Sounds and silence
By Noralyn Mustafa
Inquirer News Service

DESPITE one more (and we hope the last) political squeeze out of Angelo de la Cruz, it would have gone without a hitch. And then it happened. For one shocking moment I thought a heckler had somehow slipped through the 12,000-strong security wall and decided to commit suicide by making fun of President Macapagal-Arroyo as she delivered her State of the Nation Address.

It was the most dreadful sound, a kind of self-satisfied, mocking laughter that seemed to come from a crypt in the depths of the earth. It lasted for what seemed an eternity, and it was only when Ms Arroyo mirthfully pointed at a special person among her audience of 13th Congress lawmakers that I realized it was the President herself laughing.

"You should have seen the expression on the faces of the diplomatic corps," a Manila-based colleague would text later. "I wished the floor would open up, etc."

And that infernal laughter defined the entire SONA. False, depressing, fearsome, a distasteful joke utterly devoid of joy, totally hopeless; reflecting exactly the state of the Filipino people.

But the most horrifying sound of all was when Ms Arroyo asked Congress to go full speed ahead in changing the Constitution, music so heavenly to the ears of Jose de Venecia and his legions, that like jacks-in-the-box they magically sprung up to give her a standing ovation.

It was a spectacle that you could have aptly captioned with a paraphrase of the sign over the entrance to Dante's inferno: Abandon all hope ye who see this.

All we, in Mindanao, really wanted was a shift to the federal system. But Ms Arroyo's silence on this point was deafening. Instead, we gave her and De Venecia an excuse to shift to a parliamentary system which, from what we have seen and heard between the lines, is actually a carte blanche for them and their cohorts to rule us for the rest of their immortal lives.

Worse, she said something that I found incomprehensible. The change, she said, would come only after she had enjoyed her full six-year term so that she could accomplish all the wonderful things she had enumerated in her to-do list.

It is only after we have succeeded under a presidential system that we should change to a parliamentary one, she said with great wisdom.

And my simple mind asked: If despite pervading doubts of her legitimacy, a gigantic debt, an enormous budget deficit, escalating prices of commodities and services, a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy, ballooning population, volatile peace and order, terrorist threats and almost empty government coffers, she gloriously succeeds under this system, why change it at all?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it, di ba?

But then if we don't, we won't have Gloria in perpetual reign.

Listen to the clamor: "We hope you will be President for life," said an adoring constituent in the first pulong-pulong conducted in the territory of Roilo Golez, according to the script of the ridiculously contrived sitcom.

There will be many, many more of the town meetings all over the islands in the coming six years for as long as Ms Arroyo can rise from the floor with the help of Vice President Noli de Castro, until the clamor reaches a deafening crescendo, and an awakened citizenry will rise up to demand that Congress heed it.

The SONA was as silent as a tomb on the prospects for lasting peace in Mindanao, or on a vision of development that could at least offer hope to alleviate its populace's debilitating poverty.

The orphans who lost their parents in military offensives remain hopeless, the families crowded into evacuation centers remain homeless, the sick and the dying are too far and too numerous to receive the blessings of PhilHealth cards.

Whether or not the miserable barangays in the hinterlands of Mindanao are covered by the Patubig ni Gloria, Pailaw ni Gloria, Pabigas ni Gloria, Pakalsada ni Gloria, Pagamot ni Gloria, has yet to be known.

And as for computers in every classroom, or even in every school -- if they have a school -- why, we don't even have
textbooks here!

Well, what else did we expect? Maybe, because Ms Arroyo knows in her heart that Mindanao did not vote overwhelmingly for her, so why bother?

Besides, her brilliant speechwriters can always turn fiction into fact. They can make her stand 10 feet tall by claiming this is a government that cares, so caring it can defy even George W. Bush himself just to save the life of one Filipino --even as we all know that were it not for the militants who got their heads cracked by truncheons and their bodies smashed by water cannons to force her to save the life of her precarious administration, De la Cruz's body would now be lying headless in the Tigris River. Is there balm in Gilead? Of course.

If those speeches are not sufficient to convince us that we are blessed with a "Strong Republic," just feed your senses with those television infomercials, billboards and print ads extolling the achievements of President Gloria; so persistent are they you'd think we are still in the midst of the campaign period. But at least they are a very transparent way of showing where our taxes go.

By the way, in her SONA, Ms Arroyo promised to create 10 million jobs during this term. At least we can be sure that those 3,000 workers who are going to lose their jobs because the government has not paid the contractors who hired them to put up her billboards, can be quickly re-hired.

In the meantime, light candles and pray.

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