Mere folly or creeping dictatorship?

 Transparency is a word greatly misunderstood by many. One way of misunderstanding it is to assign wanton openness as among its meanings. Another way is to ascribe criminal intent or wrongdoing to privacy.

 Unfortunately for this country, it never knows when it has a good thing. It never knows when to stop. Heady from the triumph of transparency in the impeachment trial of chief justice Renato Corona, the Aquino government is plunging headlong into opening up everything.

 Aquino has signed into law a measure that would now allow the government to open up everyone's bank account on mere suspicion of illegality, never mind if the owner of the account has not been informed or given his consent.

 And the linchpin for this rape of privacy? Why, that corrupted word called transparency, of course. If bank accounts can now be looked into on mere suspicion and without consent from the owner, what rights are there left to protect the citizens? Who determines what suspicion means?

 Will it be the privacy of correspondence that will fall next? More ominously, will a knock on the door in the dead of night not be far away, given the mindset that allowed the demise of bank secrecy laws?

 Senator Joker Arroyo, one of the staunchest defenders of human rights, a fact underscored by his closeness to Cory Aquino, the mother of the sitting president, has described actuations by the administration as a creeping dictatorship.

 Slowly, by small increments of constitutional guarantees either surreptitiously taken away or brazenly snatched by force, Filipinos are losing their liberties, courtesy not of some malevolent foreign invader but of their own government.

 The thing about failing to understand the real meaning of transparency is that those who misunderstand it completely tend to be the most zealous and articulate in applying its wrongful meaning to others.

 Take the case of the selection process for the next chief justice. Nowhere in the civilized democratic world is the process of interviewing applicants and nominees now open to media coverage than only in the Philippines.

 This is a gross misapplication of a wrongful meaning of transparency. Just for the sake of being open, even if such openness is neither required or of any real help to the process, the interviews will be open to the public, even to those clueless about what is going on.

 As a result, the supposed underlying motivation to remove Corona by any and all means, which is to restore respect and dignity to the judiciary, cannot but be compromised by the media access as an unintended consequence.

 Transparency is not synonymous with truth. Truth is not at all served by simply being transparent. There is a context to being open. Truth does not, by any measure, rise or fall on transparency alone. On the contrary, there are things better left under the lid.

 The sheer number of nominees or applicants for the position of chief justice is unassailable proof that, instead of something good coming out of the impeachment, the whole thing has become a farce. Why, there was even a nurse who made the list of those to be considered.

 This is the problem with hypocrisy, of trying to pretend what one is not. This administration simply evolves its own meanings as it bumbles its way along. For Aquino to refuse to sign a waiver on his own bank accounts simply because he is not an accused is a lame excuse.

So what if Aquino is not in any sort of trouble. Would it be a skin off his back if, for the sake of transparency and openness, he just went ahead with the waiver and what the heck. But no. As I said, this government invents its own meanings as it plods along.