Flop

Otherwise, it would have been as downright disgusting as observing a gang-rape in progress, with the honorable senators of the land fighting for their turn to assault the “resource person.”

The only redeeming entertainment value of last Tuesday’s episode of the Ping and Jamby Show was watching how hard the senators tried to keep their own jaws from dropping.

They had sent out the barkers, ordered the drum-roll, whetted the public appetite for a forthcoming explosive testimony from a “surprise witness” — all to keep the ratings up. The Show had began to flag after the Madriaga episode when that “surprise witness” began babbling incoherently, contradicting not only himself but also all the previous “surprise witnesses.”

This very phenomenon of pulling out one “surprise witness” after another, like a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat, is in and of itself anomalous. Shouldn’t the senators rely on completed staff work — putting together the facts of the case beforehand, informing the accused, properly documenting the evidence — before putting up a spectacle that so ostentatiously consumes public resources and disturbs the political peace?

As it happens, the senators amble into the hearings in their fineries without as much as a clue as to what will happen and why they are there. From their seats, they expect discovery by say-so.

The entire process is driven by improvisation, off-the-cuff perorations, impromptu grandstanding. The outcome is not something we arrive at by the inexorable operation of logic. It is something we stumble into, nearly by accident.

This is, as we all see, a terribly inefficient way of doing things. Unprepared and uninformed, the senators fire in all directions, hoping to hit something by some sheer stroke of luck. They bear down on witnesses, browbeat them, harass them, insult them, violate their privacy, bait for a sound bite, force them to self-incriminate, ruin their reputations with no other cause than to serve a legislator’s ego.

As a consequence of this inefficiency, this terrible inability of the senators to do proper background work first and then claim the limelight later, the Senate hearing chamber has resembled a tactical interrogation room. Or, more bluntly, a torture chamber. Perhaps this is the ambience Senator Panfilo Lacson in comfortable working in: pressuring persons into issuing confessions.

As a consequence of this inefficiency, we end up with wasteful marathon sessions. Exercises of much sound and fury signifying nothing.

Such exercises are not only wasteful of precious Senate time. They waste the time of ordinary citizens as well, because we are drawn to watching these fruitless sessions because of the drum-roll that precedes them and because we know the long-shot agenda here really is to produce some mother-lode testimony that will precipitate an insurrection the very next day.

We saw that again last Tuesday.

The senators promised us yet another “surprise witness.” One newspaper (not the STAR) had wrongly reported this new witness to be an oil exploration engineer. It turns out, the “surprise witness” was Leo San Miguel, a communications technology person consulting with ZTE.

By the end of last Tuesday’s 12-hour session, we finally found out why San Miguel was called a “surprise witness”: he surprised the senators.

The senators had somehow allowed themselves to be carried away by their own wishful thinking. They strutted into the chamber expecting to feast on testimony that followed their own script.

But that was not what happened. San Miguel maintained that he was merely a technical consultant and could speak competently only on the technical specifications of the broadband project. He steadfastly refused to be drawn into repeating hearsay and playing into the malicious intrigue some senators wanted stuffed into the questions and answers.

With a witness that could not be baited into dishing out irresponsible testimony, the senators grew more frustrated by the minute. In a classic demonstration of Frustration-Aggression Theory we learned in elementary psychology, they grew more aggressive the more frustrated they became. They leaned hard on the witness, threatened him, bamboozled the guy, cut him off when he was trying to explain himself, imposed their own often uninformed interpretations of what was said.

The result was black comedy: cruel but funny. The senators ended up trying hard to wring blood from stone.

Early on in the torture session, when it became clear that the witness would not play by the script the senators preferred, the interrogators began improvising wildly. Senator Jinggoy Estrada, hamming his best, feigned an air of great discovery at something that was truly ordinary: that San Miguel went on business trips with his business partner.

Soon everything just went terribly wrong for the senators.

One senator produced a document where San Miguel’s signature was obviously forged. Then, in the face of contradictory testimony among the witnesses, Senator Roxas offered to underwrite a lie-detector test — a methodology that even at its best is unacceptable as evidence. Then Senator Lacson made the bizarre but adamant claim that file attachments to an e-mail could not be altered. He should consult with my editor, who regularly cleans up this e-mailed column of typographical errors and grammatical lapses.

At the end of that long day, only this thing remained clear: the tele-novela at the Senate was in clear danger of becoming a momentous flop.