The bride stripped bare

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” is a sculpture-installation by Marcel Duchamp. It consists of glass panels with elements Duchamp might have picked up from the town dump. The glass is broken, two huge screaming cracks running in a slight diagonal from top to bottom, right to left. Over this, Marcel Duchamp has attached items related to machines, insectile spaces suggesting a deep and mysterious loss perhaps of direction, the moral compass, and certainly of innocence in its most physical and profoundest sense. The art work suggests an orgy of rape perpetrated on the very concept of purity itself. Such as one may see from a contemplation of this scandal involving the pork barrel.

The scandal reads like an epic tale running through several presidential regimes. It tells of an organized method used by certain legislators to line up their own pockets with people’s tax money and how they did this all with something that must come from an arrogant feeling of impunity. All these being as it were merely transactions of power and influence. That this money comes deducted from the income mostly of wage earners who suffered through all these regimes gives vivid emotional contrast to the whole picture. It makes us feel unwell.

And the funny thing is: disturbing as the picture now looks, we will have to get an even fuller picture of it to make things even seem half-right. How much money did the country really lose over the years? Who benefited? Who were guilty? Is there any way they can be prosecuted for this crime?

This last question is especially bothersome. As things now stand, the Department of Justice still has to make even a single case against any legislator. Note also that Janet Lim Napoles has a warrant out for her arrest but for the alleged crime of kidnapping. That anyone can actually be held accountable for this crime is a precedent that has yet to be set. Can a case actually be made? This is the legal question. And yet it threatens to get lost in the course of this political narratives’s full reading.

The glass door unveils something beyond the glass and what it contains. The glass also reflects a picture of whoever looks into it. And the onlooker must wonder. Is Duchamp telling us we are ourselves guilty? Are we also the bride’s bachelors, even?

For we had always suspected how disinclined our leaders were to truly looking after the ultimate public good. Were it inclined, would it even know how to go about it? Which was why non-government organizations or NGOs became a critical factor in the country’s development in the first place. Few now remember the role NGOs played in making possible the EDSA revolution. Few realize that even before that NGOs had been organizing the poor, educating them of their rights and otherwise enlightening their minds to what becomes possible whenever they worked together to lift themselves from their poverty. We do not yet have a full accounting of what legitimate NGOs have achieved over the years. And yet, as the story of the pork barrel now plays out, the idea of NGOs, what they do and how they do it, seems to have become simple collateral damage. And this might be to our great tragic loss as this narrative unfolds.

It is a loss steep in irony. One that we should mourn beyond whatever sense of victory we, well-meaning people, might feel with the abolishing of the corrupt pork barrel system. Without NGOs, the cause of liberating the poor from poverty is left all up to the government, which all seems well. But why does it feel like going back to where we had been decades ago? Why does it seem like taking two steps backward from where we once had been?