Three senators charged with plunder laughing at what seems a private joke—what’s wrong with this picture?
Feeling deeply insulted and injured myself, I marched back into the bedroom to rouse my husband; he was not staying one moment longer in bed while I mortified.
“Look!” I held the newspaper to his half-closed eyes and vigorously, repeatedly stubbed the front-page picture on it with a forefinger. He lifted his head and gave it his own caption—“Three faces of impunity”—and returned to sleep, as though those were the most natural faces those three characters could make under the circumstances.
How insensitive, how numbed! Three men laughing away plunder, a scale of theft involving people’s money for which the law does not allow bail, and he just slept it all off. Didn’t he realize the joke was as much on him as on me? From someone accused, falsely or not, of such a crime, I’d have expected a face of concern or indignation, genuine or not.
But mirth!
Indeed, I wondered how the whole issue is taken generally. After all, this was not just another case of stolen pork, in which most of the pig actually went to its intended beneficiaries and only some to the pig’s custodians and their cohorts; this was a whole, fat pig stolen!
The case, in fact, has been found strong enough to merit a trial. Arrests should forthwith follow, but they are taking longer than usual. No wonder the three could yet afford to laugh. No wonder, too, doubt has persisted whether anyone is going to jail: “May makukulong ba?”
Main course
I was not the only one fuming, as it turned out. At a birthday lunch for a former classmate on the same day, the issue became the main course. Chit Noriega-Reodica, the stain-free ex-secretary of health and now the president of our alumni association, tried to steer the conversations off the picture toward an impromptu business—our homecoming. But once brought up, the PDAF issue took a life of its own, animated by an incredible surge of septuagenarian energy.
“Wala bang rally?” instigated one of us. “We have to show our support for the call to jail the plunderers!”
The spirit, no doubt, is still willing, but whether the flesh is capable of rising to the occasion is another matter.
We were thus roused in the end to the realities of senior existence; we tried to avoid aggravating it by looking at the brighter picture. Did we ever think we’d see the day a president convicted and jailed for plunder? Or a Supreme Court chief justice impeached? Or another president arrested and kept in custody to this day, again for plunder?
Indeed, a new moral mood seems to have been inspired by the sitting president, in whose term many of those victories have happened. But, as we begin to count our victories, we realize they may well be simply temporary, if not pyrrhic.
After all, the plundering president—pardoned by his successor, who is herself detained for the same crime—is back in business. He has gotten himself elected as mayor on the argument that pardon erases the crime, thus restoring the ex-convict’s right to elective office (a case that, for all its critical ramifications, continues to drag out in the courts).
The impeached Supreme Court chief justice, on the other hand, goes into lively, high-profile and comfortable retirement.
Higher priority
On June 12, Independence Day, a rally such as we had presumed our fellow alumna had in mind was mounted. But a 90th birthday party, higher now in our priorities than most anything else, kept us from attending.
And just as well: it turned out to be a bashing of the President and his Cabinet for, among other allegations, a cover-up of their own PDAF loot. It therefore becomes reasonable to suspect that the whole thing had been cooked up by the accused plunderers themselves. An objective survey should be able to show where the sentiments of the people truly lie.
As if the PDAF theft hasn’t been debilitating enough, an equally disturbing, indeed potentially farther-reaching, scandal breaks out to test my residual energy.
Remember the Commission on Elections (Comelec) operators who gave Gloria Arroyo, by her own admission, her fraudulent presidential election? Some of them are still in the commission, Chair Sixto Brillantes Jr. himself admitted in an exchange with Sen. Alan Cayetano during a Senate hearing aired on TV.
And arguing against not only common knowledge but a presidential confession (“I’m sorry”—remember?), Brillantes declared: “The Comelec doesn’t cheat; it’s the candidates that do.”
This cop-out declaration should itself qualify the Comelec chair to join the three laughing senators. Oh, they’d make a perfect quartet!