A DOG-EARED collection of Philippine literary works, “Philippine Prose and Poetry,” was my first prized possession as a farming kid in the barrio. Both established and emerging writers contributed to the anthology, which was edited by Juan Laya, the father of Jaime Laya, a former member of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s Cabinet. One of the fictionists featured in it was a young Arturo Tolentino.
Several decades later, with money to buy secondhand books, I found a slim volume — this time an anthology about Jose Rizal — at a secondhand bookstore inside a Quezon City mall. It was edited by Petronillo Daroy and Dolores Stephens Feria. The second most interesting article in that anthology, after the one written by Spanish intellectual Miguel de Unamuno, was a heterodox view on Rizal. The title was “Rizal was the idealist and Bonifacio the realist.” The essay defied the conventional wisdom that Rizal was the pragmatist more predisposed to praxis and Andres Bonifacio was the forever dreamer and idealist. The author was Claro Mayo Recto.
Speaking of Rizal, did you know that Ambrosio Padilla got better grades than Rizal at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila? The same Ambrosio Padilla who played for the national basketball team in the 1954 Olympics? On academic brilliance, very few can top the achievements of Jose W. Diokno, who placed first in both his accounting board and Bar exams, the only Filipino so far to accomplish that feat. Diokno, like Abraham Lincoln, became a lawyer without attending law school.
Recto, Tolentino, Diokno and Padilla were gifted intellectuals and great legal minds who served in the pre-martial-law Philippine Senate. Their collective corpus of legislative work, from laws authored to speeches delivered in plenary, helped earn for the Senate the distinction of being the “best deliberative body” in the Philippine polity. To political pundits during that era, it was a hallowed ground inhabited by the country’s greatest minds.
Today, what can be considered one of the greatest tragedies of Philippine polity is the intellectual regression in the Senate, taking place, ironically enough, in a century one has called the “Knowledge Century.” For men of a certain age who still remember the plenary speeches of yore on the grand mandate of legislation — complete with context and oftentimes interspersed with fitting historical anecdotes — today’s discourse in the Senate delivered by men and women who can’t even get their syntax right is downright depressing.
OK, let us clear up one thing. We have been hearing criticism that these intellectual giants in past senates may have been gifted orators, thinkers and writers. But all that was for naught, the criticism goes, as they failed the poor. True? Or false?
The Philippines, in that particular era, was riven by the feudal structure, true. But it was in that period when amazing up-from-the-bootstrap stories transpired, including the rise to the presidency of Diosdado Pangan Macapagal, who grew up in real poverty in our common hometown of Lubao. The Philippine economy then was the second fastest-growing economy in Asia, after Japan’s. Income distribution was more equitable then. The income gap between company presidents and ordinary workers was not the great chasm that it is today. The rich-poor divide was not of the unconscionable level it is today.
Philippine universities, because of their academic reputation, attracted students across Asia. That was the time the only university in what is now the Association of Southeast Asian Nations core that topped the University of the Philippines in academic reputation was the University of Malaysia. Today, UP is not even in the Top 50 of great Southeast Asian universities.
The period when the intellectual giants walked the halls of the Senate was generally a good — and proud — time to be Filipino.
Nothing can best demonstrate the depressing intellectual decline of the Senate than one senator, perpetually boasting about his academic achievement, proudly proclaiming “criminology graduate.” There is nothing wrong about a senator trained in criminology. That can even help deter crime within the Senate’s halls. But that criminology graduate was recently accused of helping another senator with a pending warrant of arrest from the International Criminal Court escape from the Senate premises hours after shots were fired there. The same one who laid down a master thesis on “force majeure.”
What preoccupies the Senate today are not matters about the majesty of the law and the transformational mandate of legislation. It is about investigating sickening orgies of corruption, involving pork-barrel allocations that funded corrupted flood control projects worth several billion pesos, in exchange for mindboggling kickbacks — and with some incumbent senators as kickback beneficiaries. And an internecine power struggle that has split the Senate into two blocs, each claiming legitimacy of leadership in the chamber.
While the Dioknos of the past spoke of their grand dreams for the country, one of the most-remembered soundbites from a current senator was “Sarap buhay sa Senado” (Senate life is wonderful).
From towering intellectual heights, the current Senate has descended into an intellectual wasteland, and its next big task is to act as judge in an upcoming impeachment trial. The House of Representatives impeached Vice President Sara Duterte on May 11 for high crimes and for betraying the law and the Constitution.
It will be senators, for the most part, inarticulate, judging the Duterte princeling, who is not exactly known for forming coherent sentences.
The scenes of tragedy and farce that are expected to emerge from the trial, if we just admit it, can be blamed on us — the voters — and the soft bigotry of our low expectations.