“This practice has been going on for a long time, no matter who are in the Palace or in Congress.”
In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a dying Mercutio, caught in the middle of a family feud between the Montague and Capulet families in Verona, cursed them by saying “A pox on both your houses.”
Listening to the goings-on in the House of Representatives’ interminable committee hearings intended to pin down the once-untouchable Inday Sara Duterte, with questions clearly not in aid of legislation but in aid of demolition, the public probably wants to curse and wish a pox on your houses, except that in this benighted country, the pox must afflict so many of the decayed institutions of governance.
When you listen to the “honorable” members of the QUAD and the appropriations committees, you get intimations in your mind of a dozen or more Torquemadas each trying to impress their “king” with their inquisitorial approach to investigations.
Badgering and the use of innuendoes which make our “honorables” more “marites” than the neighborhood tsismosos and tsismosas leave an extremely bad taste, considering that most of them did go to elite schools and state universities.
In the plenary debates on the 2025 budget, they even disallowed members from interpellation, even as the small minority mostly peppered by the left were allowed to say their usual pieces. After all, the “script’ has been followed.
Of course there are members of the “upper” house who try to outdo them in their inquisitions in aid of legislation that does not even warrant a complete committee report, but as saving grace, the chairpersons of the committees are more circumspect.
Juxtapose all these antics of our “honorables” in supposed pursuit of “transparency and accountability” with the revelations of the amount of commissions that officials take from flood control projects, farm-to-market roads, bridges to nowhere, slope protection devices that collapse with every strong rain in this era of climate change, and weep.
Just listen to the upright mayor of the summer capital, Benjamin Magalong, a man for whom the appellation “honorable” is highly deserved. Based on experience and the revelations of insiders in the public works and other infrastructure implementing agencies, and the confessions of contractors whose profits have been squeezed bone-dry by our legislators, the amount left for the projects’ construction is a measly third of the appropriated amount.
It is the classic example of what Tagalogs call “ginigisa sa sariling mantika.”
And it’s been going on and on and on, no matter who the president is, no matter who the heads of the legislative chambers are.
Which is why “a pox on your houses” is most apropos, if only a significant number of people would throw that curse at them.
Our wartime president, Jose P. Laurel Sr. is quoted as having said that a dictatorship is the best form of government, provided an angel sits on the throne.
We tried it before, under the current president’s father, and look where it got us.
They tried it in Singapore, under Lee Kuan Yew, and look where it got them.
They were not angels both, but one abetted corruption; the other would have none of it.
And the saddest part seems to be the observation by many that our people have just resigned themselves to the state of the benighted nation.
In many cities, towns and provinces, buying votes is commonplace. I was surprised to know that in a province close to mine, the going rate went up to as much as 5,000 pesos per voter. Anyway, the man who lost deserves to lose, having a long history of plunderous malfeasance in his previous posts. Not that the man who outbid him will not try to recover within his first two years in office.
In rich LGUs who “can afford,” the recent pandemic allowed them to buy votes through every kind of ayuda, using their ample coffers taken out of taxpayers’ pockets.
And now the ayuda is institutionalized, by Congress mismo, beginning with the Pantawid Pamilya to the AKAP, to TUPAD, to AICS, and whatever other acronym our “honorables” can creatively conjure.
Now the current power-wielders are painting the previous power-wielders as black as black can be, as if they did not profit from the largesse the previous masters allowed them to cut from their slabs of pork.
A pox on all your houses, indeed.
If only, as Laurel wished, we could elect an angel to the throne. Or sometimes many wish we had a man on horseback, like a St. Michael the Archangel.
