Trivialized

Nowhere else in the world does this happen: soldiers under trial for mutiny walk out of the court; with a band of armed supporters take over a hotel to use it as a bastion for a provisional government; call upon the people to rise up and overthrow the duly-constituted authority… and then claim that the entire exercise was covered by the rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.

That might seem absolutely ridiculous. But that is exactly the line of defense taken by the lawyers of Antonio Trillanes and his cabal of clowns.

If this line of defense is upheld, it will be like declaring an open season for every moron, every thrill-seeker and every mentally disjointed character to declare a revolutionary government whenever he feels like it, taking the long odds that hordes of other idiots might rally around his makeshift stronghold until a new regime comes to life.

It is as if Trillanes and his cabal of clowns intentionally wanted to drain the idea of political upheavals of the elements of solemnity and heroism that were once essential. It used to be that when people mounted a revolution, they were prepared to die for an idea. At the Peninsula Hotel last week, a cabal of clueless clowns mounted a revolution without an idea.

It was, they would now want us to believe, nothing more than a disastrous stunt aiming for nothing more than grabbing media attention. Now they are using that as their legal defense.

No one elevates cluelessness to such high art as Teofisto Guingona.

He marched with Trillanes down Makati Avenue as the latter called on baffled pedestrians to join his revolution, like a street hawker trying to peddle some piece of junk. He sat beside Trillanes and Danny Lim as they called on the people to rise up and support their leadership. He remained with the duo as they barricaded themselves — mostly with media people — to resist police efforts to recover the hotel.

Now Guingona wants us to believe he had no idea what was happening, that he was merely an innocent bystander caught up in the swirl of events. That is exactly his legal defense against charges of rebellion.

Given his advanced age, that might be believable. But given his recent political stunts, that claim can only be swallowed with a mountain of salt.

This guy has demonstrated extreme proclivity towards ridiculous political stunts. He has associated with the shrillest political characters in his sharp descent from statesman to stuntman.

Most of those shrill characters were at the hotel with him through that day of national disgrace. Does Guingona want us to believe that the presence at the Peninsula of such characters as Bishop Labayen, Francisco Nemenzo, Herman Tiu Laurel, Argee Guevarra, JV Bautista, and (just to complete the cast) that man with the atrocious wig was merely coincidental? Does he think we will buy the proposition that their presence there was just an unhappy coincidence?

Guingona must have such low regard for our intelligence as a people that he does not at all squirm as he insults us so blatantly with his flimsiest of alibis. The least he could do is to maintain his stance as a ranting old man ready to die for any obscene cause.

The Peninsula incident, as I said in the previous column, prostituted the notion of a people’s uprising. But the fact that this incident is such an indecent caricature of armed rebellion does not make it any less of a crime.

Nowhere in the law books does it say that total lack of class and complete ineptitude constitutes mitigating factors for a crime. A clumsy burglar who poses before surveillance cameras during the conduct of a burglary is no less guilty.

The Peninsula incident disgraces not only those responsible for pulling this irresponsible stunt. It disgraces the whole nation. It is a morbid assault on our people’s understanding of institutions and republican processes that reinforces the global suspicion that we are an unsteady people easily swayed by tin soldiers, two-cent demagogues and madmen of every sort, swinging wooden swords atop malnourished donkeys.

Thursday was a sad day for the Republic. A cabal of clowns, by what they did that day, demonstrated the very low esteem they held for our people’s commitment to proper democratic behavior and civic discipline. As a consequence, we have been restored to our usual standing as the world’s laughing stock.

Yet, in the aftermath, there now appears to be an effort to trivialize what happened. The trivialization has turned contagious.

It began when journalists at the hotel, shortly after that crude facsimile of a rebellion was crushed, complained about the way they were treated. The next day, driven by an egotistical sense of their place in the national scheme of things, the journalists had made themselves the story — thereby allowing the insane rebellion to melt into the background.

One broadcast network lost all sense of civic duty as it refused to hand over copies of raw footage of the event simply because they were “commanded” to do so. Civic duty requires every citizen, when they are in possession of potential evidence to a crime committed, to voluntarily cooperate with the authorities without having to be asked.

And then there is the Senate, this once grand and now misshapen institution of our once responsible democracy. Guided much more by factional than national interest, the senators refuse to discipline one of their own that 11 million Filipinos mistakenly elected to his seat.

After the day of national disgrace, the noisiest demagogues now want the police investigated with greater urgency than the perpetrators of what used to be a serious political crime. The tragedy inflicted by a small bunch of rascals becomes more profound by the day.