I wept in disbelief listening to a witness at a Senate hearing, a confessed member of the so-called Davao Death Squad, as he told in gruesome detail his story of human beings being thrown alive to crocodiles, or gutted or chopped up to feed fish, or mummy-wrapped in packing tape and dumped somewhere labeled in death as dope pushers or otherwise bad examples.

This murder style is signature Duterte, he said, indicting the former Davao City mayor and now president.

Indeed, Duterte’s allies promptly rallied to do damage control. The promptest was Alan Cayetano. In more than an hour of interpellation, he produced, out of nowhere, an assortment of tapes, hoping to catch the witness in his ignorance of the nuances of packing tapes; true enough, he didn’t know the difference between packing and masking, and only knew dead men were wrapped in them.

At any rate, the chairperson of the inquiring committee, Leila de Lima, was unseated by the Duterte’s majority in the Senate, and began to be demolished by his lieutenants from all fronts in a job that definitely lacked not only moral but general finesse. But it was Duterte’s silence for a few days after the bombshell revelations that I found quite intriguing.

Edgar Matobato’s testimony will forever haunt me, and what made it doubly disturbing was that I had heard it before and heard it from Duterte himself as president-elect. He had promised to fatten the fish with the bodies of drug users and pushers, and owned to the Davao Death Squad. He had even admitted that, as a prosecutor, he had planted evidence on suspects, a necessary evil for a successful prosecution, he contended.

Now, when I see guns and drug paraphernalia strewn around unshod victims, I can’t help but wonder if they might have been planted, too. I almost wish the president would lie sometimes, if only to spare me the shock.

But no; he’d even go out of his way to shame his own men by contradicting them, leaving them twisting in the wind, as they face the nation or the world pathetically struggling to soften his utterances.

Anger or rage

If the president won’t even lie to save his life, he must be truthful about his own feelings, which, publicly, are limited to anger or rage in different degrees. Sometimes his anger cuts so deep we don’t know where he’s coming from; whatever its source, I can only liken it to a family feud so old yet so bitter that, while its cause may no longer be traceable, the rancor remains.

Another alarm was raised when he suddenly became unhinged at journalists’ probing especially into his bank accounts and his medical records. Apparently, these to him are private matters distasteful to discuss publicly, not unlike a public display of one’s underwear. The intolerance is, of course, more serious than that; it’s about concealing truths the nation should know.

As if his gutter language wasn’t enough, the president has recently unsheathed his dirty finger, holding it up high for his audience to see, although aimed at the European Union. This after using the “f” word on the Europeans and calling them hypocrites for denouncing extrajudicial killings they themselves practiced in colonial times. (As happens, the last person I remember doing the finger in public has just been appointed ambassador to the United Nations.)

How much more international degradation can we afford to allow our president to cause us?

The bad thing is, his latest rages seem set off by an apparent refresher course in world history, which sometimes comes off as a burst from a rusty old cannon from the Philippine-American war, for instance. Perhaps, reading again about atrocities committed by the supposedly more developed nations during their colonial campaigns, he sees himself as a man with a similar mission—in relation, that is, to the drug menace. How dare the colonizers stop him now from committing an atrocity or two!

At least he’s doing his homework now—in history at least, and however inappropriately. I seem to recall how, as president-elect, he enjoyed mocking his prospective cabinet members, referring to them as valedictorians, where he himself barely passed, and pointing out how situations were now reversed—they’d be working for him.

But Edgar Matobato would seem the ultimate poetic justice: he only finished grade one and was once a mere errand boy of Duterte’s family but probably knows too much. If Duterte is worried about him, he’s leaving him to his men who have obviously begun dealing with him— by shutting out and persecuting de Lima, for starters.

For his part, he continues to defend the extrajudicial killings, now numbering about 2,000 in just three months, but tends to dig himself a deeper hole. With a shrug, hands in pockets, looking straight at the TV camera, he challenges, “Who are those people, anyway?”

This president’s candor really scares the something out of me.