October 13, 2003, The Philippine Star, Op-Ed, A matter of courage / Con-Ass is dead, by Teodoro C. Benigno,

October 13, 2003, The Philippine Star, Op-Ed, A matter of courage / Con-Ass is dead, by Teodoro C. Benigno,

"Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes." Thus spake J.M. Barrie in his May 1992 Rectorial Address at a time more courage in America was riding an errant wave. That time, the elder George Bush saw his phenomenal Gulf War popularity (90 percent) start heading for the laundry chute while a relatively unknown newcomer William Jefferson Clinton from Hope, Arkansas sniffed hungrily at the White House. For his failure to take America's war all the way to Iraq and Saddam Hussein after crushing Iraq's invasion force in Kuwait, President Bush paid dearly. A faltering US economy also did him in. Thus did a perceived lack of courage on the part of Bush open the doors of the White House to Bill Clinton. 

We bring up the subject of courage anew in this space because its absence appears to depict and define the spinelessness, the abject cowardice of Philippine politics today. Give me a politician with guts, and I'll show you a man. But, alas, there is none. What we see is rank opportunism, a thousand hands reaching for the teats of the golden cow, and other that a gilded pilgrimage to the casino and the Casbah. Those running or aspiring for the presidency are no better, even worse I would say, for their word – palabra de honor – is not worth a tinker's damn. 

Where is Sen. Panfilo Lacson? 

All alone in the Senate, seemingly all alone against the political Establishment, Ping Lacson in a twisted and tortured way personified Leonidas at Thermopylae. He would go down but not before he emptied all his cartridges, his bile, his venom, all the filth in his political stable against the Arroyos, husband and wife. Ping Lacson would be as the Jews at Masada. They never surrendered to the invading Roman legions. They fought, or failing that, they committed mass suicide. Which is what they did. The second to the last surviving Jew killed his companion before he turned the dagger on himself. That was courage, overpowering in its finality. 

Like Gringo Honasan before him, Ping Lacson, it seems has turned tail. Also a senator of the realm, Gringo acted the aggrieved and persecuted. He waggled his matinee mug on fugitive TV, let on he would never be caught alive. But in the end, the ringmaster of RAM showed his true self. He surrendered meekly, all the fight gone out of him, a feral, man-eating tiger turned tiger cub meowling for its mother’s milk. No wonder, the Oakwood mutineers who idolized Gringo, surrendered in less than a day. 

Had Gringo indeed possessed honor, he would have fought to the end, shot it out when cornered, died on his shield. 

So how about Ping Lacson? If his script has the ring of solid metal, he should now surge out in the open and dare the government to do its worst. If he refuses to surrender, then his broad-gauge weapons should explode as he fights it out to the finish. He won't win. He will end up bullet-riddled, his often placid choir-boy face blood, but he will have made his point. That whatever principles he had or though he had, he would fight for them to the end, like the Japanese soldiers at Iwo Jima who preferred death to surrender. 

I am afraid, Ping Lacson will not be able to deliver his third exposé against the Arroyos in the Senate as originally planned. Maybe this would have been a humdinger, a j"accuse, a block-buster with GMA shaved bald and brought to the London Tower. But as with most of the plots of mice and men, Ping Lacson was racing against time. The Supreme Court’s 8-4-2 decision on Kuratong Baleleng brought him up short. Now, he can be arrested and jailed anytime without bail. Lacson elected to disappear. Is he examining what is left of his options? In the end, will he saunter to OK Corral and fight, the same way Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster did? Will Lito Banayo and company pick up his remains and, like the Islamic intifada, parade his shroud as a martyr in the streets of Manila? 

I don't know. 

As in previous column (Lacson on the lam), I am inclined to believe the senator "with an attitude" has flown the coop. In a word, he has fled to another country. I don’t believe what others say that Mr. Lacson prefers to be arrested and imprisoned. From the confines of gaol, the senator will continue to wage his presidential campaign, use his prisoner’s grab like Gandhi’s loincloth, and play the role of innocent martyr to the hilt. He ain't like that. His character just ain't like that. This scenario requires epic courage, courage that climbs the cliff, tears down the skies. Ping Lacson just doesn't have this kind of courage. 

His has always been the truculence of a policeman, the practice of deceit to uphold his understanding of the law, the use of fear and presumably terror to cow the enemies of the state, the bark of the gun to settle thorny questions involving hardened criminals. Yeah, the dagger in the dark. 

Ping and his assigns had been enormously successful in blocking the normal glide of the Kuratong Baleleng massacre to the courts, in drawing the legal curtains down on the theft – allegedly by Ping's men – of about P70 million (including $2 million in cash) from the loot-bags of Wilson Soronda, Kuratong supreme whom they killed. Now that the Supreme Court has spoken "with finality", their last and desperate recourse is blacken the Court's name. This was tried by Erap Estrada and he dismally failed. Ping realizes this too will fail and there's nothing he can do to avoid arrest. 

And so, in my belief, he has escaped. There was also the fear that if he remained, "they" would get him, the same way Michael Ray Aquino and Mancao allegedly got Bobby Dacer and his driver Corbito. As the saying goes, he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.
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I hope I've seen the last of Speaker Jose de Venecia on TV telling 83 million Filipinos all our woes as a nation particularly corruption will disappear once we shift from the presidential system to parliamentary. That's an outright, outrageous lie. And what's more, Joe de V states the 2004 elections will be staged to elect a unicameral assembly. There will be a transition period of three years during which Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo or the elected president will remain only three years. After that, the party-system will prevail and a prime minister will take over the government's leadership. Did I get it right? 

Well to the first lie. Corruption will not disappear once the parliamentary setup gets going. There is massive corruption in Germany as well as in France and Japan, not to mention South Korea where two sons of former president Kim Dae Jung are in the dock for massive graft. And if you remember, only a year or so ago, Mr. Europe, Helmut Kohl, the once highly respected chancellor of a united Germany, got derricked on charged that he received uncounted millions of dirty deutschmarks under the table, Japan's economy, once the wonder of the world, imploded largely because cronyism and corruption held the day. And the banking system broke up under the overload of shady bad loans. And in France, ooh-la-la, senior ministers of the government were caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. Top corporate executives too went down the chute in million dollar scandals. One of them was caught hiding in Tagaytay. 

I can go on and on. But that is enough. These are some of the major countries long hooked to the parliamentary system. So Joe de V better stop pulling the parliamentary wool over our eyes. Now let me give him a lecture. The honesty, the integrity of a people and their government do not arise from just systemic change. They arise because of the culture that defines them, their religion, the ethos that determines their customs and habits, their educational system, their folklore, their dreams, their values, their patriotism, their determination to make good and succeed. This process takes decades, generations, even centuries to mature. The European parliamentary setup was the result of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. The breakup of the feudal system, the massive migrations of peoples from country to city, as capitalism brought a sea-change to Europe's way of life, led to the formation of hundreds of social and political groups. Eventually, these groups become the foundation for the formation of political parties. It was from these that the parliamentary system burgeoned. The party system, each defined by a different ideology, was king. 

Of course, the parliamentary system has some advantages, as does the presidential system. 

Sure, why not? But let's not proceed with roller-coaster haste as Joe de V urges. Let's listen seriously to those, including GMA and Raul Roco, and many others, who propose the establishment of a Constitutional Convention through elections. The nation is fraught with problems, and it's all we can do to survive, to stay alive. This obscene push for Con-Ass only serves to muddle the situation. And the selling of Con-ass is no different from a conclave of snake-oil merchants seeking to gull the citizenry with the phony preposterous magic of a snake's ooze. 

So vicious has it been that full-page ads have been resorted to, advocating the Senate's obliteration. And only because the Senate refuses to join the House's hysterical drive for Con-Ass. One can only guess why. The advocates of Con-Ass and parliamentary will be the same men and women who will lord it over the nation once they get their way. 

They are on the wrong side of history.