Electing the joke

“FROM HIS experience and educational background, Duterte comes off as an intellectual illiterate who has nothing more substantial to offer in public discourse than bluster and one-liners passed off as sound arguments.”

Intellectual illiterate! How dare you, old man Doro, call the next president that!

Oops, the passion of the moment – “utter anger” as the man would say – got me there. Okay, now, much as I hold in the highest esteem the venerable Armando Doronilla, I cannot agree any lesser with his prejudgment of the next president, presumptuously.  

Rather than reflective of being an intellectual illiterate, Duterte’s “one-liners” are indicative of a superior intelligence, genius even. Why, none of the other presidential pretenders, indeed not one of all the past Philippine presidents, the towering intellectual that was the Great Ferdinand not excluded, could have or ever had condensed the full essence of his/her national policy statements in one-liners.

Only Duterte. Thus:

On the separation of state and Church: Pope, putang ina ka, umuwi ka na. Huwag ka nang bumisita dito.

If you obey the CBCP (Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines), fine go with them but for me they’re dumb as they don’t understand what I said.

On foreign relations: This is politics. Stay out. Stay out Australian government. Stay out. (On the Australian ambassador’s tweet that his rape joke was unacceptable).

“Bakit, ikaw ba pupunta ng Mexico ngayon? Could you enjoy going to Mexico with kidnappings and killings there? Drugs. (Right to the face of the Mexican ambassador to the Philippines).

On resolving the West Philippine Sea row with China: “Let’s not talk about ownership and I will not make noise about it. If you want, let’s do a joint exploration. Just give me my part (of the agreement) whatever it is, (it may be) a train system from Manila to Mindanao. For six years, I will shut up.

Wow, statesmanship at par with Great Britain’s Neville Chamberlain declaring “peace for our time” as he held aloft his Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler.

On his legislative agenda: I will close Congress. Do you know why? I will use the money to improve the (performance of) guys in government.
On Martial Law: Bakit ako mag-Martial Law? Simple: sarahan ko lang 'yung gate ng Congress. I-lock ko lang. Wala na kayong (lawmakers) opisina.

On labor: You KMU (Kilusang Mayo Uno) people should stop the labour unions…But do not do that because you will destroy my administration. If you do that, I will kill you all. What would happen is, the solution would be killing.

On equitable taxation: If you pay to the BIR (Bureau of Internal Revenue), you prepare also for the NPA (New People’s Army).” (In a gathering of business leaders).

On education: ‘Yung Calculus alisin ko talaga yan. Dumaan kayo ng high school, ano ang natutunan niyo sa Calculus, Trigonometry? ‘Yang Algebra palitan mo na ‘yan ng Business Math.

On presidential succession: Ibibigay ko kay Bongbong pag hindi ko nagawa. (Eradicating criminality within three to six months of his presidency).

Why, the man even advances an ingenuous approach integrating population control with fisheries development: Magbantay kayo kasi yang 1,000 maging 100,000. Dyan mo makikita na tataba ang isda sa Manila Bay. Dyan ko kayo itapon. (Message to criminals).

On gender equality: Kasi bayot sila! Hindi nila kaya. Ako kaya ko, kasi lalaki ako.

On health: I can’t imagine life without Viagra.

On opening the Palace: Buksan ko ang libro ng Malacañang. Kung may magagandang naghihintay diyan sa labas, buksan ko 'yung pinto ng kwarto ko.

And then, who of his rivals can even relate to his anthropological take on the ethos of the poor: Ganun talaga magsalita ang mga ano...galing ako dyan sa baba, eh. Di naman ako anak ng coño.

Ain’t Duterte’s stand, okay, pronouncements, on the above compendium of national issues brilliantly impressive?

Still, Doronilla could not be budged: “All the issues are irrelevant, most of all Duterte, who does not embody any ideology for political and social change. He is a big joke—not to be taken seriously.”

Pity poor old Doro. There, surely will be lynching in the internet from here. To the keyboards, ‘tards.

Seriously now, Doro, aren’t you just forgetting this truth so trite it has long become a truism, “The trouble with political jokes is they get elected”?  

Only for the electorate to find – always too late, ever to their utter consternation and grave peril – that the joke was on them.

Ay, ay, ay. Truly, as it has been quoted here before: A people dumbed is a nation damned. No joke there. So, I am voting NOTA.   

Be like Yew, Duh

THE PHILIPPINES needs more of discipline than democracy – Lee Kuan Yew, 1991.

A truism now popping up in the Facebook page pushed principally by Duterte diehards as the indisputable confirmation of their choice as the one, the only answer to the question that benighted this country through all these years – the truly transformational president we need to have.

Yea, as LKY – with the strongest of political will, with iron-clad discipline – thumbing his nose at the Malays wanting to absorb Singapore in their bumiputra-dominated federation at the setting of Britain’s imperial sun in the Orient, for his people to craft – with him at the spearhead – the transformation of that backwaters island into the financial megalopolis it is now.

Yea, as LKY in SGP, so did Duterte in Davao City, and will, presently, in the whole country. The two, cut off the same cloth, off the same chainmail of armor – to be true to form – in the rabidity of the DU-thirsty horde.

We cannot argue with LKY’s success in Singapore, memorialized as it is in the granite canyons of Orchard Road and just about in every available space spared from greening in the city-state, impacting in all the world’s corporate boardrooms and financial enclaves.

As to Duterte’s Davao? The arguments have never been short and silent, the counterarguments even longer and louder.

Still, we concede that among the presidential pretenders, RRD’s persona hews  closest to the LKY template, not necessarily in near-approximation nor appropriation of it though.

But, even as there is universal, even avid, acceptance of LKY’s thesis for the Philippines, it is not exactly devoid of any infirmity as an argument.

To repeat: The Philippines needs more of discipline than democracy.

Incorrectly or otherwise, we sense there a mutual exclusivity, of some contradiction – dialectical, if you fancy – between discipline and democracy.

Discipline – the sore lack of it, is a problem – a hell of it, in the Philippines, yes. But to tag democracy as its contraindication makes a flawed conclusion. Discipline and democracy do not constitute an either-or proposition.  

From grade school we learned that this of-by-and-for-the-people political system rests on the tripod of executive-legislative-judiciary co-equality with the much heralded rule of law at its hub.

By that very rule of law then, discipline – if only based on its basic definition of “state of order based on submission to rules and authority” – is elemental in a democracy.        

The breakdown of discipline in the Philippines is not so much a failing of democracy as the failure of both government and people to live by its precepts. The rules are clear, only to be obfuscated in the pursuit of vested interests. The laws well defined, only to be twisted to serve any and all agenda other than the public weal. And only the least in society get punished. That ain’t the way of democracy.    

In those “days of disquiet and nights of rage” immediately prior to the Great Ferdinand’s intervention of 1972, there popped in the public discourse the proposition: “Democracy failed us.” Which, immediately bred its antithesis in “We failed democracy.”

The resultant cacophony of arguments muffled the tiny voice of reason that pointed to the seemingly opposing standpoints as part of the same proposition – that the Philippines had no need for democracy. Thereby laying the groundwork for the ultimate demise of the republican state with Proclamation No. 1081.

And we are not into dotage yet to forget the cornerstone of martial law: Sa ikakaunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan.

In the context of our Marcosian experience, discipline found its very meaning in the suppression of our freedoms and the violation of our human rights by the very state sworn to uphold them, readily translating to tens of thousands of warrantless arrests and arbitrary detention with torture in the military stockades, and thousands more of forced disappearances and extra-judicial executions.

Thus, no matter the gains that discipline wrought to the nation, it never came into full acceptance by the citizenry. Hence, the liberation that was EDSA Uno.

Alas, a mere generation removed from those exhilarating days of pride and glory, we are rooting for a self-proclaimed killer to impose his even worse brand of discipline upon the land.

So: The Philippines needs more of discipline than democracy.

Of course, we know whereof LKY spoke. And we cannot, again, argue. His most-discipline-least-democratic system wielded the economic miracle, arguably the biggest in the 20^th century, that is his Singapore.

So, we go for the Davao Punisher then?

Unlike Duterte’s though, LKY’s discipline was not of the mass murdering kind. And the ever prim and proper LKY was never heard to have made sick rape jokes.  

  

  

  

Degla

BOKING STILL winning.

So the surveys said, as reported in a story here by Ashley Manabat. 

But of course, dummy. So since when did Boking Morales ever lose?

Not since the 1992 polls, after we wrote in The Voice that piece that was cut-and-pasted in the old style, Xeroxed by the thousands, and distributed as a damning pamphlet by his rivals. Its head: Boking will not win!

In all the elections he entered hence, Boking never suffered defeat, notwithstanding the electoral protest of perennial antagonist, the now departed non-retreating-non-surrendering Anthony Dee, in 2001 decided to his favor only after Boking had served practically the whole term.

No election survey from 1995 to this latest one from some firm called The Probe  ever indicated a loss for Boking. So, he’s set to sweetly smile and charm his way to city hall again?

Not yet. Even totally nullifying the formidable forces now arrayed against him. Aye, we go here by surveys too.

Where Boking polled 58 percent in The Probe survey, his most visible rival, Board Member Cris Garbo managed only 16 percent, falling even behind one Noel Castro with 17.3 percent.

Here’s the catch. Where Boking never lost in any survey since 1995, Garbo never won in any survey since he joined elective politics as municipal council candidate that year too. To the contrary though, Garbo never lost any election he joined – councilor, board member, vice mayor, board member. Despite what the surveys said, to iterate with emphasis and impress upon everyone Garbo’s own phenomenal political performance.

Truly interesting whom the degla impacts, inflicts in Mabalacat City this May.

Simply, degla means odds, defined as “the ratio between the amounts staked by the parties to a bet, based on the expected probability either way.”

It comes too as “the law of averages.” In the simplest application in cara y cruz or the coin flip: Rizal’s face has come up three consecutive times, the law of averages holds it’s the Bangko Sentral logo that’s due to show in the next throw.   

The law of averages is what mathematicians would rather call an “erroneous generalization” of the law of large numbers, which goes thus: “the frequencies of events with the same likelihood of occurrence even out, given enough trials or instances.”

Still, many Filipinos hold degla almost, if not quite, gospel truth. Witness the depth of study to which jueteng, ­er, STL bettors subject the salida-bola – the ledger of winning combinations dating to months on end – before they decide on their own combo.

Degla holds keen interest in Angeles City too.

One. The first Pamintuan-Nepomuceno team-up worked wonders in 1995 – Ed as mayor, Blueboy as vice mayor. So will its reprise – Ed now with Blueboy’s nephew Matthew Bryan – be as triumphant?

Two. The Iglesia ni Cristo vote is a sine qua non in the mayoralty race in the city.

Candidate Sen. Lito Lapid has always been supported by the INC in his election forays.

Will he still have the bloc-votes to back him up for the mayorship this time?

The more interesting question: Will he win even with the INC blot, er, bloc?     

As much for Leon Guerrero as for the INC is the degla at play here.

Three. About EdPam, the astute Ashley Manabat noted a degla worth considering.

There is in the mayor’s camp now one whom the Zaldy Ampatuan doppelganger remembers as having publicly predicted in 2010 that EdPam did not stand a chance against the incumbent Blueboy. And then again, in 2013, that Tarzan Lazatin would landslide EdPam.

“The contrary happened in both elections, EdPam trouncing both rivals by avalanches,” Ashley could not help stressing. “Now that he’s saying EdPam will win, don’t bet yet on still-charismatic Lapid losing.”

Alas, Ashley could not find any wood to knock on while saying it.

No, political strategist par excellence Alexander Sangalang Cauguiran would have none of that. He’d rather hold on to his own degla for an EdPam victory, as proven in 2010 and 2013: three acronyms with three letters each – ABE, INC, STL.

Why, by the numbers alone, 3-3-3, that’s three times lucky. That, it does not take a numerologist to see.   

Pompyang tres and nueve-veinte siete. Some ominous anuncio there. Got to find the nearest cobrador. Make it a tumboc wager for higher winnings.      

Awww.  

Quote the vote

POLITICS IS not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. 

In that terse one-liner from the esteemed American economist, diplomat and author John Kenneth Galbraith, I find affirmation for my none-of-the-above choice among the 2016 presidential candidates.

Of course, I am well aware of the gravity of my head-in-the-sand stance, fully concurring with Plato that: One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferior.   

But, it cannot be any other way for me – even with the most fervid participation – given the practice of elections in this country which subscribes to that elementary and eternal definition in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), thus: Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

Reinforced in the American journalist Art Spander’s in-your-face: The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.

As stupid as it gets, indeed.

Finding the slightest consolation in Abraham Lincoln’s classic: You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Yes, so politicians readily deal with it, to their advantage naturally. As Democratic Party leader Robert Strauss did: You can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are the people you need to concentrate on.

Thus, one Frank Dane: Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.

In that context of fools deciding elections, whither goeth vox populi, vox Dei?

Nowhere. As there never was such thing. Never has been. Never will be.

As argued a favorite quotable, the 8^th century English scholar and theologian Alcuin: And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

Even more succinct, the 20^th century Richard Nixon: The voters have spoken – the bastards.  

People deserve the government they elect. An attribution to 19^th century French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville morphing into We deserve whom we elect. Going by my slippery slope of We are whom we elect.

The problem with political jokes is that they get elected. So quipped one Henry Cate VII. Necessarily then, from our above premise, the mutuality with the political jokes that elect them. Come to think of it, speak Visayan-Kapampangan and fools and pols become homonyms, even as their actions already make them interchanging synonyms.

As politics is universal and timeless, so are politicos. Quotes transcend space and time to profile our current crop of presidential pretenders.  

…[A]ll the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding and a vulgar manner. Indeed, notwithstanding Aristophanes (450-388 BCE) millennia removed from the 21^st century, ancient Greece as well from Davao City.

Mark Twain may have counseled an American compatriot in the PiliPinas debates in Cebu: Get the facts first. You can distort them later. In this specific instance, on the data she proffered on the Yolanda rehabilitation, clean energy and Singapore’s population relative to AFP response to China’s incursions.

…[I]n all my years of public life, I have never profited from public service. I’ve earned every cent. And in all of my years in public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I’ve earned everything I got. Shades of the Dark Side there, but actually Tricky Dick – Nixon – in his testimonial subsequently demolished by the Watergate scandal.

Then, Napoleon on the sitting (mal)administration: In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

For the last word, Stalin on the reality of elections: 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.

Duh, Comrade Josef, here we call it Hocus-PCOS.

Yes, I vote nut.

Marred Clark

"WHY CLARK? Clark is 2,000 hectares while NAIA is 440 hectares. It's not much rocket science to figure out."

So spake administration candidate Mar Roxas before the Makati Business Club and the Management Association of the Philippines, as bannered by Sun-Star Pampanga last week.  

"What's the difference? NAIA, 440 hectares only. Intersecting runways- 0624, that's the long runway and then the one heading to Baclaran is called 1331. So if you're using one, you cannot use the other. There is a limitation to what NAIA can produce," Roxas qualified, if only to stress that NAIA is already constricted by its configuration, whereas, Clark can well contain three parallel runways. (Yo, Mar, that’s what the Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement has been saying for the longest time now, or since that group took the cudgel for Clark airport development in the immediate aftermath of the Pinatubo eruptions.)

“We are 100 million people. We are a country that is looked up as the Bright Star in Asia. So, we need to step up as well," furthered he, hence the imperative of the Clark airport development. (Duh, no brainer there.)

And an integral high-speed rail system: “We need to do that because there is no new airport without [it].” (Duh, duh.)

Instant was the laudation that went Roxas’ way, primarily from his supporters in the business sector in Pampanga, exceptionally from 1^st District Rep. Yeng Guiao.

"I know he means business," said the Coach, “"because he has repeatedly given that position in my private conversations with him and in his public engagements where the issue of Clark is raised."

Enough, to Guiao, for the people of Pampanga and Central Luzon to go all out for Roxas as “[h]e truly deserves our votes because his plans for Clark hew perfectly with our plans for the future in terms of making our province and region more progressive, highly developed and totally beneficial to our people.”

We can all forgive Guiao for his yellowed loyalty to his party’s standard bearer. But we cannot believe what he is saying of Roxas: that he means business when it comes to the development of the Clark airport.

Let me remind Guiao of our record of Roxas vis-à-vis the Clark airport in some excerpts from our commentaries here.

“Nattering nabob of negativism.”

Fittingly suiting Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas for his seemingly obsessive compulsion – or should it be compulsive obsession? – to stomp on Pampanga at every jig he takes.

Blinder than a bat on anything good about Pampanga. Eyed as a fly on the minutest bad. Roxas is.

Where others – the Japan International Cooperation Agency and US Agency for International Aid included, the mogul Manny V. Pangilinan too – see the Clark International Airport as best option for the country’s premier international gateway, Roxas saw the least possibility, short-sightedly looking only at the long distance between Metro Manila and Clark, and the prohibitive cost of building a railway system to span it.

There, totally blinded to the fact that distance is best measured not in miles but in travel time. A case in point: It takes 45 minutes to motor from Balintawak, Quezon City to Clark spanning over 70 kilometers. It takes some two hours by car from Balintawak to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport only some 20 kilometers away.

As then head of the Department of Transportation and Communications, Roxas was all bullish about the development of other airports in the country, some serviced only by missionary flights. And, all bullshit about Clark, over which he sat as chairman of the board of Clark International Airport Corp. Come now, give but one good thing that went Clark airport’s way during the incumbency of Roxas at CIAC! (Roxas the Absurd, Punto-Nov. 27, 2012).

Then, on the Clark International Airport ranking 3^rd in the "World's Best Airport Freezone" list of fDi Magazine contained in its "Global Free Zones of the Future 2012/13," we wrote in part:

If any, the only consolation we can get out of this…citation is the public acknowledgment coming from Malacanang that government is working to improve the airport’s facilities.

"We welcome the assessment made by the London Financial Times Group. Certainly, we are in the process of improving our airport facilities... That has been the commitment made by Transportation and Communications Secretary Mar Roxas to the President and, therefore, the said agency will exert all its best efforts to improve the facilities of not only Clark but also the other airports." So Presidential Spokesperson Edwin Lacierda said.

On second thought, no consolation with Roxas mentioned there.

So what is Roxas concretely showing at the Clark International Airport for that “commitment made to the President”?

So sorry to sound grouchy, but with Roxas, there simply is no way for the Clark International Airport to ever become what it is destined to be – the Philippines’ premier international gateway.

Why, for over a year now as chairman of the board of CIAC, has Roxas even attended just one board meeting?

That just shows how (un)committed this loser is when it comes to anything Clark.

As anything and everything good at the Clark International Airport happen despite Roxas, so anything and everything bad happen because of Roxas. (Best airport, aww c’mon!, Punto-August 14, 2012)

Reconstructing Roxas as the champion of Clark airport development goes against the very grain of our recorded chronicles.

Here in the Metro Clark area, Roxas is demonized as having ordained the non-development of the Clark International Airport at the time he was Transportation and Communications secretary.

Through his machinations, so it is alleged – and believed – the Clark International Airport Corp. was snatched by DOTC from the Bases Conversion Development Authority. Plans in the pipeline for the CIA terminal and its peripherals were thereby put in the backburner. 

Roxas distinguished himself as chair of the CIAC Board for being personally absent in all the board meetings during his incumbency.

Even with current DOTC Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya presiding over the slow demise of the CIA, Roxas has not escaped blame, being Abaya’s karancho, if not his overlord, in the Liberal Party. (Deconstructing Roxas, Punto-July 14, 2014)

All these years, Roxas only marred Clark as premium alternative to NAIA as premier international gateway.

So, since when did he publicly embrace the Clark airport advocacy, to the point of calling his cohort Abaya’s brainchild of Sangley being NAIA’s replacement “a stupid idea”?

Only after he filed his certificate of candidacy for president.

And Guiao wants us to vote for him on that Clark platform?   

  

Only peasants

APRIL 1 was just another day for President BS Aquino III.

Per the Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines – supplemented here with our comments – the BS was:

1)     in a meeting with local leaders and the community in Kawit, Cavite trumpeting the purported progress his daang matuwid effected for the Philippines and pushing for its continuity only with a Roxas-Robredo victory;

2)     turning over a new school building at the Carmona (Cavite) Elementary School and launching the shared-service facility for the garment industry of Carmona, again straining his voice hoarser with his self-proclaimed achievements;

3)     in Mandaluyong City, speaking at the Center for Community Transformation, once more coughing out his litany of accomplishments not only contributing to but verily causing the development of the nation.

Crowed presidential loudspeaker Manuel Quezon III: “At all these events, the President emphasized our country’s complete turnaround since 2010, and reiterated the danger of straying from the Straight Path. After all, there is no assurance that a leader not committed to Daang Matuwid would continue the reforms initiated by President Aquino. Under an inexperienced, corrupt, or reckless leader, there remains a strong risk that crucial programs like the 4Ps and PhilHealth, for example, would fall by the wayside. Keeping this in mind, let us discern well the principles and platforms of our candidates, and vote for a more progressive future for all Filipinos.”

Discernment, yeah.

Discerned, so we did, the full meaning of the day – All Fools’ Day – impacted on the BS himself as the police – a company of which in full battle gear – engaged in some virtual turkey shoot of hunger-fueled angry farmers protesting government inaction and indifference to their sorry plight arising from the devastating effects of the El Nino phenomenon.

Three farmers are reported to have been killed, scores injured. The cops have also their casualties.

‘Asan ang Presidente?

Reverberating anew the collective cry of the nation in the aftermath of the Mamasapano Massacre of the SAF 44.

Even as the presidential pretenders were quick to seize the Kidapawan tragedy and squeeze some prized media mileage out of it, there was, and still is, no BS voicing whatever take he has of the carnage.

Maybe, the BS found his minions sufficient and capable enough to do the doing for him, if only in the exercise of their vocal chords.  

Thus, presidential loudmouth Edwin Lacierda: “Have you realized who can summon thousands of farmers from outside North Cotabato and linger there for several days? Who feeds them on a daily basis? What was promised to them that they would travel outside their province to descend upon North Cotabato?”

Convinced in his conclusion: “The leftists have been at this game for the longest time.”

The red herring thrown there. Causa finite est. The government closed its case.

Notwithstanding Quezon III: “First of all, I believe it is fair for all of us to expect and require thorough, impartial investigation. There is no reason why people must die in order to be asking for assistance from their own government.”

What with the “killer-cops” peremptorily proclaimed as heroes befitting medals from Interior and Local Government Secretary Mel Sarmiento himself.

Maybe, the BS is just being true to the core of his character. No, not the wide-mouthed Noynoying fiddler – in the context of a person engaged in fiddling, meaning “expending energy on something useless or misguided,” rather than the violin player – but the haciendero he was born to be and the heredero he was bred into.

As East is East and West is West, so too shan’t the twain of the landgrabber and the landgrabbed ever meet.

Class struggle, it is called. In fact, it is the “history of all hitherto existing society,” as that bearded prophet famously said it.

Bloody class struggle, of lord and serf, as proven repeatedly in the massacres of impoverished campesinos in Mendiola in 1987, at the Hacienda Luisita in 2004, and in Kidapawan only this April 1. All perpetrated in the name of, if not by, Cojuangco-Aquino.

Rings anew the song of the peasants of yore: Bangon sa pagkakagupiling, Bangon, kauring alipin…Buhay, dugo’y puhunanin, Tanikala ay lagutin…