Blue-ribbon satire

Senators staged a diverting satirical show starring themselves last Tuesday, to our rib-tickling delight.

And, true enough, our avowed guardians of the peoples’ purse were so hypocritically dense they didn’t realize they smacked their very own smug mugs purple, like what happens after Pacquiao lands his fabled left hook on a foul-mouthed Mexican boxer.

Nope, the Senate skit wasn’t some opening act for Vice Ganda’s similarly uproarious WPS-themed “jet ski holiday” concert.

Instead, the Senate’s water-logged show took place in its august chambers, during the initial hearing of the Blue Ribbon Committee ominously billed in these flood-prone times as “The Philippines Under Water.”

Presided over by the permanently scowling novice Senator Rodante Marcoleta — who at one point wanted to bring the gavel down on the head of a contractor sunnily snickering in the face of his insistent interrogation — the Senate show got first-night rave reviews, primarily for the explosive scandals it exposed.

“Wowow-wee” indeed were the scandals, like the ghastly “ghost” projects in three flood-prone Bulacan towns where under-capitalized shady private contractors merrily cornered and gorged on billion-peso projects, with a supposed entrenched DPWH mafiosi leading grandiose lives on meager government pay.

Indeed, the scandals are deserving of thorough no-nonsense investigations, which at some point may tar even the probing senators themselves.

Evidently fearing such a dire prospect, the suddenly prescient Bulakenyo Senator Joel Villanueva this early got the DPWH to state, for the record, that he never lobbied for any of Bulacan’s botched flood control projects.

Anyway, the looming scandals really will be far more consequential than, let’s say, the hysterical DDS “humba” brouhaha at The Hague’s pathetic “Duterte Street” featuring the fallen Falstaff-figure of dislocated Filipino politicking Harry Roque. Or the Veep’s eyebrow-raising grand foreign tours. Particularly since the senators’ latest follies are very much about satire (a specific form of irony), which is social criticism with the goal of shaming the powerful, the foolish, and the corrupt.

To cut a long story short, our senators did us a great favor by turning our easily distracted partisan hearts to senators chastising their own dear grandstanding selves.

Our senators, however, still need our help in making them fully appreciate why their particular skit last Tuesday was unquestionably satiric, and not merely dramatic irony as vaguely thought at first.

And, the first thing we need to do is to simultaneously keep in mind two distinct mental images: the literal meaning of the messages the senators were conveying and our awareness of the discrepancies between their messages and what they were actually about.

To clarify, we, the audience, must recognize pretense as the essential element of satire. We need to acknowledge our senators’ pretenses lest we don’t get the joke about the senators’ demeaning satire of themselves.

The senators last Tuesday perfectly played their roles of bloviating pundits, rarely breaking character.

But to only see the senators’ antics as serious and believe that they genuinely meant what they were saying is to totally miss out on enjoying the senators’ many cleverly-cloaked pretenses, specifically about them winking at in-house jokes about their individual past and present roles in the flood control mess and which somehow implicated the usually reticent Senator Mark Villar.

Spoiler Senator Migz Zubiri, however, had had enough of the fun in-house jokes. Zubiri thundered that some of his fellow senators and other politicians were as venal and as damnable for the flood control mess as the relatively obscure characters hauled before them or to be subpoenaed later.