On August 3, Wigberto “Bobby” Tañada will be 90 years old. Seven days later, his father, Lorenzo (Ka Tanny), would have been 126. Born two months after the Declaration of Independence from colonialist Spain, on June 12, 1898, Ka Tanny fought as a guerrilla in his own war, 1942-1945. After that, father and son together fought in the unending war for nationhood against neocolonialists and their native surrogates and collaborationists.
Those circumstances provide a fateful and historic context to the thread of activist patriotism that has run through the Tañada lineage. In this age of untruth, that thread is likely to be misrepresented in order to advance the argument, however blatantly self-interested and inapt, that dynastic politics is not all bad. Those truth manipulators, after all, have all the devices of modern communications at their disposal and an indiscriminate platform for the propagation of their falsehoods — social media.
The Tañadas are definitely no Estradas, no Macapagal-Arroyos, no Dutertes, and no Marcoses. In fact, they have consistently stood opposite the likes of them. Indeed, a comparison with any of them is odious.
For one thing, the Tañadas bear no taint whatsoever of the one crime imputed on all four dynasties — plunder — not to mention murder, which is imputed on the last two. What reputation the Tañadas have built for themselves is one founded on a legacy of nationalism, a bequest so well-provenly pure-hearted any attempt to so much as depreciate it would amount to a national moral offense.
Lorenzo Tañada personifies the best tradition of civic and political leadership; known as the “grand old man of Philippine politics,” he served in the Senate the longest — 24 straight years. It was that precise illustrious tradition that Ferdinand Marcos, the present president’s father, killed when he declared martial law and made himself dictator, in 1972, the year after Tañada had ended his last term. Martial law forced oppositionists, like him and members of his family, to take their fight out in the streets or in the shadows.
When Marcos was finally booted out of power and driven with his family to foreign exile in 1986, and democratic governance was subsequently restored to the nation, Bobby followed in his father’s footsteps to the Senate. In 1991 he won for his father a signal victory in his lifelong fight for national sovereignty: the Senate voted for the removal of all American military bases in the Philippines, a colonialist embarrassment for nearly a century.
At the vote, the Senate hall rose in a cheering ovation for Lorenzo Tañada, who was following the proceedings from the gallery. Before casting his vote, Senator Wigberto Tañada had spoken: “Permit me, finally, to pay homage to a man under whose caring arms I grew up to learn love of country above self, a man who spent a lifetime of untiring struggle for nationalism and independence, a man whose dream of freedom for his people may soon be realized by the vote we are to take, a man whom I am deeply proud to call Tatay….”
At the precise moment of victory, the son walked up to the father, took his hand and, in a gesture made beyond the respectful greeting that it ritually signals, raised it to his brow. The following year, Lorenzo Tañada passed away. He was 93.
Bobby, 57 then, picked up where Ka Tanny left off. In 2019, a compilation of his speeches and other public utterances was published by the Center for People Empowerment and Governance. It constitutes the Tañada credo and centers on four causes: national sovereignty, people’s rights, social justice, and “an economic paradigm that puts our country’s interests and our people’s well-being above all else.”
As a journalist, I’m fortunate to have caught Ka Tanny and the rest of the illustrious Senate of his time in its last years, and also to have observed him and Bobby during martial law, where it was at all possible to do so in pursuit of my profession. In post-martial law, Bobby and I have carried on a friendship warmed more by common cause than by chumminess. There is just no way a conversation with Bobby — not even at tennis, a game we both love and had sometimes played together until the pandemic struck — can go without touching upon the subject: the cause.
With my wife, Chit, I and Bobby, with Zeny, very rarely miss each other at Sunday Mass. If the occasion had been suitable, we might have seized the homily and picked from it for some political discussion. Philippine politics being essentially a moral issue — dynastic rule, patronage, old boys club, cronyism, corruption, collaborationism — such a discussion, as misplaced as it may be, is truly tempting to start.
And that would have drawn robust participation: Father and Mother Tañada come to Mass with family, from sons and daughters to grandchildren, and, as a matter of legacy, both faith and the national cause are a family affair. — Rappler.com
