Young Underpaid Professionals

We live in a country where surreal is everyday life, where the improbable happens once the right people will it, and where even the laws of physics are bent out of shape, and most of us have all come to accept it (well, not everybody, just most). To an outsider, our open acceptance and tolerance of corrupt politicians with 12 wives, 20 girlfriends, and 14 mistresses can be entirely baffling and it’s a little funny that we all find it old news somehow.

The unreality of it all goes up to biblical levels once the elections come along and I think this year’s elections is so far the most surreal. Elections are bad enough with what Chris calls human vermin coming out of their pits and shaking hands with everybody; the 2010 elections is not only starfuckingstudded, it’s full of drama, controversy, and twists – just like The Days of Our Lives, only more entertaining and with more face lifts.

This is Madness! THIS. IS. THE. PHILIPPINES!

I learned a few things about the world in general merely by watching campaign ads, reading mudslinging reports, and hearing entirely misleading speeches. Here are some of the things I learned (as I was chatting with Chris during the assembly of this list, I included his additions, too):

• Everybody was offered money by somebody to withdraw from the presidential-vice presidential race.
• Nobody believes survey results – apparently, they didn’t learn anything during the 1992 elections.
• Claiming to be poor at some point during a candidate’s life is vital to the campaign.
• Glamorizing the poor has become a norm in political ads.
• Using kids and old people as campaign fodder is still cheap, whatever the spin may be.
• Getting the current administration’s blessing, now more than ever, still proves to be the Kiss of Death. [Chris]
• The hoary old holier-than-thou moral-ascendancy approach is still being used, even though its efficacy is debatable and only serves to get many candidates snickered at. [Chris]
• Have you noticed how kids of influential people back in the day have names like NoyNoy, MonMon, and BongBong?
• Candidates out on the fringe, the ones with little to no chance of winning (but who are apparently still influential enough not to be junked as nuisance candidates), will always try out-of-the-ordinary techniques. [Chris] – Rio: more like out-of-this-world.
• Everybody is related in one way or another – to one another.

More things come to mind, really, but let’s not get into that (yet). Whenever I contemplate the sorry state of our politics, I remember a line from Robert Heinlein’s Podkayne of Mars (1963) where Uncle Tom explains why politics is important:

Think about it. Politics is just a name for the way we get things done… without fighting. We dicker and compromise and everybody thinks he has received a raw deal, but somehow after a tedious amount of talk we come up with some jury-rigged way to do it without getting anybody’s head bashed in. That’s politics.

He further explains how politics curbs the head bashing alternative to every dispute, how politics is the “peaceful,” civilized way we deal with conflict. Again, since we’re living the high life (in more ways than one) in the PI, it seems ironic that in some places we get politics mixed with violence. Where does the political system fail in being the peaceful alternative? Makes one wonder how some people just completely miss the point.

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