Beyond Janet Napoles

WITH AROUND 400,000 protesters descending on the Luneta – not to mention others turning out in fair numbers elsewhere around the country and some parts abroad – Monday felt, positively, like another day of great unburdening. The feeling was unmistakable in the brightened faces and strong voices in the crowds.

But “unburdening” connotes mere momentary relief, a feeling in which seemed lost the express high purpose of the undertaking – a vigorous prodding for sociopolitical reform.

Luneta, to be sure, wasn’t anything like its very mother, EDSA, that million-strong street vigil that cut down a dictator nearly a generation ago. Putting an end after all to 14 years of national constipation, EDSA may have brought relief worth savoring longer than a moment.

But not a moment longer, lest one be lost again in a state of denial and a false sense of health.

Indeed EDSA seems to provide such panacea that each time we billowed out we don’t even need to go out on the street and march our constipation away; we have only to summon EDSA’s memory to get our relief. In other words, EDSA lives only in a commemorative sense even in memory; it does not engage the consciousness so that whatever one thinks, says, and does as a citizen becomes inspired and informed by it, in that way taking it a step further each time, until it develops into a constant perspective of nationhood.

But no, EDSA has become good only for memorializing, as is all else that’s dead. For, really, what proof is there that it’s alive when scarce achievement, if at all, has been made on the order of such reform as it was hoped to bring? Patronage politics, for one thing, has not only remained but become further entrenched as the operating culture, a culture driven by a lust for wealth and power, a lust so obscene and consuming it has had to be fed by the conspiratorial crime of corruption, a crime in turn so pervasive it is committed with impunity: no one truly deserving has gone to jail for it.

Patronage, corruption, and impunity are precisely the conspiracy of cultures wasting this nation.

Yet, for all the complicit crime of denial, default, or indifference we are ourselves guilty of, Nature has remained so patient with us it has not stopped dropping us hints, hints that come broader, starker or otherwise more obvious each time, so that, for our own pathetic sakes, we may finally get them absolutely right.

And this time around, our all-too-obvious hint is Janet Napoles.

The character she is alleged to be personifies the very Laundromat that washes the traces of corruption off the money stolen from us: it separates the wash into two sets and loads each set onto its assigned conveyor – one kicks some of the wash back to its deliverer, the other kicks the rest straight through to the cleaners. But are we surprised?

It’s no secret that corruption cleaners abound, and that there’s nothing special about their operation, which takes little more than a lustful predilection to thievery and enlistment in the right conspiracy. It’s simply that Janet Napoles could not have escaped being singled out: her business, valued at P10 billion, and her connections, to an alleged six from the Senate and more than 20 from the House of Representatives, outclass the competition easily; moreover, she and her family like flaunting their scandalous wares.

But how much further beyond Napoles, the obvious and immediate provocation of Monday’s EDSA at the Luneta, have we looked, if at all? How much further beyond her and her fellow conspirators’ crime? How much further beyond the pork barrel indeed? Or are we in fact all done until the next attack of constipation?

EDSA could not have been intended to be lived in the itself obscene cycle of constipation and unburdening, but as an unending revolution toward ultimate redemption. And nothing less is expected of us the people of EDSA than to institutionalize ourselves as the true “boss” government, not just the humored one, and to visit upon our betraying surrogates, more decisively and consistently, punishment such as only rightfully ours to deal out by virtue of our natural ascendancy and numbers.

Also carried on Thursday (29 August 2013) by BusinessWorld.