THERE’S a joke about a $20 bill on the ground and three who spot it at the same time—-a child, Santa Claus, and an honest politician. Who picks the money is a no-brainer. Except for the child, after all, the two other characters do need to be pulled out of thin air. They entail a head-squashing heap of wishful thinking to take shape, really.

No kidding, it also takes a fortune of innocence and imagination to afford a magician’s rabbit out of the rat called reality.

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Not fond of fiction, Joel S. Hirschhorn doesn’t have child-like notions about American society. It’s not only “saddled with distractive consumerism and rampant corporate corruption,” he writes. What a stretch of a setting for a fairy tale when the most powerful thrive in “a culture of dishonesty.” No, he is not joking as he reveals: “Presidents in recent memory have been excellent liars…”

Come to think of it, the title of Hirschhorn’s book (“Delusional Democracy: Fixing the Republic Without Overthrowing the Government”) would have made sense, too, if it referred to the Philippines. Where a creature called an honest-to-goodness politician has arguably assumed no less a mythic status in our magic-realist cosmology of faith healers, sorcerers, and fortune tellers.

Utterly familiar, fantasy is not hard sell here. Reckon how we once slew demons and conjured a national metamorphosis simply by hoisting our L-shaped fingers, chanting shy of abracadabra: “Laban, laban…!”

Though the chapters of our history in the wake of People Power could drive a clown mad, we caught a sneak peek of the magical change we’re capable of. Never mind if it went up quick and squirmy in a puff of fart, we knew that we’re not far from perfumed possibilities.

Thumb your nose down the naysayer who’s convinced no stardust can blow away the stench of our political system. So goes the wake-up call of two political movements launched recently in Cebu: Let’s get real, roll up our sleeves, stomp away the cabal of charlatans, pick ourselves by our bootstraps, and prop up the embodiment of everything we deem authentic.

“Filipinos must learn to engage themselves in politics of principle,” quipped one of the movement’s leaders.

That we’re doomed into irrevocable drift is the delusion. So goes the unblinking assertion of those pushing for the candidacy of Noynoy Aquino whose “sincerity and passion” for public service they vouch. Their manifesto of support would make a saint jealous: The people need a leader whom the public can trust because of his “sincerity, humility and passion for public service.”

Never mind if they might not have heard of Jay Leno playing the devil’s advocate against something that smacks of redemption. “If God wanted us to vote,” mutters the funny man, “he would have given us candidates.” At the very least, they could take comfort with the fact that Leno does not speak in tongue or with the child-like faith of a Filipino.

(geemyko@gmail.com)