An “interregnum” best describes what happened in the visibly credibility-cum-integrity challenged Senate last week.
Broadly, an “interregnum” refers to a period of discontinuity or a “gap” in a government, organization, or social order.
Which in the case of the palpable tension hounding the Senate in the last week over the question of whether newly elected Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano could hold on to his post aptly describes the sit-back pause on Cayetano’s — the brazenly self-proclaimed “Ambassador of Jesus Christ” — brand of “stable” leadership.
“Interregnum,” however, in our post-truth social media times refers more to the famous quotation from noted Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci than to its conservative dictionary definition.
In the early part of the last century, Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Gramsci’s evocative quote is often invoked in many a crisis, sometimes appearing in political theorist Slavoj Zizek’s re-formulation of “in this interregnum a great variety of monsters appear.”
But whether an interregnum is a time of “morbid symptoms” and “monsters” or not, the inescapable fact is that we now seem to have a current Senate that’s both morbid and monstrous.
How our sitting senators managed to wriggle themselves into that unprecedented and disgraceful political moment is surely worthy of more than the few-hundred-words-sketch that this column is afforded.
But such a limitation agrees with the definition of journalism as “history in a hurry.” Pulling back from the minutiae of what’s happening day-to-day and to consider how our politics and society go in the longer term is often better off in the hands of philosophers, sociological and political theorists, and historians.
Anyway, in journalism’s brutal, day-to-day reactions to events, the morbidities and monstrosities of our politics did make their ghostly, fleeting appearances last week.
Among many ghostly appearances, the most striking monstrosity was probably the massive unashamed public display of barefaced lying.
Many instances of brazen lying can be presented and proven here. You too may have your own long list of all the lies uttered.
Sadly, however, many of us wouldn’t dare lift a finger. Not only because some don’t have the appetite for it but because publicly disproving those lies in detail only invites ceaseless unmitigated fury in our polarized, partisan damaged times.
I came to that conclusion after a former law school dean said in a social media post last week that after he expertly dismantled the claims of several senators that Senator Roland “Bato” dela Rosa could not be arrested without a local court warrant, he endured thousands of gutter insults rather than sober rebuttals.
Now, aren’t gutter insults and mindless verbal threats, even if mundane, one of the more definitive morbid symptoms of our present politicized and propaganda-addicted times?
Sadly, many don’t want to recognize, much less condemn, our present ways, as if those putrid reactions in the course of our public conversations aren’t morbid symptoms of the cancer ravaging the body politic.
Anyway, another display of morbid symptoms was the twisted thought-control antics of the petty fascists.
Nothing illustrates that more than the hapless and sanctimonious high-pitched Cayetano pounding the table and browbeating journalists for their temerity to ask if the Senate shooting was “staged.”
More can be said, but in a nutshell, the point remains: The current fraternal, “protect-our-own” Senate, tolerant of, even coddling, those with criminal liabilities, shows a diseased institution and, horror of horrors, likely a deceased one.
