Long live FPJ!
by Julie Yap Daza
Manila Standard
It happened to �Superman� Christopher
Reeve. It�s happened to Ronnie Poe.
If it could happen to Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods to give to mortals, why would the gods not be jealous of men with larger-than-life roles to play, heroes (like Achilles) with feet of clay?
Fate and circumstance conspired to take FPJ away from us during the season of celebration, during a Christmas party, of all things. He was happy with the friends who had kept faith and worked with him for all of his life except maybe the first 16 years, and going by Rep. Francis Escudero�s account, the only nonshowbiz folks in the merry gathering punctuated by beer and nuts were himself the congressman and Mayor Jojo Binay.
Perhaps it was just as well that in his last conscious moments Ronnie was with the showbiz people that he loved, rather than with the other kind, the politician kind, the kind who illusion a political reality in contrast to the showbiz kind who make illusion entertainment, escape, catharsis.
At his last Christmas party, Ronnie and friends were celebrating the knock-out success of Manny Pacquiao, another symbol, like FPJ, of the fighting Filipino. I for one choose to remember Ronnie more as a movie icon than as a presidential candidate who fought the good fight but lost, a victim of his faith in his destiny, in democracy, in the political advisers who needed him more than he needed them.
Ronnie Poe was too decent and too naive for politics of the presidential-campaign type. It was ironic that although he was the actor in the May campaign, he was the one least able to adjust to the demands of the role. He could not help being himself. He could not hack a script that required him to deliver speeches and drop quotable quotes, to be nice to media, act like the consummate politico who had an answer to every question, a solution to every problem.
And yet, that was the Ronnie that his fans know, Ronnie right or wrong, Ronnie fit or unfit for the presidency as long as he emerged winner and victor. So why should he change?
His best friends desperately wanted him to win the election to bring down the incumbent, damn the torpedoes and never mind his lack of experience or political sophistication. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his secret heart, Ronnie Poe was sure he could make a difference as his countrymen�s future president, although, as he candidly admitted to me one fine Thursday at Myther�s �I have never been more scared in my life.�
The dilemma was not only his but ours as well. We wanted him to lead us out of our troubles, but we didn�t want him to be tainted by politics. We wanted him to take a shot at the presidency, but we were afraid for him, for him to fail and fall flat on his face. We wanted him in the performance of his life, but given the problems of lack of the good and excess of the bad, we knew neither he nor we could afford an underperformance.
His dream of saving the poor from their poverty, the ignorant from their ignorance, and the criminal from their criminality was simplistic, but in its very simplicity lay the conviction that the job could be done.
His brief experience � immersion, though not yet total � taught him otherwise. Did it break his heart? Did the long drawn-out battle at the Presidential Electoral Tribunal contribute in any way to the stress that might have triggered the aneurysm? We�ll never know.
We do know we would rather have him in heaven than in a state of vegetation. We would rather remember him as the hero of the stuff of our collective imagination, Ang Panday the blacksmith who hammered out vengeance and justice on his anvil. We would rather remember him as the star of our dreams of a mythical country where right was might, people respected each other and the law, and peace reigned 365 days a year � a movie script that he was doomed to fail to produce and turn into real life. FPJ is dead. Long live the legend.