Who is Senator Rodante Marcoleta?

The first thing that we have to clear up is the consuming ambivalence accorded to a rookie, even barbarian, Sen. Rodante Marcoleta who belongs to neither clique nor fraternity, much less is a “tribal leader” of extraordinary following or religious cult.

Even infamously derided as being in the “lowest rank” in the caliber of lawyers — an undeserved public denunciation — courtesy of an indicatively pompous magistrate on his high horse, poor Dante becomes a vicious target of adversarial attacks.

For someone apparently dead-set on raising the level of discourse on crippling societal issues that emerge at every turn and scream for solutions, it would be the height of mediocrity if one day another fanatical bureaucrat labels Marcoleta’s demeanor as “filibustering” which in legislative parlance means “talking a bill to death,” a parliamentary tactic.

Nothing in Dante’s DNA even remotely resembles this behavioral pattern, nay, frame of mind, albeit he hides up his sleeve an unspliceable disciplinary mastery of business administration on one end and public administration on the other. Indisputably, his average familiarity in the field of law blended with his legislative experience tend to give him the whip hand.

For good reason.

Dante’s demonstrable trait of championing the public interest over rent-seekers, lobbyists, and oligarchs appears to rattle the cage of the Senate as a powerhouse of conflicted worldviews, albeit where the majority rule is tyranny.

If this growing fixation on blowing Dante’s otherwise good reputation to smithereens on the mere “say so” of public figures who cannot descend from their ivory towers, then there’s the necessity of demanding a higher metric as an unquestionable basis.

For isn’t it unthinkable to label an incumbent senator as deficient of his class simply because somebody of a prized stature may have overly romanticized, even made a badge of intellectual superiority across intelligences, his exalted position as an associate justice — that for poor Dante is presented as a barrier to social mobility?

Is there a general acceptance that the highest apex of anybody’s legal career is one who has reached that status as though there’s no other pathway nor touchpoint by which to gauge his level of legal brilliance?

While it’s pointless to argue against the concept of “honoris causa,” if a significant number of magistrates of the High Tribunal were conferred one or more thereof, still it has to be defended if the conferment of a “doctor honoris causa” carries greater weight than an earned PhD or doctorate in a relevant field of study.

By simple definition, the Latin phrase literally means “for the sake of honor” and in our cultural milieu, one does not have to be a Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, or Winston Churchill to receive the honor. Nor does one’s belonging to a “family,” nay, organization, nurture what Tommy Shelby describes in Pleaky Blinders as a “shelter from the storm” and sometimes the “storm itself.”

Presumably, Marcoleta could only be the last man to agree — if and when romanticism has replaced historicism, and “honor” for its own sake has swept academic rigor aside — that the High Tribunal is the sole predictor of a lawyer’s true caliber or to which rank or rung he might fall under, his place in the galaxy of attorneys.

When high magistrates conveniently find a “language” to characterize those whose caliber falls short of what a legal luminary is, they apparently just want to toot their own horn. Marcoleta could be the first individual to pierce the thickening veil of this self-serving corporate myth.

Indulging in obstructionist, obscurantist, defeatist conversation only fuels a prolonged “war of words” by parties whose worldviews are diametrically opposed to each other. Strange how one chair of a crucial Senate committee just wants to kick the can down the road.

With marked humility and strength of character, let poor Dante champion the people’s sad plight to pursue the commonweal, not leave it to the other “gods at the financial center.” Ultimately, a fiscalizing agent stands as a strong catalyst for the desired public sector reforms.

Throw no monkey wrench!