ATTITUDE: Some presidential wannabes reportedly hesitate to join the clamor for the resignation of President Gloria Arroyo because they dread the specter of Vice President Noli de Castro becoming president.

By constitutional succession, the Vice President, whoever he is, becomes the president the moment the top position is vacated.

It would be dereliction for a vice president to refuse to perform his duties defined in the Charter. It would also violate the covenant forged with the people when he accepted the mandate of the vice presidency upon his election.

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SAME SCENARIO: Per his job description, the vice president does not just “act as” but does “become” the president when the constitutional need arises. The electorate must have been aware of this when it gave De Castro more than 15 million votes.

This was the same scenario when then President Joseph Estrada vacated the presidency in January 2001. As the then Vice President, Gloria Arroyo was duty-bound to “become president” by constitutional succession.

It is too late in the day to review the qualifications and competence of whoever is the vice president elected to fill a vacancy in the presidency the moment it occurs.

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WHO'S NEXT?: A variation of the move to block a possible ascension of De Castro is the infiltrating of street protests with placards and streamers demanding that both the President and the Vice President resign.

Check the line of constitutional succession and you would see where this sly scatter-gun blast is coming from. Remove the No. 1 and the No. 2 top officials of the land, and who takes over?

De Castro is not the vice president of Ms Arroyo, but of the Republic. So why would he be lumped together with the President for political liquidation?

This is not to defend De Castro or to assure the public that he would make a good president. It is just to remind all and sundry that we still have the Constitution.

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POLARIZED FIELD: Everybody is demanding that President Arroyo level with the people and tell the truth.

That is all right. But one problem here is that truth is actually what one thinks it is.

To the political opposition and politicized critics of Gloria and Mike Arroyo, anything favorable to the First Couple is a total lie. And -- to the same detractors -- anything negative about the Arroyos must be true.

The same facile formula applies to Arroyo loyalists, who refuse to believe that the queen in the Palace is capable of corruption, cheating and lying.

In such a polarized political field, how do we dig out the truth? Who can we trust to tell us the truth?

We have the institutions and the due process for a sincere search for truth, if only we would allow them to work.

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TRUTH RELATIVE?: Let me give another illustration of the problem, aside from that classic story (cited in my Postscript of Feb. 24) of blind men being made to touch an elephant and tell what the behemoth is.

Look at this other illustration of how the phenomenon is actually determined by the point of view taken:

Place a super intelligent mite on a heap of black powder. It will find itself atop a pile of what to it are black stones. To the mite, the truth is black stones, not black powder.

Place a similar mite on a heap of white powder. The truth to the second mite is a pile of white stones, not white powder.

Now get the two mites off their piles, mix thoroughly the black and the white heaps of powder and place the mites on the mixed heap.

From the viewpoint of the two mites, they are on a bigger pile of black and white stones. But from our point of view, the truth is they are on a heap of gray power, not black and white randomly mixed stones.

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DUE PROCESS: When Rodolfo Lozada Jr. says that Benjamin Abalos demanded a $130-million commission on a projected $329-million transaction and Abalos denied it, who is telling the truth on the basis merely of their respective statements?

Depending on their differing viewpoints, some people believe Lozada, but there are those who give Abalos the benefit of the doubt.

Can we say that Lozada and Abalos are like the two mites describing the pile of black and white stones -- which to a third party is actually a heap of gray powder?

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CORRECTION: Here is feedback from Mark Jayson Villareal correcting my interpretation of the “6604:10” life-timer report on the Nokia phone given me by a smart provider.

I said the “6604:10” stood for 6,604 minutes and 10 seconds, meaning that the supposedly new phone had been used to make and receive calls for a total of 110 hours.

Mark Jayson said that the “6604” actually stood for hours (not minutes), and the “10” for minutes (not seconds)! He cited as authority the website http://forums.mobiledia.com/topic2696-0-asc-10/html.

He quoted the source as saying that the timer “can normally only be reset by putting a new software version onto the phone.”

For the benefit of those who came in only now: The life-timer of a Nokia celfon can be accessed by typing on the main menu *#92702689# [this is actually *#WAR0ANTY# with the second “R” replaced by a space (0)]. Try it.

When you acquire a new celfon, check its life-timer. If the celfon is new, or unused, its life-timer should read “0000:00.”

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