A couple of friends e-mailed me inviting me to help in a campaign to shame the corrupt. That was after the surveys that showed that despite government’s vaunted daang matuwid crusade, graft and corruption continued to riot in its ranks. That was at least how the public saw it, foremost of them the business community which said so in a Social Weather Stations survey of the top executives of 100 companies in the Philippines. Government itself having asked for help from the public to bolster its efforts to stop corruption, my friends said, they were responding in that wise:
Shame the corrupt. That was the only way the corrupt would stop being corrupt.
Not everyone, they said, had the sensibilities of an Angelo Reyes, which could make them feel shame all by themselves, which could make them want to slink away or make amends, preferably drastically or with finality. That being the case, they could always be helped along. Such as by entering their names and faces in some kind of “Hall of Shame” to be put out in social media, posters and a barrage of letters to the editors of mainstream media.
It’s a tempting idea, notwithstanding the plethora of litigation it invites, specifically concerning libel. And notwithstanding its being open to abuse, which the social media in particular lends itself to, as witness the stridence and indiscriminateness of its indictments toward the end of last year, in part because of the nature of the beast, which is its looseness of rules, if not utter lack of them, and in part because it is a natural magnet for spinners and schemers. Shame has been known to correct the incorrigible particularly where it impacts on their standing in the community. In our culture in particular, which is big on image, absolute rogues often hiring biographers to rewrite their life stories with a view to improving on reality, shaming them could greatly help do the trick.
My own problem with the idea is not its legal complications, it’s something more basic. Which is that I don’t know how far you can go to shame people on the strength of the imputation of graft and corruption. Last year brought corruption, particularly in the form of pork, to public attention, and in an epic way as shown by the Million People March and the explosion of (out)rage in the social media following the exposé on Janet Napoles and the exposure of several legislators as being complicit in her scam. Yet at the end of it, no opprobrium really attached to those posited as corrupt or possibly corrupt. The three senators named so remain free to torment the public, and even Napoles herself has become more of a joke or a scapegoat than anything else today.
I imagine there are various reasons for this, but I suspect the deeper one is that we do really do not have a clear-cut or definite concept of corruption, and that vagueness makes for a lack of strong, let alone violent, reaction to it. Of course that varies from class to class, from social sector to social sector, becoming vaguer and vaguer the lower down the strata you go. But on the whole, despite improvements in our awareness of or sensitivity to or even vigilance against corruption, particularly since last year, we remain trapped in a view of corruption as something excessive or overboard, sobra na, abuso na.
Reyes’ disbelieving lament after he was
accused of being corrupt for accumulating a pabaon preparatory to retirement remains the classic formulation of it: “Was I greedy?” That is how we generally understand corruption—as being greedy. It is not raking in the “acceptable” due however “acceptable” keeps rising over time—it is going beyond it. It is being ganid, sugapa, swapang.
The notion of stealing itself is problematic. Which makes the notion of shame in turn problematic. The problem is not that we have a natural tolerance for thieves. The problem is not that we are not outraged by stealing. We have various words for thieves, all of them loaded with contempt: kawatan, magnanakaw, mandarambong, tuso. More than that, we have the most violent reactions to them. When a crowd catches up with pickpockets, snatchers, and muggers in the streets, it beats them to near-death. Sometimes to actual death. No one sympathizes with them, least of all the victims.
So how come we do not have the same violent reactions to public officials—executive officials, national and local, senators and congressmen, and judges, regular or supreme? How come we do not chase them and corner them and beat them to an inch of their lives or its equivalent legally or by way of public opinion?
Again, I imagine there are various reasons for it, but I suspect the deeper one is that we do not really think that what they are doing is stealing. Except in the case of the ganid, sugapa, swapang, such as Ferdinand and Imelda and their cronies, such as Mike and Gloria and their cronies. And look how easily we have forgotten even them and their thievery. Look how easily we have forgotten that what they did was stealing, pagnanakaw, pandarambong.
Before we can mount a campaign of shaming the corrupt, we first have to mount a campaign to make us see they are thieves, no better and far worse than pickpockets, snatchers and muggers. We first have to mount a campaign to make us see that what they have done, or are doing, is no better and far worse than dipping into the pockets of someone waiting for a bus or MRT ride home, grabbing the handbag of a bedraggled woman coming home from work, announcing a holdup in a jeepney full of passengers. That is the only way they can be shamed to the very roots of their being. That is the only way they can be turned into pariahs of their communities. That is the only way they will stop.
That is the only way they can be jailed.