Crimes and punishments
Back in the early ’90s, I wrote an essay titled “Killing Time in Little Earth,“ in which I noted: “In the Philippines, we have crimes and punishments aplenty, but they have very little to do with each other.” I don’t think much has changed in 30 years, as recent events amply demonstrate.
For example, what it is about impending imprisonment that makes corrupt but otherwise bouncy politicians and officials suddenly acquire some debilitating disease that obligates their solitary confinement not in prison but in some swanky hospital suite?
Our prisons are bursting with inmates afflicted by tuberculosis, gastroenteritis, hepatitis, HIV and a host of other crippling ailments. But none of these inmates get the executive suite, and not everyone gets the treatment they need, if only because our jails are almost 300 percent congested, according to the BJMP’s own figures. Even if prison hospitals exist, they simply can’t keep up with the cases coming in; they’re swamped, and whoever they can’t serve go back into their overcrowded cells, carrying all kinds of communicable diseases.
We’ve seen this happen so often here that it might as well be part of the official script: “Public officials above Salary Grade 30 charged with plunder will be subjected to a mandatory initial period of hospital confinement for a minimum of three months and to last no longer than the prescribed punitive period for their offense, during which extensive medical procedures will be undertaken to ensure the patient’s good health and fitness for prospective incarceration. Quality and substantial nutrition shall be provided, along with adequate recreational facilities for the patient’s physical and mental well-being. All this shall be at the state’s expense.”
These country club habitues and their blue-chip physicians have been known to spin tall tales about how they suddenly acquired hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, respiratory ailments and degenerative disc disease, to name the most popular diagnoses.
But to be fair, this epidemic of hospitalitis has been a global phenomenon. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, arrested in Britain, escaped repatriation and certain imprisonment for six years by reportedly feigning mental incapacity. He was later returned to Chile and charged with many crimes, but ultimately escaped judgment by dying before he could be convicted. Former Thai prime pinister Thaksin Shinawatra, convicted of corruption, spent half of his one-year sentence in a Bangkok hospital before being kicked out by their Supreme Court for malingering. He would get in and out of jail more times since then. So politicians and despots find clever ways of replacing steel bars with green curtains, and justice often has to wait in the hallway while they take their time to recover.
All this reminds me when, as an aspiring academic seeking relief from Manila’s infernal heat and university politics, I once found myself in a northern hillside village populated mostly by decrepit seniors. A young man there was causing mayhem with all kinds of vile rumors and fiendish schemes, gleefully hurting his elders without compunction for the sheer delight of watching them suffer, as if he hated what he was fated to become. How could someone so juvenile be so evil?
A community council was called, to which I was invited as an honored guest. I would have been happy to observe the proceedings from a corner, but they sat me in a tall chair beside the village chief and handed me a bamboo cup filled with potent bugnay wine.
It was suggested, only half in jest, that this pest be disposed of as efficiently as possible, such as by driving a stake between his shoulder blades when he was squatting by the river to pollute the flow downstream.
A heavily tattooed councilwoman less inclined to brute violence proposed instead that they approach the village shaman to lay a curse on the fellow, so that he would retch uncontrollably every time he did so much as utter a mean word and grow pus-filled blisters between his legs whenever he mentioned the name of a specific villager who seemed to be the prime object of his mischief.
But then the chief turned to me, as the visiting writer and professor from the city, to ask me for my erudite opinion. Surprised but pleased to be consulted, and emboldened by the bugnay, I got up from my chair, thought hard, put on my sagest and most benign countenance, and drew on my command of fiction to offer counsel:
“O most noble chief, tell him this – you are cursed by the power of Fata Morgana! Fa-Tah Mor-gan-ah! Then turn your back on him – like this! – and leave him be to wonder what the curse entails. I trust life’s natural trajectory to bring him down to a deep dark valley where he will feel as much pain and misery as he is causing now. It happens to everyone. But for most of you here, having lived this long, that moment is surely behind you. For him, the worst yet to come, and he will not even know from where it will descend or arise. He will live the rest of his life in constant dread and anticipation of heaven’s inevitable retribution in some frightful form.”
I had to leave right after that to catch a bus to get to a beach resort in La Union before the sun set, pleased that I had contributed some paltry but precious wisdom to the community. The curse I conjured charmed me; I admired the uncertainty of the specifics against the certitude of the outcome.
But I later learned, in a long text message from the comely barangay nurse whom I had befriended in my first hour there, that the council had pondered my advice for about two minutes and then, when my bus turned the corner toward the national highway, had deputized someone to whack the fellow over the head with a shovel hard enough to make him a slobbering fool forever.
He injured no one after that, and the villager he had most maligned was kind enough to daily feed him leftovers from the pig trough with a hard wooden spoon, followed by a cool gulp of soapy dishwater, so he must have lived a reasonably long life. I never knew if he reached that low valley I predicted, but I think the plains were punishment enough.
Email me at [email protected] and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.
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