True inconvenience

Renato Corona said quite a mouthful in a speech before the Philippine Women Judges Association.

“The nation is now in great peril of teetering toward one-man rule, where executive action aims to … shackle judicial independence, undermining the rule of all .… (The courts should be shielded from) political pressures, popularity surveys, lobbyists, private partisan interests, undue influence and outright coercion from the executive and legislative departments or from major private stakeholders who are advancing their shared sociopolitical and economic interests. Justice can only be effective if those who seek it from our courts leave our courts with full satisfaction that justice has been served and done.”

Corona went on to praise Cecilia Muñoz-Palma whom Ferdinand Marcos appointed as associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1973 but went on to become a chief dissenter against martial law.

Well, it’s no small irony that Corona should insist that the judiciary be left alone by public opinion while he repeatedly goes out to try to influence public opinion in this wise. Indeed, if his going on in this way serves any useful purpose, it is only to show that the real trial is going on elsewhere than in the impeachment court. It is only to show how far the impeachment court has strayed far afield—“malayo sa putukan,” as the Tagalog puts it—with its predilection for procedure over substance. The real issues are being presented outside of it. The real judgment is being made outside of it.

His message itself is breathtakingly cheeky, as breathtaking as the cheekiness with which he clings to his position. It substitutes or superimposes an alternate reality upon us, all the more awesome for that alternate reality having been very real not too long ago. That alternate reality—P-Noy mounting one-man rule and bending all the branches of government to his will—was very real over the last decade when Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo mounted one-woman rule, bending all the branches of government to her will.

Corona of course is not alone to make that accusation. The whole Arroyo camp has been making it: It’s not Arroyo who was so power-mad she stole the vote and clung to her position by alternately using the law and the military, the first to suppress enemies, including the murder of hundreds of activists, the second to justify the unjustifiable, including executive privilege. It’s not Arroyo who bought the congressmen, along with former staunch anti-Marcos elements, and packed the Supreme Court with lackeys to do her bidding. It’s not Arroyo who stole every strand of decency, never mind democracy, in this country. It’s P-Noy.

You’d think they’d be a little reticent saying that out of fear the public will recognize it in themselves. Indeed, you’d think that if you’re going to revise history, such as the Marcoses have been doing these past years—their own accusation, as gleaned in their productions in YouTube, is that it was Cory and not Marcos who mugged democracy—you’d first allow some respectable amount of time to pass. In the Marcoses’ case, they waited a whole generation or more than two decades before attempting it.

But, no, Corona and Arroyo are doing this immediately after subjecting us to the hell we just went through. Either they believe along with Marcos and Goebbels that the bigger the lie the more likely it is to be believed, or they imagine the national memory to be so flimsy it’s like a pocket without any bottom.

Or they’re just utterly shameless. Ang kakapal talaga.

The unreality goes further. Corona of course explicitly referred to his audience as “the 21st century Cecilia Muñoz-Palmas,” but implicitly he was casting himself in the role: He is the Muñoz-Palma in P-Noy’s dictatorial regime. Can anything be more idiotic? Again made all the more so by the fact that there were Muñoz-Palmas in Arroyo’s dictatorial regime. There were Art Panganiban and Rey Puno who became chief justices during Arroyo’s time and who dissented from her rule. Of course they were outvoted by Arroyo’s lackeys in the Court, in the same way that Muñoz-Palma was outvoted by Marcos’ lackeys in the Court. But their dissent shines through nonetheless.

Corona’s dissent is a dissent only from reality. No one will agree with him more that the courts should be shielded from private partisan interests than the flight attendants of PAL. Yet all it took was a letter from Estelito Mendoza, representing Lucio Tan’s very private and very partisan interests, for his Court to reopen a ruling it had made with finality three times in Fasap’s favor. No one will agree with him more that justice can only be effective if those who seek it from our courts leave our courts with full satisfaction that justice has been served than the Basas. Yet all they got from seeking justice from the courts for an oppression they have suffered was to flee the country for dear life, never mind for dear inheritance.

I’m tempted to say that Corona wants to see one-man rule, he should look at what he has done to the Supreme Court. But that is really giving him more credit than he deserves. That is really giving him more weight than he possesses. He is just an extension of Arroyo. He is just a booby-trap Arroyo laid under the new government. His whole existence owes to Arroyo. His whole meaning owes to Arroyo. Without Arroyo, he is nothing. Without Arroyo, he disintegrates like atoms separating without a force to hold them together. But which is really the maddening thing about all this, that someone who is neither here nor there, whom heaven may consign only to the circle of hell reserved for the inconsequential, should prove to be such a barrier to getting to the real business.

Some things are inconvenient truths. Some people are just true inconveniences.