Cry ‘Havoc’
“And let slip the dogs of war. His Shakespeare is not as good as it used to be. He had to google the phrase just to remember it came from the play “Julius Caesar.” It was a line spoken by Anthony as he contemplated his own fear of the war he might unleash by his act of standing against Caesar’s assassins. Words worthy to think about when we ourselves contemplate the hidden narratives, the blank spaces in the story of the pork barrel.
The full narrative could play out many ways. One way is for this event to fall out of the “news cycle” and become forgotten only to fade into the last ripples of a social network event. We are after all and inevitably at the mercy of physics and entropy. We are pulses of energy running as waves in an expanding universe. We come and go, just like that song from which these selfsame words were taken. We are only ephemeral clichés.
The pork barrel story may well become only that, an ephemeral cliché. That this development is likely may be seen in the decaying quality of rhetoric. This incessant harping on the alleged blunders of the president and his cabinet secretary, Mar Roxas, serves only to focus the outrage elsewhere from where it should logically be. Where it should focus should be the current investigation of politicians especially those senators and congressmen who have been mentioned by name. Why does it seem as if their investigation plods along in its boring uneventful pace? Is it moving within a hidden schedule such as would “cool down” the outrage. When everything “cools down” will the whole event be simply swept under the rug? Perhaps as much of it as can be swept so?
This constant harping on the special treatment given to Janet Napoles has a similar effect. Why does it require an explanation to understand that some form of special treatment is needed to keep Napoles alive? What she knows and might reveal is enough justification for this “special” treatment. What she knows and might reveal is certainly of greater value to what the former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo knows and what she will never reveal. And yet the priests do not complain that she is comfortably “imprisoned” in a hospital. Where does she go, what does she do when we are not looking?
And everyone knows she is only waiting for the moment of her pardon, thenceforth to reenter in all her glory back onto the stage of Philippine traditional politics, just like the person she herself pardoned, Erap. Why are we not outraged by that? It is because these are events that have fallen outside the realm of “newsworthiness.” This is what he fears.
And yet he knows the other option is even more fearful. Enrile, Estrada, Revilla, Honasan, etc. are not ordinary names. They are not named singly. They are “family” names. In an earlier time, and perhaps even now when they are far from our hearing the title “Don” might be placed before the names themselves. Be as imaginative as you want when you think on it.
These are powerful men. Who knows what they might do when cornered in a particular way? Who would be man enough to face up to them? If this man is not found we might as well go back to the third paragraph of this essay and forget about it.
But not before realizing that a great deal of rhetoric has been bandied about. Some not as meaningful as others. Soon they will all simply become “background noise,” a hum or white noise from our screens. Before that time comes we must figure out where it all came from. Whose interests were ultimately served? It is not impossible that these are rhetoric with a secret funding source, rhetoric with their own secret pork barrel.
Scare everyone enough and soon there will be no one who will utter for us these words: “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war; That this foul deed shall smell above the earth with carrion men groaning for burial.”
