The vote in quote

SPARE THE pretention to pedantry, call it bookishness for all its worth, but one activity I readily return to at the onset of every campaign season is to dig into some treasury of collected ruminations usually in crisp quotations about the electoral exercise.

Find here the universality of political experience unbounded by time and space among a multiverse of nations. Yeah, the so-called Filipino political praxis is a commonality among other peoples.      

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 found affirmation for my none-of-the-above choice among the presidential candidates in 2016.

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 could not have been 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 can ever get, 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^thcentury 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 political 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.

In this era of fake news and age of fabricated info, comes the relevance of Mark Twain’s counsel to the politico: Get the facts first. You can distort them later. 

…[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.

As I voted not in 2016, so shall I vote nut in 2019?