COME election time, Philippine politics morphs into a delirious state, a ragged time when the absurd sounds normal and the normal reverberates with the hollowness of the absurd.
Consider, for instance, the feisty Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago. On normal days, she provides great logic and entertainment with her punchy one-liners. The media loves her. Why not, she usually delivers that acerbic punch- “I eat death threats for breakfast,” one of her classic lines.
Deep down in our low-key, long-suffering Filipino inner selves, we secretly lash out at our enemies. What we couldn’t fulfill in public we fantasize on or project to our imagined heroes. Thus, we rally behind that bull fighter, that Pacquiao with the iron fist, who delivers killer blows, that basketball giant who dumps the points squarely onto the enemy’s face. Lady M is a fantastic vehicle for collective fantasies, a provocative cross-dresser that fulfills our political daydreams.
Beguiling is the word for the senator. She knows how to work out the crowds. Her Facebook account confirms that with the views and numbers always appended with a “K.” She herself declared that despite her war with the Big C, she only needs to exploit the benefits of the digital age. Quick-footed Lady Miriam! One of the monickers given her by the hyperactive media. And that titular “Lady” is no random nom de guerre but a well-chosen title that subtly links her to the spires of London’s Westminster.
The challenge to the democratic-loving Pinoy is that our politics is as rambunctious as our fiestas, as illogical as our bureaucracy, as plastic as our Miss Philippines beauty contests, and as tragic as the sinking of the Doña Paz. Yes, tragic, because by the time we caught the corrupt trapo red-handed, the moolah has already been siphoned to a Caribbean bank, the votes padded and justice double-blinded for the nth time.
The combination of empty noise, illogicality and plasticity is a lethal trio to a young democracy. Even mature democratic societies perpetually battle the hidden traps and lethal turns along the democratic road. Countries such as Germany and France have to confront discordant voices and resist the seduction of the paranoid Right. And here we are changing the crucial sign posts on that road every now and then, unable to move forward due to misguided loyalties and the double agendas of elected leaders whose conscience are more flexible than the six arms of an octopus.
Conscience. That’s the key word that is missing in the vocabulary of our politicians. They want us to forget, to slide into a perpetual state of amnesia. They want us to believe there were no guns fired to murder the student activist, no tanks mowing down a labor leader, no real cash stacked somewhere in Switzerland, no conniving chief justices keeping mum and staying cosy, no military commander who issued the order to liquidate, salvage and annihilate.
For the trapo Philippine politician the supreme Wonderland is the ideal Eden where the voter has the memory of a goldfish. A three-second memory. A flash in a decade of vote-padding, counted in three seconds for crimes, past and future, which are committed with all impunity.
What is the misfortune that befell us? Is it the misfortune of opportunists or the misfortune of complacency? Considering our downward slide to the abyss, we are saddled with both adversities, degraded by the powerful that dangles a sword above our heads.
We are often seduced with the clever rhetoric that power lies in the individual, in the vote we have in our hands. But there lies the deception. Yes, that single vote is a voice, but only to be heard in a place where the systems are more or less in place, where the context is not amnesia or forgetfulness, but active, reparative memory.
Lady Miriam is wrong when she says that conscience is not the end-all, that some should not be held accountable. When she claims non-accountability that is pure legal gobbledygook Conscience is not measured in legalese. Conscience is nurtured and it springs from the well-springs of integrity.
We all know that in a circus of opportunists, integrity is collateral damage. But we all need to remind MDS and her opportunistic opponents that they cannot win with clever fibbing, and perhaps one way to show that may, ironically, lead us back again to the ballots.
Joel Vega is a medical writer and visual artist based in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.