Edgy politicians

Nervously whistling while hurrying past a graveyard on a moonless midnight comically describes why Filipino politicians nowadays are making sketchy moves and spouting holier-than-thou nonsense and arguments.

Suspected by scores of having masterminded the evident flood control and infrastructure thievery, their dubious whistles in the dark are however laid bare by the adage that politicians will say or do anything, as one wag irreverently put it, “to keep sucking on the erect nipples of eternal power.”

If I had all the space, I could give many instances of the many ways politicians suck on those nipples.

But one or two examples sputtering out of last week’s news cycle — which was dominated by the deadly Cebu earthquake — should suffice.

Now, the most notorious example is the Senate’s reckless, although ultimately pointless, resolution urging the International Criminal Court to consider humanitarian reasons for granting the aging and supposedly health-challenged former strongman Duterte house arrest.

As it is, many saw the Senate’s “compassionate” resolution as a fruitless move insofar as quickly freeing the former strongman from his luxurious detention quarters at The Hague. Some even argued the resolution can have the opposite effect of further ensuring his continued incarceration.

As a result, the senators’ compassion was politically interpreted as having more to do with their maneuvering for and strategizing their political futures.

“Ultimately, the Senate’s vote is a vivid illustration of how Philippine political culture merges a genuine, surface-level humanitarian impulse with the cold, hard logic of power. The senators, therefore, are not simply ‘forgiving,’ they are being calculating…to secure their positions in the high-stakes game of the 2028 elections,” as a fellow journalist-friend of mine observed.

While such observations are plausible, they nonetheless carry the pessimistic assumption that nothing substantial will come out of the current uproar over the flood control thievery.

Mind you, such a pessimistic assumption is established orthodoxy within our self-assured, smirking political class. This, in spite of the irreversible fact that the present wave of discontent is actually directed at them.

So, despite facing a reckoning, many of our political class stoutly believe that the radical popular demand of stripping them of all their ill-gotten wealth is far more judicious than jail time but it won’t bring significant structural changes to civil society, culture, politics, the state, or the economy.

Nevertheless, considering how the mounting pressure of events is making some very powerful political figures nervy and edgy, such established orthodoxy might well be self-deception on their part.

A self-deception which basically makes them foolish enough to assume that people will still be satisfied with marking ballots three years hence, instead of embarking on something fiercer than street protests in the meantime. The snap polls call is just a variation of voting.

At any rate, if committing seppuku forthwith doesn’t count with our delinquent political establishment for maintaining their honor, we better brace ourselves for the politically crazy things they are about to do to protect themselves and cover up their anomalies.

For sure, shoddy and phantastic scripts to outflank, repress, and coopt whatever bubbles of outrage that are threatening their rule will bedevil us. Alongside this are the mercenaries masquerading as journalists maliciously doxing, trolling, canceling, and slandering truth seekers.

Consequently, we need to keep our collective wits intact, meaning one sure way forward is for us to personally refuse to quickly believe all the wildest, most outrageous claims that spread roughly three times as fast as factually true accounts.