Tape Tales

The first tape I held was in Grade 6 Home Economics sewing class.  It was that long, calibrated flexible device for measuring sizes and lengths called a tape measure.

Magnetic tapes that became more common years later were for a different human activity apart from sewing.  Out of its protective plastic shell magnetic tapes are even longer and more fragile than the standard tape measure.  While their existence is being threatened by recording discs, the idea of taped voices in any case had given untold problems to heads of state.

But for his astuteness and staying power, former President Ferdinand Marcos may not have lived down those Dovie Beams tapes.  Dovie was a Grade-B Hollywood actress who came in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to act in a movie on the war exploits of Marcos.  The movie fizzled but Dovie sizzled and she supposedly became the president’s lover.  Far from being an innocent abroad, she hid a tape recorder under the bed “for the rainy days.”

Like any scorned woman, she later surfaced in revenge and held a press conference to play the tapes after she was dumped.  Dovie’s voice was deemed clearly recognizable in the tapes.  So was the male voice, said to be “Fred’s,” which allowed reporters to print Dovie’s assertions without defaming the country’s head of state.

According to Sterling Seagrave in The Marcos Dynasty, copies of the tapes found their way to UP students who then “commandeered the campus radio station and broadcast it to an astonished nation” that suddenly heard male “moans” and “hoarse injunctions.”  When special forces troopers came to recapture the radio station, they “crumpled with laughter.”  Senator Ninoy Aquino then called for a Senate investigation even as he was “barely able to keep a straight face.”

The 37th US president, Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was forced to resign in what became known as “A Breach of Faith” in a book.  It started as the Watergate Scandal that involved the break-in of the opposing Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters at Watergate, a tony residential complex in Washington.

What made Richard Nixon finally resign the presidency on August 9, 1974 was the impending case of obstruction of justice with the Supreme Court.  It involved the tampering of his own taped conversations with trusted aides to cover his efforts to mislead investigators away from the White House, where the Watergate break-in was hatched and would therefore involve no less than him as the sitting president.  The tapes supposedly recorded too his plans to get back at his political enemies by using the full force of government, underscoring his vindictiveness.

The Watergate Scandal must have been so reprehensible because until now any scandal that involves official leadership is tagged with a “-gate”, as in Monicagate that involved US President Bill Clinton, Kohlgate in the case of  German Chancellor Helmut Kohl a few years ago, and now these so-called Juetenggate and Gloriagate in our midst.

Much fire and brimstone had issued forth from these our own current “–gates” such that ordinary, citizen me am beginning to wonder whether the rule of law is still being given its due respect.  I fantasize another kind of tape would serve best to differentiate the sincere from the mere grandstanders and jockeyers; adhesive tapes would look well on the mouths of the latter.

No, one who tape-records voices legally or illegally is not called a taper, which is an entirely different word that refers to figures, like a spire or a conical head.  Whether or not the shape of the heads of those who clandestinely taped the president is conical, that still wouldn’t make them tapers.

Wherever this scandal or circus would lead, we can trust that as long as we retain our uncanny ability to laugh at our own foibles, we will survive.  (How can one forget those troopers sent to recapture the UP campus radio station, armas de fuego in hand, crumpling with laughter?)

Another kind of tape though is no laughing matter.  The parasitic tapeworms, some growing as long as 50 meters and have suckers or hooks on their heads, affect digestive tracts of animals, including humans.  Ingesting raw or improperly cooked pork and beef runs the risk of ingesting pork tapeworm and beef tapeworm.

A famous tapeworm gripped South Africa in 1966 with the assassination of its head of state, Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid.  The assassin Demitrios Tsafendas had claimed the tapeworm inside his stomach that had been eating him away was the invisible giver of orders.  He stabbed Verwoerd four times, and the worm went strong in the public’s imagination.  It suited the authorities as it meant that it was the assassin who was sick and not the country.

Illusory or otherwise parasitic tapes have no use, much less as recording devices.  But they do sap and slowly kill the host that feeds them.  Would that tapes of the recording kind wouldn’t sap our national energy as much, so we can go on.

(July 2005)