10:15 PM
Baguio
We flew to Baguio at 9:20 AM having been delayed by the various unfinished problems in the office:
The sudden death of Sec. Amadeo Cruz of Health. I had to indicate that Under Sec. [Clemente] Gatmaitan had to take over temporarily. I would like to appoint a prestigious person like Dr. Jesus Tamesis as Secretary of Health.
I had to write the condolence letter in long hand and appoint Dr. Pacifico Marcos my brother, as my proxy in the funeral on the 29th.
The rice procurement and purchase both locally and abroad.
The plans for Ilocos Sur and Isabela.
Final reports on the Muslim.
Many small details that had to be finished before I could leave the office.
But just the same I received a ribbing from my children for the tardiness as I had told them we would leave at 7:00 AM.
We used the Fokker for the first time since its return to the Philippines from Amsterdam
Official Gazette for December 26, 1971: IT WAS another day of desk work for President Marcos, as his usual schedule of callers for the day was clear.
Among the official matters he acted upon was the recommendation of the Monetary Board, contained in a resolution it passed at a recent meeting, which would authorize the Financial and Fiscal Policy Committee (FFPC) to make an over-all review of allocation, expenditure, investment and lending of government resources, and the economy as a whole.
In an executive order, the President authorized the FFPC to create executive committees and such other sub-committees as may be necessary for it to effectively carry out national objectives, achieving this by means of balanced and integrated fiscal, monetary and economic policy; and of coordinating and synchronizing the borrowing and lending activities of government financial institutions.
The Financial and- Fiscal Policy Committee was reconstituted on April 21, 1970 under Executive Order No. 225 in order to integrate into one body all functions pertaining to fiscal, financial and government investment policies.
As reconstituted, the committee is composed of the Secretary of Finance, Commissioner of the Budget, Chairman of the National Economic Council, Governor of the Central Bank, Administrator of the Office of Economic Coordination, Chairman of the Board of Investments, Chairman of Vie Development Bank of the Philippines, General Manager of the GSIS, President of the PNB, Administrator of the SSS and Director-General of the Presidential Economic Staff.
In the evening the President, together with the First Lady, Mrs. Imelda Romualdez-Marcos and their three children, Irene, Bongbong and Irene, motored to Nichols Air Base in Pasay City where they boarded the presidential fokker plane for Baguio City.
where it went through a complete 1-run which cost more than a million pesos but brought it back to Zero defects and Zero time.
It feels good and has been refurnished inside in red. The engines purr in perfect strength and power.
We were over Baguio in 30 minutes but we circled around till Imelda’s plane had landed. We landed at 10:15 AM.
We were teeing off at Camp John Hay with Maj. and Mrs. Jim Ball, [Manuel] Neling Nieto [Jr.] and Joey Stevens at 12:00. Finished at 4:15 PM with a 73. I parred the first two holes and birdied the 3rd Cardiac Hole. But I could not hit with my woods and long irons. I started to hit well on the 18th when I drove well. But the irons of the new set (a McGregor D-o swingweight) is lighter and I was short of the green with a pitching wedge. I used my old blaster to blast out of the trap to within one foot of the cup for a game.
Baguio is quiet. Not too many people. Even the activists seem to have left. Mayor [Luis] Lardizabal tells me that they have gone to some conference in the Cordilleras. This is the birthday of Mao Tse Tung. And they must be celebrating it. Commander Julius captured in Ifugao on November 1st had revealed that there would be a meeting in Isabela of NPA [New People’s Army] representatives of all Northern Luzon provinces on this day.
I go to Ilocos Sur tomorrow to find out what is really happening there.
On the 30th I go to Ilocos Norte.
Tonight I just read again the article “The Violent Way” by Robert Andrey, author of the The Territorial Imperative. He agrees that our overcrowded society may be headed for chaos on dictatorship.
It refers to the experiments with animals where there is order in groups with a dominant male—disorder where there is no one dominant. “Throughout nature there is a force for order.”
“Any sense of injustice, however real, must be aggrandized to a point where risk becomes tolerable. Yet I find myself doubtful that such social scenes should be characterized as neurotic, since we neglect a prime fact: that the youth with a paving stone in his hands is enjoying himself.”
“We enjoy the violent, just as callous rats sought the middle pens. We hurry to an accident not to help; we run to a fire not to put it out; we crowd about a schoolyard fight not to stop it. For all the Negro’s profound and inarguable grievances, there has not been a racial outbreak in America since the days of Watts in which a degree of carnival atmosphere has not prevailed. I myself have no great taste for Molotov cocktails; it is because I am timid, not because I am good. Gerard Suttles, in his work with juvenile groups in the Chicago slums, found that the reliability of gang members to join in an action could be analized [sic]; stealing might attract a fair number, but the prospect of a fight would enlist almost all.”
“Action and destruction are fun. The concerned observer who will not grant it indulges in a hypocrisy which we cannot afford. He who regards a taste for violent action as a human perversion will not likely make any great contribution to the containment of our violent way. Similarly, the observer who seeks nothing but earnest motivation in riot and arson, who looks only to environmental deprivation, neglect or injustice to explain it—who in other words seeks wholly in the action of the majority the motivations of the minority—may flatter himself one day that he was violence’s most dependable ally.”
x x x
“There is visible throughout all nature a bias in favor of order x x”
“Humans shares with other animals three innate needs which demand satisfaction. The first is identity, the opposite of anonymity and it is the highest. The second is stimulation, the opposite of boredom. The lowest is security, the opposite of anxiety.”
“These innate needs—identity, stimulation and security—form a dynamic triad. Achievement of security and release from anxiety present us with boredom. It is the psychological process least appreciated by our social planners. Increasing affluence, and decreasing economic anxiety, is producing the bored society described by Desmond Morris in The Human Zero.”
“The bored society could not be a reality, however, were we other than the anonymous society stripped in large part of our opportunity to search for identity. It is the most pressing of motives—to know who we are in our own eyes but even more in the eyes of our fellows. x x x And so the frustration of the search for identity from above, just as much as the achievement of security from below, forces the member of a contemporary society into the unendurable area of boredom. Imprisoned by both affluence and anonymity, no way presents itself but stimulation.”
“Pornography and riot are of a piece. x x x All provide stimulation for shocker and shocked alike in bored societies with nowehere else to go.”
“And violence, too, is stimulating. It carries excitement for both violator and violated, whether through the joyful hatreds of the one or the fearful rages of the other. A riot in Chicago is worth all the circuses that old time emperors could provide. And like any other form of sensual shock, violence to retain its stimulation must proceed to stronger or more levels of expression. That adoptable animal, the human being, habituates himself all too easily to any present situation.”
x x x
“But the violent subgroup, even as it asserts itself, defeats itself. x x x”
“Violent subgroups now threaten our modem society. But at the same time the very intricacy of our social interdependence threatens the survival of those violent little worlds. The animal cannot stand alone, and least of all animals, modem man.”
“Long before total social disorder can take place, human foresight, combined with our biological need for order, should have taken command. The question we cannot now answer is when. Shall sufficient of us glimpse the road to disaster in time?”
“If we do, then with whatever pain we shall accept certain compromises, surrender certain rights which we believe sacred, provide prizes for identity which we now deny, contain our violent confrontations within such ritualized aggressions as negotiations, seeks to correct those genuine injustices which lend respectability to violent arrangements and discourage social applause for the violator.”
“And if we do not? If we lack the will or the vision to see what waits for us?”
“A few years ago our eminent journalist and historian of the making of Presidents, Theodore H. White, published a play called Caesar at the Rubicon. While Rome sank deeply into anarchy, Julius Caesar by agreement stayed with his powerful army beyond the river. The play, of course, concerns his final reluctant decision to break the agreement, proceed to Rome and assume dictatorial power. And it close with a simple comment worthy of being stamped on the coin of every democracy.
“If men cannot agree on how to rule themselves someone else must rule them.”
“If we have not the foresight, if we have not the will, then we shall discover one day who waits beyond our Rubicon.”
End.
How strikingly apropos to our situation!