If men were angels
There’s an evil genius that plays the maestro over several artists, putting together all the pieces, roles, scenes, tactics, and behaviors in one consuming and self-fulfilling political theater.
Text size
Share
Daily TribuneThere’s an evil genius that plays the maestro over several artists, putting together all the pieces, roles, scenes, tactics, and behaviors in one consuming and self-fulfilling political theater.
Share
It’s insane to tell a six-year-old child that an exact or absolute number can be less than it is. It amounts to saying that mathematics is a dismal science; that it should fall under the domain of the social sciences rather than the hard sciences like chemistry, engineering, meteorology, economics.
If 24 could be 22 and 22 could be 20, or put another way, if “all” could mean “some” and “break” could mean “bend,” then it must be ascertained what planet we’re on. This isn’t a mere play on words, semantics, equivocation, or sophistry.
There’s an evil genius that plays the maestro over several artists, putting together all the pieces, roles, scenes, tactics and behaviors in one consuming and self-fulfilling political theater.
Theater of the absurd, you say? It’s most probably what it is.
It traverses the path toward mockery, travesty, deception, fraud. Various political tricks like spin, gaslighting, demagoguery, astroturfing, bait and switch which are all generally designed to fool the people as if every Filipino is an idiot, stupid, moron are played on us from their dirty tricks department — the same cascading from the upper and inner sanctum of the highest office.
The floodgate “cash run” (reminiscent of the TV series Money Heist) is a monumental case in point.
Whoever the elusive mastermind “Professor Alvaro Morte” is, was precisely who the Blue Ribbon Committee (BRC) in its maiden probe wanted to identify.
The probe, skillfully and dutifully initiated by one senator newbie, Rodante Marcoleta, amid an atmosphere of chaos and confusion was likened to having allowed a camel’s nose into the tent, followed by its head, its neck and finally its entire body.
There was no freezing night-time temperature out there but a collective psyche set ablaze by the apparently contrived and intervening delays that should otherwise have allowed the BRC to proceed without obstruction, without interference from above.
Today, the impeachment trial has effectively “archived” the multibillion-peso fund scam like the Titanic sailing at high speed sunk by the “iceberg” of government nonchalance and luminous effort to placate accountability.
Even so, people have already formed their empirically conclusive, certainly not anecdotal, judgment as to who the “Professor” is, and it is no longer a case of “Finding Nemo” however one navigates the turbulent and raging seas of public dismay, disconnect, and discontent.
There’s a grain of truth in what Professor Emeritus Peter Kobrak (2002) of Western Michigan University said: “Public managers are not angels. We ought not to design a system of governance that depends upon public managers acting as angels.”
This runs parallel to James Madison’s writing in the Federalist No. 51, viz., “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Thus, who would that evil genius be behind this unprecedented corruption that’s graphically criminal when unadulteratedly presented in pictures and videos and dovetailed with sworn testimonial evidence?
Disconcertingly, it would appear that the officially accepted articulation of a public idea (i.e., law) is counter-intuitive as well as antithetical to the common worldview that the hasty quorum of 12 senators of the then minority bloc rests on bad faith, ill motive and mute hostility of one faction against another.
Later scholars of law, public policy and social philosophy must revisit this mathematical fallacy as its wicked political footprint is too obvious to ignore. It’s the “elephant in the room,” to borrow from a displaced bureaucrat’s words. Thus, it’s best to be forewarned, to regard only what good public sector reform is, and to militate against institutional collapse when another shameless quorum rears its ugly head.
Questions remain whether there was a walkout; questions still unvalidated whether such quorum was a continuance or discontinuance of a legislative session. Answers never resolve whether or not coercive jurisdiction is really an end in view prior to the “deceptive switch” in Senate leadership that must have sailed a pre-plotted course.
Has the displaced ruling majority bloc assumed an illegal short-lived existence and been deemed bogus, an impostor, usurper?
