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15<br />
3.<br />
GMA’S INDIAN SUMMER.<br />
WRITING THE PHILIPPINE STORY<br />
(REVISED EDITION)<br />
I’m looking at many a would-be writer of The Philippine<br />
Story (Revised Edition): motivated Senators, aspiring<br />
Representatives, venturesome PMA graduates, go-getting<br />
ex-Cabinet members, daring militarists, enterprising<br />
businessmen, starry-eyed journalists. Men, women they’re<br />
all the same. I’m different. I’m incorrigible as they all are, but I’m<br />
different – I’m an incorruptible optimist. They’re all critical as I am<br />
– I criticize them for not being creative. ‘He has (no) right to criticize who has (no) heart to<br />
help’ (Abraham Lincoln revised).<br />
Whatever her critics say and don’t see, I’m looking at the Indian summer of my President Gloria Macapagal-<br />
Arroyo. It’s a feeling. I walk the street and see flowers framing the window; out comes my daughter Teresa’s Sony<br />
CyberShot DSC S60 to record the moment forever. I had seen the scene before, but not seized the moment.<br />
GMA has been busy writing the next Philippine Story; her detractors have been busy denigrating the size of her<br />
frame, using the wrong framework sizing up her failures, never minding her successes. I admire their tenacity, or<br />
shall I say their character? Character, I like to say, is stubbornness bordering on stupidity.<br />
Where were they when GMA was in a State Visit recently and established ‘a long-term and mutually beneficial trade<br />
relationship for import and export of various products’ (gmanews.tv) between India and the Philippines? Thank God