From: https://palawan-news.com/magsaysay-is-my-guy/
“Magsaysay is my
Guy”
The annual September 21 commemoration of the
beginning of Martial Law always reminds me of the end of the Marcos
regime. To make a pun of it, I was
caught on the wrong side of EDSA on February 22, 1986—my father being then a
Deputy Minister—and the People Power Revolution left my father jobless and our
family in a severe economic crisis. But what
I remember most of those four days following the Enrile-Ramos dig-in at Camp
Aguinaldo was the almost non-stop playing of Mambo Magsaysay over June Keithley’s Radyo Bandido. While its
logical connection with those days’ events escapes me, I actually enjoyed the song
which, I learned afterwards, was composed by the brilliant Raul Manglapus. It might also have been Manglapus who came up
with the catchy tag-line, “Magsaysay is My Guy”, for the 1953 Presidential
election; and Mambo Magsaysay is still, certainly, the classic, gold-standard
for campaign jingles, that made The Guy win.
The lyrics of the song go:
“(Stanza 1:) Everywhere that you would look/ Was a
bandit or a crook/ Peace and order was a joke/ Till Magsaysay pumasok/ (Ref.:) That is why, that is
why/ You will hear the people cry/ Our democracy will die/ Kung wala si Magsaysay/ Mambo, mambo, Magsaysay, mabu-, mabu-, mabuhay/ Our democracy
will die/ Kung wala si Magsaysay/(Stanza
2:) Birds, they voted in Lanao/ At pati
aswang pa daw/ Ang eleksyon lutong
Macaw/ Till Magsaysay showed them how”...
Last August 31 was the 111th birth
anniversary of President Ramon Magsaysay who, like my father, Badong—and for
that matter, the late DILG Secretary Jesse Robredo—died in a plane crash while in
office. I think all three were “men of
the masses” who gave their lives in the service of others. But the Magsaysay connection does not end
there.
One of the interesting personalities I have come to
know in recent years is Mr. Cesar P. Magsaysay, a nephew of President Ramon
Magsaysay, being the son of the Presidential brother, Jesus. “Tito Cesar”, as I would like to call him, or
CPM, is also the brother of Vicente, a former Governor of Zambales and personal
friend of my father. Governor Vic is the
father of Angelica Magsaysay-Cheng, the incumbent Vice-Governor of Zambales;
and father-in-law of former Zambales Representative Mitos Habana-Magsaysay, with
whom I coincided in the 15th Congress. Some years ago, CPM decided to settle in the
southern town of Jose Rizal, Palawan, where he is literally breaking ground as
a gentleman-farmer, bringing along, and sharing with the community, the
technological and managerial savvy that made him a successful businessman.
Of course, this piece cannot be only about
personalities. As my phenomenologist-philosopher
friends would have it, one should strive to end his ruminations with a “transcendental
reflection”. But there is actually
something truly transcendental in the Magsaysay legacy: it is to him that we owe what, perhaps, to many,
would be the best definition of “social justice”: “He who has less in life should have more in
law” (Magsaysay Credo).
Our 1935, 1973, and 1987 Constitutions all mandate the promotion of
Social Justice, but without giving any definition. Of course Social Justice is now generally
understood to be a more secular restatement of the “preferential option for the
poor” of Catholic Social Doctrine; which, in turn, comes from our Lord’s
discourse on the “works of mercy” as criteria for the Last Judgment: “whatever
you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” ( Mt 25:40). As Father Bernas, echoing President
Magsaysay, would put it, “social justice in the Constitution is principally the
embodiment of the principle that those who have less in life should have more
in law. It commands a legal bias in
favor of those who are underprivileged.” (Joaquin G. Bernas, S.J., The 1987 Constitution, 1996 ed., p.
1059)
My generation of
law students caught the tail-end of a trend which required freshmen to recite
from memory a long-winded definition from the 1940 Supreme Court decision in Calalang v. Williams (70 Phil. 734). In that controversy, the petitioner questioned the validity of a regulation banning animal-drawn
carriages (calesas) from certain
streets in Manila. Among others, the
issue of its being contrary to the Social Justice provision of the 1935
Constitution was raised.
Upholding the
validity of the regulation, the Court said:
“Social justice is ‘neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism, nor
anarchy,’ but the Humanization of laws and the equalization of social and
economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational and objectively
secular conception may at least be approximated. Social justice means the
promotion of the welfare of all the people, the adoption by the Government of
measures calculated to insure economic stability of all the component elements
of society, through the maintenance of a proper economic and social equilibrium
in the interrelations of the members of the community, constitutionally,
through the adoption of measures legally justifiable, or extra-constitutionally,
through the exercise of powers underlying the existence of all governments on
the time-honored principle of salus
populi est suprema lex.”
Thanks to
President Ramon Magsaysay, today’s law students no longer have to suffer
indigestion from the Calalang definition of Social Justice. (24.IX.2018)
