Heroes/heels

In the intensely partisan political discourse we have to endure day in and day out, it is easy to lose our collective capacity to distinguish heroes from heels.

Recall how much of our media nearly snowed under the fact that a rebellion happened, no matter how clumsily this one was planned and executed, as reporters carped about being bound and hauled off for processing. The process of talking away the crime by means of overly emphatic assertions of rights and entitlements obviously continues.

When the police officers responsible for crushing a stupid rebellion without bloodshed were duly awarded for the achievement, the cabal of clowns who backed the stunt at the Peninsula continued the carping. They complained about the awards being given, smeared the reputations of the police officers and, subsequently filed charges of illegal detention against the police.

It seems that, by lawyerly dissertation (read: the legalistic twisting of facts), our reality is being turned inside out, upside down and twisted to extreme disproportion. The lines of the authoritative and the anarchic, the democratic and the tyrannical, the constitutionalists and the plain rascals are blurred.

Let us look at the facts.

On November 29, a group whose sanity ought to be seriously questioned, seized the Peninsula Hotel. About 20 of this group were armed with assault rifles. They called on the people to rise up against the duly-constituted government. They laid out a plan for a transitional government: which is, in blunter terms, a junta.

Forty years ago, a group called Lapiang Malaya, generally in the same state of mental health as this one, marched down Taft Avenue towards Malacañang Palace armed with machetes and talismans. On Taft Avenue, they were blocked by the constabulary. When they continued marching, the troopers opened fire.

The leader of that group was clearly in an unhealthy state of mind. But he was convicted, nevertheless, and spent the rest of his life at the penitentiary.

At that time, the lines of republican authority and civic obligation were more clearly drawn. No one sued the troopers for murder. They did what had to be done to ensure public safety.

Today the lines are not as clearly evident — or at least they are being obscured by the ceaseless yakking of the clowns who helped pull the Peninsula stunt. The yakking is being duly covered by sections of the media rather than collectively denounced as hazards to our democracy.

Awards were given to NCRPO chief Geary Barias, CIDG director Asher Dolina, SAF chief Leocadio Santiago and SPD director Luizo Ticman because they successfully suppressed a funny rebellion without loss of life. The highly charged situation, while the hotel was in the possession of renegades, could have quickly resulted in a bloody mess if the right tactics were not properly executed.

Lawyers JV Bautista and Argee Guevarra are caught on television footage aiding and abetting the renegade soldiers. They boasted loudly about standing their ground and dying for their cause, although no one really understood what that cause was.  But  when teargas was fired into the hotel, they lost their bombast and quickly surrendered.

They were detained and charged with the capital offense of rebellion. But the trial court decided to release them, although they had not offered insanity as defense.

Now these gentlemen as trying to drag the police officer to court for detaining them. On the television station that panders to them, they are now telling us it is the police that damaged the hotel when the renegades were assaulted. They want all of us to forget why the hotel was assaulted in the first place.

Let the lines be very clear. Our republican democracy was challenged on November 29 by a cabal of clowns who wanted to install an undemocratic regime that rules through the barrel of the gun. The police responded as effective instruments of public order. 

By quashing that rebellion, they defended the democratic order. By quashing that rebellion without loss of life, the do indeed deserve to be properly honored.

The traitors to the Republic are those who now, in their pathetic cowardice, hide behind the Bill of Rights and taint the police as antidemocratic antiheroes. Their treachery ought not to be covered by the freedom of speech.

Pabling

There is another instance where the distinction between heroes and heels is being blurred.

Rep. Pabling Garcia has been characteristically standing his ground at the House floor, interrogating the draft Cheaper Medicines Act. From all I could gather, Garcia is questioning the draft law because it disables government from undertaking parallel importation of cheaper medicines whenever public welfare demands it.

That is a valid concern. If the proposed law prevents government from what it is presently able to do, that might have serious implications on our actual capacity to make cheaper medicines available to our people.

But for all his efforts, Pabling has been maliciously cast as being some agent of giant pharmaceutical firms. He is being blamed for stalling passage of an act he genuinely thinks might be insidiously crafted so that its declared purpose is actually subverted, as in the grossly deficient and now totally misnamed anti-terror law.

I know Pabling, having worked with him as constitutional commissioner. He is a patriot and it will serve us all well if his concerns are reflected upon more carefully. Haste, as we saw in the Human Security Act, makes waste.