The Present State of Lawlessness and Disorder

BIMBO CABIDOG

Hit and run at the West Philippine sea, victimizing Filipino fisher folk

When superior reason is forced to give in to the reason of superior force, madness reigns. This is now how the country is being ruled, Duterte-style.

In the judiciary, judges side not with justice, but with tyranny that has no use of the law anymore except as toilet paper. They sampled this abhorrent dictum by putting Senator Leila de Lima in jail with a fabricated case with ex-convicts in prison as false witnesses.

Authorities, who should uphold and protect the rights of the people, listen to the righteousness of might, not the might of righteousness. Whatever they are meant, rights no longer mean anything, for the law has no force. Force is the law.

The rule says that the law may be harsh, but it is the law. Dura lex sed lex. No more. The law is not law if it can’t be enforced. It does not allow ending human life whether by application of justice (there is no death penalty), or by extrajudicial means. But does its long arm yet catch those who do so? Today, they just freely and with impunity commit murder.

The President handles the Constitution as a sheaf of scratch paper. He threatens with jail or harm whoever dares to question his crazy ululations.  In many instances, he himself has been heard explicitly urging to kill. Do the institutions of justice hold him to account?

Tens of thousands are already dead in the wake of his war on drugs. Many of them were mere victims of what state authorities would wave off as collateral damage. But even the ones who were killed for being suspected to use or deal drugs were themselves pure and simple victims of the heinous crime of murder.

Under the barbaric campaign, families, relatives and friends of the dead now chafe in extreme grief. They are pained yet by a thirst for justice that they know to be merely wishful thinking. Has one felon been meted the fullest extent of the law? Law enforcement agencies and courts sweep or try to sweep the commission of the capital offenses under the rug.

The carnage for sure is palpable. It is continually being brought to the public eye by the lenses of the intrepid media. But the supposedly independent and co-equal magistrates who should look after it look the other way. The senators and congressmen shamelessly squelch investigations.

They have been mandated by the constitution to check abuse by Duterte. But they themselves have castrated their offices as co-equal entities to his. They have subsumed their authority to the rule of the pretentious strongman. They grovel before him and chorus Amen!

On the other hand, the unfortunate subjects who become recipients of extreme prejudice by the current regime are not even held to account anymore in the legal sense. They are just grabbed in the guise of Tokhang and summarily executed without due process.

These are the times now, sadder than during the dark years of the dictatorship, more tragic to the nation than the ruin and plunder wrought by Ferdinand Marcos, his dogs of war, cronies, and sycophants. All the social-reform, democratic, and economic gains of the past 33 years of post-Marcos recovery are now rushing down the drain to the gutter.

Contemporary historical revisionism (thanks to the vestiges of rapacity that are back with consummate vengeance) paints the period of one-man rule as a golden age. Yes, it was the golden age, not only of the suppression of the democratic rights of the people, but of the castration of the economy which saw three straight years of negative growth towards the end.  

It was the golden age of Ferdie’s and Imelda’s conjugal “kleptocracy” that shipped tons of gold and currency out of the country into hidden deposits abroad. But Duterte himself has gone to glorify that woebegone era, because he wants to copy Marcos.

Still, recent facts cannot be revised or denied. From a basket case, the sick man of Asia that was the Philippine economy during Marcos’s authoritarian plunder, soon after, went into high gear achieving levels of growth that made it Asia’s rising star three decades later. The country tamed its unruly public-borrowing and debt-service binge and put its fiscal balance sheets in order.

And for the first time, the former basket case even loaned $1 billion to global financial institutions signifying an enviable foreign reserves standing. For the first time also, it got investment grade from international credit ratings agencies. Now, it is on the verge of throwing all these to the wind.

The country used to be admired for its genial and well-mannered citizens. But those traits are also fast eroding. In public, the current leadership spews profuse mouthfuls of SOBs, FYs, other cusses and expletives almost every time he mounts the podium.

Duterte proudly talks about having two wives and two mistresses while yet flirting with others. He blurts misogynistic quips at will, jokes about rape, and exhorts soldiers to shoot female insurgents in the vagina. It seems that his audiences just love the charlatan.

As if the loathsome repertoire isn’t enough, one time he further spiced his sexist streak with the brag of lasciviously assaulting a housemaid in his adolescence and going to the bathroom to relieve. Taking cue from the maddening applause of his audience, he goes on from shelling libidinous dirt to vitiating decent individuals who merely points out flaws in his governance.

He calls stupid or idiot personalities of erudite learning just because they take a contrary view to his, like Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio. He behaves as if he is the only one who is, and will always be correct, in the whole solar system.

His rambling, discombobulated, incoherent and ungrammatical speeches are notorious not only for their nonsensical thought, but for unabashedly graphic sensuousness and insulting taunts against just any perceived opponent. Yet, he – potty mouth and all, just mesmerizes audiences.

Perhaps, the children who are taught at an early age good manners and right conduct are confused. But judging from how the people continue to give him high approval rating, here is a country that is turning to the love of vomit.

Here is a nation that is tending to lose not only its morals, but its soul. Alas, here is a nation losing its very nationhood.

The height of lawlessness and disorder is for citizens not to honor anymore their Constitution, the fundamental law of the land. This just happened when the president acted like a vassal of the People’s Republic of China siding with its rulers in the dispute of jurisdiction over the Philippine’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

He has not only sided with China but outdid the Chinese leadership in thrashing his own country’s constitutional provision on the eploitation of the West Philippine Sea exclusively by Filipinos. He imagined his counterpart Xi Jinping treating the basic charter of the country he is president of as merely good for wiping asses. Then he proceeds to take the position.

Yet, the president does not only mock the constitution he was sworn to protect, he consigned to the garbage can the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as well as the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration that affirmed the country’s jurisdiction over the length and breadth, features and resources of the West Philippine Sea. He dismisses as senseless the international covenants that uphold and protect the nation’s territorial integrity.

In the past three years and first half of the Duterte presidency, the Filipino people have endured historically the worst violations of their time-honored laws, their national sovereignty, and human rights. All these were to give in to his whim. All these were to yield to his lust for absolute rule even if it already shreds the very charter that put him in power. All these were to kowtow to his thinking of being always right.

He has not acted within the bounds set by law, nor fulfilled the functions and obligations mandated by his assumption to the highest office of the land. Three years were a uniquely long period to endure such tyranny in this day and age. But there is an incipient groundswell of forces who consider it time to call on him to take the proper thing to do: resign!