Sick and tired of political sideshows

I’m worried. I scolded our Editor for having bannered the Kris & Joey Melodrama, saying that "conjugal" battering shouldn’t even take precedence over the ills of our battered country. He bowed his head but, judging from his mischievous smile, I realized he was unrepentant.

Later on I was politely informed yesterday’s issue had sold out. Cry the Beloved Country! As one African patriot wrote about his own land decades ago. All day yesterday, people were listening on the radio and last night were glued to their television sets, while Kris "told all" about . . . er wanting to crush somebody’s . . . you know what. Had Joey been poking his gun at the wrong women?

I felt like laughing, but I wanted to cry also. And yet there’s a simple explanation which suggests itself for the public’s preoccupation with this sordid squabble of a telenovela. Probably the people are sick and tired of all the political exposés, probes, sideshows, comedies and histrionics, which have battered our senses and provoked spreading disgust for the past many weeks. They’re welcoming this silly showbiz scandal, this tempest in a teapot, like a brief spot of rain in a parched desert.

Okay, let the prurient public enjoy this jaunt into the horrors of alleged STD and threatened ball-busting. They’ll be back in the even more stupid world of political reality soon enough.

* * *

While the cat is away . . .

The President, by the time this comes out, will have zoomed off to New York to address the United Nations and conduct other meetings. Her trip to the US and Europe has been pared down to only five days because she wants to come back pronto. In short, she’ll fly home immediately after delivering the keynote address at the biennial assembly in Paris of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Why so short an expedition? The widespread speculation is that GMA doesn’t want to be away too long, lest some "coup" or upheaval of government take place in her absence. I’m no seer, and see the future only through a cracked crystal ball, but what I can say is that if there is a mutiny or putsch afoot, it would occur whether she were absent or present. Que sera sera, so why fret about it? Just be vigilant.

What is really afoot this weekend is that Opposition groups are meeting at an undisclosed place to form a United Phalanx – meaning a coalition composed of Senator Edgardo Angara’s LDP (Laban ng Demokratikong Pilipino) and former Governor-Ambassador-Businessman Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco’s NPC (Nationalist People’s Coalition). Will the merger, when it comes to light, include the 50 or so Lakas congressmen who have already declared for Danding? And who will then be trotted out as the Opposition’s standard-bearer? A reluctant Danding? (He, by the way, is incommunicado right now, avoiding contact with all except a chosen few.) An undeclared FPJ (Ronnie Poe is also not talking – yet). He’s being pushed by former President Erap Estrada. Or maybe there will be a nominee from the ABS-CBN ticket?

All this frantic Opposition activity, I’m informed, stems from the expectation that when the President returns from her sortie to the US, Rome, and Paris, she’ll "accept" the proferred nomination of her ruling Lakas-CMD party – and make a U-turn on her December 30, 2002 promise.

Her critics claim that the reason she’s off on a pilgrimage to Rome is that she wants, as she announced, to hear the "Voice of God" through His Vicar on earth, Pope John Paul II.

Will His Holiness the Pope bless her candidacy? Well, Toting Bunye is her prophet.

What we hear is that the 400-member Lakas-Christian Muslim Democrats national directorate will convene to choose their official standard-bearer. Who else but GMA? Why not? The Muslim component of the coalition would indicate that God and Allah are one and the same, and are of the same mind.

Then there’s the American equation. Alikabok claims that the White House, State, and the Pentagon have been quietly urging GMA to declare her intentions before US President George W. Bush gets here on October 18th for his one-day state visit. Our Chief Executive will have to state whether she is running or not, because the US President’s speeches, whether to Congress or at the Palace State Dinner, will be premised on what she decides. (The White House doesn’t want to get into a situation in which GMA, if she decides to run for re-election, will be hinting that Bush convinced her to do so.) Thus, Dubya’s speech will go: "I can only praise President Macapagal-Arroyo for her selflessness in sacrificing the legitimate aspiration to seek re-election in order that she can unify the country . . ." or, if there’s a re-election bid: "I’m happy she changed her mind, and am confident that our friendship and cooperation will extend all through her second term . . ."

We could, in a land where political addiction is as ruinous as drug addiction, speculate endlessly on this matter. But enough said already.

* * *

Not to cast aspersion on our Holy Father, who indeed is holy, but I just read a book by Garry Willis entitled Papal Sin. The subtitle was, Structures of Deceit.

There’s no doubt that the current Pontiff hasn’t only been the most traveled Pope, but the most politically-minded Pope. Even if he looks half-dead each time he descends the aircraft steps to be acclaimed by hundreds of thousands, in one country after another, he has sworn not to retire until and unless Our Lady of Fatima, who saved his life in St. Peter’s square from the bullets of a Turkish assassin, comes to get him. Thus far, the only lady in prospect is our Presidential Lady.

An irreverent Willis points out, however, that Popes are not always infallible.

He recalls that Painters of Last Judgements (Andrea Orgagna, c. 1308-1368, for instance) used to include a figure wearing the Papal crown in the fires of hell, presenting the Pope as a sinner damned forever. The immortal Florentine poet, Dante (not Ang or Tan, it must be hastily mentioned) thought that the major sin of the medieval papacy was an overriding greed, venality and desire for wealth. Thus, in the first part of his The Divine Comedy, Dante depicts two groups in hell – the misers and the avaricious – rushing toward each other along opposite sides of a circle. Prominent in each group are the shaven heads of clergymen. As Dante expressed it in his INFERNO 7.46-48: "Here Popes and prelates butt their tonsured pates; Mastered by avarice that nothing sates."

Those who over-quote the historian Lord Acton’s famous axiom, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Acton 2.383) forget, or never knew that Lord Acton was a Catholic – and even fewer know that Acton was speaking of Papal absolutism. The quotation comes from his condemnation of another historian’s book on Renaissance Popes, which, Acton avers, let venal Popes virtually "get away with murder".

Willis concedes, on the other hand, that "happily those kinds of corruption no longer corrode the papacy. Though there have been financial scandals in the modern papacy (especially having to do with its involvement in Michele Sidona’s Banco Ambrosiano), the spectacle of individual Popes amassing huge fortunes for themselves and their families is no longer the shame that caused Dante’s disgust."

Anyway, GMA need not get God’s message from the Holy Father or the Vatican. Why shouldn’t Our Lord give her "Divine guidance" directly, or at least by text?

I think it was facetious for Dagupan-Lingayen Archbishop Oscar Cruz, who otherwise is a good fellow, to quip: "How come God never talks to me? I am envious. I have not felt God telling me to do things." Of course, God talks to the Archbishop. Even the suicide-bombers of the Islamic jihad claim to hear the voice of God/Allah, telling them to blow up the place, including assorted infidels.

The trouble with most of our politicians is that the gods they really listen to are the poll and opinion surveys.

* * *

Are we surprised that there was cheating in the Bar exams? Justice Jose Vitug, chairman of this year’s exams, was right to order the 5,455 Bar examinees to retake the test for mercantile law – with new questions being asked – on October 4. Sorry for the many examinees who honestly took the test, in good faith: They’ll have to repeat it. The leakage of exam questions has put everyone’s performance in doubt.

In a nation run by lawyers, where progress is stymied by endless TROs, writs of injunction, and crass legal maneuvering, and the law has been twisted to protect evildoers rather than uphold the innocent and vindicate those victimized, cheating in the Bar exams is a fever-symptom of our sick and cynical society. Those who cheat in the Bar will be the shysters, crooked prosecutors, and hoodlums in robes; i.e., corrupt judges and justices, of tomorrow. They will, alas, join a host of the already corrupt throughout the matrix of our Injustice System.

I wish there were a way to ream out our Courts, and winkle out the incompetent, the venal, and the mercenary. Alas, so many of these cretins have "tenure", so they’ll go on sinning and frustrating us for many years to come. It’s no wonder that 24 percent of our people still stubbornly believe that "martial law" could be an option, forgetting the terror and the pillage unleashed on us for a decade and a half by the Marcos martial- law abuses. After all, only a dictatorship, many say, can sweep the corrupt in our legal system away.

Martial law, sadly, would be a case of the cure being worse than the disease – but, there are those who insist, only slightly worse.

In a speech to 150 cadets and their families in the Citadel, a military college in Charleston, South Carolina, a former NATO commander, General Wesley Clark, who’s just become the Dark Horse candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, called for a "new American Patriotism". I’m for good, old-fashioned Filipino patriotism, like that which motivated and inspired our fathers.

Clark’s announcement he is running, as TIME Magazine (Sept. 29 issue) just put it, "landed like a rocket-propelled grenade in the messy bunker that is the Democratic presidential field".

What about GMA’s coming announcement? That will be interesting. She might yet hear God say "no". But this is not likely.