Was it really Vox Populi?

I saw two abbreviated footages of a Senate legislative investigation on the now infamous “flood control projects scandal.” While I was listening attentively to a senator engaged in a rather animated repartee, Alexander Pope (1688 –1744) came to my memory. Who was Alexander Pope? He was a prominent English poet and exacting satirist who lived in the era called Enlightenment Period. His literary style was described as “heroic couplet” of which he was acknowledged as a master, although honestly speaking, I know nothing about that style. The Englishman was, in a modern terminology, a PWD, whose reported formal education was somehow limited due to his Roman Catholic faith. What actually pushed me to read about Pope during my college years, half a century ago, was his perceived insightful translation of Homer. It was Homer, by the way, who described Helen of Troy as with a face that “launched a thousand ships.

What did I remember of Alexander Pope in relation to the utterance of a lawmaker in the senate hearing?  In his Essay on Criticism, Pope said “a little learning is a dangerous thing." This line means superficial or incomplete knowledge that leads a person to be overconfident and worse, incorrect.

The very first video footage of the senate investigation that I saw had Senator Erwin Tulfo, doing interpellation. With his booming voice, Senator Tulfo said “Wala po tayong pakialam sa batas. Sometimes you bend the law to please the people.” In my earlier column, I dared to translate the first part of the senator’s Tagalog declaration as “we do not mind the law.” I was shocked to hear a legislator of the republic having the gall to tell us, the citizens, not to mind the law. How can a senator, who is a member of the legislative department vested with the power to make laws, ever proclaim that he does not mind the law? When someone (like Sen Tulfo) does not mind a law, it only means that, in his knowledge, there is s?ch a law but that he simply disregards it. Obviously, Senator Tulfo, in the mentality of Alexander Pope, possesses a little learning on the concept of law and his limited learning is a dangerous thing. In this case, he is situated in a position worse than a person who professes not to know the law. If ignorance of the law excuses no one from compliance therewith, more so, a person who knows a law but disregards it, he must be sanctioned.

The second footage was no less horrifying. It showed Tulfo tangling verbally with Senator Robinhood Padilla, in a kind of English-Tagalog debate. I sensed that Senator Padilla, rode on the tsunami of criticisms raised by thousands of citizens against Tulfo’s suggestion to disregard the law which to me was his misunderstanding of the profound legal theorem. The senator/actor correctly scored the earlier “bend the law” language of Tulfo. Then the English-speaking senator mumbled the Latin clause “vox populi suprema est lex” thinking that he could steam roll over the Tagalog-speaking legislator. Relying on the principle that the voice of the people is the voice of God is a good argument. Really, Tulfo might have successfully silenced Padilla in that session but it is very sad to note that his narrative however succeeded to show what Pope said about a little learning being a dangerous thing.