Rody and the Reds: Taking Peace For A Ride

BIMBO CABIDOG

Even before Rody Duterte assumed office as 16^th president of the country, the peace talk with the reds was already in the cards.

The question was: how will the challenge of this band of driven men and women, who were not beholden to law or society and would stop at nothing but the overthrow of the existing government, fall into place in a Duterte dispensation?

It seemed at the beginning that Duterte, an outspoken Marcos fan with also strongman tendencies, had the reds tucked in his pockets. The Davao warlord has caught the latter off-guard by feigning affiliation with the left and claiming to espouse socialist tenets.

So at first, romance blossomed between Duterte who smelled like perfume fresh from winning the elections, and the old enemy of the ruling classes he personified. The enemy was still waging an over-protracted warfare to change the social order.

The Communist Party of the Philippines through its military wing, the New People’s Army, has been conducting the armed struggle for nearly half a century. In a new twist, college professor Jose Maria Sison, founder and former chairman of the CPP, went for Duterte.

Sison, also known as Joma, has assigned himself the role of adviser and chief consultant of the National Democratic Front in the peace negotiations with the government. He is an iconic figure of the left who still commands influence among revolutionary forces in the country.  

A wily politico, Duterte strove to titillate Sison’s ego with his allusion to the superiority of the virtual CPP head up to the present. He blurted out that Joma was an idol of his, and capped the massage with the impression of also heeding the words of his erstwhile mentor in college.

Despite the glaring example of Davao, the left did not see through or preferred to look away from Duterte’s fascist bent. The open and underground groups that toed the CPP’s political line propped him glossing over his unequivocal pronouncements of carrying on a bloody regime.

Why did the self-claimed vanguard of revolution that prides in being guided by the concrete analysis of concrete conditions fall for the fakery of a certified despot?

During the electoral campaign, Digong aired a conversation with Joma in a live video call patch through Skype. It was a propaganda coup that sealed two things. One was his image as a grassroots leader, who sides with the oppressed and shares a lot of things with those fighting for them, like the militant left.

Second was his portrait as a non-traditional politician, credible even to the hardline critics of the status quo, who can be a great unifier as he is in contact with the top honchos of the movement that is waging the country’s long-running insurgency.

The public relations packaging gained for Digong a place of respect and tacit admiration from the hardest (or impossible) to please progressive elements who have persistently opposed the traditional political system as the bastion of elite rule and betrayal of the people.

Another dramatic scene to gain traction with the public was of the warlord mayor sleeping inside a mosquito net. No one cared to ask how a paparazzi managed to slip inside his house and enter so private a sanctum as his room, to take a photo while he curls up in a poor man’s doze.

The kulambo pictorial and Digong’s much talked-about contacts with the reds sent the message of a leader having a heart for the downtrodden. They easily convinced voters that he was the man to put the country to real change

For the usually skeptical left, he may just be the man whose popular appeal is something to ride on or use to utmost advantage. The naïve ones simply rooted for his slogan “change is coming,” not because they believed in it, but because they believed in him.

Manifesting unorthodox political methods and a hard-core radical brand, Duterte impressed as a devil-may-care hero with the iron will to strike at the oligarchs, corrupt bureaucrats, shenanigans in public office and powerful crime lords.

Yet, the mayor who supposedly raised Davao into a modern urban center shows to live simply. And he is simple enough to cut corners to get results. He talks directly with the rebels. His ballyhooed trysts with personalities of the extreme left are one for the charts. He was hands-down credible and believable.

The association of Joma’s circle with Duterte’s presidential challenge helped in swaying a large segment of the electorate to bank on the Davao warlord for peace and development. This would be one of the most telling spins that clinched the 2016 vote for him.

To the conspiratorial forces that bear arms against the state, Duterte for his mass appeal was harder to buck than to back. Sooner rather than later, they just have to advance the prospect of settling for peace.

After all, he converses with Joma, honored the death of a New People’s Army commander considered a pal, joined the kilometric funeral procession for the rebel even as it waved subversive clichés right at the heart of his city, and sorties alone to guerilla bases entrusting his life in the hands of red fighters.

The well-known colorful episodes in the narrative of Digong’s engagement with the reds would catch even hardliners tear up in pride and sense of fulfillment. That he immediately wheeled into operation the peace initiative with the CPP-NPA-NDF seemed to have vindicated support for his presidency.

For advance, he appointed known national democrats to the Cabinet: Judy Taguiwalo – Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Rafael Mariano – Secretary of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), Lisa Masa – National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC), and Terry Ridon – Philippine Commission on the Urban Poor (PCUP).

They were joined by closet progressives Silvestre Bello to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and Gina Lopez to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). The latter were viewed to nurse leftist precepts.

On the initiative of each, the government and CPP-NPA enunciated ceasefires. The former also worked out the release of prized rebel captives, like Benito and Wilma Tiamson, to get them to participate in the negotiations. Several political prisoners walked out of detention with new roles as peace consultants.

Duterte has at a critical juncture of the country’s political transitions succeeded in hoodwinking avowed nationalists and democrats to trust in his patriotic and pro-people posturing. But more than a year later, the progressive headways including the appointments of reds to the government would be reversed.

Above all, the olive branch would prove a con. How easily Digong shifted to derogating the reds and batting for their annihilation later. Have Joma and his comrades been had by the Davao warlord?

In the wake of all the initial confidence building, the open ND formations took to the streets not to denounce the evils of rule or hurl accusations at government anymore, but to unfold streamers in support of just and lasting peace. As armed hostilities in the battle fronts ceased, verbal hostilities in the parliament-of-the-streets also quieted.  

Very soon, the panels representing the belligerent parties of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines or the NDFP, and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines or the GRP faced each other across the table. No few were moved by the stirring breakthrough.

Was peace finally at hand, notwithstanding the long and arduous process that the negotiations for it will yet take? The succeeding period would answer no.

Accusations, taunting and provocations by elements of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the NPA bedeviled the talks. The members of both panels have barely warmed their seats when old animosities broke out again into open warfare. Shooting encounters shattered the fragile ceasefires.

As clashes escalated taking increased casualties on the government side, the old fascistic warlord could not hold any longer his legendary temper. He ranted, cursed and shouted all-out war.

A while ago, Digong and Joma posed like lovey doves. Now they lunged and hurled at each other. The brittle honeymoon between the two (it was from the start anyway) ended in a verbal mix-up matching the resumption of armed hostilities with a fiery exchange of ad hominens.

Before long, Duterte, visibly piqued, halted negotiations. The dialogues convened twice and split twice in a span of one year. In both instances, the talks proper did not bog down, the guns just sputtered. Digong would shelve the process and vow to finish the insurgents for all time.

From how the mutually declared unilateral ceasefires easily turned into mutual hostilities, it came out that both parties were not really serious about the goal of peace. They seemed more engrossed with playing games for selfish political gain.

The shrift by both parties to the tactic of vying for propaganda edge through brinkmanship in the negotiation rendered the peace endeavor meaningless. They were not after sharing the ultimate end of silencing the guns. They were pulling at each for one or the other to follow.

For the left, it may just be the one last chance to beat out of a fruitless war without swallowing pride or losing relevance. For Duterte, it may yet hide the fact that he is just a trying-hard third-rate Marcos copycat with populist pretensions.

The final question is: should peace for 105 million Filipinos be merely up to them who seem not to be in the position to give it solid chance?

Access This Domain Beyond Cyberspace and Time

BIMBO CABIDOG

Until the late 70s, technology as it is today defied common imagination. It wasn’t even sci-fi stuff. The latest futuristic movies then did not show the kind of supermachine artificial intelligence has become connecting billions of electronic terminals throughout the globe, a universe of its own.

Decades later, the technology would already create a new world reality across national boundaries. It has evolved, and keeps on evolving, the gnome of nearly everything in human affairs: arts, scientific research, government, business, industry, finance and markets.

If the power and mind-boggling magnitude of web-based data systems could not be imagined early in the fourth quarter of the last century, at present, the world is hard to imagine without them.

In the crossover to the new millennium, programs on the worldwide web already determine almost everything that people do. Societies would so depend on them that there was an instance when a foreseen digital glitz owing to the numerals 1900 and 2000 triggered fears about the end of days.

Contemporary mankind may no longer be able to live without computers. Human existence has become interminably tied to them that every mark of it on the planet bears their trace.

Aiding the AI revolution was the leap in communications capacity that transmits huge amounts of data over immense distances around the world. The development would be made possible by fiber optics and the broad band. It paved the way for the internet.

Through an age, the cablegram was the mode of getting messages to far-flung regions faster than the mail service. Then the telephone, later followed by the radio transceiver that hinged on aerials brought the world closer. Still, the wireless wonders were limited in volume and speed of transmission.

Then aeronautics reached beyond the stratosphere. It made possible the installation of orbiting space satellites that beam to the four corners of Earth. This really surpassed previous limits.

The technological breakthrough ushered societies into the information age. The novel bridges in space drew powerful wave lengths that enveloped the globe in an electromagnetic weave connecting humans through the keypad thousands of miles apart capable of sending voluminous data in record time.

Connectivity in turn ushered megatrends and social being shaped by knowledge-based economies. The global north and south that formerly seemed worlds apart saw eye to eye through the monitor’s screen. It seemed incredible, but was palpable.

The newfound power appeared at the outset metaphysical and esoteric. But man has deciphered the mystery lodged in as material in essence as the microchip with semiconducting properties. In perfectly explainable terms, the invention fused matter and thought.

Information is non-matter. It does not occupy physical space. Neither has it weight nor mass. It is not pulled by gravity. But it is nonetheless bound with man’s material being. It is a most influential presence in his historical social development.

Such is because information governs decision and thereby shapes outcomes. Though it is a metaphysical configuration, it transforms into a material force with physical impact and effects.

At the turn of the century, technology carved cyberspace which hosted the worldwide web. The event concretized a global brain by which transcontinental information, knowledge, philosophy and reality from the perspective of every culture crystalize in seconds.

The development put in the midst of humanity a superbeing of almost infinite intelligence geared at running every aspect of existence. The prodigious technological capacity communicated in binary digits, byte by byte making change in real time.

The digital codes translating thought through an infinite range of the number 01 stretched out the arch of the mind into a universe of information at man’s fingertips. They brought into concrete reality an intangible essence, the being of spirit that the human brain has pondered for ages.

Towards the first decade of the new millennium, the Internet was whipping up a revolution in all aspects of society. A web of dots connected life in every part of the world. They represented computer memory that programmed human activities through terminals linked by satellite communication.

Messages carried by signals reached distances at the speed of sound. In the terminals, processors translated the bytes back to facts, graphics and meanings. It was in this global system that mankind would be most keenly aware of the overarching intellect.

The worldwide computer connectivity poised to bring man face to face with his spiritual nature. Further steps ahead, he already stands at the threshold of a realm that brook no more limit in the knowing of truth, a fount of self-awareness beyond material realities and paradigms.

Here is the ultimate connectivity liberated from the bounds of space and time. It is a connectivity that finally closes the gap between man and God that has separated him from Him since the dawn of time. In it the binary codes fade and give way to truths churned out by powerful spiritual processors.

The link turns into an implosion of consciousness as God’s omnipotent website is successfully accessed. The site has the domain name of iam.iam. It is a realm in every human being infinitely larger than the known material universe that contains the way, the truth and the life.

To get to iam.iam, no internet server, binary processor, terminal monitor and keypad is needed. The portal of the self is enough, a dot that grows larger and larger up to infinity once clicked and entered.

Communication is not by means of electromagnetic impulses riding on far-reaching cosmic waves. It is by simply saying the word not in the language of the tongue, but in the language of thought.

Picking On The Color Yellow

BIMBO CABIDOG

There is something to the new ruling coalition of the Duterte, Arroyo and Marcos cliques that shaped up shortly after the 2016 elections. It is the picking up of the color yellow as enemy.

Branded yellow for adopting the color symbol in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Liberal Party has absorbed a lot of vitriol, targeted disinformation and distortions hurled by the Duterte camp to paint it as the most dastardly villain Philippine politics has ever had. 

Even if most of its member politicos have already sashayed to the embrace of the now dominant Partido Demokratiko ng Pilipinas (PDP), and it is more of a spent force than a potent challenge, the LP to the coalition and Duterte supporters aka DDS remains the arch nemesis to demolish.

The yellow warriors or Dilawans may now be more imagined than real. But they yet figure in the daily barrage of labeling, derogatory propaganda, trolls and fake news being churned out by the tentacles of the Arroyo, Marcos and Duterte political machines.

Former President Noynoy Aquino was once head and coordinator in some capacity of the LP. But he has chosen to hibernate for a full year right after he stepped down from office. He has continued to distance himself from the political fray even after the self-assigned sabbatical.

Mar Roxas, standard bearer of the ill-fated LP campaign to recapture the presidency, has mostly withdrawn from public attention and socio-political chitchat. He had been more of a recluse taking to his personal journeys and development of new hobbies.

The remaining LP stalwarts that cared not to join the diaspora of opportunists to the ruling PDP-Laban party, except for less than a handful of recalcitrant oppositionists in the Lower House, have chosen to play footsies with the victors in power.

So, why would Digong’s coalition dominantly played out by the Arroyo and Marcos cliques still bother with them? Why pick an enemy in an already marginalized and innocuous political entity?

The only reasonable point about it has something to do with the past rather than the present. Yellow as a political color freshens the torment and agony combined with mortal fear that the Marcoses and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo went through in their fall from power.

The yellow force cannot be forgotten whether by the people that gained from it or by the defeated villains that suffered from it. The obsession to see it crushed traces to the historical role the two iconic origins of the dilawan movement, Ninoy and Cory Aquino, played.

The full-blown alliance in rule that emerged from Duterte’s 2016 electoral victory at once exhibited its abhorrence of the memory as well as legacy of the struggle that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship and restored significant democratic space in the country.

The vestiges of Ferdinand Marcos wanted everything of that past revised in the telling of history and its glorious triumph against the forces of darkness, epitomized by his fascist rule, obliterated from the nation’s collective consciousness. In some way, Duterte’s open admiration of the dictator and his strongman tendencies favor them.

The dilawans give a Marcos comeback in the person of the dictator’s scion and heir a bad name. They have to be eliminated to retouch the dictator’s lost face. Their demise will move him to a place of honor and facilitate his son and namesake Bongbong junior’s return to Malacanang.

The main line of attack is to make the LP and the yellows out as bitter losers and power-hungry destabilizers intending to remove Duterte from office. It also strives to debunk the legacy, heroism and contribution to liberal-democratic resurgence of Ninoy.

In the end, the blitz may collaterally put down the emblematic widow of Ninoy, who emerged from political aloofness after his assassination to join the anti-dictatorship struggle up to the termination of the Marcos era.

During the waning days of the dictatorship, Cory was thrust into the center of the political currents that were driving the country to a major change. The belittled housewife suddenly found herself at the lead of the converging protest streams.

The parliament of the streets where she marched relentlessly would become the political touchstones to her providential rise to the presidency in the ouster of the dictatorship in 1986.

If Cory is also demolished post-humus, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo stands to relish more than Imelda, Bongbong and Imee. Always championing democracy and good governance, Cory’s continued crusade in the latter part of the post-dictatorship years hit the graft-ridden Arroyo regime very hard.

In some way providing moral leadership along with Cardinal Sin to the massive street protests that ousted 13^th President Joseph Estrada, the former President Cory helped usher Vice President Gloria Arroyo to the presidency by shortcut.

But Cory’s steadfast involvement in scoring electoral fraud and cheating and unbridled corruption, after Estrada, negatively impacted on Arroyo. The fact that Cory also joined the voices calling for her resignation exacerbated this.

The death of Cory near the end of GMA’s rule and the public sentiment that poured out for her proved fatal to Arroyo’s prospects for succession as safety net against cases that may rain on her later.

On the same fateful month Ninoy was killed 26 years ago, the people watched Cory’s funeral carriage slowly wound through her final journey along the thoroughfares of Metro Manila. The moving scene awakened again a nation to the crusade for good governance versus shenanigans in office.

Cory’s life dedicated to country sharply etched in contrast Gloria’s stint in the highest office dedicated to corruption and political compromises to stay in power.

The final act before the curtain totally fell on the Cory drama fiercely stigmatized PGMA who was battling forces against the evils of her reign. As yellow ribbons were once again tied around the country, Cory’s remembered life and much followed death framed Arroyo in a very bad light.

The massive funeral outpouring of yellows was another magical phenomenon in the country’s political history that paved the way to the assumption of Cory’s son Noynoy Aquino to the highest office. Noynoy won by landslide for being the diametrical opposite of Arroyo.

The rest, to the lady in Malacanang’s detriment was history.

The yellows are thus being targeted, not for the formidable challenge they pose to the ruling coalition, but for the Ninoy-Cory legacy that must be destroyed, history that must be revised, and Marcos and Arroyo who must be recast in the mold of saints.

One more thing, Bongbong missed the chance to be in arm’s length of the highest seat of the land by losing the 2010 vice presidential race to another unassuming widow and adopted LP who like Cory wore yellow, Leni Robredo. What painful and bitter memories the political color yellow evoke!

Real Leaders To Elect, A Rarity

BIMBO CABIDOG

Leaders make the difference. They advance change, ahead in idea first in action. They don't just get people to do the same thing over and over again. Used to it, the people don't need them anymore to do so. 

To blaze trails is what leaders are for. When it's the usual course, leadership is irrelevant. It is in change that there has got to be someone to show the way and direct advance. Such is to lead in the real sense.

The country abounds with personalities down to every village who presume or claim to be a leader, but could not do things differently. They tarry at the tail of the futuristic march, hesitate before the new path, and convince others not to go. 

These are pseudo leaders who pull back progress to their cozy old worldview, self-serving pretenders to public service who actually think only of their personal comfort and gain. 

No one truly leads if he/she is up to merely contenting with outcomes, but would not pioneer in making new things happen. Such is not leading, but following. To lead is to take the bold step away from the past, and saunter into the novel way.

Are elections Philippine style about choosing leaders? The people are made to believe so. The so called democratic exercise is presumable the form in which every citizen decides the future of the country by choosing the ones to lead it. In theory, this seems right. But in practice, it's not.

The current barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections are a case in point. For all it seems, the exercise is but an exercise of sidelining real leaders. It excludes those who would have nothing to do with the ways of traditional politics and cannot really pass under them. 

If you cannot stomach fooling the people every time you speak, and hypocritically campaigning about desiring to serve them but actually do not mean it because you buy their votes anyway, then you're out.

Leadership occurs in a particular situation, brought about by it. The present situation of the country conducting elections to put officials in government unfortunately is not the one for candidates to exemplify genuine leadership. It has only been a contest for who is the more degenerate in championing the rotten system of personal seeking for entitlement, privilege and economic spoils.

When the aspirant for government position wins via the road always traveled – the one of deception and bribery of voters, he/she is no leader at all or in a position to lead. He/she is merely a follower of the decadent system, afraid to lose by making the difference.

Because of the fear of defeat first of all, and the desire to win by all means, the would-be leader shirks genuine leadership by resisting the responsibility to change. Desisting from change is failing leadership. One cannot lead clinging to the old way, fearing the new.

The courage to be different and make the difference, faced by the likelihood of suffering from bad outcomes, is not easy to have. But it is the stuff that makes ordinary folks exemplary leaders. 

If the criterion is daring to be new, most of the contestants at present vying to be captains or leaders of their respective villages will not pass. What the overwhelming number of them do to win epitomizes the very antithesis of change.

Misleading the people of the true stakes in the political exercise, fooling voters with empty promises and falsehoods, and taking chance of the ignorance or lack of information of the masses show only gross disrespect and exploitation on the part of the candidate, not sincere intent to serve.

Isn’t leadership about serving the led? The pretentious would-be leader doesn’t think so. He is only after fiefdom to lord over, not the noble role of public servant. He is just after entitlement along with the position, the right to extract tribute, squeeze lifeblood from the oppressed.

All he wants is the privilege to take a slice of the pie, grab anything to grab that the heart desires sans accountability, and freedom from paying back good work. He is not in the act of championing change, nor putting the welfare of the people above everything, 

The bat for election as shepherd of the flock is nothing but pretense. The discourse of holding high the paramount interest of the people is just a lot of BS. That “sovereignty resides in the people and all authority of the government comes from them” is hogwash.

In office, who bothers with what good the people can get from having government? The token concern for the general welfare during the campaign entirely vanishes in the scramble for greater influence over the affairs of men, and private accumulation of wealth from the public appropriation.

Instead of right and responsive governance that strives to improve the lives of the citizenry, graft and corrupt practices dominate. Shenanigans, greasing under the table, fat kickbacks and the contractors’ SOP shape public affairs. Immoderate greed rule the day.

Individual enrichment with money stolen from the people's coffers is not held as an offense, but a custom the one who doesn't indulge is laughed at as fool. Taking liberties with public resources is embraced as the way things are and an entitlement of politicians no one can do anything about.

The true leader doesn't need profound discernment to realize that those are not what his calling is for. They are what betrayal of his calling is all about. They are the shards of dreams that his country has broken up into and must rise from.

Today, tens of thousands throughout the archipelago are ranged in contest presumably to be barangay leaders, but actually to capture coveted share of government largess in honoraria for such positions as kagawads and chairmen, as well as occasional cuts on funding of projects. 

In lieu are the bribing of the electorate with goodies during the campaign and money on voting time. Ideologically bankrupt campaigns strewn with shallow cliches try to regale the people. Candidates attempt to attract voters with rehashed stereotypes and promises election after election. 

The personalities offering themselves for leadership have no sound plans about it, nor depth  of vision and purpose. Superficiality takes the field. Humanity is cheapened by a price. All over is a political landscape barren of ideas for dreams of the good life to bloom into concrete reality.

Does it matter if the people elect one or the other? 

SC On Quo Warranto, The Gods Must Be Crazy

BIMBO CABIDOG

For now, they are silent. But come May their mouths will open, and what they will speak could send the nation into political turmoil.

The gods of Padre Faura think loudly these days. Legal minds, like the members of the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) and other concerned lawyers’ groups, hear them and dread.

Justices of the Supreme Court were once held high by the citizenry. They occupied a time-honored place above the ordinary scheme of things. They exuded prudence, and towered intellectually. Now they are held low with unavoidable distrust by the people.

Over the years, the magistrates have degenerated into umbrella bearers of the powers-that-be, then later to what former President Joseph Estrada called “hoodlums in robes.”

Lately, obsessed at convicting a person they accuse and judge without due process, they have donned the tunic of the Injustice League.

The current breed would not mind anymore tarnishing their reputation and damning their institution. They just wanna stop the term of SC Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno by hook or by crook.

For that single obsessive objective, driven by consummate envy and arrogance, they chose to shed their independence as a co-equal branch of government and yield to the instigation of the executive branch to take the matter of removing the CJ into their hands in reckless disregard of the Constitution.

At first, five of them descended from the high bench to pick up mud and rumble in the political brawl against their leader by Rodrigo Duterte’s thugs in Congress.

This was of no avail, for CJ Sereno still stood tall after they waded into the sludge and joined the muck-raking exercise against her of the Lower House’s Committee on Justice. They next hitched onto the illegal quo warranto petition of Digong’s attack dog, Solicitor General Jose Calida.

In the brazen attempt to mangle the law, the justices seem to be no longer thinking properly. They have become legal contortionists maddened by the desire to seal the fate of the Chief Justice. If they finally do so, a decision overriding her trial by an impeachment court will tear into the moral fabric of society.

There will be no more telling which yet is right or wrong, good or evil by universal standard. The Injustice League will have steered the nation into uncharted waters, a lost moral universe sprang out of their convoluted sense of what is appropriate for the nation.

God bless the country, for the wrecking ball they will hurl from their Mt. Olympus: removing a constitutional official beyond the pale of the Constitution. Uprooting a fourth highest authority of the land by mere quo warranto will indomitably wreak havoc on the rule of law and the constitutional order.

Hell-bent on lynching Sereno, the magistrates seem unmindful of the social cataclysm her unlawful ouster would generate. That the justices slipped it through the legal backdoor to satisfy their longing for vendetta, while giving way to the caprice of a despot, makes it all the more explosive.

The Charter says that the Chief Justice can only be removed by two-thirds of the Senate sitting as judges in an impeachment trial and finding her guilty as accused of impeachable offense.

Even non-lawyers know this. Lawyers should therefore know. But the magistrates and the Solicitor General out to lynch-mob Sereno are lawyers who would not stop at the knowledge. Their vicious craving to get her out entertains no bounds.

Should they finally oust her through the illegal application of an inapplicable means, it doesn’t make her guilty of any offense. It only makes her a victim of a wicked con: the nullification of her appointment by colleagues who have no mandate to do so.

It makes her the absorber of the gravest injustice and fraud by peers sworn to promulgate justice at the highest level and promote the noble spirit and intent of the law. The unkindest cut of all is they do so not because of any patriotic cause, but out of vindictiveness, selfish ambition and personal prejudice.

Yet, beyond the demolition of the CJ, the wrecking ball creates much greater damage to the nation at large. It renders ineffective the authority and mandate of the president to appoint the head of the Supreme Court from a short list of nominees of the Judicial and Bar Council by throwing out the prior acts of the JBC and the President.

In particular, it most arbitrarily repeals the decision of former President Benigno S. Aquino III to appoint Sereno to the position of CJ. Can the justices do this without circumventing the law, as some senators and other legal circles opine?

If the decision is ironically enforced by the present administration, the power of the JBC to nominate, and the Office of the President to appoint officials as mandated by the constitution, no longer mean anything, for their acts can just be overturned by some disgruntled justices who fancy doing so.

The imposition of such a monstrosity also means the invalidation of the authority not just of the Chief Executive, but also of the bicameral Commission on Appointments of Congress, or of Congress itself to determine with finality who should be placed in independent constitutional offices of the land.

Thus, the wrecking ball demolishes one major pillar of democratic rule in the post-Edsa period: the empowerment of Congress and the Executive arm, to take political decisions as provided for by the constitution.

Of course, the justices beholden no less to Digong may counter that the move is only for the particular instance of removing Sereno. They may pledge that the court will no longer resort to the monstrosity at any time in the future. That may be so, with regards to his dictatorial acts.

But having betrayed the public trust, it is foolish to yet trust their word unless force is brought to bear upon them. The power to compel them to toe the line now shall grow out of the barrel of the gun.

On the other hand, the wrecking ball is unloosed. It has started bringing down the legal-Constitutional order and the nation as a whole. Nothing may stop it anymore from continuing on the wild swings.

Hereon, no statute or provision of the law may stand unchallenged by a capricious tyrant. Every citizen may also just pick a club and strike another at will and have might rule the day.

The law will be what the justices state, what any other functionary like the SG states and, above all, what the capricious fascist who holds the guns, the tanks and the purse states.

Entertaining the quo warranto petition was in itself already a dangerous track. But the members of the high court chose to do so. By doing so, the supposed defenders of justice metamorphosed into its attackers. The guardians of the constitutional system became its abusers.

If the Injustice League indeed foists the unwarranted quo warranto against CJ Sereno on the legal system this May, the regime of democracy after the 1986 people power upheaval will come crashing down. And even the positions of the justices will lose the ground on which they stand.

Duterte has sought to weaponize the decision of Supreme Court justices against a constitutional official who dares to think differently. In a brazen show of corruption, they have given in. Do they ever think that the dangerous weapon in their hands may well rip the nation apart? Or do they purposely want to see it torn to pieces?

Above the Law

He promised to kill 100,000 and dump the bodies at the Manila Bay. If he has had his way, the famous sunset scene would be the real cesspool, not Boracay. Here, the country would not only have a humanitarian, but also an environmental, disaster. 

The mass slaughter was Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s centerpiece strategy for the campaign platform of solving crime in six months, specifically ending the drug problem. He had the record of 1,700 killed (per his account) by the Davao Death Squad to prove he meant business.

Despite the glaring madness of it, 16 million Filipinos voted him to be the 16^th president of the republic. They believed he was the guy they wanted. With their credulity, Duterte made a killing of the 2016 presidential election garnering a landslide margin of seven million over second runner Mar Roxas.

The electoral massacre was only the foretaste of his dish. He has barely assumed office when the actual killing of people in senseless mayhem began to pile up.

“I will really kill you,” he bristled promising to end the drug menace very soon or he will resign. Eighteen months later, he would admit that it cannot really be ended during his term.

Illegal drugs continued to flow even as the deaths spiraled. From 1.9 million drug users and peddlers previously reported by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, the number got to four million in Duterte’s list. His top diplomat and extra mouthpiece Alan Peter Cayetano would later revise it to 7,000.

Before anyone says again that he was only joking or has been taken out of context, the killing was for real. Now, the reported victims of drug-related summary executions have already surpassed 20,000. They were listed suspects who would never be proven either guilty or yet be able to prove themselves innocent anymore.

Duterte admitted in public that the Davao Death Squad was his brainchild. Media quoted him to say, “I am the Davao Death Squad.” In July 2016, upon his assumption to office, the DDS would no longer be a local affair. It rose in size, scope and operational scale to cover the whole archipelago.

Cops were reportedly commissioned to augment the Davao-style vigilantes. They shed uniform, wore hood, and transformed into bounty hunters. The thugs could not wait for Duterte’s inauguration. By June, young and old began falling like flies on dark alleys and streets of Metro Manila.

But the masked rogues were not the only group doing the bloodletting. Uniformed police themselves finished off, in the open, tokhang (knock and request) invitees on the oft-rehashed pretext of “nanlaban” (the suspect fought).

Under the baton of Duterte’s right hand, Philippine National Police Chief Rolando Bato de la Rosa, the law enforcers metamorphosed into law breakers, fabricators of stories, and planters of evidence. They turned their agency into a hideous bloodthirsty monster.

Insiders revealed that a quota-and-award system (vintage Davao) enjoined as well as incentivized executions. Higher-ups imposed numbers to be “neutralized,” evaluating performance of law enforcement units on the basis of deaths scored.  

Every kill chalked a generous sum from the anti-drug chest. Painted first to be a patriotic crusade, the war on drugs degenerated into bounty hunting by agents of the law feigning self-defense, or themselves as hooded vigilantes along with plain criminals meting death sentences to mere suspects for reward money.

The mass murders compared to nothing in the past in atrocity and impunity. Towards the second year of Duterte’s watch, deaths already hovered at 16,000. Prodded by his public pronouncements and prompted by cryptic orders down the police hierarchy, gun-for-hires and uniformed cops just snuffed lives with no regard to rights, due process, and the rule of law.

But basing on demographics, Digong’s war showed more and more to be a “massacre of the poor,” dismayed watchers pointed out. Almost all of the EJK victims came from the lower strata of society, a big portion of them innocent children and teenagers waved off as collateral damage. All were helpless with no means to resist or defend themselves or bring a case to court.

The rampage may have cowed the populace into submission to Duterte’s evident fascist tendencies. But it has not substantially dented illegal drug use and drug dealing in the country. The climate of fear has had no effect on the powerful drug rings that would be found out to smuggle at will tons of crystal meth through the Bureau of Customs and distribute it from the country’s foremost penitentiary, the National Bilibid Prison.

The war on drugs ran into a wall when it came to the lords of the narco ring. This was queer. The suspected poor street traffickers and users fell dead. But the big bosses and high stakes traffickers reigned free.

The senate investigation on the P6.4-billion shabu smuggling across the BOC’s green lane implicated Duterte’s son Paolo Duterte, who was the incumbent vice mayor of Davao City. On questioning by senators, a custom’s broker and fixer traced cellphone text messages to him as head of a Mafia-like ring called the Davao Group that runs big time smuggling and facilitated BOC capers. Its latest racked up P28 billion worth of illegal drugs.

The presidential scion was also exposed by Senator Antonio Trillanes to be a dragon-tattooed member of the Chinese Triad which supplies the bulk of the drug shipments to the country. Pictures presented in the senate hearings showed him romping with tagged drug lords.

Paolo got a lawyerly advice from his dad Digong to keep mum and invoke his right against self-incrimination in the senate questioning. The presidential father challenged accusers to produce a single affidavit that involves his son in drug traffic. Because it is his son, he now calls on the same due process denied to victims of bloodletting by his war on drugs.

The case of Paolo brought home the point that human rights advocates and organizations including the Commission on Human Rights have been voicing, but which Duterte condemned and threatened. Suspects even if they are alleged to have committed a capital offense should be hailed to court, not slaughtered. Yet, not even the ones convicted of heinous crimes can be killed, because the constitution and statutes do not sanction punishment by death.

But the Duterte rule overrules the rule of law. In one of his bragging spells, he taunted God by saying that if He really exists, what he does would make Him cry. The tyrant and his supporters think that a landslide election victory gave him all the right to play God, kill at will, and have himself obeyed as the law.

The Working Man

BIMBO CABIDOG

To work is to be human, as to bark is to be dog. What ultimately distinguished humans from the rest of the animal kingdom was not higher intelligence, but a pair of hands. Shortly after the first appearance of the species Homo sapiens on the planet, the hands got to work. And work defined humanity.

With humans at work, the world would never be the same again. Man changed the world. It would in turn change him. Part of his change was becoming slave of a work-bound and hurried world, captive of the thinking that he could not live without earning a living. This lashed him to the machine of social toil, eight to 12 hours a day five-six days a week.

The enslavement is actually longer, and it goes by the name Routine. It starts with the early ritual at home to get ready for work, proceeds to the hassle on the street for a ride to the office/plant, and settles down to putting everything in place for the day.

After work, the routine goes in reverse: logs out of workplace, hits the street joining the mass of humanity rushing home, scrambles for ride, and settles down with a sigh of relief to hearth and family.

The robotic hum takes the whole time of day from early morning to early evening. In ten years, it begins to sap the juices out of life. The work slave loses what actually makes life worth living: being free to relish the wonderful moments of a brief earthly sojourn.

The simple joys become rare and vanish. The childlike disposition of a once happy human being breaks under the pressure to do a man’s job 300 days a year, and the fun of living turns to the angst-ridden lot of striving to live.

There is no more time to bond with family, or have fun with friends. The adventuresome self is reined by the fear of not sustaining the stint of dogged labor and therefore not earning as the system orders. It foregoes with a carefree, meaningful and fulfilling life.

Serving the sentence, the damned mortal shirks from the disapproving stares of other fellow slaves, at his/her spending time lazing in the beach or drinking with barkada (gang), instead of burying one’s self in sordid drudgery. What a waste, the judgers rue.

But down the road, goals get confused. Sought-for contentment escapes. The strife ends up hounded by the imperative to strive more. No worthy prize awaits. There is only the continuous turning of the daily grind, and wasting of life in slow death day by day.

What a sorry way to live: exhausting oneself out in ceaseless struggle to earn a living. Live! Period!

Labor is not what God has made you for. He did not fashion you in His image and likeness, to bend your knees to mammon. You do not stop being human when you don’t sweat to buy food or ensure your breath. That is not the purpose or reason why you are here.

Being a rational animal, pundits say, you must worry about earning a living. Whew! Behold the fouls in the air, they do not reap nor gather into barns. Yet, the heavenly Father feeds them. Shouldn’t folks skip taking thought for tomorrow, and let tomorrow take care of itself? Others along the food chain do not, yet they eat. They do not hustle for a living. They simply live.

The natural biophysical environment supports life. Basic needs can actually be satisfied by the resources it has. Rest assured. Don’t be restless, convincing yourself with the strange thought that you cannot just depend on what earth has to offer, but must renew it. Begin to entertain the thought of needing more, and you become slave of the thinking that you can’t do without them.

So, from just feeling inadequate, humans must yet take on the obligation of doing something to resolve the sense of inadequacy. Historically, this necessitated and entailed (at least for them) a different order from the rest of the natural world. Necessity and the matter of course enjoined the specie to put pair of hands to work, and work endlessly. From then on its needs would grow exponentially to infinity.

Education attributes the peculiar circumstance to so-called higher intelligence.  Then so-called intelligence has done little to help him, and so much to imprison him. The truth, not it, will set him free.

Country as mode of being

BIMBO CABIDOG

Now, anybody knows wisdom is not the automatic possession of a graduate from college. A bachelor’s degree does not guarantee its holder to be wise or erudite. On the other hand, many of those who have gotten to the apex of life’s achievement do not owe it to a degree or diploma.

Some have become very successful, mainly because they failed in higher education. They took a different path and rose to great heights. Their stories are well known, among them the multi-billionaire Bill Gates, and IT magnate Steve Jobs.

The nation thirsts for wisdom and erudition, most especially at its helm. But all the millions of college graduates from its universities could offer is a narrow worldview that says life is just about making money. The outlook does not build a nation or raise a people from shallowness and mediocrity. It merely propagates selfishness and crab mentality.

An archipelago of crabs has no hope of attaining excellence in the international community, for it is just a sprinkling of isles pretending to be nation. It is a heap of purposes stepping on one another to claw to the top, but pulling each other down.

Millions of tendencies colliding can’t pull off the nation act. Yes, Filipinos should be competitive. But this should not be confused with seeking the downfall of the other guy, to triumph at his expense.

No country overcomes odds with its citizens just trying to outrace one another for his/her own glory. It soon splinters into individualistic goals and unravels.

Superficiality molds leaders who could not see beyond the goal of power over and above the rest. Their pursuit of personal wealth is confused as the interest of the public. Nothing is shallower than to take one family’s dynastic advancement as the good of everyone.

Leadership should be a product of shared vision. The country needs to be united on one compelling idea of the future, no matter if its population is already 105 million. But has education under the present system yielded such?

A national dream cannot emanate from a professional sector which is ultimately bent on getting a dollar-paying job abroad. Progress can never come to a country whose most able and skilled would rather work in and for another country, regardless if it is what will realize one’s dream of self-advancement.

A nation can only rise on the self-sacrifice of patriots for their native land. But what do people now care about nationhood? Asking it is not cool. Education seems to evade frank answers. It just says: we’re all in the ship. Not by choice anyway!

Like it or not, what happens as a result of purposes driving in opposite directions is still a shared future, a destiny everyone has commonly shaped and will commonly partake by rejecting collectivity. There is no escaping the collective result even if we escape collective responsibility.

Does education give life to living, working, fighting, and beating the unbeatable odds together? Yes and no. Yes, it promotes values of community, fellowship, connection and loving one’s neighbor. No, it champions individualism and the egocentric pursuit of self-excellence.

Individualism is the antithesis to nation and community. In fact, it trumps the individual that provides collectivity numbers, strength, role function, contribution and even uniformity. Indeed, collectivity is meaningless without the individual, for the whole will always be the sum of its parts, even if so much greater. But the individual that is not individualistic.

Worldview galvanizes individuals and cements collectivity. It sets them on a plane higher than themselves, than what meets the eye. Thus, they see not only the trees, but the forest. With the view, even the most disparate elements see a shared lot and a shared fate to work on as one.

Individual ambitions need not be selfish. They can be brought under a single unifying aspiration. This is when folks begin to see, not just the family but the community, not just the province but the whole nation.

In the end, selfish ambition defeats itself. Nothing in the world today is a product of a single craftsman anymore. Everything is already a product of social labor, the work of many. Everything can only happen through community and collectivity.

Communities do not succeed or survive by having every family box against each other or be mastered by the other for the prize of success. They do so by having everyone depend on each other, and so, work for each other.

What this means is letting the other in on the prize. It is not about going into the ring, fighting toe to toe for foothold, and bringing down the other guy to the canvass with a knockout punch. Here you see only an opponent. In the former, you see a fellow traveler and source of synergistic strength.

Instead of sending the other guy to the floor, you raise him up. Instead of stepping on him to climb to the top, you seek a ladder for both of you. Instead of grabbing his land, you help water it to yield a rich harvest.

The age of tribal warring, head-hunting and irrigating the land with the blood of the vanquished is long gone. Let it remain buried in that very remote past. This is the age of country, of people functioning as citizens for the wellbeing of all. Folks do not hack each other anymore for a means of a living. Country is the mode of living.

Let each one be the wind beneath the other’s wings. Then we can soar to the heights of our collective destiny: a prosperous society where every individual precisely by not being individualistic enjoys the good life in harmony with fellow human inhabitants of this planet, and in balance with nature.