Strangers, not in paradise but in frustrated protest

It rained heavily on their rally, but Susan Roces, Cory, etc. proceeded anyway. There weren’t enough to constitute "people power," but hopefully not people pneumonia. They’ll keep on trying.

I don’t see them attracting much more than they got yesterday, rain or shine. The same faces, the same angry raising of fists or indignant cries of "Gloria resign" (she won’t). People who normally dislike each other, indeed hate each other joining hands and pretending to be comrades-in-arms. United only in a common cause: shout Gloria out of Malacañang.

Yesterday, Susan – Mrs. Poe – sounded even more furious and hortatory. Can’t blame her. She grieves for her husband FPJ whom she honestly believed was cheated in the polls. Yet who’ll replace GMA? Noli de Castro? Susan herself in lieu of FPJ? How can this happen? By "people power" or mob action? From all indications, the people were absent yesterday, and won’t be coming today or tomorrow.

I won’t presume to tell them to give it up. It’s their right to protest – but too much can be too much, and end up by annoying the people instead. "Vox populi", I heard Bishop Labayen on TV yesterday intoning, "is the voice of God." God didn’t say too much yesterday then, judging from the sparse attendance at the EDSA monument.

Can God make common cause with the Communists and the Radical Left? Atheists most of them, but with the usual sprinkling of militant nuns? They had Bayan Muna, Reporma, Uno, along with Erap’s Partido ng Masang Pilipino (PMP) and Brother Eddie Villanueva’s apparently dwindling Bangon Pilipinas. Strange bedfellows.

I saw a photo yesterday of Cory Aquino linking arms with Anakpawis Party List Rep. Crispin Beltran, etc., the Hacienda Luisita animosity forgotten. Together yesterday were Bayan Muna’s Party List Rep. Satur Ocampo, a former NPA, Jude Estrada, and Makati Mayor Jejomar "Jojo" Binay. The three Musketeers?

According to Alikabok in the Palace, GMA was seen widely smiling Tuesday night for the first time in weeks. But she must have a care. The "impeachment" sword of Damocles once hanging over her head might have been removed by landslide Lower House vote, but there’s still much work to be done to stabilize the situation.

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I hear that she is trying to cut her trip to the United States short. Anyway, obsessed with recovering lost confidence in his slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina’s destructive flooding of New Orleans and much of Louisiana, and the robbing, raping, and violence there, America’s President George W. Bush won’t have any time for her in New York, or for most of the leaders who’re congregating in the United Nations.

If it’s true that there may be 10,000 dead, Katrina has proven a disaster worse than 9/11 in New York City and the Pentagon, which resulted in under 3,000 dead, even though under more dramatic terrorist circumstances.

In the case of New Orleans, this time Bush won’t have a foreign enemy or terrorist to blame, merely the clumsiness and tardiness of his and the Federal government’s response. It’s both shocking and instructive that the world’s only remaining superpower, fighting in Iraq with powerful resources at its command, vowing to save the world, couldn’t rush to save hundreds of thousands inside its own territory, its own citizens, for more than two days – hampered by lack of attention, bureaucracy, an underestimation of the tragedy, and probably disagreement over turf. Louisiana has a Democratic State Governor, Kathleen Blanco, while Bush and his Cabinet leaders are Republicans. Yes, it sounds churlish to attribute possible lack of coordination to Party hostility, but in the US it’s not too much different from the way it is in the Philippines.

Anyway, Bush was found unaware of the enormity of the New Orleans catastrophe while "on vacation" in his Ranch in Crawford, Texas. Just goes to show that the President of the vast USA (used to be styled "leader of the Free World") can’t afford to go on vacation or, indeed even to catch forty winks a night.

Remember the Sept. 11, 2001, Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks? Bush was attending a Kindergarten class when he got the "word." Then, his advisers told him to seek safety so his life would be preserved, when instead he ought to have gone out and boldly reminded rattled Americans he was "in command" and present at his post of command.

In post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument, Bush is even being blamed for diverting funds from domestic prevention measures to fueling his "war" in Iraq. Bush and the Republican-majority Congress, angry wails are arising, halved federal spending for flood control in southeast Louisiana and funds for control of possible overflows in Lake Pontchartrain by close to two-thirds. In sum, while the levees and mini-dams were eroding, money authorized for the Urban Flood Control Project in Louisiana were re-channeled for Iraq war use.

This serious accusation was voiced by Michael Lind of the New America Foundation when he pointed out that earlier in the year the US Army Corps of Engineers asked for $27 million to repair the levees to protect them from hurricanes, but Mr. Bush sought to cut the amount to only $3.9 million. Congress ultimately passed $5.7 million, and a measly $36.5 million for a "prevent flooding" undertaking.

In any event, these are blame-casting times and, alas, Bush, as a President who made the tough decision to plunge America into a costly war will be getting complaints of a similar nature each time tragedy strikes at home and money "wasted" abroad might have been utilized instead for the welfare and protection of Americans.

No President is "great," perhaps, until after death. Abe Lincoln was repeatedly assailed and reviled, even for his emancipation decision to free the slaves. When he delivered his now immortal Gettysburg address, it elicited very little applause. Lincoln left that occasion morosely feeling he delivered a poor address! That he had muffed the occasion and failed to pay due tribute to the honored dead.

In the end, in the moment of victory, Lincoln was assassinated on April 13, 1865 in the theatre by a demented actor, John Wilkes Booth, who shot Lincoln then cried out, "Sic Semper tyrannis!" (Thus, forever tyrants) Guess he meant: thus forever perish tyrants!)

Obviously, a President just can’t please everybody.

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When he was in the Philippines reporting on Mindanao in his columns, this writer disagreed on occasion with Pulitzer prize-winner Nicholas D. Kristof’s sarcastic, often irritating reporting. However, Kristof is a no-nonsense journalist who goes for the jugular, and has told it how he saw it, without compromise, in dozens of countries.

Yesterday, reporting on his own in a piece for his newspaper, The New York Times, entitled, "The Larger Shame Behind New Orleans," Kristof put his finger on what ails American society.

He wrote:

"One dispiriting element of Katrina was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing more than 6,000, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery."

" ‘No, you misunderstand,’ he said firmly, ‘These looters weren’t Japanese. They were foreigners.’ "

"The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation’s social fabric. In contrast, the United States – particularly under the Bush administration – has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent."

As a matter of fact, I arrived in Kobe about a week after that terrible earthquake and toured the ruins, then interviewed the Mayor. The Mayor attributed much of the damage to, alas, Japanese efficiency. Most of the damage, he pointed out, was not caused by the quake itself, but by the subsequent fires, turning into a firestorm, which devastated the quake-hit districts. The initial tremor and richter-scale aftershocks had burst, and ruptured the gas mains which intersect the city. When electric current was switched back on before the gas pipes were sealed off or repaired, the electric sparks set off the escaping gas resulted into massive explosions and a conflagration.

"Our efficiency," Hizzoner ruefully shrugged, "was our undoing."

Kobe and neighboring Osaka, moreover, as "home" to powerful Yakuza (gangster) organizations said to number, in those days, close to 100,000. Did the Yakuza take advantage of the tragedy to rob or kill? On the contrary, the Yakuza set up aid stations and water-distribution posts (the water mains, shattered, could deliver no potable water). They gave out blankets and relief goods like, by golly, the Salvation Army!

Mind you, the Yakuza and their Oyabun (crime-lords of the Underworld Daimyo type) are no angels, they indeed prey on people, handle prostitution, and run organized criminal activities. But they also want to promote themselves as community do-gooders. As Kristof remarked, it’s a cultural thing.

In New Orleans, long before Hurricane Katrina, it was a mess. Crime ran rampant, the cops were accused of being crooked (the hurricane flooding and aftermath showed they were cowardly, too, turning over their "badges," cringing in the face of the mob, not defending residents and tourists from robbery and gang-rape – or halting the looting of department stores and homes).

Some of the "colored" residents practised voodoo and black magic. Jazz and the "Blues" of Bourbon Street melodiously giving life to the Latin Quarter, only thinly disguised a sad, sickly and increasingly seamy society.

The famous novelist Anne Rice came from there, which is perhaps why she so vividly wrote The Vampire Chronicles, Interview With a Vampire and other warped but fascinating thrillers.

The Bayou "tour" was a poor excuse for an excursion.

When we spent a few days in New Orleans, our friends insisted on giving us a tour guide "bodyguard", and we were, in truth, happy to leave, not out of fear, but out of boredom. Alas, poor New Orleans is under a flood of waters teeming with dangerous germs – a displaced society, buried in grief and corpses. I hope a better New Orleans will emerge from the waterlogged wreckage and the contaminated floodwaters.

And a better, more forward-looking society, too, its social fabric mended by the enlightenment of education, not just federal aid guiltily ladled out by a previously neglectful government.

As an afterthought, this is a prayer we must express for ourselves, as well.