Enough with the distraction

Homer, the ancient Greek poet who authored Iliad and Odyssey, was a blind man. His blindness was a part of his epic tale. Philosopher Aristotle claimed that the blindness of Homer was a punishment for seeing the beauty of Helen. While modern scholars posit that Homer was simply legendary than factual, we continue to marvel at his such narratives of the monster Cyclops as if they are true.

There is a Homer-like storyteller who swirls around us. This is difficult for me to admit. His narrative appeared to be as convincing as Homer’s story of the cyclops that I seem to have lost my bearing on a real and factual matter. For a while, I was intent to listen to the floor deliberations of the House of Representatives on the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio and hopefully an eventual hearing by the Philippine Senate as the impeachment court. But a Homer kind of a person appeared with a bomb of a tale and the series of social media posts that followed diverted my attention. If this Homer-like expose and the succeeding postings were designed to distract me from focusing on the impeachment proceedings, these have somehow succeeded.

In the main, I first saw a social media post of a lawyer holding a press conference about two weeks ago. A fellow attorney always has my trust. We, lawyers, are trained to uphold the truth. In law school, there is no professor who instructs his students to tell lies. In my case, I taught Constitutional Law and related subjects for about four decades and I could not remember of any single day when I educated my students to becoming purveyors of falsehood. So, when that compañero of mine summarized an Odyssey similitude of story that each of the 18 men, (whom I would refer as all Argonaut ex-marines) participated in transporting on the streets in Metro Manila about eight hundred billion pesos and delivering the incredible amount of money to corrupt officials, I believed him like I thought I believe Homer’s Odysseus.

Some objective and legitimate questions though have arisen. These are not aimed to challenge the integrity of the Homer-lawyer and his 18 argonaut-ex marines. After all, they shall have a chance to substantiate their story. As of the present, these queries appear to puncture holes in the Homer-lawyer’s narrative. First, would there be any one person, even a congressman, who could collate paper bills amounting to eight hundred billion pesos? Did he print it? How many warehouses would he maintain to keep this incredible money bulk? It is more impossible than just merely improbable that a man stockpiles that unimaginable amount of money. I can surmise that not even Elon Musk, the No. 1 wealthiest person on the Forbes billionaires list, with a net worth surpassing $800 billion can pile up eight hundred billion pesos in cold cash assuming he wanted to. Mathematically P800 billion is equal to $13.5 billion.

Second, the commodity reportedly distributed by the argonaut-ex military men was in cold cash and not in any form of negotiable instrument. How many banks did the reputed lawmaker withdraw P800B in crisp bills from? We know the top five banks in the country although we refuse to identify them here. Was anyone of them the depositary bank of the beleaguered legislator? Would anyone of them release this sum to any one man or his corporate shield?

Third, the Homer-lawyer revealed that the 18 argonaut-ex marines delivered a part of the stash to a woman of political and legal standing. Immediately a question arose. How could that be possible when the lady was in jail at the time of the supposed delivery? The hole punched by this query was admitted by the Homer-lawyer in a subsequent interview.

Perhaps like me, many of our countrymen initially took the narrative of the Homer-lawyer as true. So, we shifted focus away from the discussions of the House of Representatives on impeachment as we highlighted the thievery of public funds by corrupt officials as parlayed by Homer-lawyer. That distraction-story seemed to be founded on falsehood as the lawyer is not as convincing as Homer. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. We can now throw the diversionary tactic aside and henceforth observe how our congressmen tackle the vice president’s impeachment.