Hide and seek

Failure has no father.

And so it now seems that the coup attempt that happened never happened. It was a ruckus without a conspiracy. It was a disturbance that no one is responsible for – and therefore some sort of spontaneous combustion that happened because the air of leadership was dry and the rot of corruption in the military made for highly combustible circumstances.

There is an effort, mainly by the criminals, to talk down this crime. To minimize its dimensions. To make it appear like an ultimately superfluous event: soldiers expressing their grievances in their "working clothes" no different from what unionists normally do.

The experts at doublespeak are ruling the day.

The people who massed along Edsa in the very early morning of July 27, with fresh banners proclaiming a "national recovery program," were not there to support the coup, the principals of this march now tell us. They were coincidentally passing by on their way to a "counter-SONA" rally.

The leaders of this march, coincidentally members of the pro-Gringo faction of the Guardians Brotherhood, now find the gall to say the police shoved them towards the site of the mutiny. An obvious set-up, they say, in order to implicate them in the crime that was in progress that early Sunday morning.

Another band of early risers, identified with the pro-Estrada PMAP, began marching towards the Edsa Shrine that bright Sunday morning. They, too, were only coincidentally marching about in the streets before the rest of the city was awake.

A large band of mutineers launched their assault on the Oakwood from a safehouse in Dasmarinas Village. The house, coincidentally, belonged to Ramon "Eki" Cardenas who was coincidentally Joseph Estrada’s deputy executive secretary.

Another band emanated from a townhouse in Mandaluyong. The property, according to an affidavit issued by the nominal owner, belonged and remains under the beneficial ownership of Laarni Enriquez – coincidentally one of Estrada’s acknowledged mistresses.

Delivery receipts recovered by investigators from the equipment stockpile abandoned by the mutineers at the Oakwood reveal an office address in San Juan. The address coincidentally was one of Jinggoy Estrada’s offices.

Representatives of Sanlakas and Partido Manggagawa filed a petition before the Supreme Court challenging the President’s declaration of a state of rebellion. These cohorts of the late Popoy Lagman are, coincidentally, in come sort of tactical alliance with the pro-Estrada PMAP. True to form, the Court junked the petition for being technically deficient.

Other leftist mouthpieces are likewise trying hard to make the President’s pronouncement of a state of rebellion the issue. Relying on knee-jerk anti-Americanism, they are trying to convince our people that the pronouncement is part of the "fiction" that a war on terror needs to be waged. The deadly bombing of a Jakarta hotel last Tuesday might knock some sense into their heads.

It will take some work, I am sure, to convince them that the mutiny itself was an act of terror. It was an effort to hold the entire nation in the folds of fear and cause a shift in political power through the employment of coercion and intimidation.

Leaders of the mutiny, in an effort to diminish the dimensions of their crime, say the adventure did not adversely affect the national economy – because the national economy was flagging anyway. The numbers suggest otherwise.

Despite evidence of abundant financing for the destructive exercise, the mutineers are now telling us they enjoyed no financial backing. Fine. So all the high-tech gadgetry fell from the heavens?

The members of the opposition in both chambers of Congress are passionately bent on looking into the grievances of the mutineers. That is laudable. But they should be reminded that the first order of business is to look into the mutiny itself.

In the mad quest for unearthing the grievances, the mutiny itself might vanish under the rubble of congressional inanity.

My friend, the irrepressible Homobono Adaza, lawyer for the mutineers, has an even more astounding position. Allowing us a glimpse into his defense strategy, he is now saying that because the rebellious soldiers occupied a private facility rather than a government installation, no crime was committed.

Ha, ha, ha! Good luck with that one, Bon.

Alas, even Bon Adaza’s remarkable ability to devise semantic mazes pales in comparison with Greg Honasan’s obscurantist skills.

After surfacing momentarily to deliver an incoherent speech at the Senate, Honasan disappeared into the netherworld. But he is not hiding, mind you. He has simply made himself inaccessible.

Well, so did al Ghozi.

Honasan wants to lull us into imagining there is a functional difference between hiding and intentional inaccessibility. He must be in possession of some magical thesaurus that is not available to other mortals.

But what has he made himself inaccessible from?

There is as yet no warrant for his arrest. No one, other than his traumatized wife, seems anxious to find him. Through the magic of modern communications technology, Honasan has certainly made himself extremely accessible to media – and, we imagine, to his cohorts in the field.

While we are all busy dealing with the panic, the rumors and the adverse economic fallout in the aftermath of that bizarre military exercise at the Oakwood, Honasan reminds us that the electoral season has begun. He is definitely running for president, the Inaccessible One bothers to mention for all to remember.

Ok, fine.

And are we now to conclude that the siege on Oakwood was nothing more serious than an ingenious publicity stunt to launch the Honasan-for-President campaign?

With all the nonsense being spewed by enemies of our peace and sanity, the Oakwood might as well be the modern counterpart of the Tower of Babel.