IN REAL life, I wear glasses, I look different,” confessed the acclaimed and best-selling author Amy Tan. At a book convention where she came dressed to the nines, she noted the similarity between American publishing industry and Hollywood entertainment. Her tongue was no less sharp than a scissor’s blade, cutting through the publicity drive for acceptability: the packaging of personality.

“The person talking to you,” she revealed, “is not the person I am.” Ironic, but it may take a transformative penchant for fiction to ensure that the thirst for truth would not be watered down. To the lip-smacking level of froth goes, after all, the gooey substance of self-promotion. Something that, you know, usually runs through the puddle called politics in the heat of an election season.

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Now that it’s raining candidates, there will be lightning out of every camera-ready grin of goodwill along with usual thunder of double-talk. As if we the audience of all that ooze were still wet behind the ears.

Will the real contender please stand up? And then descend upon us as if we, in dire need of ballots instead of dry diapers, were no longer babes in the woods of democracy.

In Cebu recently, president-wannabe Sen. Manuel Villar tried to tell potential voters about his true colors. Short of saying he’s green-eyed with envy at Noynoy Aquino’s surge in the latest survey, he reportedly “admitted being affected.” But he’s no carabao stuck in the slough, insisting he’s no pushover as he averred: “We all know that an election is a marathon.”

Aquino may be grazing through political pastures now greener in the afterglow of his popular mother’s death, but Villar believes his valley is no less breezy. Thus he got his hands literally dirty for a reforestation project in one of the city’s mountain barangay in Buhisan, leading the planting of 1,600 trees.

Not to be outdone, other contenders will soon come and might even convince us they’d rather be ecologists and farmers than presidents. Cultivating a down-to-earth personality, they might lull us into seeing the trees for the forest of promises still not taking root, much less bear fruit: improving the economy, alleviating poverty, and promoting health, education, peace and order as well as the plight of overseas Filipino workers.

All the buzzwords, you know, a beauty contestant would profess if she’d forget to mumble her advocacy for world peace.

But even if the cynics among the electorate would opt to drop dead than be caught up in the wings of posturing in lieu of platform, it would still be comforting to hear the contenders thus: “The person talking to you is not the vote-vulture I am.”

Saying so, in the mist shrouding their myth-making, they might be mistaken for fictionists. Or, finding it hard to swallow to suspend disbelief, we will always be up our necks straining—like those about to drown clutching at straws—for a political fairy tale: an election with a happy ending.

(geemyko@gmail.com)