The Villaruel episode / Will sanity prevail today?

Was he tetched in the head? Was he mad? Was it a temporary fit of insanity? Was it part of another hidden plot to destabilize the government? Or was it the genuine agony of a man who had given up on his country? We don’t know. All we know is that Panfilo Villaruel, former Air Transportation Office chief, pitched forward lifeless after he was riddled with bullets at the very top of the NAIA control tower. We also know he and a companion had seized control of the tower with arms, explosives and hand grenades early Saturday morning. We further know he told GMA-7’s Arnold Clavio he was ready to die, "to offer my life" in behalf of 82 million Filipinos because graft and corruption were everywhere and the country was beyond redemption.

Absent the conspiracy theory – a larger plot – the man was a patriot.

But if he was a patriot, Villaruel must have flipped. Surely he did not think his death would ignite the Filipino to revolt or take to the streets or even rise in outraged passion. As Napoleon said "The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means". Or as George Santayana said, madness goes with suffering and both "can set themselves no limit". But whatever it was, Villaruel’s death was a call to arms, however poignant and powerless it seemed at the time. It was also a bareknuckled symptom – the drama of it all – that Philippine society was sick, very sick. It is terminally ill maybe, and its last gasp could be brought around by the presidential elections next year.

This columnist had felt like Villaruel more than three years ago. We wrote a blizzard of columns that our society, our system, and our way of life were beginning to break up. Most of the time, I felt isolated. Many readers said, even friends of mine, that I was too depressed, that I could only see the glass half-empty and not half-full. But as events came and went, as poverty vomited its ugliness everywhere, as crime stood over the city like Godzilla, as graft and corruption soared into a mushroom cloud of utter depravity, as the leadership fiddled while the nation burned, more and more people saw and recognized my side of the issue.

And now Villaruel. How many more Villaruels will have to immolate their lives in the emptiness of an airport control tower before the nation wakes up?

He probably knew he was going to be killed. He was up against the Airport Security Guard which would not allow him to mess with international flights coming and departing. Otherwise, the Philippines would be blackballed, otherwise no international carrier would risk landing its passenger and cargo planes in the Philippines. Even then, there was a maybe. Maybe the ASG should have captured Villaruel alive so he could be grilled thoroughly. But again maybe, the ASG was not taking any risk. Villaruel after all was loaded with explosives and he could have blown up the Tower.

It was obvious Villaruel was media-savvy. He gave interviews right and left and wanted the whole world to know about his plight. He landed in CNN all right, and international media gobbled up his adventure. He vent out all his frustrations, accused the government of "killing my program" to develop the Defiant 300, a small wooden aircraft.

And yet, I find it hard to summarily dismiss the idea of a wider plot, a larger scheme involving some active and retired military officers. Something must have misfired. As the Oakwood mutiny last July 27 misfired in a multitude of clumsy miscues. At least, Villaruel did Oakwood one better. He was ready to die, and he died with his boots on. In less than 24 hours, the Oakwood mutineers turned tail, and marched back to their barracks with their tails looped between their legs. Antonio Trillanes, who looked like a William Holden daredevil during the mutiny, afterwards got to look like Wimpy Fuentebella.

I think we have entered a very dangerous period.

When self-anointed messiahs begin to abound, the nation is in peril. These are no different from vultures circling the sky when they smell blood and sense a fat-bellied beast below is staggering and about to die. Talk will wildfire that this or that coup is in the offing, that many military men are restless, are fed up with politicians, and would like nothing better than to take over Malacañang. The extreme Left is strangely non-astir. It is the time for massive demonstrations and there are none. Civil society, so muscled up, so sure of itself before and during EDSA II, is now bereft of leaders, many of whom have sold out to Malacañang.

I am afraid this is the calm before the storm. So watch out.

* * *

Today, November 10 is supposed to be make or break. Congress will decide whether to transmit Articles of Impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide to the Senate or freeze the ball or agree to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s covenant. Then it may just die down.

My forecast, or the feeling in my bones, remains the same. Congress will back off one way or another. The Brat-Pack in the house under the aegis of Danding Cojuangco’s Nationalist People’s Coalition, will zip its big, deformed mouth now that it senses it has become the prime target of national wrath. Whatever Speaker Jose de Venecia declares about protecting the "political and territorial integrity" of the House, he too will turn tail for fear he will be pilloried by the mob. While the Brat-Pack has become the national villain, Joe de V has become the national toothache. He is hurting badly.

I can’t imagine, I just can’t imagine the Articles of Impeachment reaching the Senate today, and almost instantly the Senate constituting itself into a court to try Hilario Davide. That would be a scenario so ugly, so revolting, so aberrant, so obscene, so utterly destructive of the republic. It would be the Spanish Inquisition all over again. It would be the Marquis de Torquemada all over again. It would be the hiss of the serpent all over again, the bite of the cobra, innocent people summarily executed because they were reportedly guilty of betraying Catholic dogma.

It would be the Terror period of the French Revolution of 1789 all over again when Virtue was beheaded by the guillotine because only a few power-mad Jacobins decided who was guilty, who was innocent. It would be the burning of the Witches of Salem all over again. Every woman who disbelieved current scripture was a witch and was incinerated at the stake.

Is that what we have come to? This man Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide is probably the most respected and admired public official in the Philippines. If he is impeached and tried, former Senate president Jovito Salonga is right. It is the business dealings of just one man, Eduardo (Danding) Cojuangco, that has driven Congress to impeach Mr. Davide, not lofty principles having to do with the integrity of the House. We are a nation gone mad, inviting the whole world to watch as, like the Spanish Inquisition, our Congress – House and Senate – picks its collective teeth with a golden toothpick while driving a dagger into the exposed breast of Hilario Davide.

And the supreme irony of it all is that our Congress, of the three so-called independent organs of the government, is known to be the most corrupt. It is a prehensile monster with an insatiable appetite for power and money. Again Jovy Salonga is right when, asked during a talk show whether GMA did the right thing by posturing herself as "neutral" in the impeachment imbroglio, he testify replied: When truth and justice are at stake, no president of the Philippines can be neutral.

Congress boasts it alone has the "power of the purse" and therefore the "power of oversight". That is carabao manure. The purse? What is the purse really but the money of the citizenry collected by the government in taxes and other tariffs and fiscal burdens. All to be ploughed into the national budget so the heart of the government can tick. Its arteries throb. So the House decides the budget. So what? The money or monies allocated are the people’s money, not the House’s. In fact, the House gets a lot of this money in pork barrel, congressional initiatives and other smelly, questionable deals. The power of the purse is not theirs. It is the people’s. As we have repeatedly said in this space, the power of oversight must have as a priority the people’s power to investigate how congressmen spend their pork barrel. How much of the pork goes into their pockets?

We do hope that today sanity prevails.

When such pillars of national virtue as former President Corazon Aquino and Jaime Cardinal Sin, not to mention icons of constitutional law like Jovy Salonga, extol Hilario Davide, and of course virtually the whole of civil society, it is time Congress take a good look at itself. It will discover in the mirror the capacity of the crocodile, the twitchy hobbledehoy manners of the baboon, the bestial hilarity of the hyena. So I don’t see what Speaker Jose de Venecia means when he talks about the "political and territorial integrity" of Congress. What integrity, in God’s name?

Beat a retreat, Your Honors. You have no other choice.