Mercado's Column

Viewpoint : Taxicab tutorial

Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service

WHAT has a taxi driver, barreling through traffic gridlock, got to do with today's crisis and Mark Twain?

"Our 'mga (expletive deleted) ina' leaders made us believe it's better to have Filipinos, even if they'd run government like hell," he said while cutting lanes. I braced for a crash. "We got what they wanted."

"Life here is rough," he continued while braking behind a scavenger's cart. I let my breath out slowly. "But Filipinos with foreign spouses must be embarrassed over what's happening here. 'Nakakahiya.' [It's shameful.] We were better off under the Americans."

"Mark Twain wouldn't agree," I mumbled. "Mark who?" he asked.

This American humorist, I explained, dismissed Washington's decision to take over the Philippines as a laughable status symbol. The May 10, 1907 issue of the Baltimore Sun's interview with Twain had this:

"The funniest thing was when at the close of the Spanish-American War the United States paid poor decrepit old Spain $20 million for the Philippines. It was just a case of this country buying its way into good society.

"Honestly, when I read in the papers that this deal had been made, I laughed until my sides ached.

"There were the Filipinos fighting like blazes for their liberty. Spain would not hear of it. The United States stepped in, and after they had licked the enemy to a standstill, instead of freeing the Filipinos, they paid that enormous amount for an island which is of no earthly account to us.

"(We) just wanted to be like the aristocratic countries of Europe which have possessions in foreign waters. The United States wanted to be in the swim, and it, too, had to branch out, like an American heiress buying a Duke or an Earl. Sounds well, but that's all."

What's-his-name got it right about our fighting for freedom, the cabbie persisted. "The Guinness Book of World Records says Andres Bonifacio was the first Asian to successfully challenge foreign colonizers."

"There's nothing about Bonifacio in the Guinness Book of World Records 2005," I said. A fixture in Guinness' "Crime" section in the 1990s, the Marcoses were dislodged since the 2000 edition. That triggered a philippic on how Marcos ripped off Japanese war reparations. But that was when we arrived and I dropped off.

This cab-ride tutorial was stripped of administration spin and untainted by opposition bile. Was it a state of the nation message from "below"?

He reflected our stunted national self-esteem. Like most Filipinos, he went through the economic wringer daily. The $60-a-barrel oil hits cabbies first.

And he saw clearly that massive impoverishment occurs as so-called "leaders" gambol in ill-gotten luxury, blind to the misery, cocksure there'll be no accounting.

None of those who tortured under martial law were ever tried. Coconut farmers haven't received refunds from the coconut levy, imposed by the dictatorship, over two decades ago.

"There's a widespread impression that the most pervasive rot today is massive corruption," Cebu Daily News said in an editorial, titled "Crime pays."

"It is not so," the paper says. "Rather, it's the miasma of cynical impunity that corrodes democratic governance. Daily experience tells us the law is skewed in favor of the affluent and vests them with impunity. Thus, the list of those who thumb their noses at the law is long."

What aggravates this impunity is the fact that, in our lives and institutions, far too many work by "pecuniary decency." Cash is the sole yardstick of value. "Self worth equals net worth," a banker explains.

What is decent and human is overwhelmed by appetites, not shaped by "values that endure even after the sun goes out." We saw that in Joseph Estrada's second envelope, those Mega-Pacific election computers or the "Garci" tapes. This results in an economy where the powerful batten off on the weak.

But context is not destiny. Repeated betrayal of the poor is not inevitable. Change is needed. Governance must be overhauled so that the basic human needs of the poor command first priority. Measures that reinforce skills should replace doles. Our scarce resources must broaden options for people, like our cab driver.

"There has never been this number of poor people in the Philippines," Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales said. He'd just visited a Maricaban hovel, where squatter families huddled. "It was broad daylight outside," the Inquirer reported. But inside the hovel, it was "as though night had fallen."

That image of darkness resonates. Fridays I'd drive the wife and friends to the pediatric charity ward in a run-down public hospital to bring medicines, etc. Once, we came across an almost totally blind girl, singing softly a lullaby to herself. She was all of five -- too young to sing of "old unhappy far-off things / And battles long ago."

Her left eye was gone, the emaciated mother explained. Early treatment could have saved the right. But they never could scrape up enough loose change for the jeepney fare to the hospital. Now, she faced a prospect of night falling, "even if it was broad daylight outside."

The cab driver, Maricaban hovel dwellers and the girl of the lullaby "do not belong to another race of creatures, bound on other journeys," as Charles Dickens wrote. "We are fellow passengers to the grave."

They deserve far better than Estrada who offers himself as alternative head of government, Senators Franklin Drilon and Mar Roxas sprinting for president, and below the radar screen, Eduardo Cojuangco and his Brat Pack positioning for a grab, at a prime minister's post, should that appear.

"These are all honest men," the bitter Spanish proverb says. "But my cloak is not to be found."