Watching the men and women around Gloria Macapagal Arroyo these days tells me something about the heavy burden of truth, once you know it, even if others may not.
Knowing the truth, or having sufficient knowledge that would confirm your worst suspicions, could be like having a yoke upon your neck. It is a heavy burden. It is not easy on one’s conscience when you participate in the denial of truth, or obfuscate it, hide it, or twist it. It certainly should be heaviest on the one who committed the transgression, and willfully hides it.
Never mind if it is Prospero Pichay you see on television. Truth has never been his suit. Conscience as ordinary mortals know it is not balm enough for someone like him. You see how shifty the eyes of Joey Salceda can be each time he guests on talk shows. He keeps mumbling economic jargon, as if the prescriptions he had whispered to his lady boss, the so-called fiscal reforms that would transform a dying economy by the strategy of cutting more meat from the emaciated frame of the poor and middle-class, would obfuscate the truth about her willful participation in the conspiracy to cheat her election to the highest office. One wonders why these lazy news commentators do not bother to ask Mr. Salceda about Robert Barber’s claim in one of the taped conversations, where he was supposed to have fixed the votes in Ligao, Albay, for his favorite senator, the father of his colleague from Surigao del Norte.
You see Bunye lying with a straight face. Maybe his facial arteries have hardened. Practice makes perfect. Or my friend Mike Defensor. You cringe when he offers to credit all of Mindanao’s manufactured margin, for the sake of argument, he states, to the late FPJ. That was about 400,000 votes, he keeps repeating on TV. Which means, Mike computes, that GMA would still win by over 600,000 votes. Was it his aunt Miriam Defensor who taught him arithmetic? (OUCH! - J.M.)
One could forgive Mike his faulty arithmetic. Most politicians make a profession out of talk precisely because they were poor in arithmetic, much like many journalists. But one certainly wonders about the kind of amorality that permits such rationalization. Maski na hindi nandaya, lamang at lamang pa rin si Gloria. E bakit nga nandaya?
Of course, my friend Mike and my friend the Senate President staunchly claim that there is nothing in the taped conversations that would incriminate Gloria Macapagal Arroyo with the illegality of cheating. They quibble endlessly that she did not order Garcillano to do the things that he proudly narrated to the president who made him commissioner. Have they become as amoral as the president they serve? Or is the lack of any concept of what is right and what is wrong the established norm in their definition of "good governance"?
***
Of course in a crisis situation, one is not expected to know everything, specially if the subject of one’s defense compartmentalizes the details of the truth. That happened to some of us in Malacañang during the last four critical months of the Estrada presidency. Since I wake each day before the sun peeps through my bedroom window, I have to be in bed by midnight. What was happening in the presidential residence beyond dinner time was something I had no personal knowledge of. Sure there were suspicions, much of it brought by whispers. But you tend to give your president all the benefit of the doubt.
I had never been inside the Boracay mansion, or Wack-Wack. I only learned about their existence when the crisis of Erap had begun to unfold. That was when my own personal crisis with the burden of truth began.
Are the cabinet members and the senators loyal to Madam Arroyo now saying that preserving their own niche of power has beclouded all sense of right and wrong that their parents and their teachers taught them?
The truth, as the Bible teaches, will set us free. But only if, after discovering the truth, we allow it full flower. Otherwise it shall remain a yoke upon our neck, a heavy burden upon our conscience.
***
Over the weekend, I listened intently to the rest of the tapes, all three or so hours of it. Some included conversations between Garci and his wife Grace, household concerns that the ISAFP agent discarded sometimes right in the middle of the conversations.
Some were fairly recognizable names — a commissioner here and a commissioner there. I had to call on some Comelec insiders to try to identify as best they could who the others were. And when they did, the whole cheating conspiracy unravels.
Kikilabutan ka talaga. How can we ever hold credible elections in this country from this day onwards? Come August the ARMM will choose its leaders. What will the Comelec, and their bosses in Malacañang, manufacture once more?
Will the Liberal Party, which shouts to the highest heavens that they stand for principle, countenance participation in an obviously flawed process presided over by deeply compromised people? Or is their boy, the very able Toto Paglas, the one anointed by those who toil in the bowels of the palace that stinks? In which case, Senator Frank Drilon, sir, okay lang?
Even my friend Toto must be having bouts with his conscience these days.
***
But Senator Joker Arroyo warns us of the "horrid spectacle" of having two presidents in jail, and because of this, we should let the pressure off on Gloria?
Two presidents of South Korea apologized profusely after findings about their personal involvement in corruption were bared. They were both placed in prison. Is this country, is our leaders’ twisted sense of morality any better than South Korea because we close our eyes to the truth, cover our noses to the stink?
Lawyer Joker Arroyo must be reminded of something his law professors pounded into his head — Fiat justitia, ruat coeli. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
***
Joe Villamor writes from Pennsylvania in the US of A. He downloaded the PCIJ transcripts of the tapes. And he smiles on Garci’s use of the acronym S.M.I.L.E. When he was in school, he remembers how he would ask his parents for Some Money Immediately, for Lack of Energy. When Garci told his secretary, Ellen Peralta, a province-mate of Leonardo Perez, Marcos’ faithful Comelec henchman who mastered multiplication before he learned addition, he kept mumbling S.M.I.L.E.
All throughout the conversations, the coven of criminals who worked with Garci clearly had but one motto — pera-pera lang ang lahat.
But Garci had another obsession, and it was his re-appointment after the president he invented was finally proclaimed. He had to be constantly re-assured of that. Clearly therefore, his appointment in February, along with Noli Barcelona, was a "probation".
Deliver the votes, and probation becomes permanent. It was a pre-meditated conspiracy against the Filipino people, willfully committed by an absolutely amoral president. Now she admits to a lapse in judgment, in an apologia non profundis, and her lapdogs want the nation to hail her and "move on".
Read this too.
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