Teaching

Truly there’s something magic-realist about this country, which makes you wonder why we didn’t discover that literary device first. Indeed which makes you wonder why media have to sensationalize stories. This is a country that has added whole new meanings to the saying that truth is stranger than fiction. You just report things faithfully and it would sound as though you invented it. The whole country eats surrealism, bathes in surrealism, lives surrealism.

The latest addition to it is Renato Corona contemplating doing the rounds of schools and universities, law schools in particular, to teach. That is something he has in common with Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as well. If I recall right, Arroyo tried to quell widespread doubts about her willingness to step down from power after her purloined term by saying she would do so with alacrity as she was looking forward to a peaceful and contemplative post-presidential life of teaching. She had been a teacher at UP before she entered public life, she said. She would go back to it.

I wrote about it, wondering what lessons she could possibly teach the kids. Being an economist, could she give them insights on how to husband resources? Maybe so, but only in an ironic way. “Husband” is a strange verb to refer to the judicious use of scarce resources, a thing that has stoked the ire of the groups that mean to stamp out gender-insensitive words from the face of the earth. In her case, teaching the kids the art of husbanding resources would be an eye-opener. With a husband like that, it would give them tremendous insights on how to be corrupt.

It never happened of course, which gave the country only added insights into her capacity for honesty, or doing as she says. She became a representative instead, a thing that Fidel Ramos, who at least had a healthier respect for the dignity of the presidency, found utterly tasteless. No president before her had shown such a cavalier attitude toward it. But she was desperate. Her decision to join the ranks of the congressmen and risk being derided head to toe by her opponents there had more to do than staying in power, it had to do with protecting herself from legal retribution for her sins. Alas, all in vain.

But back to Corona teaching. Like Arroyo, if he did do it, it would add whole new meanings as well to the saying that those who can’t do, teach. Corona would of course be the perfect teacher in law school if he were contrite and willing to impart lessons on how not to be a chief justice. Or indeed how not to be a lawyer. Not least, he could always reinforce the view that a man who lawyers for himself has a fool for a client. A variation of that was what felled him in the end. He decided to defend himself by appearing in court and airing his side, going into a long spiel with much weeping and gnashing of teeth, and stalking out afterward. He succeeded only in compromising himself, particularly with his admission of dollar deposits, quite apart from pissing off the one person who might have kept the hounds at bay.

But teaching by negative example is clearly not what he proposes to do, to go by Judd Roy’s avowal. Which makes his academic plans, if he is really serious about them, a not particular pleasant prospect for law students, if not the nation itself. It doesn’t do justice—and no word has been more apt—either to teaching or to law.

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes, who knew a thing or two about both, who said that the business of a law school is to teach law in the grand manner. Law, he said, is not just the collection of statutes to be found in the yellowed pages of law books lurking in dingy libraries, it is the distillation of the tradition, history and moral precepts of a society seeping into the pores of daily life. The business of law is not just to bring to bear on a case chapter and verse, it is to bring to it rhyme and reason. The practice of law is not just to serve the ends of clients, it is to serve the ends of justice.

That’s a principle that has been lost on this country, where law bears little relation to justice, where the teaching of law bears little relation to the living of it. Certainly, that’s a principle that has been lost not just on the former chief justice but on his allies in the impeachment court. Chief of them Miriam Defensor-Santiago who keeps posturing as God’s gift to law in this country, harping on the separation of powers, when all she has done is to separate the power of law from the power of justice, quite apart from separating herself from her senses. When all she has done is sell her loyalty with the ease of a lady of the night selling her virtue. Truly those who can’t do, teach, or get a sinecure in an international court.

Not a poor second is Joker Arroyo who in a bizarre, surreal and magic realist turn of events has found himself in the same camp as Bongbong Marcos, lamenting P-Noy’s despotism while failing to note the irony of how his accusations more properly apply to his favorite nonpresident, about whom he remained deathly silent during her time. The sublimest irony of all is that for all of Joker’s brilliant record as a human rights lawyer and anti-Marcos crusader, he will be remembered largely for this, while Juan Ponce Enrile, for all his dismal record as Marcos’ henchman who presided over martial law, might end up being remembered as the Senate president who presided over Corona’s impeachment. It’s a lesson in that what matters is not how you begin but how you end.

Teach law? Corona and friends would do better doing so by carrying a sign not unlike the ones that prefaced the titles of some of the movies of the 1980s:

Huwag tularan.