E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
Welcome to the Monkey House
Sunday, 05 21, 2006
If you are hanging around with nothing to do and the Manila Zoo is closed, go over to Malacañang. If you’re lucky enough to gain admission, you will get the same kind of feeling when you are with the monkeys at the zoo — and you won’t have to pay. Besides, you will get more entertained by the antics of those people behind the heavily guarded fences of the Palace (to keep its zany occupants in, lest they go on an embarrassing rampage all over the place).
Consider, for instance, the latest development in that monkey house: Sensing defeat at the Sandiganbayan, the persecutors…er, prosecutors of President Joseph Estrada have come up with a canard, allegedly involving a beauty queen and hundreds of millions to play around with, in another case of plunder and money laundering.
The details of the tall tale appeared in a Malacañang daily, and the woman’s counsel admitted to have met with that juvenile adviser of the president. The “exposé” has all the hallmarks of a Palace production: the timing, the daily where it appeared for the first time, the motive and the players, one of them the lawyer who not too long ago got involved in a grand conspiracy to have a senator of the republic disbarred for exposing a rotten deal at the Palace.
Right there, the motive is all at once clear: to blacken, tar and feather Erap at the eve of his acquittal from the charge for plunder, and apply more aggravation and emotional stress on him in facing yet another charge, or set the stage to use the beauty queen as a rebuttal witness. The Palace spinmasters believe that the busier Erap is kept in protecting himself from a charge of grand proportions, the better it is for Malacañang, for then they think Erap will have no time to engage in some undesirable behavior (like plotting GMA’s downfall, perhaps?) or if he does engage in such mischief, nobody will go along with him to carry it out.
The spinmasters of Malacañang deserve some credit for their devious mischief in putting Erap on the defensive. They relied on the shock effect of the exposé. Erap, even though innocent, will have to put in extra effort to convince people he did not do it, or that he could never had done it. Even as the accusation lacks any credibility and has no hard facts to back any single claim of Erap’s alleged involvement, still Erap has to face the people and convince them of his innocence.
But like the antics of caged monkeys in a zoo, this Palace mischief has only managed to elicit howls of laughter. The spinmasters clearly miscalculated: they cannot fool the people anymore, and this time the laugh is on them. Who would believe a charge dating back to 2000 and exposed only now? Who would believe a complainant who declines a P50 million offer to finance a business yet accepts a P5-million bribe and goes on to use it to buy an expensive watch and a car? Will anyone believe someone who claims she told her benefactor straight to his face that there will be no string attached to a gift, a P50-million condominium unit? And who will buy the yarn that a respectable businessman will go down on his knees (figuratively) to implore a woman to become somebody else’s mistress? Tales like these tax the limits of credulity and are properly classified as fiction.
Speaking of fiction, we have seen just recently the furor among Catholics — and the interest among the populace — that The Da Vinci Code has generated before its actual showing. And sure enough, the millions who mobbed the theaters when the film opened were entertained by this fanciful yarn but — and this is the most important of all — they came away with their faith intact and unshaken. The movie notwithstanding, I do not foresee any mass defection from Christianity in the next several years. Nor, despite this latest Malacañang palabas, do I see a desertion of Erap among the masses who up to now continue to give him an 84 percent credibility rating, unequalled among government officials, whether past or present, former or incumbent.
The denizens of the monkey house should know by now that an inordinate dose of imagination can kill credibility albeit provide diverting entertainment. The very nature of entertainment, movies especially, invites us to suspend our disbelief and to accept the unfolding scenes as true. But when the last reel runs off, we are back to reality, fully conscious that the blood we saw on the screen was only catsup, the bullets blank, and the bruising slapstick comedy only contrived, pretend situations. Like Mary Magdalene in that movie, the woman most recently linked to Erap is suddenly elevated to the level of the absurd, the profane and the ridiculous. Poor girl — she is being used, as in that children’s game, as a tail to be pinned on the picture of the monkey on the wall, and she does not even know it (or does she?)
This reckless Malacañang movie is attracting crowds but not in the long run. The timing of its release could not be more propitious, though. But the plot, for all its imaginative cleverness, is too predictable it becomes laughable. As that dark humorist Kurt Vonnegut says, “Welcome to the Monkey House. You don’t have to be crazy to work here…but it helps.”
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