The Napoles affidavit as satiric literature

“I remember she wore a black duster type dress accented with pashmina shoal [sic]. I personally handed the cash to Ruby amounting to Ten Million Five Hundred Sixty Thousand Pesos.”

The Janet Lim-Napoles’s affidavit submitted on May 26, 2014 reads less like a dry legal text than it does a yellow press weekend essay or an experimental piece of political satire. Expecting to slog through a dense legal text, I instead found the pages fly by as I avidly read the affidavit on my phone, unable to wait to reach a computer. Taken as a work of literature, it would be the darkest, best satire I’ve read in a very long time. That it is not deliberately a satire only makes it still darker and more searing as such. From the eating tour of Manila, the vivid description of mundane details, the tsismis, the cast of known characters, the abject state of our government, and the incredible scam details, to the sheer scale of governmental corruption, this affidavit is a would-be satirical masterpiece. Depressing, hilarious, and incredible, it shows the deep farce of our government.