HARD & FAST By Roly E. Eclevia

HOW would you feel if doctors refused to prescribe antibiotics? Outraged. Naturally.
Ah, but that is perfectly analogous to lawyers and judges denying the accused his right to due process, the legal policy—if you can call it that—under the present dispensation.

The rights enshrined in the Constitution are a defense against tyranny, as antibiotics are a cure against diseases. To deny citizens these rights is like withholding the wonder drugs from patients who need them.

Although they came relatively late, advances in the field of medicine, once the impetus occurred, did not stop. The discovery of vaccination, pasteurization, and penicillin, in that order, was made in less than a century and a half, from 1796 to 1928.

The advances haven’t slacked off since.

The fight for a government that truly works for the benefit of the governed has its roots in Ancient Greece. Alas, progress is rather slow, and whatever gains painstakingly made are thrashed out by dictators.

The two presidents who give short shrift to the legal system—Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte—are lawyers. One is brilliant, the other less than mediocre.

Ironic? Not really. It is lawyers, competent or incompetent, who make life difficult for us. Not doctors or engineers or professionals of any kind.

DU30 is from a past we all dread, when demons and dragons roamed the earth and afflicted mankind, but at what point in history should we place him?

Not in the Classical Period. DU30 would not fit in the company of Greek philosophers or Roman statesmen. He spurns the democracy they invented and the civilization they built. If he understands them at all.

Or in the Dark Ages, which followed the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Unlike the impious DU30, the kings of France and England felt they were heirs to, and observant of, the Christian faith. That mitigated the harshness arising from a belief that kings ruled by divine right.

That was also the time, by the way, when the nobles of England forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which basically mandates that no man should be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process.

Our senators and congressmen compare poorly with the nobles of that bygone era.
The members of the Philippine Congress are too cowardly to check the excesses of the executive department, the duty that gives them their only reason for being.

Their proposal to amend—scrap is the more appropriate word—the Constitution is a thinly disguised move to limit the exercise of those freedoms, while perpetuating their family dynasty at the same time and securing their fiefdom for all eternity.

In the meantime they approve of the war on drugs and, presumably, of the summary executions, while they acquiesce, by their silence, in the exoneration of big Chinese drug lords and their Filipino distributors.

It is tempting to put DU30 in the turbulent years before, during, and immediately after the two world wars, but he does not belong there.

He professes admiration for Adolf Hitler. He does not measure up to his idol though. The German dictator dreamed of a thousand-year reich; the Filipino tyrant has no long-term vision.

DU30 is no Mao Tse Tung or Josef Stalin either. The very idea is absurd.

The Chinese prime minister and the Soviet president had their Great Leap Forward and Five-Year Plan, respectively, which resulted, it must be acknowledged, in the development of their two countries.

DU30 has no economic program. To bring prosperity to the nation is de rigueur to every president. He does not even pretend interest in the subject.

He is unpatriotic. He has ceded the country’s sovereignty over a wide swath of waters in the West Philippine Sea to a foreign power. It is unthinkable that Mao or Stalin or

Hitler would give away an inch of their territories.

He is terribly incompetent. It is said that Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Under DU30, the trains stop on their tracks.

Unlike DU30, these dictators did not enrich themselves in office. If he shares something in common with them, it is the total disregard for human life.

Oh, but the dictators were responsible for the death of millions, while DU30 has killed ONLY 20,000. He’ll catch up. Give him time.

One has to travel several millennia back to find DU30’s rightful place, and that would be when savages and beasts, now unrecognizable to us, hunted each other.
That time, life was, according to Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”