Summer of our discontent
Professor Felipe Miranda ponders the desolateness of the country's political condition in his Philippine Star column today:

The poor survive unaccountably. The powerful shun accountability in the course of their "democratic" rule. Plunderers rob their hapless constituencies blind; the latter quietly suffer their victimization and paradoxically even take pity on their merciless predators.

Private sector "entrepreneurs" concoct and get away with risk-free ventures, each venture enjoying a "sovereign" guarantee awarded by extremely accomodating political administrations. When these ill-inspired ventures fail as may be expected, the preferred solution by cavalier authorities is to unload losses on the country’s born losers – the general public.

Miranda adds that the miracle of it all is "that this nation of over 40 million registered voters generally reflect no revulsion...."

This too has been the greatest mystery to me. Why do the people keep electing rotten officials, humbly accepting their lot without a single thought that things can and should get decidedly better? Surely the lower classes cannot be rationally considered as being contented with their lot, but why do they not protest?

One friend told me that the explanation is simple: feudalism. The people think that they can change their lot only through the mediation of our feudal politicians, dispensing large amounts of stolen money during elections. The democratic idea of a citizen paddling his own course, determing the course of the nation-state by his individual vote, has not yet sunk in our political consciousness. A genuine democracy is a polity of citizens who naively believe in the power of one.

Our people do not exercise their power of one. They prefer to surrender it to some trapo politicians, who, little did our people know, are, in fact, just as ignorant as they are, albeit arguably with better clothes. In A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul, the protagonist Salim has a contempt for the Third World. For Salim, citizens of the Third World all too readily surrender their masculinities to great men. They say to a Mahatma Gandhi or a Mao ZeDong, "Here is our masculinity, we surrender it, please invest it for us." Nobody feels responsible and all the burden falls on the shoulders of the great man appointed by history.

I think a similar thing is operative in our total dependence on the country's rotten political ruling class, except that nobody among it has managed to become a great man in the style of Gandhi. (President Arroyo was even at pains to point out that she has no desire whatsoever to be great.) We have surrendered our masculinities to our politicians and they have squandered the capital. Unfortunately, there is no reason to suppose that the coming elections in May would be different from our prior investments. Oh well, caveat emptor.