Estrada: Go for broke / Justice for Venturina

Joseph Ejercito Estrada and his apologists do not know their history. We are now being told that Erap’s "brilliant cinematic mind" has rewritten the script of his trial, switching it from the courts to the public at large and thence to history. Hello. What history? The expectation is that Estrada multitudes will take to the streets once again, peal the thunder of the downtrodden and oppressed, lay siege on Malacañang and slit the throat of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. They say this will be EDSA IV. I say nuts.

EDSA IV (what a travesty of EDSA!) will never come to pass.

We are being warned by Estrada’s two most vocal advocates, Makati Rep. Agapito ‘Butz’ Aquino and Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel to make haste and allow the disgraced president to undergo knee surgery abroad. And if this should lead to permanent exile, why not? Hello again. Isn’t Butz the younger brother of Ninoy Aquino? Isn’t Pimentel once the hero of the valiant political underground during martial rule? And also a protégé of Ninoy? If the latter were alive today, we would dispatch Butz and Nene to the whipping post, there to receive thirty lashes each. And the verdict of civil society they have both betrayed Ninoy’s name and Ninoy’s legacy.

Now to Estrada’s rewritten script. It is proof positive, final as final can be, that he has grossly misread and continues to misread the temper, pulse and psychology of the Filipino people. Mr. Estrada, understand this. You do have our supporters among the masa, even in the Senate and the House, and it’s just possible their heart throbs for you. But they will never die for you or expose themselves to shoot and shell for you. Theirs is probably pity, Christian compassion, that emotional surge for the underdog. But take to arms, rise in revolt, they won’t.

This time, if they ever take to the streets and threaten Malacañang, the police will make short shrift of the, send them fleeing like whipped and yelping canine.

Mr. Estrada, understand another thing. It’s not the masa that conceives and spearheads revolutions. It’s the middle class. The middle forces. Probe and analyze every successful revolution in history. The French. The British. The Russian. The Turkish. Mao Zedong was a rich middle farmer, Chou en-Lai a patrician. Stalin and Lenin came straight out of the educated Russian bourgeoisie. Robespierre, Danton and Marata were pedigreed intellectuals. Kemat Ataturk was a lawyer and educator. History’s first slave revolution, led by Spartacus, was an ignominous failure. I’d like to see Butz Aquino, Nene Pimentel and Dingalen Dilangalen, not to mention Ping Lacson and Loi Ejercito lead their vaunted throngs that will march on Malacañang. That will be a sight to see. The first burst of police fire, and I an assure you, they’ll hotfoot like a flight gabbling geese.

Besides, Mr. Estrada, a revolution such as Dilangalen threatens , has to have an ideology. What’s your ideology? That of Asiong Salonga? Certainly, a disgraced president accused of the high crime of plunder, who has admitted to forging the signature Jose Velarde on official bankdocuments, cannot have an ideology. If by ideology we mean a body of doctrine that ignites an individual or group or society to high purpose. What about arms? As Mao said very succinctly, "Political power flows from the barrel of a gun."

If your followers should march and lay siege on Malacañang without arms, without air and artillery support, you might as well forget the whole shebang. It will be a duck shoot. Even your so-called masa and apologists will think it was crazy from the very beginning.

The jig is up, sir. Admit that everything you are doing now, with the connivance of your decrepit lawyers, while pretending to rise up to the stature of a freedom fighter, betrays desperation. There’s that saying: If you have the law, pound on the law. If your have the facts, pound on the facts. If you have neither the law nor the facts, pound on the table. And that’s what you are doing now, pounding on the table, struggling mightily to look like d’Artagnan but succeeding only in looking like, yes, Gen. Marciano Ilagan. Gahd, that man should never have worn an army uniform. When the camera caught him riding piggy-back on a diminutive porter to avoid getting wet while boarding a boat, he put the entire military to shame. An American sergeant beside General Ilagan simply splashed into the water.

What did the savants say about desperation?

Elizabeth Brown: "There’s something so showy about desperation. It takes hard wits to see it’s a grandiose form of funk." Graham Greene: "Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim." Ambrose Bierce: "A tyrant’s authority for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure." Mark Twain: "Lord save us from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms."

The truth is, sir, the legal noose is tightening, getting closer and closer to your neck. The truth, sir, is that your burn knees can easily and successfully be operated upon by Filipino surgeons and you don’t have to leave for the US for any kind of special surgery. The truth, sir, is that what matters is the song not the singer, and no matter how you strum the guitars to gain public sympathy, the song has got all the legal bullets in the world to nail you. The truth, sir, is that you are now plumb scared, scared stiff, and the whole thing is only now getting to you. The truth, sir, is that even before your being ousted from Malacañang, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the Church were agreeable to a graceful exit for you from the Philippines, but you declined and that was a big, big blunder.

Now GMA, who has always been sympathetic to you, has put her foot down, insisting with a fire that was never in her eyes, that the law must prevail, that you cannot be above that law. Congrats, Mrs. President, that’s showing them. Jaime Cardinal Sin, earlier also well disposed towards you because of Christian compassion, now says there can be no mercy without justice, and letting you out of detention is plain and simple kalokohan. Many congressmen who signed the resolution recommending that you be allowed to undertake knee surgery in the Us now are pulling out their signatures. Why? Because they have seen through your deception. The Makati business community which supported your presidency now looks at your with spite and scorn.

You blundered, Mr. Estrada. Now you’re going for broke. You signed your death warrant when you admitted you indeed forged the signature Jose Velarde.

This writer fully shares the sentiments of Quezon City Regional Trial Court Judge Jose Mendoza. His was sheer agony when he sentenced five members of the Scintilla Juris Fraternity of UP to life imprisonment. The facts, the whole array of evidence established they killed Dennis Venturina, 22, of the rival Sigma Rho Fraternity in 1994. Judge Mendoza said the convicted "are, in their hearts, not rogues, rakes or murderers." Three of the accused graduated with honors. One of those convicted even topped the civil engineering board exams in 1996.

So they were young men and good men who would have greatly honored society with their professional competences.

Their fault was that they went berserk with lead pipes and lethal bludgeons. That is what a fraternity does. It renders suddenly sadistic and savage the most gentle of students who make the mistake of joining fraternities. Such is the dolorous drama of Ateneo University’s Aquila Legis, a law fraternity known for its primitive and ferocious initiation rites which shattered the life of Lenny Villa in 1991.

It passeth strange that until now college and university authorities indulge these fraternities. It passeth stranger still that the Court of Appeals, the House and the Senate and elsewhere in high society would all bring us back to the Dark Ages or even before when cavemen clustered in blood-drinking rites, vowing undying loyalty to each other. Maybe the beast in man is always there, lurking beneath a civilized layer, but ready to spring when the moment is right, when fraternity rivalry reached demonic pitch. In a flash, all they have learned as a Christian is gone, the pealing of the angelus bells, the Ten Commandments.

Like babbling baboons pitched for battle, they seek relief in violence. And even when they kill, they won’t tell on each other, why should they? Theirs is the brotherhood of criminals – one for all and all for one. As the story goes in fraternity circles, an Aquilan can rape and ravish the sister of a fellow Aquillan, no matter, he’s still free as a bird.

I just hope Judge Mendoza‘s verdict stands. And Scintillans up high, as in Aquila Legis, do not reverse the verdict.