Sunday, December 09, 2007 Mercado: Tinsel prophets By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
GLENDOWER: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur: “Why so can I. Or so can any man. /But will they come, when you do call for them?” —from Henry V, by Shakespeare
The dust is settling over the aborted Peninsula Hotel coup. Guests are trickling back. But a question festers: Why didn’t people surge forward when Sen Antonio Trillanes IV, Gen. Danilo Lim and rebels, called them, like Glendower, to overthrow the scandal-studded Arroyo government?
“No one came,” noted Honululu Star Bulletin and other observers. Yet, 11 million voted for Trillanes six months earlier. Look back. You’ll find this wasn’t an isolated case.
In the 2003 Oakwood mutiny, Trillanes and cabal summoned the people. Joseph Estrada, in the clink, denied bankrolling the Magdalos. This was not a “coup for rent,” Trillanes fumed. But people saw it as a raw power grab. So, no one reached for marching shoes. The mutiny crumbled.
Before that were the “Kawals: a smattering of junior officers who revolted thru a grotesque clandestine press conference. Nobody listened. And the farce promptly collapsed. In surrendering, “leader Capt. Edwin Navaro claimed: hangers-on, like the Council on Philippine Affairs (Copa), conned them.
Erap followers earlier tried to clone the anti-Marcos “noise barrage” of April 1978. That was People Power One’s forerunner. Ferdinand Marcos cronies, like martial law bouncer Juan Ponce Enrile, Jinggoy Estrada and others, tooted away.
But no one came, as Hotspur predicted. “Except for isolated areas, it went largely unheeded,” an Inquirer editorial noted. “There was a sorry disconnect between method and need.”
In 2005, the opposition tried to trigger “People Power” thru a cell-phone barrage. “Let a thousand cell phones bloom.”
Japanese use cell phones as “electronic wallets” for shopping. We wage revolution with them. That happened in People Power 2. But cell phones didn’t ring this time--–and the coup fizzled.
Last month, the “Black and White Movement” mailed an “eviction notice” postcard to the Malacańang occupant. Only 300 showed up, at the post office. Why?
Surveys shows the “so-called masa” spurn extra-constitutional grab for power, Social Weather Station’s Mahar Mangahas observed. It’s the volatile middle class that gropes for shortcuts.
Successful people power jells around leaders of integrity who present moral alternatives. Nelson Mandela offered that for South Africa and Corazon Aquino here. The Burmese junta is scared witless of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
There is also “protest fatigue,” columnist Antonio Abaya notes.
Filipino electors have matured. They trounced movie stars and candidates who spent lavishly. Still, would-be-rebels fooled themselves into believing they were
“Glendowers,” that they could whistle up people at whim.
“In rebellion, nothing succeeds like success. But nothing fails like failure.”
Communist and left wing groups, identified with Sanlakas, thought they’d bag slots in a junta. Now, they’re running for cover, Abaya says. So is former UP president Dodong Nemenzo, who stitched together a “revolutionary junta plan,” in the event of a successful power grab by his comrades.
“People Power remains what it always was--–a spontaneous cry from a betrayed people, for peaceful redress under God’s sun,” an earlier Sun Star commentary noted. “Filipinos do not wield this weapon of last resort lightly.
“Twice in our recent and checkered history, we‘ve used it: first, against a dictator, and then against a plunderer. But it always resisted manipulation by tinsel prophets.
