Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Call all the recent politicization of this blog a result of certain dread for the coming elections. (And pardon me for being delinquent: I have just been too busy lately...) But here's an excerpt of a very incisive, insightful column by Conrado de Quiros about the prospects of coming years... and he is so right. I don't always agree with him, but he has my vote if he ever runs for a Senate seat:

"I'll tell you what's going to happen in the next 18 years in this country," a friend of mine told me last week. "Fernando Poe Jr. will be the president for the first six years, Noli de Castro for the next six, and Bong Revilla for the last six. Brace yourself, pards, we will be old men before the light of reason dawns once again in this country."



I must confess this possibility had lingered at the back of my mind. Or at least the possibility that Poe will be followed by De Castro as the next president. Revilla had not yet loomed in the horizon then, but he has so now. My mind simply refused to accept it, or articulate it. I did express the thought of what to expect if Poe and De Castro became president and vice president, respectively, in a blank column, and got deluged by assenting voices -- though largely from the middle class. I know that because they communicated through e-mail and cell-phone text messages.



The prospect is alarming. And not just for Malacañang but for the Senate and the House as well. It is not inconceivable that the future Senate would be populated by Revilla, Robert Jaworski, Loren Legarda (if or when she goes back to being so), Rudy Fernandez, Herbert Bautista, Lito Lapid, Joey Marquez, Paquito Diaz, Korina Sanchez and Kris Aquino. Not only is it not inconceivable, it is very probable. The people above are variously senators already, have expressed a desire to be so and are being egged to be so.



I must confess too I did not see this coming after the first EDSA People Power revolt. The "snap election" in 1986 quite apart from EDSA People Power I itself, was a gratifying thing, despite its awesome tragedies, notably the murder of Evelio Javier. It was an election that went beyond a choice between Corazon Aquino and Ferdinand Marcos, it was a choice between freedom and tyranny, life and death. That would soon birth a world where elections would be a choice between one set of clowns and another, well, this is the Philippines.



Someone did ask me last week how something like this could have happened. My answer is that it is the (absurdly) logical conclusion of what we call, completely accurately, the "politics of personality." What is the "politics of personality" really, particularly when applied to elections? It is the choice between people who offer charm rather than vision, who offer charisma rather than conviction, who offer personality rather than rationality. But that answer itself raises the question of where the politics of personality comes from....

And people still wonder why so many dream of getting out of this miserable circus?


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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