A national fantasy

“POLITICAL MATURITY” is one of our great national hang-ups. We like wearing it for the same reason that a child given to fantasies of adulthood likes wearing Mom’s large, high-heeled shoes.

The whole psychology may have developed from the one event in our recent history in which we shone, as we haven’t shone before or since, as a people coming together for a national purpose. It was a flash of – if you like – nationhood, a momentary show of polity by a people who, in the spot-on phrase of the writer F. Sionil Jose, “became a state before [they] could become a nation.”

That shining moment was when we descended on our main street, nearly a generation ago, and, by our mammoth presence alone, drove the dictator away, and inspired the naming of that moment for that street, the easier for us, and all the world, to remember – EDSA.

In fact it’s a moment for mere remembrance now, not any point of departure to which we might trace our arrival as a nation or even our first serious steps toward nationhood. In fact there was no such arrival or such steps. One moment is all EDSA was – all of four days in our life. It may have been a phenomenon noble and grand enough as it was to merit enshrinement in our history, but evidently not potent enough to create the momentum for launching us into political maturity.

For all its high drama, EDSA was a practical eventuality. It has its analogy in the physics of the pressure cooker: an explosion of emotions repressed for 14 years. A reformative revolt it was not. It happened unplanned, serendipitously triggered, and whatever lessons it has held for us remain scarcely learned.

It may have left us a nice memory, but it has also given us a bad hang-up. Now we like wearing large, high-heeled shoes in our all too childish desire to look grown-up, and pick the most fitting season to dress up so ill-fittingly: elections.

The one we’ve just had happened to provide the setting for the most fantastic farce that could be woven around our case. It was an election in which the vote was processed unseen and decided effectively by machines, with no way of immediate verification or validation.

But, fed with pontifications on virtues freely assigned to computer technology such as infallibility and unequalled efficiency and unable to distinguish between modern and mature, we’ve allowed our fantasy to become so stuffed nothing reasonable could set us straight. We’re happy enough that the machines have in the end produced a count, a ridiculous expectation given alone their cost, never mind the numerous flaws they betrayed.

Politicians played us, too – they have in fact done so as a habit of patronization. They go into raptures about us being such intelligent voters; they sing and dance for us, and, taking no chances lest we be less mature than they think after all, they also buy our votes.

Observers fall into line to further reinforce the fantasy in their post-mortems. This time around they hailed the first choice for senator, Grace Poe, as intelligent, unpretentious, forthcoming, and good-hearted – a breath of fresh air all in all. But they forgot she is daughter to a father who lived and died in the most dramatic of circumstances. Hugely popular as an actor and respected as a man, Fernando Poe Jr. suffered a fatal heartbreak after losing narrowly and possibly fraudulently in his run for the presidency.

They also somehow overlooked a rival who also won resoundingly, placing fifth, on nothing but a name – a name that has been gaining in dynastic ring since her father, Jejomar Binay, now vice-president, secured Makati as a spoil of EDSA. No mayor outside his immediate family has run Makati since.

In fact a University of the Philippines count shows that 46 percent of the winners of the May 13 elections (for senator, district delegate to the Lower House, provincial, town, and city executive) belong to dynasties that have survived EDSA or been established after it. Among the most durable of them are the Marcoses and the Estradas.

Chased into exile during EDSA, the Marcoses of Ilocos Norte and their partners by affinity, the Romualdezes of Leyte, not only have reestablished control there, they have the late dictator’s junior himself in the senate, well situated for posturing for the presidency.

Led by a prodigious sire, the Estradas, on the other hand, are a dynasty in the classic sense, you might say. Their patriarch, first mayor of their native San Juan, after that senator, then vice-president, and finally president, until impeached, has just annexed the country’s capital. A convicted plunderer, a confessed womanizer, and an obvious imbiber, he owes his election as mayor of Manila to whom else but its supposedly mature electorate.

An especially tragic case involves the Tañadas, a family of such fine political pedigree it should easily pass for an excuse for a dynasty. Wigberto Tañada Jr., a grandson descended straight from Lorenzo, hero in the war and in the fight against Ferdinand Marcos, lost in their native Quezon.

A Tañada adopted into the family of relations too distant to trace had been persuaded to compete as a spoiler of a good name and a good run. Officially declared a nuisance too late, unseen throughout the campaign but named on the ballot, the phantom managed to steal the votes that would have won the legitimate Tañada his seat in the Lower House.

If it did not get a good laugh, nothing, indeed, would be more shameful to indulge than the fantasy of our political maturity. Indeed, I’ve always wondered why we’re in such a hurry to grow up. We’re only 115 years old!

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Reproduced from today’s issue of BusinessWorld, of which the writer is the publisher.