PLATITUDINOUSLY BUT truly, politics makes strange bedfellows.
Yeah, that much misused and abused take from the Civil War epic Gone with Wind easily comes to mind beholding the militant Satur Ocampo and Liza Masa sharing the same platform with the dictator’s namesake Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
Dialectics be damned: the Ocampo-Masa thesis and the Marcos antithesis finding synthesis in the consuming ambition of the nouveau riche. Mind-boggling!
Then there is the equally militant Risa Hontiveros – “unequivocal in her stand that Hacienda Luisita be distributed to the farmers” – flanking Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, the very heir to the estate drenched with the sweat, tears and blood of Hontiveros’ constituency.
Karl Marx’s “history of all hitherto existing society” gone kaput here.
No surprise there really:The bedfellows politics makes are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.
Of the wooing and cooing among the above, we have the least tsismis to cite.
What we feel is that French dramatist and journalist Marcel Archard could have had precisely in mind – with that quote – Loren Legarda who after damning Manny Villar in the earlier committee hearings on the C-5 Road controversies ended up being her running-mate.
Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder. Women too, if we may add to the observation of George Washington.
“Political prostitution” so shuddered Jamby Madrigal at the Villar-Legarda union, plainly echoing what then Col. Victor Corpuz cried at Legarda too at the time of the much, much earlier testimonies of Ador Mawanay, now remembered only for his extended chin.
Though I remember the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, musing: Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
So true. So very true.
All for the money? Not quite to one Joseph Napolitano: I don’t understand why someone would spend $2 million to get elected to a $125,000-a-year-job, but they do it all the time.
Truly, why would anyone in his right mind will himself to spend billions of pesos to get a P60,000-a-month job of being Philippine president?
To get at the billions of pesos in discretionary funds and budget allocations, the tens of billions in government contracts, foreign aid, loans and grants?
Hindi ako magnanakaw. So Noynoy vowed in his infomercials.
“I have never stolen money from the public coffers and I do not intend to steal.” So went Villar’s testimonial in his emotional privilege speech at the Senate.
“I’m not a crook.” So said Richard Nixon, disgraced as Tricky Dick.
It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember. So cautioned US Senator Eugene McCarthy.
Yes, as the Filipino remembering GMA on Rizal Day 2002 announcing she would not run for President in 2004.
And speaking of the controversies of 2004… It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
Hello, Garci, is that you? No, that’s only Josef Stalin.
So the Commission on Elections did away with the prone-to-cheating manual counting in favor of the automated polls. It takes more than the system to make elections really work for the nation, folks. Some fault lies in the very right of suffrage. As this entry in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary suggests: Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
A wreck of a country inhabited by a nation of fools. It hits right at home.
So it will take all the wisdom one can draw from his very core to make the best choice in 2010, ever mindful, nay, conscienticizing, the American journalist James Reston’s truism: An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.
So I shall vote neither Ninoy nor Cory, no matter how sainted they may be.
Yeah, that much misused and abused take from the Civil War epic Gone with Wind easily comes to mind beholding the militant Satur Ocampo and Liza Masa sharing the same platform with the dictator’s namesake Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.
Dialectics be damned: the Ocampo-Masa thesis and the Marcos antithesis finding synthesis in the consuming ambition of the nouveau riche. Mind-boggling!
Then there is the equally militant Risa Hontiveros – “unequivocal in her stand that Hacienda Luisita be distributed to the farmers” – flanking Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino, the very heir to the estate drenched with the sweat, tears and blood of Hontiveros’ constituency.
Karl Marx’s “history of all hitherto existing society” gone kaput here.
No surprise there really:The bedfellows politics makes are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.
Of the wooing and cooing among the above, we have the least tsismis to cite.
What we feel is that French dramatist and journalist Marcel Archard could have had precisely in mind – with that quote – Loren Legarda who after damning Manny Villar in the earlier committee hearings on the C-5 Road controversies ended up being her running-mate.
Few men have virtue enough to withstand the highest bidder. Women too, if we may add to the observation of George Washington.
“Political prostitution” so shuddered Jamby Madrigal at the Villar-Legarda union, plainly echoing what then Col. Victor Corpuz cried at Legarda too at the time of the much, much earlier testimonies of Ador Mawanay, now remembered only for his extended chin.
Though I remember the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, musing: Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
So true. So very true.
All for the money? Not quite to one Joseph Napolitano: I don’t understand why someone would spend $2 million to get elected to a $125,000-a-year-job, but they do it all the time.
Truly, why would anyone in his right mind will himself to spend billions of pesos to get a P60,000-a-month job of being Philippine president?
To get at the billions of pesos in discretionary funds and budget allocations, the tens of billions in government contracts, foreign aid, loans and grants?
Hindi ako magnanakaw. So Noynoy vowed in his infomercials.
“I have never stolen money from the public coffers and I do not intend to steal.” So went Villar’s testimonial in his emotional privilege speech at the Senate.
“I’m not a crook.” So said Richard Nixon, disgraced as Tricky Dick.
It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember. So cautioned US Senator Eugene McCarthy.
Yes, as the Filipino remembering GMA on Rizal Day 2002 announcing she would not run for President in 2004.
And speaking of the controversies of 2004… It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
Hello, Garci, is that you? No, that’s only Josef Stalin.
So the Commission on Elections did away with the prone-to-cheating manual counting in favor of the automated polls. It takes more than the system to make elections really work for the nation, folks. Some fault lies in the very right of suffrage. As this entry in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary suggests: Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.
A wreck of a country inhabited by a nation of fools. It hits right at home.
So it will take all the wisdom one can draw from his very core to make the best choice in 2010, ever mindful, nay, conscienticizing, the American journalist James Reston’s truism: An election is a bet on the future, not a popularity test of the past.
So I shall vote neither Ninoy nor Cory, no matter how sainted they may be.
