Really now, who’s shaming the country before the world?

A while back, Vice President Leni Robredo rode on a wave of commiserating words when she left the Duterte Cabinet after being barred—shamed, more like it—from attending Palace meetings. The Inquirer commended her departure address as “effective” as it “suited both official occasion and personal character.”

These days the VP is facing a classic circling the wagon against her video presentation on EJKs before the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. Swiftly, a daily ran a series of op-eds that picked on the video and presenter. My barber, who gets to scan the papers at the barangay library during haircutting lulls, says he didn’t read past the opening lines of the articles where one writer calls Robredo “stupid” (sounds familiar), while another admits disdaining the VP, and another confesses no “love lost” between her and Leni. My simple-minded barber also didn’t relish sleepless nights figuring out what “gravitas” (which bannered another article) means.

“Tone down” talks on EJKs as they are shooing away beach lovers, pleads the tourism secretary. As if talking about them in whispers could dilute the blood on the streets. Remember the lady of the thousand and one shoes who put up kilometric fences so that her perfumed friends would not see or smell—or so she thought—the squalor and stink behind the blinders?

A UN human rights expert suggests, correctly: Just stop the killings and there will be no blood-stained tsinelas and bullet-riddled bodies—the country’s dirty linen—to “wash” in public.

Comes now the man with harems on his mind threatening to impeach Robredo for “treason.” But “who’s the traitor”? asks a lady writer (who, though “at large,” is very much in the thick of things). One who “speaks about the country’s problems and failings” or, the one who once said he’d jet ski to and raise the country’s flag on the islands (that are by right and legally acknowledged are ours) but who ended up shuffling to China with a Ming begging bowl?

My barber says it would be worth the effort if those up there at Baa-baa Hills along with the chief herder themselves are impeached for just one reason—betrayal of public trust. Now that really sticks out like a sore thumb.

Yet comes another who tells the VP to correct her video. But whether Robredo is just out to stabilize the government or is in a hurry to become the queen by the Pasig, notwithstanding the quibbling on numbers, and the once-gospel reader now Palace mouthpiece declaring there are “no extrajudicial killings… none.”

What the video portrays are right there on side streets, along narrow alleys, inside shanties suddenly bereft of a future and dreams.

Alas, despite what “we know,” and what “they know,” a noted professor and book editor laments, it’s “still no to obvious ba?”

MANUEL GARCIA CALLEJA, [email protected]