The Senate: Shame, shame /Ninoy Aquino: Heart and

I was expecting a Promethean spark. What we got last Friday was the Senate version of the Spanish Inquisition with two senators playing the role of the fearsome Marquis de Torquemada. They were Rodolfo Biazon and Robert Barbers, the rest playing obligatto to a shocking Senate display of hubris and the worst in the Philippine politics–a fascist display of power. And a circling of wagons to protect one of their own – the accused Senator Panfilo Lacson. Senator Biazon was particularly crude and offensive, digging his meat cleaver into Colonel Victor Corpus like a matadero slaying the bulls at high noon at the city slaughterhouse.

And suddenly I was ashamed and mortified that our once august and regal Senate had sunk to such a low, splurging in the swamps rather than the blue deep waters of senatorial navigation. It had become and execrable Old Boys Club. Lacson had to be protected at all costs.

I can perhaps partly forgive Senator Barbers. For his chief of staff Stephen Villaflor was wrongly and inexcusably fingered by Colonel Corpus as Kim Wong, a suspected Chinese drug lord who fled to Xiamen in China a few days ago, looking very much like a fugitive in flight. After all, Colonel Corpus is chief of the ISAFP (Intelligence Service, Armed Forces of the Philippines), and the identify blunder made him look like a schoolboy in short pants caught playing hooky. In fairness, however, Colonel Corpus repeatedly apologized to the entire Senate virtually prostrating himself, red in the face like a Sun Valley beet.

Which did not deter Senator Biazon from further pounding Corpus, this time like a pit bull tearing out the entrails of a rabbit. And there lay the beginnings of a great Senate tragedy.

What was scheduled to be a Senate probe of Corpus’ charges that Senator Panfilo Lacson was engaged in money laundering, drug trafficking, kidnap for ransom, summary executions and the commission of other heinous crimes turned to be a clumsy, heavy-handed turkey shoot on the ISAFP chief. The Senate may not know it, but Friday’s hearing not only turned off the TV audience against the Upper Chamber but the Church as well, virtually the entire left which now wants Lacson impeached in Congress, huge layers of civil society, and the military establishment.

Mark the latter. That is a dangerous turn. For the perception was that the Senate was not only crucifying Colonel Victor Corpus but the Armed Forces of the Philippines, its name, its honor, its prestige. As it is, Philippine politics is already rotten to the core. The Senate made it more so last Friday. And now the future looks more bleak. A tottering nation.

Already, the Young Officers Union (YOU) and the Rebolusyonaryong Alyansang Makabayan (RAM) have taken the cudgels for Corpus. And the warning Supt. Rafael Cerdeno, chairman of YOU, issued was that they were giving a two-month ultimatum to corrupt government officials to either reform or resign, or "be dislodged from power" – whatever that means. Shades of Rudy Aguinaldo? Shades of barong tagalog gifts, with snub-nosed bullets lodged in mid-center? Warnings of impending extermination? All this scares me no end. For if the military should take it upon itself to move and grab power, nobody but nobody can stop it.

That was the danger I smelled when I watched the Senate hearings on TV.

Although not a single senator sensed the Upper Chamber had grievously crossed the line, so full were they of their cock-eyed importance. After all, didn’t they occupy the supreme fortress of Philippine politics – the Senate? And so they were arrogant, imperious, conceited and contemptuous. Erstwhile Senate president Aquilino (Nene) Pimentel behaved like a boot-strapped Gestapo colonel and demanded and got the imprisonment of Angelo "Ador" Mawanay in the Senate brig until such time Ador could produce evidence of his charges against Sen. Loren Legarda. Can the Senate really to this? Indefinite imprisonment? Dammitohell, they can’t. That’s summary justice. That’s the Senate playing God.

Sen. Robert Jaworski deigned to speak English. Calamity. He mispronounced preposterous propesterous, proving once and for all he should never have left basketball. Sen. Tessie Oreta opened her mouth. And, predictably, out came swill. I would have wished that Sen. Loren Legarda kept her cool. After all, hardly anybody believed Ador who said she allegedly bought from him – personal delivery – 1000 cellphones worth P8.9 million.

But Loren pushed her luck too far. She behaved like the Queen of Sheba. She raged, raved and ranted when she could have been magnanimous with these words (which I now supply): "As all of you can see, this man is a fool, a knave and a liar, and I shall have no further truck with him. Let us proceed with our agenda of investigating Colonel Corpus’ charges against Senator Panfilo Lacson. For there is the pursuit of truth, the nobility of what we senators were elected for, wherever this truth might take us. Even if in the process our colleague Ping Lacson should suffer the direct consequences. May Divine Providence guide us in this endeavor." Loren blighted this opportunity, and turned off quite a number of people, including many of her admirers. Ah, my dear Loren, you have a lot to learn.

I will admit without any hesitation that Colonel Corpus as ISAFP chief committed a number of grievous mistakes, pulled boo-boos, and badly stained his metal as chief military spook.

But let me say this to avoid any misunderstanding. And here, I think I speak for the great majority. I prefer a bumbling, blundering Colonel Corpus to the person of Senator Lacson who over the years has acquired a great notoriety for the alleged commission of high and heinous crime. I prefer Corpus to a Senate that has shamelessly disgraced itself. Victor Corpus at least is a sincere and honest man, a reformist full of good intentions, not known to ever have committed graft and corruption, a crusader for good and virtue. Lacson is specifically charged with money-laundering, with having together with his wife deposited more than $50 million in drug money in American banks. The US State Department no less has confirmed this.

The Senate should shiver like three sheets in the wind listening to Corpus’ main accusation that Lacson is the Philippines’ drug lord par excellence. And the Philippines could go the way of Colombia where narco-politicians hold sway, narco-money buys everything including – of course – elections, and drugs are the supreme evil bent four ways – like a swastika.

Let’s give Victor Corpuz credit where credit is due. Before his exposé, everybody was afraid of Ping Lacson. The very mention of his name raised goose pimples everywhere. Even among the police, many of whom quaked in their boots when Lacson hove into view. Even supposedly brave columnists, except possibly Ramon Tulfo, gave him a long, long leash. Now Senator Lacson is fair game for comment and criticism – and the banging of brass gongs.

The Senate has gone too far. The guns of August. Is our democracy on self-destruct mode?

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And that’s why we miss Ninoy Aquino all the more these days. He was everything today’s Senate is not. He had flair, he had courage, he had prescience, he knew his history. He loved prowling along the edge of the cliff for there he encountered the danger that spelled the difference between life and death. Heroism and cowardice. Where today’s Senate is a peek-a-boo Senate, scared of its own shadow, Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. in the Senate was out front, bare-breasted, daring Ferdinand Marcos to do his worst.

Ninoy died eighteen years ago tomorrow just past the stroke of high noon, killed by a dictatorship that couldn’t silence him, dip his flags, buy him out with all the money, all the material honors in the world. He told me in Boston July of 1983 that nothing could stop him from returning to the Philippines, nothing really even if death by assassination awaited him on the instant after his arrival aboard a China Airlines aircraft.

To him, what mattered most was courage. Knowledge, erudition, intelligence were okay. But history moved forward only on the legs of men who had courage, because the binding soul encapsuled courage, courage that ignited and encouraged the multitudes, gave them hope, illumined the road ahead. Once, before Ninoy exiled himself to America, before he was imprisoned even by Marcos at the outset of the declaration of martial rule, he asked me about Frantz Fanon. He had heard of the author, who wrote Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) who spurred the masses of Algeria to seek independence from France. I told him Fanon justified the resort to violence by people who had been oppressed and exploited for long by their ruthless masters. Ninoy in Boston became afraid of this violence because the dictatorship left the Filipino masses no choice.

So he had to return, ward off this violence. Seek to restore democracy. T he Filipino was worth dying for.