I don’t mind if Romulo Neri confirms or denies that he called Gloria Arroyo “evil.”  At this point, annotations on GMA’s morality are irrelevant.  In fact, almost every opinion on GMA being embroiled in the biggest scandal to rock the country is rendered irrelevant: it seems to me that people just don’t care anymore.

Apathy is evil.  If by now you still have nothing to say about the NBN-ZTE fiasco… connect the dots.

Benny Areola, a TV personality here in Baguio City, says, “Evil triumphs if good people do nothing.”  This is exactly what Mr. Neri did: he did absolutely nothing to confirm or deny a hand in the NBN-ZTE deal.  Right now, Mr. Neri’s possible testimony is all that stands between Lozada’s word and justice.

I would, like John Nery in today’s issue of PDI, hazard to guess why Mr. Neri refuses to talk about the NBN deal: it’s because Mr. Neri is a man with nothing to gain, and everything to lose, if he speaks out against the President.  Mr. Neri’s silence over the issue is something I could understand: had he done things like his friend Jun Lozada, he would have faced the very grim possibility of being kicked out of Administration circles, effectively losing his job in the process.

While Sen. Alan Cayetano could get away with his rather showbiz-zy ad-libbing in the NBN-ZTE hearings, Mr. Neri cannot: without a job, without political clout, and his name being dragged along the proverbial septic tank of corruption, saying anything at all about the NBN-ZTE deal will probably spell doom.  John Nery is right: among many Malacañang insiders, Mr. Neri is considered the “weakest link.”  Silence, right now, is golden.

But if Mr. Neri rises up to say something - anything at all - to clarify the NBN-ZTE issue, then he should do so the soonest.  I can’t say I will support whatever he says, but right now, that’s one thing we all need.

Evil triumphs if people - in this case Romulo Neri - do nothing.

I was reading a friend’s Friendster blog when I came across an entry on “competing role conflicts.” Multiple roles are an important aspect of modern society: we all have to go through about a dozen roles every day. At the very moment that I’m writing this blog entry, I am going through six roles:

1. Man
2. Blogger
3. Young adult
4. Filipino citizen
5. Computer shop customer
6. Anthropologist-in-passing

At any given day, this short list of roles expands to a larger set of roles: taxpayer, employee, passenger, pedestrian, commuter, son, uncle, godfather, cousin, and so on and so forth. I may have six roles at this very moment, but I would add to to that whenever I feel like smoking a cigarette (smoker) or whenever I feel like running in place and quack like a duck while prophesizing the Apocalypse (lunatic).

Among premodern societies, there’s such a role as a “village whore:” the community’s resident sex slave. The village whore’s tent is on the far edge of the hamlet, where her only job is to pleasure the menfolk either in ritual ceremony (like rites of passage), or just for the libidinal desires of a man looking for some action. Yet even a role as low and base as the communal prostitute is not exempt from multiple roles: the village whore is the community’s taboo, the tribe’s pariah, is afflicted with sexually-transmitted diseases. She also happens to be a woman.

While we won’t be voting for whores anytime in 2010 (although I beg to differ, if by “whore” we mean a more general term), my small example of the multiple roles of a village whore can be exponentially increased in modern life. In Republic, Plato abhors the idea of multiple roles, at least from the perspective of an auxiliary becoming a philosopher-king, or of a shoemaker (an artisan) expected to defend the State.

Why that didn’t happen, I do not know.