Weep Like a Woman!

Weep Like a Woman!

(By: DinggolAranetaDivinagracia - August 31, 2018)

 

“With the impending Federalism on the horizon, and the return to political power of the “small but terrible” Ilongga-at-heart; we have an epidemic of insecure people in our society today. “ --dinggol.d~~~

Excerpted:

“. . . . By ignominiously fleeing from the seat of power, Erap gave the Supreme Court the excuse to concoct what only Filipino lawyers could have invented, namely that he had "constructively resigned"from the presidency, thus justifying swearing in his vice-president, Gloria Arroyo, as the new president.

Barely five months later, in May 2001, another unarmed mob descended on Erap’s former Alhambra, egged on by the likes of Juan Ponce Enrile and Miriam Defensor-Santiago, this time seeking the "constructive resignation" of Gloria.

But unlike the easily frightened Rajah Erap, the steely-nerved Gloria, who has all the intimidating persona of a Girl Scout selling cookies, stood her ground and, in effect, stared the mob eyeball-to-eyeball until they blinked.....”

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Weep like a Woman!

By the year 1482, the Moorish caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula (what is now Spain and Portugal ) had shrunk to a small perimeter around the city of Granada in southeastern Spain.

At its zenith, the Muslim armies from North Africa that had invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the years 711 to 718 AD, had conquered most of what are now Spain and Portugal, and had sallied forth into France, where they were finally defeated and driven back by Christian armies led by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in the year 732. AD.

The Muslim occupation of Spain and Portugal lasted for several centuries leaving an indelible imprint on Iberian culture and civilization. To this day, many modern Europeans sniff that "Africa begins at the Pyrenees ."

But by the end of the first millennium (1000 AD), incessant quarrels and fighting among Muslim chieftains – a common enough phenomenon that persists to the 21st century – allowed the Christian kingdoms to fight back and recover lost ground.

By the year 1482, the Christians had re-conquered the kingdoms of Toledo , Sevilla and Cordoba .. In the year 1492, when the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus – Cristobal Colon – was sent by the Spanish king on his epochal voyage to the Americas , the Christian kingdoms of Aragon and Castille, reunited by the marriage of their sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, fielded their combined armies and defeated the quarreling Muslims in Granada.

The last Muslim caliph in Iberia , Boabdil, was sent weeping into exile back to North Africa . Legend has it that his aged mother bitterly reproached him: "Weep like a woman for the city you would not defend like a man."

Seven years ago, on a scale not quite as grandiose as the events that unfolded in Iberia in 1492, a pretentious rajah – historically the inheritor of the Muslim outpost of Maynilad – also gave up his throne on the banks of the Pasig River as a band of unarmed street demonstrators noisily descended on his Alhambra.

His son, the Datu Jinggoy, was weeping openly, and Rajah Erap was teary-eyed, as they and their entourage boarded a motor launch to the rear of their Alhambra that would take them to the relative safety of not quite North Africa, but their scruffy ancestral fiefdom of San Juan.

History did not record Erap’s aged mother saying anything quotable during the Teary Escape, but she could just as justifiably have uttered the same humiliating lines hurled at Boabdil in 1492: "Weep like a woman for the city you would not defend like a man."

Whatever happened to Filipino Machismo so often personified – or so I am told – by Erap in his Tagalog movies? Why did he not stand his ground and defend his Alhambra to the death? What was he so afraid of from an undisciplined but unarmed mob?

He had his heavily armed Presidential Security Group Janissaries, backed up by armored personnel carriers, who would have sent the unarmed mob scurrying for cover with a few shots fired in the air. They may have stopped being under the command of Erap after AFP Chief-of-staff Gen. Angelo Reyes had "withdrawn his support," but surely Erap’s magic would still have worked wonders with the masa of whom the soldiers were a part...

By ignominiously fleeing from the seat of power, Erap gave the Supreme Court the excuse to concoct what only Filipino lawyers could have invented, namely that he had "constructively resigned" from the presidency, thus justifying swearing in his vice-president, Gloria Arroyo, as the new president.

Barely five months later, in May 2001, another unarmed mob descended on Erap’s former Alhambra , egged on by the likes of Juan Ponce Enrile and Miriam Defensor-Santiago, this time seeking the "constructive resignation" of Gloria.

But unlike the easily frightened Rajah Erap, the steely-nerved Gloria, who has all the intimidating persona of a Girl Scout selling cookies, stood her ground and, in effect, stared the mob eyeball-to-eyeball until they blinked.

By hastily abandoning the seat of power without a fight in January 2001, Erap showed himself to be a coward, the exact opposite of the two-fisted Macho Man he liked to portray in his movies and, no doubt, his personal fantasies.

Of course, Rajah Erap was following in the footsteps of another Filipino Macho Man, Rajah Ferdinand, who famously but falsely promoted himself as the Most Decorated Filipino Soldier in World War II, with most of his medals awarded to himself decades after the War, when he was already senator……who also abandoned the seat of power without a fight in February 1986.

Erap says Jan. 20, 2001 was the "death of democracy in the Philippines ." That would have been convincing had he stood his ground and fought heroically to the death.

Instead, he "weeps like a woman for the city he was not man enough to defend."

(The issue of above Jan. 22, 2008 article by Antonio C. Abaya was forwarded to INM Banwa_Mo eGroup of the Ilonggo Nation Movement)

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