Mercado's Column

Viewpoint : Abattoir ethics

Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service

"WHY should we believe you?" GMA Network's Maki Pulido lobbed that question at the improbably named Michaelangelo Zuce, self-confessed bagman. That left the Senate's "star witness" on alleged 2004 election fraud "tongue-tied," columnist Marichu Villanueva chuckled.

"Skewer bastards with tough questions" is counsel that editors drill into cub reporters. The probing query can help sift fact from spin and reality from propaganda. They curb lynch-mob journalism.

They're also indispensable for a country steeped in what Sen. Miriam Santiago calls "slaughterhouse politics."

Another bagman, this time from the "jueteng" illegal lottery probe, confirms this fact. Richard Garcia wailed that opposition legislators "coached him and other witnesses" on how to link the President's family to jueteng.

His covert drillmasters in perjury, he claimed, included Senators Panfilo Lacson, Aquilino Pimentel and Jinggoy Estrada and Rep. Ronaldo Zamora. "The twists and turns" … of this case have started to loop themselves around Lacson," an Inquirer editorial notes. "He now has to extricate himself."

But senators like Jose Laurel, Claro Recto, Lorenzo Tañada and Raul Roco never had to extricate themselves. They never rigged testimony. Aside from intellectual stature and integrity, they had that exquisite moral sense we Filipinos call "delicadeza" [sense of propriety].

Far too many of their successors unfortunately work by ethics of the abattoir. And "slaughterhouse morals" sap institutional credibility.

The Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph Estrada kleptocracies devalued the presidency. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's governance, stripped of values other than what is expedient, eroded it further.

Rodrigo Perez Jr., Hilario Davide and Christian Monsod were exemplary Commission on Elections stewards. But Luzviminda Tancangco and Virgilio Garcillano debased that.

The "Craven Eleven" senators sealed the second envelope in Estrada's impeachment. Dwarfs like Tito Sotto, Gringo Honasan and Lito Lapid replaced the likes of Lorenzo Sumulong, Oscar Ledesma or Emmanuel Pelaez. Thus, we're saddled with a diminished Senate over the years.

"The whole lot lack credibility, not for want of competence, but of morals," Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture's Melba Padilla Maggay writes in Patmos Features. "Our leaders have so alienated themselves from the people by their utter lack of integrity."

People are roused by today's moral rot but not enough to pour out into the streets in massive numbers, Maggay observes in "Ambiguities and the Search for a Moral Center in Governance." In today's crisis, "no line in the sand bids us to take sides with the resolute force" of earlier emergencies.

Left, Right and religious groups, like those of Bro. Eddie Villanueva, forge tactical alliances without agreement on aims. These ambiguities shut off clear-cut responses to positions staked by hardline partisans.

Most of today's responses are "relics from failed social experiments" -- coups, martial law, a junta or badly contrived imitations of "people power" -- Maggay notes.

People reject murky plots of the ruling elite. They're "wary about calls for extra-constitutional means of transferring power." One finds a "growing consensus to work within the disciplines of our constitutional framework."

Yet, today's impasse could open a new way out of obsolete response boxes, Maggay thinks. We must link to "that spiritual center out of which our people make most of their decisions, including politics."

"Our indigenous culture is such that people get roused only where the battle between good and evil rages. We resonate best with issues that connect with the depths of our spiritual moorings as a people. Politics must touch that core of values… [seen] now and again, in surprising displays of momentary solidarity."

She cites "the calming effect" of the Catholic Bishops Conference statement as an example. "The opposition was reduced to mumbling in corners, even as they whip up yet another wave of protests. The middle forces were quietly nudged into deeper reflection."

"Not even in Latin America, where countries are also predominantly Catholic, has the Church such authority and power to influence a nation's political temper," she adds.

Analysts claim this is partly due to "residues of the late Cardinal Sin's forceful moral leadership at critical times" and the Church's "almost medieval hold on centers of power." Maggay disagrees. "This influence is rooted in the very character of our people, at its core deeply and unabashedly spiritual," she writes. "This is why our prayer rallies also morph into political meetings."

"This culture produces folk heroes and heroines that fuse within themselves the political and the spiritual," like Hermano Pule in the mid-1800s or Cory Aquino in 1986. They have power when they give voice to what the people sense to be the Santong Boses. "Our millenarian movements call that the Spirit."

Priests or politicians lose that potency when seen to lack "malinis na loob," or selfless service. Religious leaders lose their following when they shift from prophecy to politicking.

"Today, as in previous crises, there is such a deep longing among our people for a moral center in governance," Maggay points out. The Arroyo government's future hangs to "the extent to which it regains credibility by fulfilling this expectation."

Neither will the opposition meet that yearning by a treadmill of seamy bagmen, cadged from the abattoir -- and coached by covert drillmasters to perjure.