Appalling ovation

Going by the subsequent disgust, it was an appalling standing ovation for their shamelessness, callousness, and hypocrisies.

For the cynical and jaded, the senators, congressmen, and bureaucrats loudly applauding the President’s stirring SoNA promises last Monday meant to assuage the public’s anger over the devastating floods made it clear they were political realists.

Amoral political realism because no one cheering, or even those who had boycotted, will publicly dare cross the man whom they privately assess is a lame duck but could still do them all in.

Political realism is a degrading thing. If in politics realism seems always right in surviving amoral, brutal politics, it is nevertheless always morally wrong.

So, more than discrediting themselves with their brazen cheering they were dishonoring themselves with their incredible lack of character.

Character is always necessary. But after last Monday, many listening to a humbled Chief Executive vowing populist policies subsequently haven’t shown any. It was as a friend succinctly put it: “Shaming the shameless.”

If that wasn’t the case, senators of the majority, for instance, wouldn’t have sarcastically named last Tuesday the one senator who could still be held partly responsible for previous sub-standard and non-existent infrastructure projects to head the Senate’s public works committee.

No other inference can be made from that vulgar Senate move than it shows the Senate’s failure to understand that true and courageous reform is effective only if it is total — that it involves all of government.

Additionally, it needs also to be said the Senate is indirectly telling us that we can’t count on it, that the Senate won’t succor our search for the undistorted truth behind the massive failure of the flood control projects.

“Truth is a harsh master, allowing no time for rest,” once wrote French author Albert Camus. But the majority of our senators now want a respite and are sweeping the dirt of fellow lawmakers under the rug of their sacrosanct chamber.

Not all is lost, however. Some senators and their House counterparts are creditably demanding public access to the suspiciously secretive bicameral conference committee deliberations on the budget, where many suspect questionable and overpriced projects are often inserted.

Well aware of the fact that reviewing ongoing flood control projects and penalizing those who corrupted and profited from them aren’t enough, these lawmakers stress institutionalizing preventive measures.

But despite their urgent efforts to amend Congress’ rules on the bicameral committee leaving other lawmakers lukewarm, many are instead focusing their attention elsewhere.

And that attention, I gather, is on the devious ways they can whitewash their participation in the infrastructure anomalies.

More than pointless suspicion, in more senses than one, the guilt-ridden lawmakers are undeniably trying to determine if the Chief Executive will push through with what he promised, if under the musty but still pertinent proverb he is putting his money where his mouth is.

We, too, are similarly anxious, adopting also an apprehensive wait-and-see attitude. We, too, await with bated breath if Mr. Marcos will keep his year-end deadline to expose the rogues.

It is only then that we can judge Mr. Marcos’s real political qualities, judge if he is truly a leader with enough political will and courage to publicly name, castigate, penalize, and jail the crooks, whether they be prominent or not, whether they be political allies or not.