Both blew it, Gabby Lopez of ABS-CBN and Deputy Speaker Rodante Marcoleta, did.
At the House of Representatives hearing on the network’s franchise renewal last Monday, Marcoleta asked Lopez to recite one line of the Panatang Makabayan in connection with the question of his citizenship.
Lopez dutifully obliged Marcoleta, no sweat.
Apparently, Marcoleta wanted to find out if Lopez’s Filipino citizenship was emotionally and intellectually authentic. It fell awfully short of the mark. It came across more like he was humoring Lopez or somebody. Or vice versa.
It would have been better if he asked Lopez to recite the Panata en toto. That would have convincingly achieved his objective. His asking his fellow congressman Carlos Sarate to give a hand to Lopez gave an impression it was a hard-sell retrograde, an oblique attempt to blindside the Bayan Muna party list representative, for the same objective.
Marcoleta’s tactic follows the familiar line invoked by former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile that if a thing walks like a duck, quack likes a duck, it must be a duck. Lopez, on the basis of a one-liner of a patriotic pledge, passed the Marcoleta test. Lopez quack. That’s it folks, says the familiar cartoon character.
Marcoleta’s aim at Lopez’ patriotic sense coincided with a recent opinion of a retired Supreme Court justice who said it must be earned. If that were the case, Lopez can be more optimistic about his TV station’s new franchise. There should be ample proof to show that Lopez and his corporate family had paid their dues, even if imperfectly. Nobody’s perfect. Passing the Marcoleta test could come in a handy.
On the other hand, Lopez failed to turn the table on Marcoleta by not seizing the moment as an opportunity to find out the congressman’s own sense of patriotism. He could have politely requested Marcoleta to recite the Panata, en toto, with him simultaneously. Or another run-of-the mill oath tailot-made for public servants about ratting on crooks in their ranks.
That would have brought the House down, so to speak, nailing two birds in one bullet: 1) convince the skeptic lawmakers of his patriotism and 2) do away with the issue of citizenship as one of many hurdles to the new franchise the network is seeking. Or,better yet,unmasking the masked in broad-day light hypocrisy. Well, you do not go that far, considering what’s at stake.
It’s doubtful if some members of the House still remember fully the pledge of allegiance that students are required to recite during flag ceremonies. It’s equally doubtful if the Philippine National Anthem is wholly memorized by them, verbatim et literatim,and correctly. Some may even refer to it as Bayang Magiliw, a common mistake. How many in the House, like Lopez, have dual citizenships and with properties in the United States? How many know by heart the Star Spangled Banner more than the Bayang Magiliw?
It’s time to get real. Way back in the late 60s, a small movement to make the Philippines the 53rd state of the US was advocated by a second-rate politician. There was even a survey that purportedly showed most Filipinos favored the advocacy. But patriots have ,every now and then,parroted Manuel L. Quezon’s trenchant slogan that he’d rather see his country ran like hell by Filipinos rather than like heaven by the Americans.
Many Filipinos have since disagreed with Quezon by voting with their feet: Filipino migration to the US has unbashedly continued through the years , precisely because of the socio-economic and political conditions that seems to validate a Tagalog saying “lumaon bumubuti, sumasama kaysa dati. The hell with ” Quezon’s hell”. Millions of OFWs dispersed around the world in diasporic fashion reinforce this widely-shared lamentation year in and year out.
This state of mind remains a sad logic, like a cul de sac. Sucks.
Looming on the horizon is another potential constriction of the democratic space for the workaday Filipino that will compel many more to look beyond our shores for a better future. At the end of the day, it’s existentially true as the corona virus that you can’t have patriotism for breakfast and, realis tically so because the v ery self-proclaimed patriots are standing in the way. Love of country can wait as the window of opportunities narrows ad nauseam. And there’s China’s sunset shadow.
In the final analysis, Marcoleta’s test is more a one-upmanship, a pathetic political antic rather than an honest-to-goodness motivation to establish a genuine p aradigm of what a real Filipino citizen is. ( I would even suspect that Marcoleta had a Malacanang denizen in mind as an audience, real and imagined, when he jogged Lopez’s memory of the pledge).But one-liner is too little, to easy a way to show that. A patronizing act is an object lesson on how not to go about it.
Past forward the story of a certain Francis Marcos who challenged anyone to match his alleged hefty donations to pandemic victims and latter nabbed for alleged estafa. Now , there’s an apt contextual background to one man’s impassioned quest for an authentic lick on patria adorada.
Samuel Johnson has a friendly caveat that rings as true today as it was on the day he penned it: patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Whose shoe is in the other foot?
