Gauntlet

I am really, genuinely, enthusiastically, achingly awaiting the spectacle of a polygraph test being performed on the “witnesses” the Senate has managed to collect for its interminable browbeating sessions.

It is, after all, the last stunt that could keep public interest in this whole exercise sustainable. We are all waiting to see the gadgetry that will be used in this exercise and the questions that might be asked — apart, of course, from the names and birthdates of the “witnesses.”

We could all use a lesson or two in science. Or in political stupidity.

At the very least, it will be welcome respite from the tedious trial-by-ordeal the senators inflict in those who haplessly wander into their flytrap of a session hall. It is like that dreaded method of fraternity hazing called The Gauntlet: the poor neophyte, blindfolded and sometimes bound, is made to run through a line of “masters” who rain down blows on him without fear of accountability for whatever sort of jab they do.

The beauty of this polygraph gambit is that there is so much downside to it and so little upside. In plain language, it is a ploy that would most likely blow up in the Senate’s face.

I wonder if Sen. Mar Roxas thought through the option well enough. Or if he was just overwhelmed by the media opportunities of the moment.

Consider this: the test is really all about what Lozada and Madriaga said and what San Miguel might have not said. The test puts Lozada and Madriaga up for a possible sin of commission for what they said. That is called perjury in legalese.

The test, on the other hand, puts San Miguel up for possible sin of omission. That is for, at worst, not admitting what he likely knows little about. It could also be for not admitting what he really knows nothing about.

By saying nothing, San Miguel did not lie. By saying too much, Lozada and Madriaga might have the alarm bells in the polygraph test ringing all the time.

I hope the Senate makes very sure this stunt is handled by qualified professionals. None of the questions laced with malice and the insinuation-laden remarks we get so much of during the hearings. None of the hectoring, the browbeating and the buttonholing we have been treated to in generous excess by senators playing to the camera — and not to the public’s edification.

Last week’s session featuring Leo San Miguel brought the Senate hearings to a new low.

Everything, it seems, started on the wrong foot. To begin with, the “surprise witness” was more surprised than anybody else that he was the surprise witness.

The weekend before, a major daily headlined another name as the “surprise witness.” That daily had to issue an apology eventually. My sources say the wild story emanated from the camp of Sen. Lacson, who does seem obsessed with adding new subplots to a telenovela that has begun to bore many.

At any rate, the senators seemed to have set their minds about what San Miguel should say. In the preceding sessions, the man was vilified by casual accusations by the senators, caricatured as a member of some sort of imagined mafia cutely nicknamed “the greedy group.”

It was apparent the senators have become fixated in their own narrative of what happened. On the basis of that conjured narrative, they expected everyone else and all of reality to conform to that storyline.

When San Miguel did not conform to that conjured narrative, insisting he was merely a technical consultant (and not the designer of the deal), the senators began beating up their own “surprise witness.” They cut him off when he tried to explain things. They imputed their own malicious meanings into every word he said. In a grossly unfair attempt to influence the way the public understood a fiasco of a session, Sen. Lacson told his own “surprise witness” that he had been “lying the whole day.”

For 12 long hours, the senators took turns abusing their own “surprise witness.” They probed into all his business affairs, demanded to see his tax return and tried to find every imagined inconsistency in what the witness said.

After 12 hours enduring verbal abuse, cruel insinuations and malicious twisting of what he actually said, San Miguel remained unshaken. In the end, it was the senators who appeared shaken, not the witness they were trying to shake.

In the days that followed, it was the senators who were desperately trying to save face, not the witness who was slandered in his face by powerful and imperious senators of the land. It was Lacson who was trying to peddle the absurd story that their own “surprise witness” was on the phone with the President while half the Senate was bearing down on him.

There is no hint of statesmanship in the way the senators are scrambling to save face after all their drumbeating produced a let-down of a hearing. Now they want to summon the President’s confidential staff: as if to subject the President of the Republic, by proxy, to be berated and insulted by insolent senators.

This is political warfare by the crassest and crudest methods.

Nay, it is vain politicking by politicians blinded by ambition, driven by delusions about insurrections that will install the undeserving in power and craving for anything that could be used to bludgeon the existing power arrangement.

But our people are a lot wiser than may be granted by purveyors of the politics of hate. The shriller the tone of the rabble-rousers, the more suspicious the public becomes of the actual political agenda in play.