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“Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it
is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
—Bob
Dylan
Lost in
the controversy surrounding photographs showing the
Arroyo couple enjoying a round of golf with ZTE
officials is a British High Court decision to reverse a
lower-court ruling that secretly filming “a man in his
swimming trunks at a swimming pool” violated the 2003
Sexual Offenses Act.
At issue
was whether or not “man breasts” or “moobs” constituted
private parts, as contemplated in the law.
Lord
Justice Anthony Hughes said, “The intention of
Parliament was to mean female breasts and not an exposed
male chest. The former are still private—amongst 21st
century bathers—the second is not.”
Thus the
Lord Justice ruled, “This act [2003 Sexual Offenses Act]
didn’t mean to refer to the male chest but only to
female breasts, it follows that the judge’s directions
on the meaning of breasts were erroneous.”
The
Agence France-Presse summed it up as the failure of the
judge in the initial case to properly explain “the
difference between breasts and chest.”
And that
brings us to Gloria Arroyo and her minions, who want the
public to believe that the Shenzen photos are just
“chest” pictures despite the fact that, as Sunday’s
Philippine Daily Inquirer editorial correctly pointed
out, the camera-hungry Mrs. Arroyo uncharacteristically
and purposely kept away her usual retinue of paparazzi
and chroniclers.
Deputy
Presidential Spokesman Anthony Golez Jr. told dwIZ
radio, “Ang nagpapakita ng litratong ’yan, magaling
gumawa ng mga karugtong o ang imagination nila medyo
malawak. Simpleng litrato, walang ginagawang illegal
transaction o kahit anuman, pilit nilalagyan ng
malisya.” (“Those who are showing those pictures
have a wild imagination. It was an innocent picture,
there was nothing illegal going on, and yet they
injected malice into it.”)
Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said, “I don’t see
why you think there should be anything wrong about that.
In the first place, there was no commitment made by
anyone, not even by the President. All she knows is
there is this forthcoming ZTE broadband project, but why
impute any flaw to a project [whose details had yet to
be discussed]?”
In other
words, the Palace is accusing the opposition of
superimposing breasts on an innocuous picture of a
chest.
The
truth of the matter is a picture of a breast or a chest,
in and of itself, does not tell us anything. It is the
context that tells us the story. In this case, those
photos of the Arroyo couple blissfully strolling in a
golf course in Shenzen are the beginning of a tale that
ends in an orgy of plunder. But who cares?
“I don’t
know if that is the headquarters of ZTE. What I know
from information I tried to gather was that, okay, so
they played golf, they were treated to lunch and then
they were asked to tour the place. Now, if that was ZTE,
then so be it,” said the callous Ermita.
My
favorite blogger, the x-rated Rude Pundit, might as well
have described the Arroyo regime when he wrote these
words about the Bush administration:
“Of the
legion of harms done to this nation by this presidency,
one of the worst has been the elimination of our
capacity to be appalled. The administration has just
raised the bar too high. And that is a loss of
innocence, in a sense, like post-Watergate or post-Kent
State. When a government demonstrates what depravities
it is capable of, and the people are willing to blithely
accept them, then we have indeed fallen; we have been
traumatized into apathy.”
That is
what’s happening here, Mr. Jones.
Buencamino is a fellow of Action for Economic Reforms (www.aer.ph). |
