Mad justice
Edith Sitwell once said that the public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth. Maybe, this is true in a land where truth fluctuates along with the dollar rate. On the rare occasion that someone stumbles on the truth, people kick it to a corner, pick up their spilled umbrellas and rush off to the MRT.
But in a country with very few truths, at least it’s easy to enumerate what’s left. Traffic is terrible. The government is generally corrupt. Chickenjoy will always trump the McChicken meal. And the justice secretary is a moron and a madman, not a few suspect.
Consider the evidence.
On the day Fernando Poe Jr.’s widow Susan Roces launched a tirade demanding that President Macapagal-Arroyo step down, the good secretary was asked by the media on possible charges against Roces. Raul Gonzalez, with his typical smug sneer, called Roces a “griping widow” whose late husband was clearly not destined to be president. However, he forgave her moment of weakness, after all, she was “too beautiful to be sent to jail.”
On former President Cory Aquino’s renewed call for Ms Arroyo to resign, Gonzalez commented that instead of trying to fix the country’s political situation, the former president should fix her controversial daughter’s life first. When asked whether the administration is monitoring the former president, Gonzalez said, “I think there is no need to monitor Cory Aquino because she’s also busy monitoring her own daughter.”
On the Subic Base rape case, Gonzalez proclaimed his biases from the beginning, and went so far as to imply that young Nicole “imagined” the rape. Even before the case went to trial, Gonzalez had said he wanted the charges against three of the four accused to be downgraded, but that he felt constrained to include them in the rape charge to “appease the mob.”
On the University of the Philippines, he decided, suddenly and without any seeming stimulus, to upbraid the institution for producing “dissenters and naked runners.” These same protesters, he claimed, were ungrateful whelps wasting taxpayers’ money with no sense of duty to the State and with little conception of national interest.
On Julia Campbell’s murder, he said she was careless for somehow managing to get bludgeoned to death and buried in a shallow mountain grave. Gonzalez said Campbell might have become careless and could have courted trouble when she decided to take a walk in a remote mountain area all alone. “She was a little irresponsible,” he said.
On the allegation that he bribed 18 Iloilo village chiefs with an offer of P10,000 each if they would deliver a 12-0 sweep for Team Unity candidates in their respective barangays, he claimed it was not bribery, only a prize. “As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t done anything wrong.” He also said he could afford to back his promise because it would “just be equal to one harvest from my wife’s poultry farm.” He was not running, he said, it was merely election strategy. There was probably going to be some nut out there who would file a case against him. “There are many nuts in this country; more than the coconuts there are other nuts.”
Comelec claims that the mere promise of financial compensation is already a violation of Sec. 261 of the Omnibus Election Code. The section states that a person is guilty of vote-buying or vote-selling if he/she “gives, offers or promises money or anything of value” to any entity to vote for or against any candidate in the elections.
Yet the Palace sees nothing wrong with Gonzalez’s latest escapade. “It’s up to him if he has resources. I don’t see why we should fault him for that,” Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said Wednesday at his press briefing. “That is an exercise of political leadership on the part of Secretary Gonzalez.”
It is easier to believe Gonzalez is a madman, and allow him to shoot off his mouth to a pack of amused reporters while the piles of paperwork that seem to grow higher every day surround him. But, as Sigmund Freud says, from error to error, one discovers the whole truth. And contrary to all evidence, I do not believe that Raul Gonzalez is insane. There is a method to his madness, an almost bizarre recklessness so ridiculous that it is impossible to believe it is real. Every statement he makes revolts the country, and still he keeps going, without care or consequence. And as I do not believe the opposition will stoop low enough to put its hired gun in the justice secretary’s office, I believe that Gonzalez, hard as it is to believe, has some use to the government. His daily insanities make us so used to such profound violations that anything and everything the government does seems, if not acceptable, necessary evils.
Kennedy once said that the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. The myth that persists with the continued impunity of men like Gonzalez is this: that the government will always be able to take care of its own, that right and wrong have no room in the face of vulgar power and that justice is dependent on who holds the scales.
In his Business Mirror column, whose publication offers great entertainment every Wednesday, the good secretary wrote:
“It is true that we are only human and are often misunderstood by others, who like us, are influenced by our strengths and fallibilities. The words we utter are dictated by the truths we wish to convey without garnishing it to cater to the idiosyncrasies of others. We cannot help the way we project ourselves and this, too, is interpreted by others according to what they are prepared to believe.
“To say what to our minds is the truth is not arrogance, nor is our direct way of saying the truth a form of disrespect for others. Reality bites and truth hurts, but there is no substitute for saying it like it is. We think and act according to what we believe to be the truth, not according to what others want us to think and do.”
If our justice secretary were indeed as honest as he claims to be, if he says it like it is, and if the words he utters are dictated by the truths he wishes to convey, not garnished “to cater to the idiosyncrasies of others,” and if he thinks and acts irrelevant of everyone’s interpretation and independent of social norms, then from all his words and actions, it would be justifiable to say that he belongs far away from the rest of humanity, lest he decide to act independently and pick up an M16 and start the next Holocaust.
Such a man, without any conception of right and wrong beyond his own, without any understanding of individual rights and human dignity, with no regard at all for public perception or basic morality, and who claims, with all pomp and arrogance that this is who he is, is not fit to be among men, much less judge men.
