Largabista

A leisurely Sunday drive it was not to be for many entering Metro Manila the day before the 21st year after People Power Day. 

Turning 21 is the normative turning point to maturity, unless one counts calendars backward.

And that's exactly how the calendar flips for whoever give marching orders to the police and soldiers flagging down city-bound vehicles with a crowd large enough for possible mischief the next day.

In their natty uniforms, what are these personnel but stylized versions of ragged bands manning feudal fortresses in the European Dark Ages.

If you need any show of force at all to make a point, where does that put you and the institution you stand for in the rungs of civilized behavior?

Not much above the law of the jungle. Whoever thought up that hoax about the "code of Kalantiao" as proof that Filipinos have ever lived under any objective rule of law at all must be on to a private historical joke indeed.    

People who try to shake the tree like Lozada et al just don't seem to get the point so patently obvious to people like Mang Domeng, the oldest mag-uuling in a charcoal yard in Tondo. Or maybe they pretend not to for their own agenda.

Who determines the fate of the likes of Mang Domeng is not some obscure seat of power on the banks of the Pasig River --- the biggest fiefdom of it all. It is the minor government factotum and neighborhood pulis --- lords of the ulingan realm --- who extract their weekly share of the mag-uulings' earnings on pain of personal reprisal cloaked with legal authority.        

Only the amount of money changing hands seem to vary. But it is the same black grease of lord-among-vassals entitlement that oils the big and small cogs of venality from Malacanang to the ulingan.

One's perspective can get so skewed by the sheer scale of it all that sometimes you wonder if making a blanket judgement of corruption is not somehow being anti-historical.