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Sunday, June 26, 2005
Obenieta: Dead between the quick and the slow
By Myke U. Obenieta
Sun.star essay
Jesus Christ had it. So did Mohammed. Same thing happened to Joan of Arc, Carl Jung, Mahatma Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, among others. Yes, all of them heard voices.
So aren’t we in good company, ears wagging with our doggone tongues as President Arroyo purses her lips in the face of her enemies’ fangs? In the wake of a wiretapped conversation, enough to send rats scurrying from intimations of an earthquake under Malacañang, the hue and cry is for the President to prove the nation is not suffering--besides a massive tumor of rumors between our ears--from an auditory hallucination.
Vox populi, vox dei. Or, it’s the devil if it’s not God speaking. And we’ll be damned to madness, if not dead after listening to the stir of speeches inside our heads.
Speak once and for all. Or so hopes Cebu City Councilor Edgardo
Labella, out loud about the steadfast beat of his heart for her. Only then would she diffuse the “groundswell of public indignation.”
And render dumbstruck the chorus chanting about political uncertainty and economic instability. Talk about paradox as a parody: her being quiet has only heightened the decibels of disquiet.
If her noncommittal stance doesn’t sound tragic, the consequences can only be comic. Apart from the “Hello, Garci!” ring tone, a rib-tickling repercussion is patent from this piece of joke: “Doc, you've gotta help me,” a man pleads. “I'm hearing voices but I don't see people.” When did these happen, asks the doctor.
The man replies, “When I'm on the phone.”
Does the President swear by the smart-alecky alibi about wordless defense being the best response to the stupid? Oops, Jung warns, “Through pride, we are ever deceiving ourselves…”
It works both ways like a double-edged sword, this silence. This hush Lao Tzu hears and affirms as a source of great strength. But it is also, avers another philosopher, the "safest course for any man to adopt who distrusts himself.” Ano ba talaga, Ate Glo?
It’s cliché, that stuff that will set us free. It’s also a baggage enough to stuff the President’s head in. Is she gifted with the grace to heed that still, small voice inside her? Jung calls it conscience, surfacing when “something is out of tune.” Or when one is stumped deep into a silence engulfed by guilt.
On the other hand, do the lips of her enemies drip with the milk of innocence? If not, no idea is more sound than humming with their silence.
And so against her foes’ sound and fury and the nothingness she has signified so far (so bad), the call for sobriety and the voice of reason do seem as though whimpering from the wilderness. Yes, like what the apostle James preaches: “Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger…”
Let there be light. But, in the meantime, the dissonance is deafening as the frogs are burping with a mouthful of night.
We’re hearing voices, right?
(June 26, 2005 issue)
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