What a shame!
The Senate, still respected though no longer as revered, allowed a despised, discredited world-class tyrant to use its sacrosanct hall to perform and attempt to beguile, again, a wounded nation with its usual tricks and antics. He was no ordinary backyard weed that once lorded it over the political landscape.
“If Hitler invaded hell, ‘Winston Churchill said”, I would make a favorable reference to the devil to the House of Commons.” Sen. Risa Hontiveros reminded the notorious resource speaker that the Senate does not cover hell and, unlike him ,doesn’t, look forward to it. You can’t blame him for that weird,if authentic, feeling.
Former Senator Leila de Lima may have an idea why the former president felt that way while he was in the Senate. She was ousted by her former colleagues after fabricated drug charges were levelled against her and put her in jail for nearly seven years. Everybody knows who’s behind it or has an idea who’s the mastermind.
She was just one, no doubt, the most prominent victim, of the tyrant’s war on drugs. There were at least 6,000 victims of extrajudicial killing (EJK) or as many as 20,000, if you go by the report of the Supreme Court. Justice has not been served yet to the victims and their relatives. The tyrant has yet be held accountable which he,alone he confessed, should be made accountable.
As a suspected mass murderer, the former president, strutted the Upper House with hubris, arrogance and contempt, and made a mockery of what should have been a more civilized proceeding with his devil-may-care invectives and put downs.
He also played well to the gallery of rah-rah boys and/or girls who tried to show that he is still the toast, not the roast, of the town. The man, now older and weak, appeared to be in control. Thanks, in no small way to a coterie of sycophants who tried but failed to convince everyone, including the victims of what is known as the crime against humanity, was just a figment of the imagination,
Or as the chief of them all, the senator and former police cbief, called it: propaganda.
Except that there were unassailable huge numbers and numbers don’t tell lies. Sure,the dead don’t tell tales ,that’s why they were neutralized or reduced to semantics.(Why was the deadly word used , in the first place, when a simpler and the right one should have removed the ambiguity, the human right lawyer Chel Diokno argued.) Wasn’t Thomas Becket, Bishop of Canterbury, slaughtered because of the king’s wayward semantics? Of course, monetary incentive, known to be the currency the killings in the war against drugs, was an added factor.
Except that there were women who had more balls than the men, who confronted the evils that the former tyrant and his men did and collectively denied it. Except that there was former Senator De Lima who was jailed for nearly seven years on fabricated charges and has been saying all along who’s the evil mind behind it. Except that there was Senator Hontiveros who faced the devil in the flesh and called his bluff.
Despite his admission of culpability, the former president is unrepentant with a new bragging right. If he were to do it all over again, the number will double. After all,his objective was noble: he wants to protect the people and the country. Can there be a better act of patriotism? The gullibility in the gallery resounded. For once,the Senate remembered its house rules. Decorum is as important as remembering history and the need for accountability. They who forget it, Santayana warned, are condemned to have a second serving.
If only the tyrant was the Job of the Bible. “ I know that you can do all things and your plans cannot be thwarted,” Job spoke to the Lord.. “ I ,therefore , retract my words and repent in dust and ashes.” But no apologies nor excuses, the former president defiantly told the Senate ,and mind your own business, please. Any excuse will serve a tyrant, Aesop said.
The defiance only encouraged more mockery– and dumbness. If De Lima had the goods against the former president, she should have filed a case against him while she was the secretary of justice, according to Sen. Jinggoy Estrada. Hear ye, hear ye, De Lima repeated. If the Jesuit priest is championing the cause of hundreds of families victimized by EJK, shouldn’t he be filing cases against the perpetrators? What is the police doing, Sen.Koko Pimentel, who could not resist the sarcasm of the moment, asked the Senate “Rock” who had vowed to sink or swim with the man on the dock.
It’s the prophecy of the English philosopher John Stuart Mills fulfilled time and time again. In a representative government, Mills wrote, there’s always the risk of electing people with low intelligence. Or to quote Murphy, if something can go wrong, it will.
After the Senate burlesque, the king was further found with no clothes. Two things remain possible. With a new mea culpa, cases for EJKS in the local court may move faster and grow in number. No less than the chairs of the Inquisition group in the House of Representatives known as QUADCOM have become more bullish. So have the lawyers for EJK victims in the International Criminal Court. The fish was caught in the mouth and the world witnessed. Of course, there is an unspoken Faustian deal between the powers-that-be and the powers-that-used -to- be stands in the way. For now.
The future remains dicey for the erstwhile tyrants and his cohorts.
