“Everybody is for sale in this country.” Former House speaker Jose de Venecia delivered this “hope deferred” claim before a congressional committee hearing impeachment raps against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. It came just before Advent started. The four-week season, before Christmas, traditionally focuses on hope.
The hearings offered a chance for legislators to scrub their image as “commodities for sale,” De Venecia claimed. Remember how a member of Ferdinand Marcos’ cabinet wandered into a Makati City hotel lobby? Spontaneously, the string ensemble burst into “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?”
Not this time. Committee members swiftly shred, by a 42-8 vote, the complaint as “baseless.” This was the fourth time the House embalmed an impeachment rap in as many years. Practice does make perfect.
But is the exercise more lucrative? Committee members deny they pocketed post-vote payoffs at a Linden Suites meeting. “I never deny, I never contradict,” Benjamin Disraeli said of his relations with Queen Victoria. “I sometimes forget.”
Some 190 or so congressmen never denied or contradicted reports that, in a Palace meeting in October 2007, cash-stuffed envelopes were thrust on them. All forgot to return the cash. De Venecia remembered—a year later when he wrote, as a Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial noted, “the perfect epitaph for the House of Representatives” as a glitzy brothel.
Unfortunately, that buttresses a perception held by far too many citizens. Where does the former speaker’s new candor sprout from? He hasn’t gone through a “Road-to-Damascus” experience. Still, his charges, like that of mass bribery, have the “insider’s” ring of truth.
So, why can’t he get people steamed up? “Babati-bati, butas ang labi,” the Pilipino proverb says— “He criticizes, yet is hare-lipped himself.” Doesn’t overseeing for five terms the best House of Representatives money can buy require shared values and bed?
After squabbling with Malacañang over the ZTE broadband scandal, De Venecia tries his hand at fiscalizing. This is not for wimps. And “Sunshine Joe” has had precious little practice. He thrived best when comfortably embedded within regimes in power.
He gropes today for a new opposition identity. In so doing, he glosses over his tolerance, not to say involvement, in scandals he now denounces. He jettisoned fig leaves of uprightness. “I’ve never turned a fig leaf that didn’t have a price tag on the other side,” novelist Saul Bellow once wrote.
Still, the fact is that some decent men and women are House members. “We are all in the gutter,” Oscar Wilde once wrote. “But some of us are looking at the stars.” And daily, one bumps into people of self-effacing integrity everywhere—in courts, government agencies, business firms, hospitals, schools, the military, ordinary homes. They work by values.
“These people of faith are truly an Advent people,” the late Jaime Cardinal Sin wrote. “[They] see in the Babe … the God who wanted to share the ‘not having’ that is theirs, the littleness and being of no account… They hope … in the promises God made to those who bear unbearable burden … and struggle for a better life to give to their children…”
Goodness, however, coexists with goodness. “What are you willing to give me if I turn Him over to you?” Judas Iscariot probed as he sidled up to the chief priests. The 30 pieces of silver became the world’s most notorious quid pro quo.
This mercenary rule taints our national life. Consider the 40-30-30 divvying of slabs from Joc-Joc Bolante’s fertilizer scam. A P1 deposit ballooned to P3,233,104,173.12 in the “Jose Velarde” (a.k.a. Joseph Estrada) account in just one year. And the notorious coconut levy continues to draw predators, to cite a few examples.
Human nature is flawed. Many of today’s leaders are old hands at government by quid pro quo. Anyway, the poor sell us their votes, they shrug. Indeed, many do—out of necessity. Yet, the last eight Social Weather Stations surveys, going back to 2002, reflect consistent opposition by “buyable” citizens against shooting craps with the Constitution.
Agencies turned into bawdy houses call for better checks and balances. “This is the old system, gasping for life,” sociologist Randy David has pointed out. But they’re barreling down a blind alley. As Judas learned, that leads to a potter’s field. So, better safe than swindled.
Is there hope that ordinary citizens can curb wayward officials? There was, after all, only one Judas and his 11 companions ultimately stood by what was decent. “Dum spiro, spero”—while I breathe, I hope. And Advent underscores this truth.
“When Advent comes around, we say—is it with such naiveté?—come, even when nothing better seems to happen,” the theologian Catalino Arevalo, SJ, wrote. “Only we keep wanting him to do what he doesn’t intend to do. What he has come to be is Emmanuel: God with us…
“Emmanuel means there is nothing in human life and joy and pain and even dying but God is in it also… Nothing of our human experience but He has made His own… To all our darkness and despair, there is a God who gives us one answer today, one only: ‘Behold my Son is born.”’
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Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com
