Rhinoceroses

Trust Miriam Santiago to make the language of our politics more colorful. Perhaps even too colorful, too intensely vivid, that the proper proportion of things becomes lost in the overdose of verbiage.

In her latest outburst, she lined up a slew of executive officials putting out “infomercials” and mowed them down mercilessly with linguistic excess. She condemned them all without mitigation and described them as “rhinoceroses.”

Even the thickest-skinned creatures of the African jungles might have cringed at the carnage. This was political mass murder at the extreme, a spectacle of oratorical slaughter that played to the gallery — and very likely won her more name-recall points than all the paid ads she claims to have outraged her.

Miriam is wise. She demonstrates here that one does not need a ton of cash to win media mileage. All one needs is a well-stocked vocabulary, something that a solid UP education used to provide as a matter of course before a bout with misguided nationalism impoverished our verse.

There is danger in over-relying on linguistic prowess, however. We are awed by the adjectives but lose sight of the underpinning issues.

Remember when she made inter-chamber courtesy obsolete by describing congressmen as “fungus-faced”? Does anyone today recall the issue at hand that caused that rhetorical inflammation?

For the life of me, I could not now remember what the fuss was about then that forced this fuming female to call her fellows fungus-faced. I like the alliteration nevertheless.

Today, I nearly forget why otherwise respected men serving national agencies and local governments are being called rhinoceroses.

I believe it had something to do with a noticeable increase in the volume of infomercials touting the achievements of some public agencies and local governments. That noticeable increase, it will have to be admitted, positively correlates with personalities perceived as having electoral designs for themselves. But that is mere perception, however, unlikely to be judicially acceptable as telling evidence until and unless they actually file candidacies.

I also vaguely recall that a week or so ago, Sen. Miriam Santiago ordered these infomercials stopped. That was odd, I thought, because the separation of powers usually prevents a legislator from expropriating executive power — unless our form of government has discretely evolved into some novel form of senatorial tyranny.

If she had any discomfort about the infomercials at issue, Sen. Santiago might have quietly stepped back into her inalienable role as an ordinary citizen and filed a taxpayer suit at the proper venue. That would have completely averted accusations that the Senate, funded by the taxpayers as well, is being used in pursuit of a personal vendetta or as festive staging ground for a reelection bid.

Remember how, when she was President of the Republic, Corazon Aquino decided to step back into her role as a citizen in order to file suit against a journalist who had offended her by wrongly claiming she hid under her bed at the height of a coup attempt? That was propriety at its best. No publicly-funded post was used to intimidate the judiciary or any other agency that might be called upon to act on a personal grievance.

I likewise vaguely recall that a Senate hearing had already been called to look into the matter of the infomercials. That hearing was poorly attended both by the senators as well as the executive officials who did not wish to be dummies for Miriam Santiago’s carnival.

The news reports about that particular hearing highlighted the rather tense back and forth between Sen. Loren Legarda and Vice-President Noli de Castro. Here was another lady senator with an axe to grind over a previous electoral defeat.

It was that tense back and forth that was highlighted because Santiago’s axe was idled by the absence of what many of us believe is the real intended victim of this exercise in senatorial wrath: DILG Secretary Ronaldo Puno. Santiago blames Puno for masterminding her defeat in the 1992 presidential contest, an event that an entire new generation of Filipinos has no memory of.

Santiago’s crusade against the infomercials has so far elicited a COA report detailing public information expenses accruing to the taxpayers. That COA report must have disappointed the lady senator. It shows that, over the last two years, the DILG spent the least in public information campaigns. This particular agency spent well under a million pesos in paid ads during this period — a pity really.

The ads that call public attention to the presence of women and children protection desks in every municipality and the beefing up of our police by 3,000 annually, it turns out, was paid for by private do-gooders through the Friends of Ronnie (FOR). These infomercials, even as they feature the agency head as it normally happens, also improve public appreciation of the improvements in our law-enforcement and raise the morale of our enforcers.

Instead of praising this as an exemplary instance of private sector support for public sector goals, Santiago now wants this classified as an instance of graft. That is a stretch to prove in any decent court. It will also serve as an unintended deterrent for other forms of private sector support extended to public agencies.

If, for instance, a business group donates a direly needed fire truck to a local government whose head might seek reelection, will this now be condemned as an instance of graft?

In her eagerness to settle old personal scores, Sen. Santiago might be causing more harm than good in the long run — even if this improves her own name-recall ratings.