MANILA, Philippines - I am frankly puzzled by the ongoing debate over Clarissa Ocampo and Jun Lozada. I am puzzled because those engaged in the debate, in particular those who hold Ocampo as a superior example to Lozada, also want to couch the debate in terms of focusing on issues and not personalities. I think it?s merely a cop-out to continue justifying the biases that continue to keep the President in power despite her long ago having committed acts that justified the eviction of her predecessor from the Palace.

Of course I myself operate from the fundamental assumption that you cannot separate issues from personalities. You can hope that you can balance the two aspects, but both aspects will always be there, as well they should. We are human beings and any question involves this human dimension. Insisting that personalities be separated from issues, then, serves to shield personalities from actually being held to account based on the issues raised against them.

It is a form of rationalization, couched in idealistic terms.

The debate over who is more admirable, Clarissa Ocampo or Jun Lozada, is a debate over aesthetics. Nothing more and nothing less.

The way the debate is framed, take a look at it: it?s a question of debate, at the end of it.

Ocampo was devoid of drama and dramatics, as befitted a banker; Lozada has been accused of hysteria and histrionics, as befits, in my mind, a wheeler-dealer caught up in a situation he proved not clever enough to master, and which mastered him instead. Faced with a subpoena, Ocampo testified. Faced with a subpoena, Lozada went into hiding. Having provided testimony, Ocampo retreated back into private life, facing no cases but also, by many accounts, facing the prospects of a dead career. Lozada, having provided testimony, has embarked on a national road show and offered his opinions on everything ranging from history, to our society. Yes, he may be alive, and too avid about the limelight, but he faces cases and the end of his wheeling-dealing lifestyle.

That Ocampo could simply testify and be done with it, and Lozada continues to alternate between not wanting to confront the trauma of his abduction, and being expected to constantly remind everyone how no one has been called to account for his near-death experience, tell us how the comparison between the two is a case of undue focus on personalities and not the issues they represent.

Ocampo faced a controlled environment in terms of an impeachment trial in which the prosecution and the defense operated within predictable boundaries of law and procedure, and where the best efforts of lawyers failed to hide the truth. Yet she did not face what Lozada had to face: abduction and potential liquidation at the hands of his former masters. Lozada the wheeler-dealer, the schemer-for-hire, confronted with the law, tried to wriggle out of it; yet faced with no choice, the choice of his masters was to settle the issue by permanently silencing him.

The prudent banker faced with career death was brave, but had no cause to justify her bravery and composure by appealing to a higher purpose; but people who have faced the prospects of an untimely death can be excused for clutching at every opportunity to insist on their survival representing a higher calling, however tiresome it may sound to those who have to listen.

This is what I mean by referring to the debate as one over aesthetics. The demeanor of the witnesses becomes a validation of whatever it is they claim to say; the calm and composure of one exalts what she said while the dramatics and flair for publicity of the other somehow diminishes the importance of what he has testified to. Yet there is no fundamental difference between the two: both belonged to the fairly high, but not the highest, level of responsibility in their respective lines of work. She, in a bank; he, in the administration.

Both turned a blind eye, at best, and actively connived, which is closer to the truth, in the breaking of the law and the violation of the public trust by the highest elected official in the land. In both cases both presidents could plead, and both witnesses could excuse themselves with, the argument that everyone does it anyway (hiding bank accounts and putting ill-gained wealth in those accounts, using or ?gaming? the system so that rules meant to thwart corruption actually abets wrongdoing), and that after all, they were just doing their jobs.

In a sense, this brings me back to a problem that?s long bothered me about the political crisis we?re facing today. It is that the fundamental similarities between the crisis in leadership in 2001 and since 2005 refuse to be seen by many Filipinos, because the leader in the dock back then, Estrada, was so obviously pig-headed and coarse, while the leader in the dock since 2005 purports to represent so many of the superficial virtues of the middle and upper class.

For this reason, there are friends of Fely Arroyo who are all shrill about the ?half truths? of Lozada, while remaining willfully ignorant of the outright lies?and so many of them!?peddled by a President whose shortcoming they continue to excuse as not really her own, but her husband?s. (They cannot call them outright lies, because their insistence that they?re half truths is a half truth in itself, and that half truth they wish to cover up is how Joker Arroyo and his wife got their comeuppance from Lozada.) At the core of the hostility to Lozada, and the celebration of Ocampo as a kind of anti-Lozada, is the belief that the outside is a sure guide to the inner recesses of another human being that none of us can ever really know.

The question then is perhaps this: Why must either one be considered a hero? It is not whether Clarissa Ocampo was a hero, and Jun Lozada is not, but rather, that neither was a hero but both were undeniably brave.