Then we heard screaming and yelling in the lobby below.

  One of the city hall policemen had taken issue with the NAMFREL human chain, a shoving match had followed, and a teenage girl had been thumped on the head.

  The crowd went wild. Tony and I came downstairs just in time to get caught at the front of this nascent riot and squashed against the lobby’s inner doors, which had been barred by retreating police. The crowd fell back to make a second rush, and the policemen came charging out. A club went whistling under my nose. Tony got truncheoned on the shoulder.

  This was great! Just like taking over the dean’s office in the sixties. It was all I could do to keep from leaping on a drinking fountain and screaming, “Stop the war!” A pretty inappropriate sentiment, since this wasn’t a war and if it had been the crowd would have been all for it.

  The police charged again, acting fairly restrained, if I have to tell the truth. Mostly they rushed at the mob with cross-body blocks and only used a little bit o
f clubbing every now and then. I looked over and saw Tony being shoved back by four or five policemen while behind him a dozen members of the crowd were pushing him forward, yelling: “Foreign press! Cover this!”

  Eventually a NAMFREL leader, a police sergeant, and a Makati vice-mayor appeared with bullhorns and got everything settled down. The police would promise to stop hitting people if people would promise not to block public employees from going about their business, although it was Saturday and the only public employees going about their business were police.

  Peace lasted five minutes. Tony and I were in the lobby with some policemen and some Aquino supporters who had obligingly stopped hollering at each other so we could interview them. Then we heard screaming and yelling at the back of the building.

  A Mercedes had tried to pull into the city hall parking lot.

  The crowd went wild. First they blocked its entry. Then the driver tried to leave. Then they blocked its exit. The police finally had to wade in and collect the car’s two occupants and hustle them into the city hall.

  “Who was in the car?” I shouted to the crowd.

  “We don’t know.”

  This sounded pretty dopey.

  “No, no,” yelled the crowd. “Maybe they are delivering something!” “It looked like envelopes!” “Envelopes the size of votetally sheets!”

  “They are delivering fake vote-tally sheets!” the crowd concluded triumphantly and began rocking the car back and forth.

  I went over and pressed my nose against the tinted windows. Inside, on the floor, were a pair of M-16 rifles. Whoever these guys were, they probably weren’t goodwill ambassadors from the Little Sisters of the Poor. The police hustled them back out of the building and into the Mercedes. I never got a good look at the pair. The crowd pressed on the car. The driver pressed on the accelerator. The crowd began pounding on the fenders and hood. The police began pounding on the crowd. Somebody’s head got busted and blood ran down his face. For a moment it was a standoff, but horsepower won out. Somehow no one was smeared under the wheels. The car tore through the crowd. People were heaved right and left. They picked themselves up and took off after the Mercedes, throwing stones and chunks of Manila’s crummy pavement. These folks were worked up.

  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.

  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 t
o 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.