“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

RP’s scheme and scene – comedy of errors!

            Keen observers will not fail to notice the comedy of errors the whole scheme and scene in our contemporary realpolitik now has become.  After the “Hello Garci” scandal (that an NBI director has called the mother of all scams) had been buried alive, breathes another multi-million dollar scam that would soon rock the very foundations of Philippine society and bring it to her knees.  If writings on the wall were gauge, simulations of People Power as they actually happened in Edsa I and in Edsa II are fast taking place.  Such call for GMA’s final exit or ouster will soon reverberate across the globe as it has begun to inflict major injury to our own collective psyche.  Ours has always been a damaged culture and to add insult to injury, we, individually and as a whole, self-destruct. 

            The untiring, endless, even useless Senate proceedings as televised the world over must now come to a halt.  In the end, they mean nothing than mere competing political advertising campaigns from either side of the political fence.  If one worldview is destroyed by another and so on up to infinity, then we are just moving about in circles.  No one member of Senate will stop the vicious cycle of pros and cons and at the end of the day, nothing in aid of legislation would have been achieved.  If that happens, the Senate has just been a huge tri-media field of free publicity.  As the Senate does its avowed task, it is not far removed a lot of payolas will flow into every door of the institution.  The thin membrane that divides the wall between decency and indecency will count its own beneficiaries.  Patronage politics is even more strengthened in the unseen process.  Since nothing more can disabuse the public mind that something of a high-level corruption has really taken place right at the inner sanctum of Malacanang, what more is there to add in an entirely unmarked, even unstudied and highly untrained discussion of issues brought to the fore? 

            Cory, the principal icon of EDSA Revolt has spoken – prescribes that GMA has to go.  In an earlier occasion, FVR, another major icon of that historical event sent across the same plea to GMA’s face.  Erap seals all beams, matter-of-factly, short of asking for GMA’s ouster likewise.  Who, in his right mind, will not want GMA to go as the plot thickens.  No amount of so-called ‘unity walk’ by her Cabinet in the premises of Malacanang or by her AFP and PNP in places elsewhere can delete the solid public perception that GMA has done a public wrong that manifests itself clear as crystal.  The more well-meaning members of her Cabinet should start thinking of having to leave an institution now under siege and it is almost predictable that the domino effect of one resigning to trigger mass resignations is about to unfold.  It bears watching.  JDV, now sings another tune, disowns his former big boss when he was moved out of her grace.  Political survival for the man who has claimed authorship of nearly every law enacted for the last two decades was the name of the game.  To think he will again be the major beneficiary of a GMA ouster, if it happens, is tantamount to sheer luck – a turn of events that goes back to the dirty guys.  Pray tell, it will not be so.

            CBCP, playing well its make-believe image as the final moral arbiter of large societal issues, was never quick to the draw.  Its pastoral letter has always been buried in the limbo of meaningless utterances.  For the average mind, it is nonsensical, myopic, and for its ‘neither-here-nor-there’ stance, it is worth nothing at all.  It betrays its avowed concern as expressed in the dictum – the greatest good for the greatest number when it fails to deliver the true message across. And it failed as it has always failed.  Behind every 10-hour closed-door meeting beyond the piercing eyes of media that CBCP holds on a number of ‘turning points in the country’s history’ is a presumably institutional ‘power struggle’ taking place.  However, in an institution built on chronic seniority and hierarchy, personality cult is its chief beneficiary.  The head  of CBCP rules that little universe of supposed-to-be noble men of faith – the religious clique. 

            JDV’s little Congress – his once kingdom – is now on the silent mode as if to tell us nothing is the matter with this country.  The daily menu in the entire viewing screen that is the “Jun Lozada” brought to light an entire wasteland of claims and counterclaims, evidence upon a counter-evidence, truth upon counter-truth to the point as though, everything will be mathematical at the end of the whole equation.  What is this?  Truth, as we know it, provided nothing obstructs its flow like a self-serving defense mechanism as an EO 643 (whatever its number is) does not come as mere pile of facts, documents, or narratives.  Truth, when it comes out, comes out with simplicity in its wholeness.  All available evidence, if we may call it that, point to FG, that again, by simple implication is GMA herself.  An entire infrastructure of testimonies, material evidence, and papers can be built had the process been allowed to take its normal course.  There is however, a country to be saved as the official line from the military and the police would have us believed. 

            Malacanang is under heavy attack.  If it survived “Hello Garci”, is there anything else it cannot overcome?  If the prescribed legal route be followed, nothing tells us of a way GMA will be ousted, nor resigned from her position, nor booted out of Malacanang.  They know something we don’t.  They can do something we can’t.  They have planned ahead of time something we can never do.  In this country, the AFP and the PNP make governments, believe it or not.  And so long these institutions are beholden to the Queen, ouster is next to impossibility.  GMA will finish term, good or bad.  There is even greater danger of rallying behind that certain Jun Lozada who cries when nothing pains him to a breaking point, laughs when highly serious statements were uttered, smiles when there is nothing so suited to smile about and breaks the frontiers of serious ideas from the non-serious ones.  We might be rallying behind a man that history will soon unravel to be just another ‘Chavit Singson’, pray not.

PRIMER C. PAGUNURAN

JDV out – another with a different collar

JDV’s almost theatrical 59-minute rhetoric, served public notice that he stood trial – and pleaded guilty as charged, matter-of-factly.  Keen observers of trends know where the man is coming from – trying even a last-ditch effort – to free his head off the noose.  Blackmail, call it that, for the first and final act, against the president of this damned republic.  It was time for the man that left a legacy only best known to him – to go.  Or ask anyone in the know what monstrous scenario he has created in an institution called the House of Representatives as its supposed-to-be mere agency head.  JDV projected himself as bigger than the institution he represents when in truth and in fact, no part ought to be bigger than the whole.  Thus, he probably overdid the state of affairs of what ought to be a sacred institution in so far as the officials and employees are concerned and more so in so far as the historic role of a Legislature is taken into account.

            The vote configuration betrayed the man who thought he has all the Batasan for himself – as new set of congressmen and women mixed with the old set in what Pichay always referred to as the ‘Old Boys Club’.  Now, there must be any given number of his colleagues – old or new – who rebelled against JDV’s own self-fulfilling prophecy not to mention antics that have already lost their spell or hypnotic effect.  Ironically how many editors, political analysts, and even scholars ever thought of JDV as the consummate statesman – as such perception rests on a mistake.  It is not just Malacanang that benefited more with his ouster – the Filipino people in general.  The anomaly that is JDV is soon a thing of the past or how indeed can he seat as speaker for three consecutive terms when each time a new Congress opens, every member is deemed on equal footing – no such thing as primus inter pares.  In other words, he is the author of a grand historical blunder and good thing this Gorgian knot is finally cut that no more tradition as bad as that JDV authored be repeated in history.

            Public perception of JDV is limited to what we read in newspapers, hear over radio, watch on TV, view on the net.  All these were created to be false by the man himself who writes his own press release, his own oratory, his own place in history.  History should be objective but when he came, he made it purely subjective as though everything that happens in the country, every issue that burns in the day, every hope left for the entire people – gravitates around his well-designed image as a great political leader of the times.  Not anymore as his long oratory or rhetoric gave the man away – JDV – in real than in reel, has become more of himself.  Now that he has to subordinate himself to the new leadership he himself apparently anointed – good or bad – not much shall be heard of him.  He shall resigned himself to oblivion – the sooner the better – that no more of him is heard, not his idea – if it ever was a bright one anyway.  His chronic reference to all his accomplishments – spoken from the first point of view, that is – really is an insult to intelligence.  Now he fall in his own snake pit.

            JDV’s successor, albeit his protégé, does not have to test the waters any longer.  Problem is, our fate and future might still be more of the same as they both came from the same breed of what Salonga conveniently calls ‘traditional politicians’ and its negative slant.  Spin doctors, damage control experts, media handlers need not do a lot of dishing in or dishing out.  The same menu will be served to the public at large with no perceptible change in flavor detected from any distance from the frying pan.  As a people or as a country, Nograles doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.  Creeping patronage politics as that discussed by Brillantes of UP will be the norm than the exception.  If we go by B.F. Skinner’s psychoanalysis, we shall find out in no time at all, that anybody driven by the same set of stimuli will respond in the same particular way as that demonstrated by the old occupant for three punishing terms or the man called JDV.  Thus, it is not as if ‘payolas’ will be a thing of the past.  It is not as if ‘lobby money’ will no longer circulate within the Big League.  It is not as if, the Congress will cease to be a Malacanang rubber-stamp.

            PGMA is probably the luckiest president we ever had.  And she better has to finish all of her term in office till she really has to go herself – with all the music and trimmings of a well-served term, if we can call it that.  Nothing has been proven of all the charges slapped against her to the satisfaction of the High Court.  On whether or not the High Court is beholden to her is another story by itself.  If the AFP and PNP and even the bureaucracy itself continue to patronize her leadership, so be it – nothing is the matter with that.  If coup plotters, destabilizers, or other extremists group cannot inflict the political blow they want to deliver, then so be it.  The president is the president under all the harsh conditions that have visited her – past, present, future. 

            It would seem that no promising group ever holds promise.  No such group can keep up a good fight – not even the so-called ‘bully from the school yard’.  Definitely, not Lacson, not Cayetano, not Escudero, not Magdalo.  Nobody as no group can boot PGMA out of office except by the tinkerable processes of law. Malacanang knows what buttons to press, its survival kit complete, its lieutenants and sub-alterns trained in politics as it should be better done under existing culture and sub-cultures. PGMA’s core group of advisers are a force to reckon with and they understand their political calculus more than other presidents combined.  Who said it was hard for PGMA to boot out JDV from his speakership?  It is a walk in the park – so far as PGMA is concerned – no fuss, no fibs. The daughter of the former president knows how to run the affairs of state, albeit – one step forward, two steps backward, if you follow my drift. Fact is, the more she is ‘harassed’, the stronger her stay in power becomes.

            What is in store for the Filipino people?