Idiot’s score board

The very first kind of a reviewer on Constitutional Law that Fr Joaquin Bernas (d. 2021, may his soul rest in peace) wrote was among my early favorite reading materials. It was still based on the 1973 Philippine Constitution. Unlike the usual thick law books, it was rather thin and a paper-bound blue covered manual entitled “The 1973 Philippine Constitution - Reviewer-Primer” which I believe was written precisely to complement his two main texts, namely Structure and Powers of Government, and Constitutional Rights And Duties.

The very way Fr. Bernas compressed the legal principles into short lines of impactful learning was much uniquely helpful to me then as a first year law student. The book helped me understand our fundamental law. I do remember that in the Preface of that first edition, he said that he wanted to call the book as his “idiot box.” Certainly, he did not mean to refer it to a television set because it was a most scholarly literature.

True to the OFF TANGENT nature of this column, please allow me to copy the description Fr Bernas used in his “reviewer-primer.” I call this article today as my own “idiot box” to refer to the very first lengthy criticism written by Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio against President Ferdinand R Marcos Jr. The critical letter went viral and so it is not necessary for me to reproduce it here in this column. I will just mention the issue which the vice president hammered on as it might fall relevant within the context as “idiotic”.

The vice president picked correctly the environmental issue of the president. In the State Of The Nation Address which Marcos Jr delivered, he boasted of having completed more than 5,500 flood control projects. It really seemed impressive since I could not remember of any president of our country addressing that problem with an incredible number of completed projects. There was no denying the importance of attention Marcos gave to the ever recurring flood problem. Unfortunately, before we were all about able to write in our memoirs such a splendid achievement, two days after the SONA, nature made the president look like an idiot. Flood waters ravaged many areas in Luzon including those places which never experienced floods in the past.

Marcos Jr did not cite what flood control projects he completed. He blurred the important data where such infra structures were constructed. On the hindsight, I thought that his omission was both idiotic and intentional. Considering how bureaucratic red-tape delays government programs, I surmised that many of those completed ones were still the projects of the past Rodrigo Duterte administration. Marcos only completed them. But, in so doing, he wanted to impress us that those projects were his own. It was thus sinister for Marcos to deprive Duterte of the authorship of such projects. His purpose was to hide who conceived and initiated such flood control programs. His idiocy boomeranged though. Had Marcos been candid enough to say that the flood control projects began in Duterte’s time, the anger of the people who suffered the inundation would not have been heaped upon him entirely. Duterte would have borne the brunt.

What about Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio’s claim that she can have something that was absent from the text of the SONA? The vice president spoke of a master flood control plan presumably better than that of the president’s.  I can find an answer in a 1940 musical recording, (composer Rune Blum, lyricist Johnny Mercer) the introductory part of the lyrics said “Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread.” Without any known tract record of doing any worthy flood control project as mayor in her home, Davao City, she is the idiot (rather, fool) referred to by Glenn Miller. In fact, that southern Mindanao city was recently hit by a horrible inundation while the Duterte team was in Tacloban City trying to rouse people to a kind of civil disobedience. So what flood control program could she show? My idiot box entry.