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Friday, July 01, 2005
Roperos: Susan’s role-playing
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
When I heard in the news broadcast on TV the other evening an unfamiliar feminine voice that sounded pugnacious and aggressive, I hurriedly went out of my room to watch.
The members of my household were already focused on the woman whom I did not immediately recognize. It was not until she said, in effect, that she was ready and willing to lead the nation that I recognized Ms. Susan Roces.
Truth to tell, I was sort of taken aback. I did not expect to see her in that kind of stance. Well, probably it was because my first impression of her was of a girl in her teen, made to star in a Sampaguita Pictures movie called “Boksingera.”
If I recall correctly, it was her first starring role. I featured here then in a pictorial in the Sunday Times Magazine. That first impression stayed through the years even when she played just a supporting role to FPJ in the 2004 elections.
It was further buttressed when she refused to be carried away by the urgings of her late husband's “handlers” who asked her to do battle with his enemies, real or imagined, in behalf of her husband’s memory.
And more recently, when she said she didn’t want to be “pushed” to move against the President amid her troubles on the jueteng payola.
That was characteristic Susan Roces, a woman of dignity, and typical Filipino decency.
But then, the other evening, I saw the other, uncharacteristic side of Ms. Roces. I was taken aback. It was not her--not the typical Filipina who could sit back and wait for the opportune time to face people and talk.
Really, I wonder who was behind Roces’ recent sudden appearance in the nation’s political firmament when, without a by your leave, she started swinging an imaginary sword to do battle against the political enemies of her husband. I wonder who wrote the script and directed her performance that was horribly out of her character.
For a moment there, I thought this nation had another potential lady president who appears to have even a more refined nature than the incumbent one. As luck may have it, someone or some people spoiled the “broth” for Ms Roces.
Her appearance on TV the other night evoked not admiration and sympathy for her but fear and doubt that she has fallen like her husband into the hands of some people who are trying to re-mold her into something she is not.
Sure, who says that Ms. Roces would not make a better president than GMA when the opportunity arises at the right moment? Sure she does, left to be herself, to be truly her natural self.
Indeed, left without the political spoilers with their respective hidden agenda, Ms. Roces could have revealed her genuine practical Filipina view of the national condition. And how she would approach the solution to the national problems with her practical and objective political wisdom might have been interesting to watch.
Left to her own sense of politics, still untainted with personal motives, even if touched with a measure of political naivete, this country could have found in her the leader it really deserves. But that has become water under the bridge.
Her performance on TV last night might have impressed those who have become hardboiled anti-GMA, but at the same time, it left the peace-loving, the indifferent, the still unconvinced, and the benign centrist and rightist, aghast and fearful.
(July 1, 2005 issue)
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