In thickness and in hell

SHE SAYS

Dinah S. Ventura

10/27/2008

The plot thickens… thick as thieves… thick with suspicion… in the thick of things… through thick and thin… thick-faced… thick-headed…

Thick is such an intriguing word. Saying it with some force seems to evoke some kind of unholy satisfaction, derived from a mild curling of the upper lip as in a sneer, the tongue sticking from between teeth like a wordless protest, and the –ick part expressing exactly what one might be feeling at the moment. THICK! A delightful little spear from the tongue.

“Thick,” mostly uttered in local parlance, may well have surfaced in the minds of cynical Pinoys during the last Senate hearings, where many of those watching no doubt felt everything from dismay to frustration to disbelief to a helpless disgust at the utter absurdity of our endless telenovela.

Is this what we have for leaders — those who manipulate the rules to suit their ends, and those who appear oblivious and pathetic when underhanded methods are possibly being employed under his watch. Are these people to whom we entrust our nation’s welfare, they who appear to condone wrongdoing in order to protect some kind of indeterminate brotherhood? There they are, snarling at each other and “unsettling” old scores, if there is such a thing.

Last Thursday’s Senate hearing, if it were a movie, would have been the sleeper hit of the season. People are always transfixed by unbelievable displays of most anything — emotion, bravado, ineptitude; you name it, people will watch it. But just when everyone thought they had had enough of the formulaic plots happening in Congress, out pops a retired Philippine National Police (PNP) official with a bagful of tricks, er, 106,000 euros and a truckload of shame.

Investigating chairman, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, articulated then what the general public has been feeling at this point — the impatience and brimming anger over the effortless slithering going on around us.

This is why her pithy remarks have made it to the airwaves, replayed over and over again for all they’re worth. People just love to hear “Don’t open your mouth unless you’re spoken to, that is the rule in the Senate!”

How we wish we could say it, too: Stop the blathering and do some actual work; stop the bickering and seek the truth!

While she certainly showed that she suffers no fools and liars in the course of that Senate hearing, it was obvious that, like always, nothing much would probably not come out of it. In fact, the general opinion seems to be that just like always, this explosive new caper would likely generate just a lot of bull, unless someone really pursues the truth with dogged determination.

See, when an issue crops up, lying seems to be an automatic reflex for some people in government. How many times have they gotten themselves in a fix by trying to fob off an accusation of misdemeanor? I still can’t forget the “real CD-fake CD” scenario where Malacañang tried to win the public favor by appearing to address the issue. Unfortunately it backfired. If I were that person holding the CDs trying to keep a straight face in front of the nation, I would have crawled off in shame even before that fiasco was uncovered.

When the Moscow mishap came out, what did we hear from some of these officials? The undeclared cash was a contingency fund for we cannot have our officials suffering from emergencies abroad. When it became obvious that no one was buying this story, and indeed when it was clarified that there is no such thing as a contingency fund, nor any reasonable explanation for the bloated budget for the PNP’s group of eight, we could almost hear the brakes, the rapid reverse and the bleated “I did not authorize it.” Tsk, tsk.

Just like that, angles shift and stories change. And just like that, declarations are made to sweeten the moment, followed by a deluge of the same declarations when they are found to be unrealistic or, worse, untrue.

This is why some of us are afraid of the planned two-day “debriefing” by the Bureau of Investigation of former Agriculture Undersecretary Joc-joc Bolante. And this is why we regret the waste of energy when feel-good, pa-pogi announcements are made, such as that billion-peso contingency fund of this administration supposedly to cushion the possible blows of the economic crunch abroad, knowing that such measures do not address our deep-seated problems and long-term goals as a nation.

It’s getting hard to breathe here, and I don’t mean the pollution. The air is thick with tension over an endless, shameless barrage of unsolved “mysteries” in the Philippines, piling on top of each other like stinking bodies in hell.

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